When Love Hurts: Making Peace with Childhood and Finding Self-Compassion

Claudio Silva
Aug 4
6 min read

Understanding the Connection Between Childhood Experiences, Self-Talk, and Emotional Healing

The way you talk to yourself is often the way others talked to you during your childhood.

— Claudio Silva, LMFT

Often, the way you treat yourself is rooted in how those close to you treated you during your childhood. The closer these individuals were, the greater their influence on your self-perception and self-treatment. Being treated with kindness during childhood sets the stage to be kind to oneself in adulthood.

Self-criticism is sometimes just the echo of an unkind childhood.

You may have difficulty recalling the interactions you had with your caregivers, siblings, teachers, and peers when you were a child. However, paying attention to your self-talk can provide insights into how they treated you. If you often speak to yourself harshly, it may indicate that certain people who were important in your early life were unkind or aggressive.

Even if these memories have faded, the impact of their treatment lingers in the way you speak to yourself. These conversations have been imprinted in your brain and continue to shape your self-talk to this day. If you start paying attention to the way you talk to yourself, you will become more aware of how you treat yourself, which will also shed light on how you were treated in your childhood.

The quality of your self-talk reflects the nature of your childhood relationships with those closest to you. If your self-talk is kind, compassionate, and supportive, it likely indicates that you experienced positive and uplifting relationships in your formative years. Conversely, if your self-talk is harsh and unkind, it might suggest that your childhood relationships may have been harmful or abusive.

Your inner critic was once someone else’s voice.

Childhood interactions with loved ones characterized by criticism, shouting, physical punishment, and harsh discipline indicate that you likely endured considerable hardship and unhappiness during your childhood. While you may not recall your feelings from that time, your internal self-talk can reveal those experiences. Even if these memories have faded, the impact of your past is still reflected in how you treat yourself today.

We often build walls to protect ourselves, but sometimes they keep love out too.

Some people are reluctant to face how badly they were treated in their childhood by their loved ones. We might feel protective of them because we think it’s a betrayal of them if we acknowledge how they hurt us. However, the purpose here is not to blame them, but to understand the impact of their maltreatment on us. Above all, we bring compassion to both them and ourselves as we dig into those memories. In most cases, they believed they were doing the right thing and had good intentions in mind. However, despite their good intentions, they might still have caused trauma and influenced the way we treat ourselves today.

Forgiveness begins not with others, but with how we treat ourselves.

Confronting the reality of how poorly our loved ones treated us can help us forgive them and improve our relationship with them. This was true for a client of mine whom I’ll refer to as Rita. At 38 years old, she had never had a good relationship with her mother, Laura. During all their interactions, she grew angry at her mother, who would act like a helpless victim to see if Rita would feel compassion and be gentler with her. However, Rita felt manipulated by Laura’s victimhood and became even angrier. The truth is that Rita carried a great deal of resentment from how Laura treated her in childhood and the preference her mother showed for her younger sister.

In Rita’s view, her mother treated her like a maid. She had to go out to buy things and also had to work hard at home. When she asked her mother why she didn’t ask her sister to go out to buy things as well, her mother said it was because Rita was ugly, which meant that no one would be interested in hurting her. This made Rita not only feel like a maid but also think she was repulsive to others.

The worst of all is that when Rita was a child, she was sexually abused by an uncle who took care of her. When she talked to her mother about it, her mother didn’t believe her and was upset with her. This led Rita to shut down and no longer seek comfort from her mother. She didn’t trust that her mother would defend her if someone abused her. It was more likely that her mother would defend the abuser instead of protecting Rita.

Because Rita was the oldest sibling, her mother asked for her support in taking care of the younger ones. This prevented Rita from being a child because she had to take the responsibility of caring for her siblings.

Despite all her trauma, Rita became a hardworking, independent, and successful woman. This caused her mother to rely on her to help her siblings financially. Her mother never considered that Rita might need help herself, as Rita worked hard to achieve what she had. When Rita tried to express her own needs to her mother, she seemed not to understand.

There was a session in which Rita looked into her relationship with her mother with courage and acceptance. As we talked about what she suffered, she sobbed and cried. She allowed herself to feel the feelings she had in her childhood and grieve the love and attention she never had.

When we grieve the love we never received, we open ourselves to the love that still lives within us.

A few days later, Rita told me about something remarkable that had happened to her. She had connected with her loving feelings for her mother and felt deep compassion for her. As she allowed herself to grieve the connection she never had with her mother, the love she felt for her resurfaced. She realized that although she had always loved her mother, resentment and anger had prevented her from accessing the loving feelings that were inside her.

This prompted Rita to start a conversation with Laura about her childhood. She explained to her mother why she couldn’t allow her in for her entire life. She told Laura about how she had built a wall that created distance between them and made her mother feel unable to connect with her. The two of them cried together and reconciled the issues they faced in the past.

Love is never one-directional. Compassion toward ourselves happens together with compassion for others.

Rita was so happy about this breakthrough in her relationship with Laura that she wanted to share the news with others. She was very grateful because she didn’t like the distance she had with her mother. Feeling warmth toward her mother helped her overcome the guilt she felt for not accessing those feelings of love that were always inside of her. At the same time, Rita could also have compassion for the difficult childhood she had. This caused her self-esteem to improve as she understood that the treatment she received from her mother didn’t have anything to do with her not deserving to be loved, but with Laura’s traumas and problems.

I have realized through my clients’ progress in therapy that when they connect with the way they treat themselves, they can make peace with those who hurt them in childhood. When we become gentle with ourselves and treat ourselves with kindness and respect, we ultimately forgive those who shaped our self-perception.

Becoming aware of your self-talk is the first step toward rewriting your story.

Most of the problems we have originated in our relationships with important people in our childhood. When we feel diminished, disrespected, and devalued, we develop a negative view of ourselves. The worst of all is that we learn to treat ourselves the same way our loved ones treated us. However, there’s another consequence of that. We harbor a resentment against that person that will make it hard for us to connect with them.

Becoming aware of our self-talk and the way we treat ourselves not only helps us to be compassionate to ourselves but also to forgive those who hurt us in the past. Anger toward others only exists when there’s anger toward ourselves.

Healing isn’t linear—it unfolds gently, through courage, reflection, and time.

I also want to point out that we cannot force this process. For a long time, Rita felt uncomfortable about her lack of affection toward her mother. She felt angry when she was with her mother, but she couldn’t change it. We had talked about her childhood trauma in many sessions, but the problem persisted. In the session I talked about here, she finally had a breakthrough. However, it was a combination of all the sessions that finally changed her feelings toward her mother.

Being gentle and kind to ourselves helps us to be gentle and kind to others. Your treatment of yourself will help you to connect to yourself and others. It will also help you to grieve whatever trauma you might have had in your childhood and forgive those who hurt you.