The Role of Childhood in Forming Adult Identities

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Many adults who begin therapy describe a subtle but persistent feeling that they have spent much of their lives being the person others needed them to be, rather than the person they naturally are. On the outside they may appear capable, responsible and well adjusted, yet internally there can be a sense of disconnection from their own feelings, preferences or needs. In psychology this experience is sometimes described as living from a false self.

Despite how the phrase may sound, a false self is not about dishonesty or pretending. It is usually a protective adaptation that develops during childhood in response to the emotional environment around us. When we understand how this process unfolds, it becomes easier to see why so many thoughtful, capable adults still struggle with authenticity later in life.

The idea of the false self was introduced by the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, who observed that a child’s sense of identity develops through being seen, understood and responded to by caregivers. When a child’s feelings and spontaneous expressions are welcomed, they gradually develop what Winnicott called a true self; a sense of being real, emotionally alive and able to express themselves naturally in the world.

However, not all environments allow this process to unfold easily. Children are highly sensitive to the emotional climate around them. If certain feelings lead to tension, criticism, withdrawal or unpredictability, the child often learns, without consciously realising it, to adjust their behaviour in order to maintain connection and safety. They may become especially responsible, quiet their own needs, avoid conflict or focus on keeping others comfortable. These adjustments can work remarkably well in childhood, helping the child navigate difficult emotional situations. Over time, however, these adaptive patterns can become so familiar that they begin to replace the person’s natural responses.

In adult life this can lead to a feeling of performing rather than simply being. Some people notice that they automatically prioritise other people’s needs, struggle to identify what they themselves want, or feel uneasy expressing disagreement or vulnerability. Others describe a sense of exhaustion from constantly adapting to expectations. Interestingly, these patterns can become especially noticeable in environments that resemble earlier family dynamics. Returning to the family home, interacting with certain relatives or entering hierarchical situations can sometimes trigger a quick return to old ways of responding. When this happens, it does not mean that personal growth has been lost; it simply means that the mind recognises a familiar emotional landscape and briefly reactivates an old strategy for maintaining safety.

Seen in this light, the false self is not a flaw but a sign of the mind’s remarkable adaptability. At the time it developed, it was often the best available way to preserve connection, stability or emotional protection. For this reason, the aim of therapy is not to eliminate this part of the self but to understand it and gradually reduce the need to rely on it in every situation.

Reconnecting with a more authentic sense of self tends to be a gradual and compassionate process rather than a dramatic transformation. It often begins with simply noticing the moments when we automatically adapt or override our own feelings. From there, many people begin to rediscover their internal experience, such as preferences, emotions and bodily responses, which may have been set aside for many years. As these signals become clearer, it becomes possible to experiment with expressing them in small, safe ways within supportive relationships.

Over time, these experiences help the nervous system learn something important: that authenticity does not necessarily threaten connection. In fact, when it is expressed thoughtfully and safely, authenticity often deepens relationships rather than weakening them.

In this sense, reconnecting with the authentic self is rarely about becoming someone new. More often it involves rediscovering aspects of ourselves that were always present but had to remain quiet for a time. With patience, understanding and the right support, people can learn that it is possible to remain connected to others while also remaining connected to themselves.

Collette O’Mahony 07 March 2026

If anything in this article resonates and you wish to explore more: Contact me at info@colletteomahony.com – with your name, age, issue and goals for therapy. I offer a free introduction session of 15 minutes to assess if you want to proceed. One hour online sessions are £45. Psychotherapy

Unlocking Emotional Flow: Therapy Beyond Behavior Change

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Most people come to therapy wanting to change a behaviour. They want to stop people-pleasing. To control their anger. To quiet the inner critic. To ‘fix’ the pattern that keeps repeating in relationships. But behaviour is rarely the beginning of the story. It is the surface layer, the visible structure of something that formed much earlier.

Many of our most frustrating patterns function like ice. They are solid, organised, and protective. They hold shape. They prevent collapse. They conserve energy. At some point in our development, they were adaptive responses to relational or emotional environments that felt overwhelming, unpredictable, or unsafe. A child who learns that anger disrupts connection may freeze it into compliance. A nervous system that cannot safely process grief may convert it into productivity. A system exposed to chronic uncertainty may develop hyper-vigilance disguised as responsibility. What we later call maladaptive was once intelligent. Ice is not a mistake. It is water under particular conditions. The question is not how to shatter it. The question is what conditions would allow it to soften.

Awareness as Heat

Force hardens defensive structures. Awareness softens them. In psychological research, metacognitive awareness, the capacity to observe internal experience without immediate reaction, has been shown to reduce emotional reactivity and increase regulatory flexibility. When we bring non-judgmental attention to a pattern, activity in the prefrontal cortex increases while limbic reactivity decreases. In simple terms, the nervous system begins to feel less threatened by what it is observing.

Awareness is heat. Not analysis, self-criticism, or intellectual dismantling. Just sustained, regulated noticing. When a person becomes aware of their people-pleasing in the moment it happens, the slight tightening in the chest, the automatic yes before checking internally, something subtle begins to melt. The pattern loses some of its rigidity. It becomes less compulsory. The solid begins to liquefy.

Beneath the Structure: The Emotional Layer

When the ice melts, we encounter water. Underneath rigid behaviour patterns lies emotion, often the emotion that was once too overwhelming to process safely. Sadness that had no witness. Anger that threatened attachment. Shame that felt annihilating.
Fear that had nowhere to discharge. Emotions are not irrational disruptions of the mind; they are adaptive physiological signals. Contemporary affective neuroscience shows that emotions are embodied states, involving shifts in heart rate, breath, muscular tone, hormonal release, and neural activation. They are movement in the system.

But when emotion cannot move, when a nervous system remains in chronic sympathetic activation (fight/flight) or dorsal shutdown (collapse), that movement becomes trapped. Anxiety frequently emerges not because emotion exists, but because it has been inhibited. Water that cannot flow becomes stagnant. This is why insight alone rarely produces lasting change. A person may understand why they developed a pattern and still feel powerless to shift it. Cognitive clarity does not automatically restore emotional mobility. The work at this stage is not to intensify emotion, but to allow it.

Allowing as Regulated Heat

When we apply gentle, regulated heat to water, it becomes vapour. In therapeutic terms, the heat applied to emotion is not confrontation, it is permission within safety. It is the experience of feeling anger without losing connection. Of feeling sadness without collapsing. Of feeling shame without being abandoned.

Research in attachment theory consistently demonstrates that co-regulation, being emotionally accompanied while activated, increases affect tolerance and integration. When emotion is allowed in the presence of attuned awareness, the nervous system reorganises. Neural networks associated with threat begin to link with networks associated with meaning and self-reflection. Emotion begins to metabolise rather than accumulate. And when emotion metabolises, something remarkable happens. It rises.

Vapour: Expression, Flow, and Radiance

Steam is water transformed. It is still water, but now it moves upward. It expands. It becomes visible in a new way. Psychologically, this is the stage of expression. Expression is not performance. It is not cathartic discharge for its own sake. It is the natural outward movement that occurs when internal pressure has been processed.

Expression may look like: Speaking a boundary without apology. Crying without shame.
Laughing without restraint. Creating without self-censorship. Saying no without collapse. Human systems are organised around movement. Suppression requires continuous energy. Expression restores energy. From a physiological perspective, regulated emotional expression is associated with improved vagal tone, reduced inflammatory markers, and greater autonomic flexibility. Chronic inhibition, by contrast, correlates with elevated stress hormones and increased inflammatory response. The body does, quite literally, carry what cannot be expressed. We are not built for indefinite containment. We are built for circulation.

We Are Wired to Radiate

On a literal level, the elements that compose the human body were formed in stars. The carbon in our cells, the oxygen we breathe, the iron in our blood, these are stellar materials. We are matter that has already undergone transformation under immense heat. There is something deeply fitting in the metaphor. Just as the sun radiates, living systems radiate when unobstructed. Radiance is not a personality trait. It is what emerges when suppression eases. When maladaptive structures soften into emotion, and emotion is allowed to move into expression, vitality returns. Presence deepens. Relationships become more reciprocal. The body often softens its defensive tone.

This is not mystical. It is regulatory. The aim of therapy, then, is not to dismantle the self. It is to create conditions of warmth. To bring awareness to what froze. To allow feeling where there was structure. To support expression where there was inhibition. Not breaking the ice, but warming it. You were never meant to remain solid. You were meant to move. And when you move, you radiate.

Collette O’Mahony, March 2026

Therapy is not about dismantling who you are. It is about creating the warmth and safety required for transformation. We move at the pace of your nervous system. We begin with awareness, build capacity for feeling, and gently support expression so that change emerges naturally rather than forcefully. You do not have to shatter the ice alone. If you are ready to explore what it would mean to feel more present in your body, more regulated in your emotions, and more authentic in your relationships, I invite you to reach out. Together, we can create the conditions that allow you not just to cope, but to flow and radiate.

An introduction on zoom (15 minutes) Free. One to one sessions (online) £45/ $62.

info@colletteomahony.com – Include your first name, date of birth, goals for therapy.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Emotional Dysregulation

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Making Sense of Reactions That Once Kept You Safe

When someone has lived with emotional abuse, their reactions later in life can feel confusing or even frightening to them. They may feel overwhelmed by emotions, struggle to calm themselves, or wonder why certain interactions affect them so deeply. Often, what they are experiencing is emotional dysregulation, not because they are failing to cope, but because their nervous system learned to survive in an unsafe emotional environment. Emotional abuse doesn’t always look dramatic from the outside. It can be subtle, ongoing, and hard to name. It might involve criticism, emotional withdrawal, unpredictability, or being made to feel small or ‘too much.’ Over time, these experiences shape how a person relates not only to others, but to their own inner world.

When emotions were not safe to express, or when love felt conditional, the nervous system adapted. It learned to stay alert, to watch for changes, to anticipate harm before it arrived. These adaptations were intelligent responses at the time. They helped the person remain connected, avoid rejection, or minimise emotional pain. The difficulty is that the nervous system doesn’t automatically update when circumstances change.

Body’s Response

Many people describe feeling as though their reactions are out of proportion to the present moment. A tone of voice, a silence, or a perceived shift in connection can bring a surge of fear, anger, or despair. Intellectually, they may know they are safe, yet emotionally they feel anything but. This isn’t a failure of insight or self-control. It’s the body responding to something that feels familiar, even if it no longer reflects the current reality.

When emotional abuse occurs within close relationships, particularly in childhood or long-term partnerships, attachment becomes intertwined with threat. The person they need for safety is also the person who causes pain. In these circumstances, the nervous system often chooses connection over protection. People learn to minimise their own needs, to take responsibility for others’ emotions, or to work harder to preserve closeness, even when it costs them.

Healing the Nervous System

Later in life, these patterns can reappear in adult relationships, especially during conflict, separation, or emotional distance. A sense of stability may feel fragile. Calm may feel temporary or unreliable. There can be a strong urge to repair, to fix, or to hold things together, alongside moments of emotional shutdown or exhaustion. Again, these are not signs of weakness. They are echoes of earlier survival strategies.

Healing emotional dysregulation is not about learning to control emotions or make them disappear. It’s about helping the nervous system experience safety in new ways. This is a gradual process. It involves becoming curious about bodily sensations, learning to recognise the early signs of overwhelm, and developing ways to settle the system rather than override it.

Just as importantly, healing often involves grief. Grief for the safety, consistency, or emotional calibration that was missing earlier in life. Allowing space for that grief can be deeply regulating in itself. Over time, as safety is built from the inside out, emotions become less frightening. They begin to move through rather than take over.

For those living with the effects of emotional abuse, it’s important to say this clearly: there is nothing inherently wrong with you. Your responses make sense when understood in the context of what you lived through. Healing is not about becoming someone different. It’s about slowly, compassionately helping your system learn that it no longer has to live in survival mode.

Change doesn’t come from self-criticism or pushing harder. It comes from understanding, from patience, and from relationships, including the therapeutic one, that offer steadiness where there was once uncertainty.

Collette O’Mahony (Dip.Psy.C) Psychotherapy

For a free 15 minute introduction, email me at: info@colletteomahony.com (include your name, email address and goals for therapy).

Surviving Parental Trauma

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Many adults struggle in relationships, with emotions, or with their sense of self without fully understanding why. Often, the missing piece is this: they grew up with a parent who was carrying unresolved trauma. This article is for adult children of trauma-affected parents. It is not about diagnosing parents or assigning blame. Instead, it’s about understanding how growing up around unprocessed trauma can shape a child and how that child, now an adult, can begin to heal. A parent does not need to talk about their trauma for it to affect their child. Trauma lives in the nervous system, and children are exquisitely sensitive to it. They feel it in tone, in mood shifts, in emotional absences, and in reactions that seem bigger than the moment calls for. A trauma-affected parent may feel emotionally unpredictable to a child, sometimes present and loving, other times overwhelmed, withdrawn, anxious, controlling, or unreachable. Even when care and love are present, they may exist alongside fear, confusion, or emotional distance. For a child, this creates a painful contradiction: the same person who provides comfort may also be the source of distress. Over time, the child adapts.

Adaptation as Survival

Children always adapt to their environment. When a parent’s unresolved trauma dominates the emotional landscape, the child learns, often without awareness, what is required to stay connected and safe. Many adult children of trauma-affected parents learned to closely monitor moods, anticipate emotional shifts, stay quiet or helpful, take responsibility for other people’s feelings, or grow up far too quickly. These were not personality traits; they were survival strategies.

Often, these adaptations later become strengths. Empathy, responsibility, sensitivity, and attunement may be highly developed. But what once protected the child can later limit the adult, especially in relationships that require mutuality rather than vigilance.

Body Memory

Trauma is not just remembered; it is encoded in the nervous system. As adults, many people notice that being with their parent, or even thinking about them, triggers strong physical responses. Anxiety, panic, freezing, emotional shutdown, sudden anger, or overwhelming guilt can appear quickly and feel disproportionate. Some people notice that they feel much younger in these moments, as though they are transported back into the emotional world of childhood. These reactions are not signs of weakness or immaturity. They are learned survival responses. The body remembers what it had to do to stay safe long before the adult mind had language or choice.

Invisible Beliefs

Growing up around unresolved trauma often shapes quiet, deeply held beliefs about self and relationships. Many adult children carry an unspoken sense that their needs are too much, that they are responsible for other people’s emotions, or that closeness inevitably leads to danger or loss. These beliefs are rarely conscious, yet they influence boundaries, intimacy, work, and self-worth throughout adulthood. They shape how much space a person feels entitled to take, how safe they feel depending on others, and how easily they experience guilt when prioritising themselves.

Triggers

For many adult children, the parent themselves becomes a trauma trigger, not because the parent intends harm, but because the relationship is linked to years of emotional unpredictability. This can create a deep and painful inner conflict. There may be a longing for closeness alongside a strong sense of unsafety, compassion that exists next to anger or grief, or a tendency to minimize one’s own pain because the parent “had it worse.” Understanding this dynamic can be profoundly relieving. It explains why insight alone does not make these reactions disappear and why healing must involve the nervous system, not just logic or willpower.

One of the most difficult and most healing tasks for adult children is learning to hold two truths at the same time: a parent may have been deeply wounded and doing the best they could, and the child’s emotional needs were still not fully met. Acknowledging impact is not the same as blaming. Your pain does not invalidate your compassion, and your compassion does not erase your pain. Both can exist together.

Healing

Healing from parental trauma is not about fixing the parent or forcing forgiveness. It is about restoring safety, choice, and connection to oneself. This often includes learning to recognise and regulate trauma responses, developing boundaries that protect the nervous system, grieving the parent you needed but did not have, and untangling responsibility from love. Over time, it also means building relationships that feel steadier, more reciprocal, and less activating.

Healing rarely happens all at once. It unfolds gradually, in layers. What matters is not how much you understand, but how much safety you allow yourself to experience in the present.

If you grew up with a trauma-affected parent, your struggles make sense. You adapted to an environment that asked more of you than it should have. You are not broken. You are responding exactly as someone who learned to survive early and often. Healing does not require blame. It requires honesty, compassion, and the permission to care for yourself in ways you never received. You deserved safety then. You are allowed to choose it now.

For one-to-one counselling email me with your name, age and goals for therapy. I offer a free introductory session of 15 minutes. All sessions are online.

info@colletteomahony.com

Collette O’Mahony. February 2026.

The Politics of Attention

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Beneath the surface tensions cracking like chasms across our world, there is an inner world, a centre point where we replenish our energy. Now more than ever, it is important to draw our focus inward. Our energy is our most precious resource. When we lose sight of this, our attention shifts to outer, more tangible sources such as gas, oil and money. Attention itself functions as an energy source for leaders, industries and technologies that depend on visibility and engagement. This is one reason we perceive them as powerful; our sustained attention amplifies their influence. In this way, our precious resource, energy, is consumed and scattered across continents in the pursuit of profit and supremacy.

Internal conflict, when left unexamined, reflects outward as division in the world.

High-conflict traits are becoming more audible in the world. This noise drowns out the inner quiet we need in order to replenish our energy. A shift is required: away from pathologising outer conflicts, whether at home, at work or politically, and towards reclaiming our own agency and tending to our inner landscape.

If we find ourselves over-identifying with social and political rifts, it is worth examining what we gain from this attachment. There is a double-edged sword in engaging with people or groups caught in high-conflict patterns: validation on one side, criticism on the other. The outer dynamic may mirror an unconscious pattern in which we seek validation while capitulating to overly critical or controlling behaviour. We must decide where our responsibility for other people’s behaviour ends, and where our responsibility for safety and inner peace begins.

Inner and Outer Boundaries

Every country has its own boundaries, whether drawn on land or by sea, and people operate within its laws. When boundaries are invaded, conflict arises; the twentieth century stands as testament to this. We, too, have boundaries. We protect them by remaining centred and by drawing our focus inward. When we allow our attention to drift towards conflict and drama, we become vulnerable to invading forces. Once our energy strays beyond our boundaries, it is picked up and scattered like salt across the wound of the world.

Perhaps the work, then, is not to resolve the conflicts of the world, but to notice where our attention rests and to choose, again and again, where we place our energy. In moments of tension or outrage, we might pause and return to the quiet centre within, where boundaries are felt rather than defended. From this place, harmony becomes less about agreement and more about presence; less about changing others, and more about remaining intact ourselves.

Collette O’Mahony

21st January 2026

For enquiries about one-to-one counselling (zoom) click below: colletteomahony.com/counselling Psychotherapy

or,

send an email with you name and counselling goals to:

info@colletteomahony.com info@colletteomahony.com