Healing Our Core Issues: Learning What Was Missed in Childhood
No parent is perfect, but most aim to be the best they can. Parents try to provide more for their children than they received. Life is complicated, and parents find it challenging to provide everything a child needs—especially when we lack role models to follow. Financial hardship, work-life balance, relationship issues, and wounds from our past represent some of the obstacles to parenting.
There are six core concepts which are proven necessary for becoming a functional, healthy adult. These lessons begin in childhood and are essential to model and teach our own children. Jan Bergstrom highlights them as areas of healing in her book Gifts from a Challenging Childhood: Healing the Legacy of Childhood Trauma—loving ourselves, protecting ourselves through internal and external boundaries, creating a sense of self, taking care of our needs and wants while establishing interdependence on others, moderating or containing ourselves, and attaching to ourselves and others (2025).
What are the core issues and how do they impact people?
The first core lesson is learning to love ourselves. When we view ourselves with contempt or scorn, we guarantee our defeat. When we treat ourselves as the enemy, we feel worse about ourselves and continue to spiral downward. Someone who feels unloved and has no compassion for his or her mistakes and imperfections finds it difficult to offer love and safety to others, even his or her own children. This is especially challenging when a child seems to be a replica of the parent. Instead, we must esteem ourselves as valuable, offer ourselves grace to grow, and extend that same grace to others as well.
Another essential lesson is protecting ourselves through internal and external boundaries. Boundaries allow us to designate where we end and others begin. External boundaries are a little easier to identify and maintain. Saying “no” to others, not allowing someone to cut in line, or limiting how much overtime you work are all examples of external boundaries. Internal boundaries are more subtle and require more deliberate monitoring. Internal boundaries represent what we allow to impact our thinking, emotions and behaviors and which actions, words or emotions we express. For example, not allowing an insult to change the way you feel about yourself would be keeping the internal boundary in place. Keeping a lid on your frustration and talking through a disagreement is an example of using your internal boundary to guard what comes out of you. Difficulty with boundaries can stem from feeling unprotected when we were vulnerable as children or interpreting our vulnerability as burdensome or shameful. Instead we need to form and maintain boundaries to protect ourselves.
We also needed to learn a sense of self. In order to create a sense of self we must know ourselves. A large component of knowing the self is accepting our imperfection and humanity. Rather than criticizing ourselves and holding to standards of perfectionism, we must allow ourselves to make mistakes without equating them with a lack of worth. We need to know our preferences, needs, opinions, values, goals, and purpose. Having a sense of self helps us stay the course when we are in a challenging situation. When we know who we are and who we want to be, we are able to live in congruence and offer our authentic self to those around us.
Next, we needed to learn to advocate for our personal needs and wants. Having needs does not make us shameful or weak, simply human. Assertiveness in communicating our needs is crucial in forming healthy relationships. As humans, we live interdependently with friend and family to meet the need for safety and connection. We offer safety and connection to others and rely on them to reciprocate. Ignoring personal needs or expecting others to guess what we need, creates a lack of connection with oneself and others. This can result in anxiety, fear, anger, depression, or self-sabotaging behaviors like numbing, abusing substances, overworking, etc. When we take care of our needs and communicate them to others, we are better able to get our needs met.
Moderating or containing ourselves is often difficult when there has been childhood neglect or abuse. We have to learn to maintain a balance in order to live healthy lives. Overdoing something is not good, but neither is total deprivation. Balance looks like doing hard things and to enjoying life, enduring and celebrating, working and playing, being open and maintaining appropriate boundaries. Without persevering through hard things, we never learn the satisfaction of accomplishment and without spontaneous fun we lose the exhilaration of living. Extremes are unsustainable and keep us from flourishing.
The last core lesson we need is to safely connect to ourself and others. Ignoring personal needs, or living in isolation leads to despair and loneliness. We need to attune to ourselves, attune to others who are trustworthy, and have others attune to us for intimate connectedness. Our attachment style, formed in early childhood, can become secure through safe, loving, connected relationships. As we experience secure attachment with ourselves and others, we are able to
Even if we missed these crucial lessons in childhood, it is never too late. We are able to learn and change now. In order to do so, we must approach the process with compassion and patience toward ourselves. With intentional self-awareness and healthy relational support wounds can be healed, and the unhelpful ways we meet legitimate needs can be replaced with healthy skills and habits. We can become functional, whole adults who share these lessons with our children.
If you recognized one or more of these lessons you would like to improve in, I would love to assist you in your personal growth and wellness journey. Take this opportunity to reach out and get support.
Resource
Online Courses: Healing Your Core Issues Parts 1 and 2
Reference
Bergstrom, J. (2025). Gifts from a challenging childhood: Healing the legacy of childhood trauma. Mountain Stream Publishing Company.