The Surprising Advantage of a Truly Terrible Childhood

Everyone loves a hero’s journey. A protagonist goes on an adventure, learns a lesson, wins a victory, and returns home transformed, from Luke to Neo to Frodo to Harry.

But what if we met our characters while living relatively comfortable lives, with decent relationships and jobs, and facing no imminent existential danger? Would they go on their hero’s journey? Almost certainly not. No one climbs Mordor for fun.

It was only due to an intolerable life or existential danger that our heroes found the motivation to initiate the journey that would transform them into the best versions of themselves. Without that motivation, there’s no story and no transformation.

While we recognize a hero’s journey in the movies, therapy is a hero’s journey for real life. It is fraught with danger and uncertainty and pain. But due to our unconscious minds, it is also the only path to our best selves.

Like every hero’s journey, therapy is very hard to start, and harder to complete, requiring strength we don’t believe we have to overcome obstacles we don't believe we can.

Whether battling evil empires or recurring nightmares, the challenges we encounter make us want to quit, badly and often. Most will. Heroes can’t—the alternative is intolerable. That’s how they find the strength to keep fighting.

Childhood creates challenges for everyone. But in this paradoxical world, sometimes being born into the deepest holes gives us the very best chance to become the best versions of ourselves.

Because the worse the hurt, the more appealing the journey.

Talk It Out

Why is therapy the only path to our best selves?

Left on our own, we can neither feel nor articulate our most painful emotions; our unconscious minds will never allow us to. Their purpose is to shield us from paralyzing pain in the short-term. They will always distract us before we can complete a painful thought.

In doing so they create a much larger problem. Suppressed pain does maximum damage to the experience of life. Living with enough unexpressed hurt turns life into a funhouse that is never fun, where everything feels disproportionate, always. It is a terrible way to live.

It is only in talking with another person, like a therapist, that we are forced to see painful thoughts through to their conclusions. (You can’t trail off mid-sentence talking to someone else, as you can talking to yourself.)

“But,” you say, “My spouse / family / friends are my therapist,” or even more abstract, “My art / animals / work…”

No, they are not.

As for the non-human options, flow and Zen certainly enhance your life, but they do not surface buried pain. The people in your life are a worse option. You can’t be therapy-honest, and they can’t provide feedback beyond their emotional needs. And neither provide the structure and discipline needed for actual growth.

There is only one way to surface suppressed pain—with trained psychologists who know what to do. The only question is: Who’s willing to go on the journey?

Universal Doesn’t Mean Everyone

There are a few no-win scenarios baked into childhood.

Getting everything we need as kids would be awful, leaving us completely unprepared for the real world and motivated to do little.

Not getting everything we need as kids is awful, leaving us damaged and forced to suppress emotions that as children we cannot possibly fathom or handle.

Adults have context, experience, and stoicism with which to handle failure, rejection, and loss. Kids don’t.

.Absolutely no one emerges from childhood undamaged. It is impossible, and inevitably leads to a skewed perception of reality for us all. The only question is extent.

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We all must understand our skews to become our best selves. But while that need exists for everyone, it’s not the same for anyone.

The Lucky Ones

It’s true that on a certain level, every family is dysfunctional.

But how do you differentiate between a parent with too-high expectations vs. one who vandalizes the family home when displeased?

A parent who expects too much maturity from a seven-year-old vs. one who says, “If it wasn’t for you, I’d kill myself?”

An uncle who gets drunk at holidays vs. being cut off by both sides of the family before graduating middle school?

Experiencing the latter leads to very different lives than the former.

As a child in agony every day, you embrace any behavior that you believe will help you in the moment. You don’t understand how the same behaviors will work against you in every other environment.

You end up attracted to the very hurt that will continue to ruin your life on a loop. At some point you may question whether life is even worth it, even when it's going ostensibly well.

Eventually, though, you are faced with a fundamental choice: a hero’s journey or a horrible life. Sadly, many people are unable to choose the path to their best selves, despite the clarity of the choice.

Alternatively, people with relatively happy childhoods do choose the hero’s journey. That choice is even harder because the alternatives are not nearly as stark.

And many people live happy lives without therapy. None, I would argue, are living their best lives, which requires surfacing buried pain. But that does not mean that therapy is always worth it. That’s entirely a contextual consideration..

But when you’ve suffered enough as a kid, a happy life is an impossibility without it.

No one knows why some people can find the inner resources for a hero’s journey and some can’t, regardless of circumstances.

But I do know this. Having a terrible childhood makes the choice a hell of a lot easier. And it provides the motivation to continue when things feel the most painful and the most hopeless.

Enough motivation, even, to reach the journey’s end.

I never could have imagined we were the lucky ones.