How to Overcome Your Childhood

A guide to understanding, and liberating ourselves from, our past.

To an extraordinary and humbling extent, who we are as adults is determined by events that happened to us before our fifteenth birthday. The way we express affection, the sort of people we find appealing, our understanding of success and our approach to work are all shaped by events in childhood.

We don’t have to remain prisoners of the past, but in order to liberate ourselves from our histories we must first become fully aware of them. This book by The School of Life is about such a liberation. We learn about how character is developed, the concept of ‘emotional inheritance’, the formation of our concepts of being ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and the impact of parental styles of love on the way we choose adult partners. We learn too about how we might evolve emotionally and, in particular, how we may sometimes need to have a breakdown in order to have a breakthrough.

We are left with a powerful sense that building up an emotionally successful adult life is possible so long as we reflect with sufficient imagination and compassion on what happened to us a long while back.