Imprints From Childhood May Effect Your Intimacy Today

By Milan and Kay Yerkovich, posted on MarriageVine.com

When she was eighteen years old, Tina came to Milan and me for help. She was desperate for close connections, but she often felt misunderstood, which made her angry. She was frustrated by her inner turmoil and told us, "Something is wrong, but I don't understand exactly what the problem is or how to change it."

In our first session I asked Tina to explore the feelings beneath her anger. She was quiet for a while, considering the matter for the first time ever. "Uneasy," she finally said. "It's a yucky feeling, like something is wrong, and I want someone to make that feeling go away. Then I get irritable because it won't." She looked up at me with big eyes. "Wow, I never really thought how anxious I feel before I get angry. Or I just never put words to it."

As we continued talking, I discovered that Tina's feelings of anger and anxiety were intense. She could see that she often overreacted and that little things set her off. Often this intensity tells me that the past is flooding into the present. Yet nothing in Tina's memories seemed to fit. We revisited numerous childhood experiences, yet nothing seemed to explain the cause of her current emotions.

Then finally, in his gracious way, God intervened. During a conversation with her mother, Tina was surprised to hear her mom describe a serious car accident that had taken place when Tina was only ten months old. Tina's car seat had protected her from injury, yet at the scene, her seat­with Tina it­had been placed to the side of the road while injured passengers were tended to. The atmosphere was one of total chaos. Police came. An ambulance arrived. Tina watched as paramedics removed her mother from the car and took her away in their big, noisy van. Tina didn't see her mother after that for an entire week while her mother recovered in the hospital from a broken pelvis. The uninterrupted care Tina had experienced for the first ten months of her life had vanished in a flash.

When her mother arrived home after a week in the hospital, she was shocked that Tina wouldn't look at her or come to her. Even worse, Tina's mom was not allowed to pick her up or hold her until her injuries fully healed.

Imagine what this experience had done to young Tina even though she remembered none of it consciously. After listening to her story, I asked Tina to describe what she might have felt at the time of the accident and afterward. "Scared. No ... terrified," she said. "Like my mom was never coming back." She paused. "I sort of still feel like that all the time, and it's so strong. When someone leaves, I feel like that person won't come back, and I get scared." She continued, "When my mom came back, I didn't want to look at her because I was mad that she'd left. And I was afraid she might leave again." Tina began to cry. "I still have these feelings all the time. Every time my boyfriend leaves. It's the exact same feeling. I'm not crazy. I really did feel all this. I still feel it."

In my book, How We Love, I mention that an imprint is like a song we know by heart. It plays over and over in our relationships, and unless we take the time to learn to hear it, we'll remain unable to do anything about it. Many people have told us, "I can't remember much of my childhood. How could it have such a strong impact on my relationships today?"

I'll let Dr. Daniel Siegel help me explain. In his book The Developing Mind, Dr. Siegel presents a fascinating description of how we recall our early years as he discusses two types of memory: explicit, which requires language, and implicit, which is preverbal. "Explicit memory is what most people mean when they refer to the generic idea of memory ... When explicit recollections are retrieved, [one has] the internal sensation of 'I am remembering.' ... Explicit memory is often communicated to ourselves and to others in the form of descriptive words or pictures communicating a story or sequence of events. If we asked you to share a sad childhood memory, you would tell a story from your past and be aware that the sad feeling is linked to the event you are recalling. You would know you are "remembering," and you would know why you are sad.

Implicit memories, however, are our preverbal "baby memories." As an infant and toddler, you experienced your environment through facial expressions, voice tones, feelings, and bodily sensations when you responded to your parents and surroundings, always learning what to expect. These feelings and sensations (good and bad) are implicit memories, and "by a child's first birthday, these repeated patterns of implicit learning are deeply encoded in the brain."

We adults are influenced by these preverbal, implicit memories when they are activated in current relationships. We experience them as a flood of feelings, but without the awareness that we are remembering anything. Dr. Siegel clarifies, "Implicit memory involves parts of the brain that do not require conscious processing during encoding or retrieval." Also, as implicit memories are recalled, there is no sensation that something is being recollected. Milan and I think of these as "feeling memories" that are formed by experiences and relationships during our preverbal years. And when our negative implicit memories go unnoticed, they can wreak havoc on relationships.

Are you surprised that such an early experience can affect a person for so many years? Tina was exceptionally bright, perceptive, and sensitive from birth, but a specific trauma had interrupted her attachment to her mother and shattered her secure base of comfort. Connecting that past event to her present troubles flipped the switch for Tina. Suddenly she understood the reason for her reactivity. And after hearing her mother's account of the experience, Tina realized that her mother had been a victim of the situation as well. Tina's deeper awareness and resulting healing confirm the remarkable truth that "knowing about implicit memory allows us the opportunity to free ourselves from the prison of the past."

Milan and I believe that identifying our own childhood imprints really can help us overcome present problems in our relationships. But to uncover those relational "dance steps" we learned from our parents, we must first be willing to form a picture of our early years. Most of us have plenty of memories from which to draw. But asking relatives for their recollections can sometimes be helpful too, especially when we're asking about our infancy.