Reflect on your childhood:

‍

Reflect on your childhood.

‍

What was it like?

‍

Who did you grow up around?

‍

What was considered normal?

‍

Did you have good influences around you?

‍

Or bad ones?

‍

Who did you spend a lot of time with?

‍

What were they like?

‍

Were they good people?

‍

Did you grow up with stable relationships around you?

‍

Or was there always a lot of fighting?

‍

Or stress?

‍

Or uncertainty?

‍

What kind of people were your parents like?

‍

Did they spend time with you?

‍

Did you have two parents raise you?

‍

Did you have siblings?

‍

How are they similar or different to you?

‍

All of these questions are worth asking yourself.

‍

For our parents and grandparents, they never had time.

‍

They were too worried about survival.

‍

People weren’t talking about therapy, childhood trauma and reflecting on the past.

‍

Only in the last few decades has more evidence come out about the experiences of childhood.

‍

Learned all of this in a book called ‘What Happened To You’ By Oprah and Dr. Bruce Perry.

‍

One of those books that changed me forever.

‍

The more you think about it in your own life, the more you see it in other people’s.

‍

This came up because of a conversation at the family dinner table.

‍

I’m on vacation with my parents and siblings and the topic of therapy was brought up.

‍

A few of us have been going to therapy and that shocked my parents.

‍

They couldn’t understand it.

‍

They never went.

‍

Their parents never went.

‍

But as we were speaking more, they were more open to the idea of therapy.

‍

Specifically addressing childhood trauma.

‍

Understanding why they are the way they are.

‍

My dad said ‘we didn’t know anything else. All we knew was what we saw.’

‍

Exactly.

‍

They grew up in households where education was stressed and hard work was the minimum.

‍

So how did they turn out?

‍

Exactly like that.

‍

What did they stress to me and my siblings?

‍

Hard work and education.

‍

That’s why I’m the person I am today.

‍

It’s why I have the drive.

It’s why I have the commitment.

‍

It’s why I have the discipline.

‍

It came from them.

‍

But there’s a fine line between achievement and misery.

‍

If you’re always chasing success, you’re always chasing a destination.

‍

Thinking that achievement will make you happy.

‍

It doesn’t.

‍

I’ve tried.

‍

It’s a temporary boost to your ego, and then it’s onto the next thing.

‍

You have to be careful you’re not running a race you don’t want to run.

‍

It took me years to figure this out.

‍

Hours of writing, meditating and learning.

‍

Happiness is not a destination, it’s a journey.

‍

It’s a choice every day.

‍

To understand that you have enough.

‍

You are enough.

‍

These motivators that dictate your life are not yours.

‍

They’re from your subconscious.

‍

That comes from your parents.

‍

It comes from your childhood.

‍

It comes from the environment you were raised in.

‍

We didn’t know this before.

‍

The knowledge, culture and awareness wasn’t there in our parent’s and grandparent’s generation.

‍

But it is today.

‍

So please.

‍

If you only do one thing in your life.

‍

Reflect on your childhood.

‍

It’ll give you more answers about yourself than you will ever find anywhere else.