In the next of our blogs on Children's Mental Health, our award-winning hypnotherapist Marcus Matthews looks at how childhood issues can continue to cause issues for us as adults.

"The great Greek philosopher Aristotle once said, “Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man, but is that true?

When I work with adults with Anxiety and even PTSD, without a doubt, the root cause of the way they feel comes down to childhood experience, but the interesting pattern is that the root cause is never a big trauma or abuse, but something more subtle.

As children, we are born expecting to be loved, and that our needs will be met, but as a parent there is no manual and every child is different.

In the first years of life, the mind is like a sponge absorbing experiences to help the child survive and fit into their environment.

Data from Harvard University shows the brain develops rapidly during the first years of life. Forming 1 million neural connections every minute, before the age of three

These neural connections become the automated subconscious mind that creates the programming in which we install other applications to live our lives.

If within those formative years, we create 80% of our thoughts and feelings, you can see how many of us become stuck later on in life.
 

In a baby’s first year of life, children do not respond to logic, but emotion and the bond will form not through words or logic, but through tonality of voice, physical energy and other sensory experiences.

This is why as adults when we talk about how we feel, we may get a temporary emotional release, but that feeling never seems to go away.

These infant neural connections are like the roots of a tree, the foundation from which everything else will grow.

Imagine planting a tree in poor soil, where nutrients are hard to find, you can see that as the tree grows it may not weather the storms of life, and become uprooted or broken.
 

I am sure you have heard the phrase “Like mother, like daughter; or like father, like son”. There is a reason for that, it’s the programming which has been installed in us, in those formative years.

As parents, we can’t control every aspect of a child’s life, but what we can do is introduce them to their inner child, their inner truth.

We have two voices in our head, but the one voice, the ego voice, always seems louder, because its job is to keep us alive not happy and takes its cue from those who have programmed it.

“The person that you want to be, is the person that you really are.”

Steve Peters, The Chimp Paradox

What Peters means is we are all born perfect, we are all born with the ability to have happy and abundant lives, our true blueprint still exists, but it is the programming of others, which informs how we navigate the world, so how do we upgrade the program and get back to that original blueprint?

Imagine that feeling is a small baby, unable to verbally communicate their needs, how would you react?

Would you be critical?
Would you tell them they are not good enough?
Would you reject them?

As adults, we don’t feel good enough, if we tell ourselves that being different is bad or that the things we desire to keep us happy are not available, so what does the inner child learn?

Those feelings are available to us all when we know how to communicate with ourselves.

Children rely on adults for their feelings, but as adults, we must be responsible for our feelings and then teach children the truth about who they are, not who we want them to be.

When you or even a child feels uncomfortable, take time to be still, listen to that inner voice, the one past the ego voice, the true voice, your voice, what does it say?

You see every part of us, even the parts we don’t like feeling, have some role, function, purpose or intention to keep us alive.

But if you want to have the freedom of a child with the wisdom of an adult, you need to speak to that inner child in a more loving way.

Turn that inner child, into an inner cheerleader, tell it what you want to hear and why.

Unless you communicate with your mind and body in a loving, purposeful way you will not reap the rewards.

Think of those words like fertiliser and water, poured onto an apple tree's roots. You may not see beautiful flowers and fruit straight away, but over time, that goodness will build and the tree will produce beautiful flowers and fruit for the rest of its life, we are no different.

If you would like to find out how you can upgrade your voice and remove those toxic thoughts and feelings then get in touch."

Marcus Matthews
Clinical Hypnotherapist and Life Coach