A child’s psychological development is not only about acquiring skills or knowledge, but above all about the formation of an inner world: the way they perceive themselves, others and their relationships. Therapeutic experience itself shows us that this process is never purely individual, but deeply relational. A child becomes who they are through how they related to the significant people in their life — and above all through how those experiences were perceived and given meaning by the child themselves, not through how adults narrate them on the child’s behalf.
To complete this picture we need to focus on a child’s need for a secure emotional bond. A child needs at least one devoted caregiver who is sufficiently available, consistent and emotionally present. Through repeated warm experiences of care and responsiveness, they build a sense of trust and what will later become their internal template for close relationships: a deep, often unconscious belief about whether they are worthy of love and whether others will be available and reliable. This belief will accompany them into all their future relationships.
A child does not simply experience what happens to them; they inscribe those experiences deeply in their psychological and bodily system, even when they cannot consciously recall memories. As Alice Miller describes it, the unconscious is not something abstract but the very life history of a person — a history that is not lost with the passing of time. On the contrary, it stays alive and inscribed in the body, and surfaces into consciousness in fragments. So our early childhood experiences and traumas go on being stirred internally and expressed as bodily memory, through physical sensations, symptoms, tensions and emotional reactions that we often cannot explain rationally. These broken pieces are what we are called upon to bring together in psychotherapy, forming our personal story while also cultivating a sense of responsibility for how we choose to stand in relation to it. Do we choose to take an active role in authoring our story, or to place ourselves in passive roles towards it?
At an existential level, these psychosomatic inscriptions are not simply memories; they are ways of being. They shape how we relate to ourselves, whether we feel we are worthy, how far we can bear to ask and to claim. The body becomes the language of this truth. One of the most telling things inscribed in us is the experience of love and acceptance. A child needs to feel that they have worth not because they “manage” or “are quiet”, but because they exist. When acceptance depends on performance and becomes conditional, the child learns to adapt themselves in order to preserve the relationship, feeling obliged to move away from their authentic feelings and their own truth.
Whenever there is a mismatch between what a child feels and what the environment demands, the child will make a compromise, as the only option developmentally available to them. When a child is exposed to abuse, neglect or intense psychological pain, they face an existential impasse: they depend absolutely on the very person who is hurting them. This stance is not weakness but a survival mechanism. It is less threatening for a child to experience themselves as “bad” than to recognise the parent as dangerous or neglectful. In this way a sense of control is maintained — “if it’s my fault, maybe I can change something” — and, above all, the bond with the parent is protected, the bond on which their very survival depends.
Preserving this vital relationship requires a psychological adjustment: distorting what the child perceives in order to keep the sense and image of the good parent intact. So they turn responsibility onto themselves, not as a conscious choice but as an unconscious necessity, even if this means ignoring or rejecting their own experience. For example, if a parent shouts at them, it is far easier to feel that they are a bad child than to think that their parent is tired, or has some other difficulty that has exhausted their patience. When a parent is tired, distant or upset, a child does not have the capacity to attribute that state to external factors. Instead, they are very likely to internalise: “I did something”. If this is not corrected, that interpretation can harden into a deeper belief: “something is wrong with me; it’s my fault that mum or dad reacts this way”.
This inner conflict between what the child — and later the adult — feels and what they “ought” to feel is deeply exhausting. Psychological energy is spent suppressing and controlling the “forbidden” feelings. The body becomes the primary carrier of this tension, and also the most reliable mirror of what we cannot yet bear to recognise. I think of a client who, every day when she came home from work, would withdraw into sleep in order to avoid the painful emotional reality of her home. Taking refuge in sleep as a way out of unsatisfying relationships or pressured work environments is a common way of escaping a difficult reality. Sleep, in these cases, functions as a form of disconnection from existence — a numbing in order to avoid coming into contact with what one cannot bear to live.
Overall, healthy development does not depend on the perfection of the environment, but on an adequate response to the child’s needs. Donald Winnicott’s concept of the “good enough parent” captures this balance: a child does not need a perfect caregiver who always responds to their needs in the best possible way, but a person who can, most of the time, be available, respond, and recognise the child’s experience. Among the basic psychological needs, then, is recognition of the child’s subjective experience: someone who “sees” and names what the child is feeling. A child borrows the words and concepts adults use for their experience, and in this way learns about their inner world. When a difficulty is not acknowledged, it stays unprocessed or is repressed (pushed out of awareness), and so the child learns to deny that they are living it.
When we begin to come into contact with our real feelings, the possibility gradually widens of interrupting this protective mechanism of inner distancing from our own experience. Psychotherapy presupposes a turning towards the child we once were. An inner stance that allows what was missing to be recognised: acceptance, attention, respect, understanding, protection. Through this process, a different relationship with ourselves and with others can gradually develop. So the relationship with the therapist often functions as the space where this experience becomes liveable for the first time — through a relationship that neither ignores nor distorts, but can bear to see and to support.
An adult can be fully aware of their feelings only if they received emotional care from those who raised them — and so, when that experience was missing in childhood, there is a second chance in the therapy room.
References:
Miller, A. (2005). The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Cruel Parenting. New York: W. W. Norton.
Winnicott, D. W. (1960). The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 41, 585–595.
Winnicott, D. W. (1986). Home Is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst. London: Penguin.
