Contents
The taste of grandma’s pie or the words of a once popular hit, sounding from the country radio, can instantly return us to childhood. How can childhood memories be useful in adulthood, and why does memory hide certain episodes of the past from us?
- Childhood memories allow you to regain what is erased over the years: spontaneity, fantasy, lightness.
- Some of us need the courage to touch again the childhood problems and resentments repressed into the unconscious.
- To heal old wounds, to understand oneself and to accept means to give strength and meaning to one’s adult life.
Each of us from time to time feels the need to return to his childhood. Touching it, we rediscover forgotten sensations: lightness and serenity in relation to life, sincerity and spontaneity in actions, pure joy or genuine sadness in the feelings that surround us. Looking at the world through the eyes of the child we once were, it is as if we are awakening from a long sleep.
Associations evoke memories
Childhood returns to us at the level of sensations: taste, touch, smell. A piece of biscuit cake allowed the hero of Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time to feel again the serene happiness forgotten long ago.
“The taste of madeleine cake is a classic example of how an insignificant detail, a fleeting sensation triggers a chain of the earliest childhood memories,” says psychotherapist Margarita Zhamkochyan. “And each of us has our own memories that can turn us into children again.” For 29-year-old Inna, this is the smell of strong tobacco: “My grandfather tarred Belomor from morning to evening, he was simply saturated with it. I still, feeling this smell, remember the summer, the house of my grandparents, how we splashed from a hose in the sun, how we baked potatoes in the ashes.
Feeling like a child again, we experience happiness that seems to no longer belong to us.
40-year-old Anna smiles: “Every time I bite off a piece of sheep cheese, it’s like I’m at VDNKh, in the Sheep Breeding pavilion. I loved going there with my mom so much! When she, exhausted by the smell, tried to take me away, I began to cry bitterly.
And 36-year-old Dmitry feels like a child when he hears the once popular motive of Yuri Antonov “Sea, sea …”. “In an instant, I return to that summer when my brother and I were first brought to the beach: there this song sounded from the speakers for days on end. The sea was cold, parents did not allow children to swim for a long time, but our mother said that we were seasoned and we were allowed. My brother and I spent several hours in the water and were probably the happiest kids in the entire resort.”
Feeling like a child again, we experience moments of happiness that seem to no longer belong to us, but they give us a special feeling that we want to keep forever.
Madeleine cake in Proust’s novel
“Dejected by the gloomy today and the expectation of a bleak tomorrow, I automatically raised a spoonful of tea with a piece of biscuit to my mouth. But as soon as the tea with cake crumbs soaked in it touched my palate, I shuddered: something extraordinary happened in me … I was filled with some precious substance; or rather, this substance was not in me – I myself was this substance. I stopped feeling like a mediocre, inconspicuous, mortal person.
Marcel is the hero of the novel In Search of Lost Time. Towards Swann by Marcel Proust, he tries to understand the nature of this amazing feeling and finally remembers: his aunt treated him to such pieces of madeleine cake in the morning when he spent summers in her small town as a child. The memory, which the mind tried in vain to resurrect, came alive thanks to the biscuit crumbs; that before which thoughts surrendered, sensations did.
Proust writes: “But when nothing is left of the distant past, when living beings have died and things have collapsed, only the smell and taste, more fragile, but more tenacious … remind of themselves, hope, wait, and they, these barely perceptible tiny ones, among the ruins, carry on themselves, without bending, a huge building of remembrance.
Memories from the past are the key to the present
Every childhood memory, no matter how trivial it may seem to another person, is surprisingly important for us. Why is the attractive force of these brief moments, which are preserved in our memory for some unknown reason, so great?
The founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, believed that childhood memories allow us to understand the behavior of an adult. He called the child the father of an adult. His student, the great Austrian psychoanalyst Alfred Adler, used the analysis of early memories to recreate the individual life history of his patients.
“There are no accidental memories,” Adler wrote in “What Life Should Mean To You,” “out of the countless number of impressions that fall on a person’s lot, he chooses to remember only those that, although vaguely, he feels as connected with his the current situation.”
We turn to childhood, because it is in it that enormous resources are hidden.
“Adler believed that when our lifestyle changes, our memories also change: other stories from childhood come to us, we interpret the cases that we remember in a different way,” explains psychotherapist Elena Sidorenko. Reflecting on them, we get the opportunity to look at ourselves from the outside, to realize the pattern, the continuity of everything that happens to us and, thanks to this, influence our future.
“Remembering, we look for the source of our personal strength in those distant events and experiences,” says psychotherapist Margarita Zhamkochyan. “We turn to childhood, as if warning and consoling ourselves, because it is at an early age that colossal resources are hidden. And the amazing thing is that, by remembering, we can return them to ourselves.”
Immediacy or infantilism?
Looking at how an adult man enthusiastically plays football with the boys, many people think: “What a childish thing!” When an elderly lady, having listened to street musicians, suddenly throws off her cloak on the hands of her venerable companion and starts dancing, we are touched: “What immediacy!” But if this kind of behavior is repeated in our loved ones over and over again, we feel annoyed: “Total infantilism!”
“Every adult sometimes wants to be a child,” explains psychotherapist Viktor Makarov. – We act like a child, we fool around, but then we straighten our tie – and into the office! Returning to the usual way of life, we act like adults: we allow ourselves to be different. But an infantile person is always the same.” “Psychologically, an adult is able to directly express his feelings, but at the same time keep promises, be responsible for the decisions made. An infantile person cannot do this,” agrees family therapist Inna Khamitova.
Infantilism has many faces: irresponsibility, egocentrism, dependence on others, unwillingness to deny oneself pleasures, inability to make decisions independently. An infantile person is sure that there will always be someone in the world who will solve his problems: a husband or wife, bosses or the state. But in fact, he simply refuses to grow up, and this is not at all the same as a genuine return to the brightness of the sensations of the first years of life.
The most recognizable example of this behavior is Peter Pan, the boy who chose not to grow up. In fact, this is a tragic character. Despite all the charm of this image, it reminds us that there is no other way of personal development than growing up – from childhood to adolescence, from youth to maturity. It is a sad life for those who remained on the eternal “pier” one of the early stages of their lives, denying themselves the right to know what will happen next.
Why do we tend to forget childhood experiences?
Many modern psychotherapeutic schools, following Freud, help us to look for the causes of our adult problems in early childhood. But it is difficult to go this way … without difficulty and doubt. Even in working with a psychoanalyst or a psychotherapist, some of us fail to extract childhood memories from the depths of our memory.
“It is difficult to look into oneself, because it is scary: after all, childhood makes us not only experience moments of happiness, but also suffer, feel small again, defenseless or rejected,” explains existential psychotherapist Svetlana Krivtsova. “Therefore, many people prefer to forget about their childhood, but along with difficult memories, they also reject childish lightness, spontaneity, a vivid sense of life.”
The Forgotten Inner Child Can Help Us Understand Our Children
Psychoanalyst Tatyana Alavidze confirms: “In their youth, some people are in a hurry to quickly become adults, they are ashamed of any manifestations of childishness: they do not dare to fool around, play, show their feelings. By suppressing a child in himself, a young man (or girl) is trying to reinforce a sense of self-importance – after all, in fact, he is not sure that he is an adult, he is afraid to “compromise” himself with children’s actions and dreams. But even as an adult, such a person often continues to behave in the same way.
The consequences of this behavior are often dramatic, especially when we become parents ourselves: it is this forgotten inner child that can help us understand our own children. Receiving attention and support from the adult we have become today, our childhood gives in return its invaluable properties: clarity of feelings, serenity of the soul, the ability to fantasize, play and create. Not only psychotherapy teaches us to return from time to time to the child living in us, to communicate with him – each of us has such an opportunity. It is in our interests to use it to make our life richer, more harmonious, creative and truly alive.