The Roots Beneath: How Childhood Shapes Your Adult Self
We are not born blank slates. We arrive carrying ancestral memory, cellular imprints, the whispers of generations before us. And from the very first breath, our nervous system begins adding to that story, storing each touch, each rupture, each repair. Long before you could name what was happening, your psyche was already forming its architecture: the Ego learning how to survive, the Persona learning what mask would keep you loved, and the Shadow gathering every piece of you that was too much or not enough.
Early Childhood + the Architecture of the Psyche
Carl Jung described the Ego as the seat of consciousness, the “I” we identify with. Yet the Ego is only one part of the whole. Around it, the Persona forms: the mask we wear to gain approval and safety in our family system. If you learned that being quiet, helpful, or cheerful kept the peace, those traits were elevated in your Persona. At the same time, the parts of you that disrupted harmony — the anger, the neediness, the sadness, the wild creativity — were exiled into the Shadow.
This splitting is not a flaw. It is survival. A child will always choose belonging over authenticity, because to be cast out from the tribe, literal or metaphorical, once meant death. But what saved you in childhood becomes the prison bars in adulthood.
Most of this shaping happens early. By the age of seven, the foundations of Ego, Persona, and Shadow are already formed. The stories you lived in those years — whether of safety, neglect, chaos, or conditional love — became the blueprint for how you understand yourself and the world.
Attachment Patterns: The Blueprint for Love
The nervous system learns how to bond before it learns language. When your caregiver soothed you, your body encoded safety. When your caregiver was absent, unpredictable, or overwhelming, your body encoded vigilance. These attachment patterns become the blueprint you unconsciously replicate in your adult relationships:
Secure attachment: Love feels safe, intimacy is nourishing, conflict is survivable. You can disagree with your partner and still feel certain they will be there in the morning.
Anxious attachment: You crave closeness and fear abandonment. You may panic when a text is left unanswered, overanalyze tone, or exhaust yourself keeping the other person from leaving.
Avoidant attachment: Independence is prized; intimacy feels suffocating. You might shut down during conflict, avoid commitment, or feel more comfortable when others rely on you less.
Disorganized attachment: You long for closeness and fear it at the same time. You may rush in with intensity, then withdraw when things get too vulnerable, leaving you and your partner in confusion.
These patterns are not destiny, but they are powerful. Left unconscious, they replay in our partnerships, friendships, careers, and even in the way we relate to ourselves.
The Adult You Carrying the Child Within
You may notice yourself:
Always saying yes to others, then collapsing in resentment, because the child in you learned that love was conditional on being useful.
Achieving and striving endlessly, because the child in you believed worth had to be earned.
Going silent in conflict, because the child in you knew speaking up would bring chaos or punishment.
Chasing unavailable partners, because the child in you is still trying to win the love of a parent who could not give it.
Distrusting intimacy, because the child in you remembers closeness as unpredictable or unsafe.
These are not random flaws. They are echoes of a child still trying to get needs met. The Shadow holds the exiled pieces of that child, waiting for you to turn toward them with the love and presence you once lacked.
Much of adulthood — the struggles, the pain, the sense of stuckness — is simply the invitation to re-meet ourselves at the root.
Shadow Work: Becoming the One You Were Meant to Be
The patterns you live as an adult did not come from nowhere. They were shaped before you even knew language, when your nervous system and psyche were still forming. By the age of seven, much of your Ego, Persona, and Shadow had already taken shape. You learned who you had to be in order to belong, and which parts of yourself had to be buried to keep love close.
Shadow work is the process of meeting those buried parts. It is how you bring consciousness to what was split off in childhood. When you turn toward your Shadow, you begin to recognize that the “flaws” you carry as an adult — the overachieving, the shutting down, the people-pleasing, the fear of intimacy — are not personal failings. They are the survival strategies of a younger you who was simply trying to stay safe.
This is why shadow work is so potent. It closes the loop between who you were, who you are, and who you are becoming. Instead of living from the Persona you built as a child, you reclaim the exiled pieces and step into the fullness of your Self. Integration allows you to stop repeating the past and start creating the life you actually want.
Integration is not neat or linear. It is raw, grief-soaked, and holy. And it is also liberating. Because on the other side of this work, you no longer live as a collection of survival strategies. You live as your whole Self: unshaken, sovereign, and alive.
FAQ: Unraveling the Common Questions
What if I don’t remember my childhood?
It is very common to lack childhood memories if you experienced trauma. Forgetting can be the psyche’s way of protecting you. But you don’t need a full memory reel to heal. The body and the unconscious leave a trail — in your triggers, your relationship dynamics, and the ways you silence yourself. These are the living remnants of the story.
What if my childhood seemed good, but I still feel off as an adult?
Not all wounds look like abuse or chaos. Sometimes the wound is silence. Sometimes it is the absence of attunement, the sense of being unseen or misunderstood even in a “happy” home. A good childhood on the surface does not mean every need was met at the root.
What if I cannot tie my current struggles to a specific childhood incident?
You don’t have to. Most of the Ego and Shadow are formed before age seven, when you were too young to fully grasp or record what was happening. What shapes us is often not one dramatic event but subtle dynamics repeated over time: the look away when you cried, the tension before an argument, the unspoken rule to be “good.” These early conditions were absorbed long before memory could catch up.
What does shadow work have to do with my childhood?
Everything. The Shadow is formed in childhood, when parts of you were judged, dismissed, or too overwhelming for your caregivers to handle. Those parts did not disappear, they were simply pushed underground. Shadow work is how you revisit those early imprints, bring them back into the light, and release the grip they have on your adult life.
If you want to begin exploring this connection, my free guide Return to the Root (available on my homepage) offers a deeper look at how the Mother + Father Wounds shape the psyche and how you can start working with them.
Ready to Begin?
If you feel the pull to go deeper into this work, to finally stop repeating the patterns that began in childhood and reclaim the pieces of yourself that were exiled long ago, I invite you into a Discovery Call with me. Together, we will explore where your patterns began, how they still shape your present, and what it looks like to integrate through shadow work so you can live as your whole Self.
If you are curious but not quite ready to step in, you can also download my free guide, Return to the Root: A Psycho-Spiritual Guide to Healing the Mother + Father Wounds, available on my homepage. It will begin opening the doorway back to the roots of your story, where all true transformation begins.
Your childhood shaped you. But it does not have to define you.