They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

— from “This Be the Verse” by Philip Larkin

No one passes through childhood entirely untouched. We may grow up, leave the family we came from, enter new relationships, take on new identities, and build new lives. Yet childhood does not simply end. It remains within us in more hidden forms, as an internal grammar shaping how we understand love, power, dependence, shame, and our place in relationships.

The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips once suggested that one reason childhood leaves such deep traces is that the child’s world is structured from the beginning by asymmetry. One person is big, the other small. One knows, while the other is learning. One gives, while the other needs. One can leave, while the other can only wait.

We usually imagine this relationship as loving, necessary, even innocent. After all, children do need adults. They need someone to protect them, feed them, hold them, and teach them how to live in the world. But Phillips’s point is sharper than that. When love and dependence become entangled with frustration, anger, control and envy, this asymmetry is no longer purely tender. It may also contain something of a sadomasochistic structure.

This does not mean that all parents deliberately harm their children. Nor does it mean that every childhood is traumatic. It means, rather, that childhood as an experience of having once been small leaves traces that can never be entirely erased.

I came to understand this gradually.

As a postdoctoral researcher in early childhood development, I worked with many parents and children under the age of three. There I saw this asymmetry in its most primitive form: an infant wholly dependent on an adult, while that adult struggled with their own anxieties, exhaustion, needs and unresolved history.

Later, when I began offering long-term psychotherapy to adults, patient after patient brought their present relationships, shame, anger, compliance, perfectionism and self-doubt back to the earliest experiences of childhood: how they had been held, ignored, silenced, criticised, or made to find their place inside an adult’s emotional world.

Then, when I became a parent myself, I saw intergenerational transmission from yet another angle. We are not simply “raising children”. We are often meeting, through our children, the parts of our own childhood that remain unresolved. A child’s crying, dependence, defiance, longing and vulnerability can awaken experiences in the adult that had long been pushed down.

Over time, I came to believe that the question is not whether childhood asymmetry leaves a mark. It always does. The real question is what we do with the marks it leaves behind.

The Core Structure of Childhood: One Big Person and One Small One

Children do not first encounter the world as a set of abstract ideas. They encounter it as a set of differences.

Who is bigger, and who is smaller? Who is stronger, and who is weaker? Who knows, and who does not? Who can walk away, and who must wait? Whose mood can change the whole room, and who must adapt?

To a child, the adult body is enormous. The adult voice can fill an entire space. An adult’s closeness can bring comfort, but it can also bring threat. An adult’s absence may be nothing more than a brief departure, but in the child’s world it can feel immeasurable.

Long before any explicit teaching takes place, the child has already learned through the body and through feeling what power is. Someone else can lift you up, or hold you down. They can soothe you, or ignore you. They can answer your cry, or leave you alone with it.

This asymmetry is not in itself evil. Children do need someone bigger. Without adult care, they cannot survive. Their dependence is not symbolic; it is real. They need to be fed, protected, comforted, and slowly helped to understand the world.

But because children have no other way of making sense of experience, they easily read the adult’s responses as judgments about themselves.

When an adult responds tenderly, the child feels worthy of love. When the adult withdraws, the child may feel unworthy of closeness. When the adult becomes angry, the child may feel bad. When the adult is impatient, the child may feel that their needs are too much.

Within the asymmetry of childhood, the adult’s emotional state often becomes the mirror through which the child comes to know themselves.

An adult may simply be tired, overwhelmed by anxiety, or struggling with work, marriage, money or their own mental life. But a child usually cannot understand it that way.

The child does not think: “My mother is in a bad mood today because she has her own difficulties.” The child is more likely to feel: “Am I too much trouble?” They do not think: “My father’s anger comes from his own helplessness.” They are more likely to believe: “Have I done something wrong?”

Children need adults, so they cannot easily allow themselves to see the adult as unstable, fragile, confused or unreliable. For a child, it is too dangerous to believe that the person who cares for them may be the problem. If my caregiver is unreliable, then my world is unsafe.

So the child often chooses an explanation that feels more bearable: the problem must be me.

This is a primitive and painful form of psychological protection. If I am the one at fault, then perhaps I can change. If I become better, quieter, cleverer, less needy, perhaps love will return. But if the adult is the problem, the child has almost no power over the situation.

In this sense, self-blame is not always weakness. Sometimes it is a survival strategy. By turning the adult’s projection inward, the child preserves the relationship and preserves a fantasy of safety and love. However painful that fantasy may be, it at least allows the child to believe that there is still something they can do.

The Child Also Longs to Become the Big One

Within an asymmetrical relationship, the child is not only passive. Children also fantasise about becoming the bigger, more powerful one.

A toddler who kicks, bites, commands, screams or protests is not simply being “naughty”. Such behaviour can also be a way of learning about power. The child is testing: if I too can affect others, if I too can make someone stop, listen, hurt or respond, then perhaps I am no longer only the helpless one.

But this experience is always confused.

Dependence produces frustration. Frustration produces aggression. Aggression produces guilt. The child wants to be cared for, yet fears being controlled. The child longs for closeness, yet feels their own powerlessness within it.

Gradually, children begin to sense that love and control are not always cleanly separable. Being cared for can sometimes feel like being dominated. Trying to control someone else can sometimes be a plea to be cared for.

This is the complex sadomasochistic structure that Phillips locates in early relationships. The child longs for the powerful other, yet fears being swallowed by that power. The child wants to depend, yet wants to escape dependence. The child needs love, yet may experience love as control.

These contradictions do not disappear naturally with age. They are carried into adult intimacy, friendship, work, and even into our relationship with ourselves.

Our later desire for closeness, and our fear of it, often take their earliest shape here. A person may long to be held tightly and yet fear being engulfed. They may want to be cared for and yet fear that dependence will cost them their freedom. They may want to express need and yet fear that need will make them shameful.

Childhood does not leave behind only isolated memories. It leaves behind a way of understanding relationships.

How Adults Project Their Own Childhoods Onto Children

If Phillips helps us hear the echo of early asymmetry, the psychoanalyst Elisabeth Young-Bruehl takes the argument further. She suggests that our culture contains a largely invisible prejudice against children, which she calls “childism”.

Children do not face only the inequality of size and authority. They also face adults’ unconscious fantasies about what children are.

In different families and cultures, children may be imagined as bad, rebellious, dangerous, fragile, seductive, in need of correction, or naturally in need of control. Before the adult has truly encountered the child in front of them, they often approach that child through an inherited idea of what a child is.

This is what makes Young-Bruehl’s argument so unsettling. It asks us to reconsider many things that are usually described as “normal parenting”.

An adult may call it discipline, but beneath it may lie a fear of losing control. An adult may say it is for the child’s own good, while also being unable to bear the child’s independence. An adult may call it teaching manners, while projecting their own vulnerability, dependence, anger or shame onto the child.

Very often, the child is not seen as they really are. They are filtered and interpreted through the adult’s unresolved past. The adult cannot bear certain parts of themselves, and so places them in the child: aggression, vulnerability, dependence, longing, shame, disobedience, and emotions the adult was never allowed to have.

The child then becomes the container for the adult’s emotional history.

Adults often believe they are responding to the child, when in fact they may be responding to some part of their own past. A parent who grew up feeling unseen may demand constant attention, admiration or compliance from the child. A parent who feared conflict in childhood may require the child to be “good” at any cost. An adult who once felt intruded upon may experience the child’s natural dependence as suffocating. Someone who was shamed for having needs may feel anger or panic when their child cries.

These responses do not arise entirely from who the child is. They come from the adult’s own unprocessed history. That history becomes an emotional script, and the child is made to perform it.

In my work with parents of very young children, I often saw this clearly.

One mother was highly capable in almost every area of life. She was stable at work, organised, practical, and outwardly rational and composed. Yet she could barely bear the sound of her infant crying. She knew the baby was not in danger. She knew the baby simply needed soothing. But the crying itself could undo her almost instantly.

She was not frightened that something had happened to the baby. She was struck by helpless need.

In her own childhood, need had meant weakness, and weakness had meant contempt. She had learned very early to escape that shame by becoming capable. If she could be independent enough, controlled enough, and undemanding enough, she would not have to feel the smallness she once felt.

But an infant’s cry does not obey adult order. It is raw, direct, helpless, and impossible to organise neatly. Her child’s dependence brought her face to face with a part of her own childhood that she had never fully digested.

She was not a bad mother. She was a person who had not yet fully understood the asymmetry of her own early life. And her child had the astonishing power to bring the deepest parts of her past into the present.

How the Adult’s Gaze Becomes the Child’s Inner Voice

In this kind of relationship, children learn very early to adapt to the adult.

They read the adult’s moods, watch the adult’s face, and anticipate the adult’s reaction. They suppress their impulses, shrink their needs, adjust their expressions, and may even begin to care for the adult’s feelings.

Children do not do this because they are naturally obedient. They do it because, within the asymmetry of childhood, adaptation feels like survival.

If expressing need brings impatience, the child learns not to need. If curiosity is treated as trouble, the child learns to be quiet. If anger threatens the relationship, the child learns to suppress anger. If independence is experienced by the adult as rejection, the child learns to exchange compliance for closeness.

For the child, safety can easily be mistaken for love. If I become the version of myself the adult can tolerate, the relationship can continue. So the child begins to organise the self around the adult’s fantasy.

This is a creative adaptation, but it is also a painful distortion.

If a child is repeatedly treated as “too much”, they may eventually believe that they really are too much. If a child is always treated as disobedient, they may come to believe they are difficult by nature. If their needs are resented, they learn to hide them. If their sensitivity is mocked, they experience sensitivity as a defect.

Over time, the adult’s gaze becomes the child’s internal voice.

That voice may say: you are too much trouble. You are too sensitive. You should not need so much. Do not disappoint anyone. You must perform well in order to deserve love.

The most difficult part is that all this often happens before the child has words for it. These inner conclusions are not experienced as “thoughts”. They feel more like facts. They become bodily certainties: this is simply who I am.

The child then begins to confuse who they truly are with who they were required to be.

This may be the beginning of a lifelong confusion.

When an adult cannot bear some part of the child’s aliveness, the child may develop a diffuse sense of inner badness. This badness is not moral badness. It is more like a vague but firm conviction: my needs are a burden; my feelings are too much; my presence makes others uncomfortable; I must manage, reduce and control myself in order not to lose love.

From the outside, this is tragic. But from the child’s point of view, it has a function.

If I am bad, I can try to become good. If I am too much, I can become less. If I am too sensitive, I can become numb. If I am not obedient enough, I can try harder.

This explanation preserves a small sense of agency. It allows the child to believe that the relationship can still be repaired. By contrast, if the adult is the one who is out of control, distorted or unable to tolerate feeling, the child is left in a world that is frightening and impossible to manage.

So children often protect the adult by refusing to recognise the harm the adult has caused. Instead, they take the blame into themselves. This is one reason so many adults find self-blame so hard to relinquish. It was once the way they preserved relationship and safety.

This psychological mechanism does not exist only in individual families. It can also be reinforced by culture, religion and social custom.

In the Deep South where I grew up, the whipping of children was often spoken about with a strange pride. Adults talked about having been whipped as though it were a rite of passage, a moral training, even a proof of love. Many children who had been beaten grew up repeating the same phrases: it was for my own good. It kept me on the right path. It showed they cared.

Pain was explained as education. Domination was dressed up as devotion. Harm was named as love.

This is a classic form of identification with the aggressor. The adult cannot tolerate the child’s dependence or defiance, and so punishes it. The child cannot bear to see the adult as cruel or wrong, and so interprets the punishment as necessary goodness.

What complicates this further is that such a culture may also be supported by religious ideas. The doctrine of original sin, for example, can lead a child to believe that their badness is not the product of a relationship, but a fact written into existence itself. The child does not receive the message “something is wrong with you” only from the parent. They hear it from an entire moral order.

If a child is told that their impulses are corrupt and that adult correction comes from love, it becomes extremely difficult to recognise that they are being harmed. The aggressor is no longer merely one parent. It becomes a culture, a theology, a whole moral world.

When a culture calls harm love, it becomes much harder for the child to believe that their pain is real.

When We Grow Up, Childhood Adaptations Become Personality

I think of one patient, whom I will call Daniel. He is a composite figure drawn from many years of clinical work.

Daniel came to therapy in his twenties, ostensibly because of anxiety. But as the work unfolded, something deeper emerged: he carried within him a merciless inner voice that catalogued his inadequacies with precision. He was intelligent and thoughtful, yet he felt perpetually on the verge of being found out, as though some unforgivable defect lay at his core.

His father had been emotionally explosive. Not constantly brutal, but prone to sudden outbursts of contempt. When Daniel made a mistake, cried, or expressed emotion, his father might say: “Stop being so sensitive.” “You’re too much.” “Why are you so difficult?”

Over time, Daniel did what children often do: he agreed with the father’s judgment.

He came to believe that the problem was not his father’s inability to tolerate feeling, but Daniel’s own sensitivity. The problem was not his father’s contempt, but Daniel’s supposed excess, fragility and intolerability.

In therapy, an important shift occurred. For the first time, Daniel began to consider another possibility: perhaps he had not been a bad child. Perhaps his father had been unable to bear his own feelings, and had passed that difficulty on to his son.

This did not heal everything at once. But it changed the story.

“I was too much” became “he could not bear what he was feeling.”
“There is something wrong with me” became “I was carrying something that did not begin with me.”

That shift is often the first and most important movement in healing.

By the time we grow up, the adaptations we formed in childhood often no longer look like adaptations. They are called personality.

The child who once feared criticism may grow into a perfectionist. The child who once felt “too much” may learn to keep every need small. The child who had to manage the adult’s emotions may become exquisitely sensitive to everyone else’s feelings. The child who learned that compliance brought closeness may shrink themselves inside adult relationships.

These patterns do not always look like wounds. They may be praised as maturity, capability, kindness, discipline or thoughtfulness. But underneath, they may be arrangements the child once made in order to survive.

What we call personality is often the continuation of a childhood survival strategy.

This is not to dismiss a person’s achievements or efforts. It is to recognise that some things we take to be “just who I am” may not have begun as free choices. They may have formed as ways of preserving relationship, avoiding shame, and escaping fear.

I also think of another composite patient, whom I will call Maya.

Maya came to therapy after the end of her second serious relationship. Both relationships had followed a similar pattern. At first, she felt enormous relief at being chosen. At last, she felt wanted, seen and given a place in someone else’s world.

But as the relationship deepened, she began to grow smaller.

She expressed her needs less often. She yielded more often. She increasingly organised her life around her partner’s moods. She guessed what the other person wanted, avoided conflict, swallowed dissatisfaction, and surrendered her boundaries little by little.

Then, at some point, she would erupt. The intensity of the eruption was often out of proportion to the immediate situation, startling both her and her partner. Afterwards, she would feel ashamed and try to restore the old pattern: apologise, comply, become small again.

In childhood, Maya had had a mother who was loving but subtly controlling. Her mother experienced her daughter’s independence as rejection. Maya learned early that closeness required compliance. To preserve the relationship, she could not be too independent, too separate, too much herself, or make her mother feel abandoned.

As an adult, Maya was not simply “choosing the wrong person”. She was unconsciously repeating an earlier relational grammar. She chose partners who responded to her accommodation, and then, once she had endured too much, she erupted with years of suppressed anger.

The work of therapy was not merely to help her find a better partner. It was to help her see that her choice of partner, her shrinking within the relationship, and her sudden explosions all came from a structure older than the relationship itself.

Childhood asymmetry is not found only within families. It is also repeated in peer groups and cultural hierarchies.

Growing up in Mississippi, I saw these structures of power in school hallways: racial tension, rural and urban rivalries, and the brutal hierarchies of boyhood.

There was a small boy everyone called Little Billy. He was thin, soft-faced, and always a target. He was humiliated in the way boys often humiliate one another in games of dominance: teasing, pushing, making sure he knew he occupied the lower place.

One afternoon in the locker room, Billy snapped. He grabbed one of the boys who had long tormented him, a boy nearly a foot taller, and slammed his face into a metal locker with a force that stunned us all.

For a moment, the order seemed reversed. The small one had become the powerful one.

But what I remember most is not the violence itself. It is Billy’s expression. There was terror in it, and excitement too, as though he had suddenly discovered a forbidden kind of bigness and did not know how to inhabit it.

The roles had reversed, but the asymmetry had not disappeared.

This is the cruelty of childhood power structures. A person may move suddenly from being dominated to dominating someone else, but if the underlying logic remains unchanged, they are still trapped inside the same structure. The powerless person gaining power does not automatically become free. Sometimes it is only the old relationship turned inside out.

Adult relationships are not doomed to cruelty. But the traces of early dependence can draw us again and again toward familiar emotional climates.

Some people are drawn to intermittently available partners because intermittent love feels familiar. Some always become the caretaker because they learned early that caring for others preserved the relationship. Some fear dependence and use power, achievement and control as defences against vulnerability. Others move in the opposite direction, finding strange relief in submission, because giving up the self feels more manageable than waiting for someone else to take it away.

We long to be held, yet fear being swallowed. We want closeness, yet fear losing ourselves. We want to express need, yet fear that need will make us shameful.

Familiar pain often feels more bearable than unfamiliar freedom.

That is why people can know that a relational pattern hurts them and still return to it. It is not only a choice. It is an old way of organising experience. It once helped them understand the world, and it once helped them survive.

Healing Is Not Escaping Childhood, But Reorganising It

In this sense, healing does not mean fully escaping childhood.

We cannot erase the past, nor can we create a self that has never been touched by it. The traces of childhood are structural. They are not only memories. They are embedded in how we understand relationships, the self, love and power.

What can change is our relationship to those traces.

When the old explanation — “there is something wrong with me” — begins to loosen, the logic of childhood begins to change as well.

We can come to understand our needs differently. They are not burdens, but part of human life. We can understand dependence differently. It is not shameful, but an unavoidable fact of relationship. We can understand protest differently. It is not necessarily a threat to the relationship; it may be the self recovering a boundary. We can understand disappointment differently. It does not mean we are greedy. It means we once truly hoped for something.

Healing is not getting out of childhood. It is reorganising what childhood has left inside us.

Psychotherapy can bring change not only because it offers explanation or insight, but because it offers a new relational experience.

The structures left by early relationships often can be reorganised only within new relationships.

When a patient risks expressing need and the therapist does not respond with contempt; when they express anger or protest and the relationship does not break; when they disappoint the other person and are not abandoned; when they show vulnerability and are not used — what they experience is not merely understanding. It is a new reality.

For the first time, or perhaps for the first time in a very long time, they experience being small in the presence of someone more powerful without being overpowered.

This experience is slow, uneven and often full of doubt. The patient may test it again and again: will you really not tire of me? Will you really not punish me? Will you really stay?

Only when the relationship survives these tests, again and again, does a new structure begin to form.

This is not simply remembering the past. It is the creation of a different emotional environment. In that environment, things that were once dangerous — need, dependence, protest, disappointment, closeness — begin to become thinkable, speakable and livable.

Becoming the Kind of Big Person Who Can Be Safely Relied On

Childhood teaches us that bigness is unstable.

The big person can protect, but they can also intimidate. They can soothe, but they can also silence. They can hold you, but they can also control you. They can give you a world, but they can also make your world collapse.

Children know this in their bodies long before they have language for it. The experience is remembered even when it cannot yet be spoken.

The task of adulthood is to learn another kind of bigness.

True bigness is not domination. It is not overpowering others. It is not making someone smaller, weaker or dependent carry one’s own emotional burdens. Maturity does not mean requiring others to submit in order to prove one’s strength.

Maturity means being able to hold one’s own needs, hurts and vulnerabilities without passing them on to someone else. It means being able to care for another person without demanding gratitude, compliance or admiration in return. It means allowing someone to depend on us without experiencing that dependence as a threat. It means having strength without turning strength into fear.

This is a different kind of bigness. It does not need to make others small in order to know itself.

Perhaps Phillips is right: no one fully recovers from the sadomasochism of childhood. Childhood asymmetry leaves traces, and the confusions between closeness and control, dependence and fear, love and domination continue to echo through adult life.

But that does not mean we are doomed merely to repeat them.

We can change what those residues become.

We can stop treating our needs as sins. We can stop treating sensitivity as a defect. We can stop mistaking compliance for love. We can stop requiring those weaker than ourselves to carry the unresolved past we have not yet faced.

We can develop a new kind of strength: strength without oppression, care without the demand for obedience, vulnerability without shame.

This is the possibility of adulthood, and also its responsibility.

Perhaps growing up does not mean leaving behind the small child we once were. Perhaps it means finally being able to turn back toward that child with greater tenderness and clarity. We no longer have to see ourselves only through the gaze that was once cast upon us. We no longer have to carry emotions that were never ours.

We begin to understand that the child was not too much, too bad, too sensitive, or too difficult to bear.

He was only small.
And the person before him was too big.

The responsibility of adulthood is to become the kind of big person a small person can safely rely on — including the small person we once were.