How to Overcome Your Childhood

To an extraordinary and even humbling extent, who we are as adults is determined by events that happened to us before our fifteenth birthday. The way we express affection, the sort of people we find appealing, our understanding of success and respectability, our approach to work and money all have a habit of being decisively shaped by events in childhood. This isn't to say that we have to remain prisoners of the past; it simply means that in order to liberate ourselves from our histories, we first have to become fully aware of them.

This is a book about such a liberation. It acts as a guide to the influence of childhood on our adults selves, as well as to the way we can through understanding move on from some of the more unhelpful aspects of our early family dynamics. We learn about the way that character is formed, about the concept of 'emotional inheritance,' about the formation of our concepts of being 'good' or 'bad' - and the impact of parental styles of love on the way we choose adult partners. We learn too about how we might evolve emotionally and, in particular, how we may sometimes need to have a breakdown in order to have a breakthrough.

The tone throughout is gentle, wry and humane. We are left with a powerful sense that building up an emotionally successful adult life is possible so long as we reflect with sufficient imagination and compassion on what happened to us a long while back.

Dettagli