HealthyGamerGG - Is Childhood the best time of your life?

Episode Date: June 22, 2022

Dr. K talks about childhood and all it's parts, the good, the bad, how this effects you growing up, and how to remedy a toxic childhood! Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/healthygamergg/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Because if these are the best years of your life and those years were bad for you, that's like that opportunity is gone. That ship is sailed. Screw the idea that childhood is the best part of your life. First of all, first off, you're entitled to your happy childhood memories. This is more of event post. Every time I hear about how much fun it was to play D&D as a kid, the intensity of finally finding the courage to talk to their crush, hearing them laugh as they remember that relationship

only lasted about a week, or about how big. bullying made them stronger, how they snuck out of the house as teenagers about how their interests and dreams for the future were in constant flux, seeing them smile as they reminisce about going to a party, dancing their ass off and noticing that their girlfriend was embarrassed. Every time I hear about how people would want to do it all again if they could, all I think of is that I really wouldn't. Not that I don't have good memories, but most of it really just sucked. School specifically, it was an environment where you were either part of the class or completely excluded by it. There was even bullying going on early on, though perhaps not as you would normally envision it.

It wasn't a small group of people then, that came later, but the entire class that would hate on one individual. It was an environment that taught me to be extremely conscious about what I said and did, so as to not give people ammunition, while simultaneously not making an effort to make friends. Because the less I could be part of that, the better. As people got older, I started to believe that I must somehow be fundamentally broken for no one to life. like me. I did somehow find friends occasionally, though, but unfortunately, I hadn't been taught much about conflict resolution. Combined with my newfound belief that there must be something wrong with me, so no one must like me, every disagreement felt as if they had finally seen through me, resulting in me pulling back into myself. I didn't realize it then that conflict

doesn't have to end with me apologizing profusely, ignoring my own feelings and taking full responsibility, or ghosting as they probably hate me now. perhaps if my own feelings of nervousness, fear, and anger, when I started school had not been dismissed as me being whiny, I could have found someone to help me with my problems as I grew older. As it stood, I was left to draw my own conclusions. So since I had clearly driven these people away, I should try to act less like me and more like the people around me who have friends. Exaggerate the things about me that are likable, suppress the ones that are not.

When I do find friends, I should always be talking about them. helping them out when they need it, whilst solving all of my own problems by myself. Strive for complete independence in all things. So friendships as a teenager were mostly surface level, and a lot of my life was just kind of dull. Again, there were highlights. More than before, and ironically, mostly when I let the mask slip was more authentic to myself. But a lot of teenage life just was really boring and uneventful. all that to say if it was possible, I would never go back in time just to live it all again.

Perhaps to change things or to get more time to live and learn the lessons that people learned as kids and teenagers that I'm currently learning for myself. So childhood sometimes suck as can teenagers. I hope that even if childhood might be the best part of other people's lives, it doesn't have to be the best part of mine. So we have this idea. That childhood is supposed to be the best part of our life. but for a lot of people, for too many people, we don't have warm, glowing memories about childhood. The truth is, childhood was hard.

We were sort of thrust into the world without adequate training or education. We skipped past the tutorial. And we just got bodied by life. It wasn't a small group of bullies that picked on you. It was the whole class. Because the class likes to make fun of one kid. And some of us are that one kid.

And then that shapes our perception of ourselves. We start to learn how to survive where communication becomes giving up ammunition. So we withdraw into ourself. As we withdraw into ourselves, we don't develop social skills. We miss milestones. And then what happens is we don't learn basic things like conflict resolution. And so there are opportunities for friendship. There are opportunities for connection.

But since we miss these milestones, we end up. learning lessons like conflict has to end with me apologizing profusely, ignoring your own feelings, and taking full responsibility. And then what we end up doing is cultivating relationships where it's always our fault and never theirs. We become dormats. And then what we end up doing is since other people are right and I'm wrong, you discover that, oh, okay, like there are people out there who are narcissistic who will be my friend if I let them, you know, if I don't advocate for myself. And you'll find a lot of friends, right? So if I'm lonely and I don't have friends,

a really easy way to find something that looks and feels like friendship, because truth be told, you may not even know, right? Is when you do things for other people, when you help people out, when you're always the friend who will help them move. But you don't know how to ask for help yourself. Striving for complete independence within yourself while fostering complete dependence for the people around you.

you're the friend that's always there for them even if they're never there for you and you feel frustrated by that but that too is something that you don't know how to even ask for help sometimes right because a long time ago remember that like opening up to people and being authentic is giving them ammunition so you learn to exaggerate the things about you that are likable suppress the things that are not and by the way a friend who needs help is something that is not fun right if you're crying and upset about being lonely and stuff like that. Like, that's not a good look. And so we sort of end up in this kind of situation, like as an adult sometimes, where we're kind of looking back on our childhood and actually saying to ourselves, you know what?

Childhood for me sucked. But that's kind of tricky. Because there are a lot of other people out there who say, childhood is the best time of our life. Oh, my God. It's the best years of your life. Enjoy them. Everyone says that, right? So let's think about that for a second. Let's try to understand what does that mean for you logically if your childhood wasn't good? What it means is that you're screwed. Right? So let's just think about this. So if the childhood is the best years of your life and then as you get older, things

get worse. So like this is the best that life has to offer. It's your childhood. Right? And then your young adulthood, old age, then you're sick and you get cancer and all that bad stuff. This is the best part of life. But you start over here because your childhood wasn't.

good. Your childhood sucked. And so what that sort of means is as time gets older, like, this is as high as you can go. Because everyone says this is the best and you missed out on that. So it's almost as if you were not given the opportunity for a complete and happy life. Because if these are the best years of your life and those years were bad for you, that's like, that opportunity is gone. That ship is sailed. It's like starting a classroom, starting a class with the highest grade that you can get as a B. You missed out on the A. The A is like not even a possibility because everyone says that the A happens in childhood.

And since you didn't get that, since you missed out on the best opportunity that life has to offer, you will never have as good of a life as everyone else. This is what it means, right? Because if childhood years are the best years and you missed out on those, you've missed out on the best of life. You're going into the game, having missed out on the best part. It's devastating. So like, what do you do about that? Right?

It's kind of like, that sucks. So there are a couple of really important things to understand. The first is what does best mean? So, like, what does that mean best? So a lot of people appreciate childhood. First of all, because our brains, let's understand why people appreciate childhood. First is that our brains have bad memories. Like, think about.

you know, how much do you remember about being eight? How much do you remember about being nine? How much do you remember about being 12 or seven? Like, do you remember what it was like to be you two years ago versus 10 years ago versus 15 years ago? So the first reason that we tend to come to the conclusion that childhood is the best years of our lives is because our memory sucks. So we tend to romanticize things. We tend to have powerful emotional experiences which define. our childhood. So this goes back to Vedic psychology. If you all have seen, you know, our lecture on this,

we've done streams about it. We've done YouTube about it. It's in Dr. K's guide very succinctly. So if you need like a comprehensive resource, that's the best place to find it. But you can find it on our YouTube channel as well. But this is the kind of thing where like you have that emotional impression, which does not get digested. So anytime you experience an emotion, that emotion gets somewhat digested. And then whatever doesn't get digested gets deposited and gets stored. And what digests emotion? Generally speaking, the adult mind gets better at digesting emotion.

So if you think about emotional processing, a five-year-old doesn't know how to emotionally process. A 10-year-old may know how to emotionally process a little bit better. A 20-year-old may know a little bit more emotional processing. By the time you're 35, you're hopefully decent at it. And that's why you can be a parent to someone else, so you help them emotionally process. therapists will help you emotionally process, right? So you can help out. But here's the thing as a kid, you can't really emotionally process very well. So what that means is that a lot of emotions get stored down. And then they get recalled. So you don't remember, you just remember this epic birthday party where everything was a blast, but you don't remember these vague, like, emotional impressions that are tied to like almost pictures of memories. They're not a full memory where you remember what was, said and what was done and what everyone was wearing, you just have these like impressions,

right? That's what memory is like. It's like this impression that has a powerful and emotional experience. You remember the first time that you had a crush. You remember exactly what they looked like, but you don't remember what you had for lunch that day, or maybe you do, maybe it's very vivid in one particular day. So we tend to romanticize childhood. And part of the reason we romanticize childhood is if you had a good childhood, then there are all these positive emotional impressions. And when you think about this being the best time of your life, what you really remember is those positive emotional impressions, because that's what really all you can remember.

So childhood in that way isn't really the best time of our life. It's just we remember it in a particular way that makes it appear the best because of the way that our memory works. There are other features about childhood that make it better. So one is that generally speaking, we don't have responsibilities. Right? So like you're free and things are new. So like as a child, things are...

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So as a child, like what's so awesome about childhood? We've got a clean slate. So experiences are like novel and interesting, and we're not quite as cynical. Any kid you meet at the playground could be a friend. They're not judging you for the way that you look. So after you have lots of experiences and you start to learn these things about yourself,

you start to form beliefs about yourself, you have an outlook on life, that negatively impacts the way that you live life. Children are also incredibly present, right? They don't really think too much about the past and they don't really think too much about the future. So when we put these things together, we put together like the way that your memories are formed, like how we romanticize our childhood. We put together things like a present focus, novelty, and a lack of, like, cynical outlook.

We can see why childhood, a lot of people say that childhood is the best time. of their life. So if you had a crappy childhood, does that mean that you've basically missed the boat on having a good life? Your amount of happiness is going to be capped at 80% because you missed that sweet, sweet, upper level happiness, that high quality, top-notch happiness of childhood. That's how it can feel. Thankfully, the answer is no. That's not the case at all. So some of us, I mean, I didn't grow up this way, but some of y'all, I suppose, some of us, have crappy childhoods. We have childhoods that are filled with toxicity.

We have childhoods that are filled with judgment. We have childhoods that are filled with being rudderless. Right. Like, as we're navigating problems in childhood, like, if there aren't people there to help us and support us, we don't have the capability to help ourselves as children. So if you're in a bad environment, like you just don't have the capability

to try to affect change in your life. And so all you do is you get screwed. you get body, you get beat up, you get pushed around, you get knocked back and forth by life. Because you're a kid and you don't know what to do. Like you don't know how to like stand up for yourself. No one taught you how to stand up for yourself. And in the worst case scenarios, you started to believe that you didn't deserve to stand up for yourself. And if that's your childhood, what does that mean?

Does that mean that your life is just not going to be as fun? I completely disagree. So I think there are two kinds of childhood. One, childhood is where you peak. and the other childhood is where you trough. So for some people, childhood is the low point in their life, and life just gets better. And for some people, they feel like childhood is the best part of their life,

and generally speaking, goes downhill. Or do they feel that way? But that, too, is a cynical impression, right? So that's something they carry with them. So we'll get to that in a second. So there's some people that I work with, have worked with that grew up in toxic households. And what I've experienced with those people is that childhood, it's only uphill from childhood in terms of quality.

So this is where if you're growing up in a place where you had a toxic childhood and you kind of feel like screwed out of life, there's good news, which is that it like gets better and time is on your side. So I'll give you all just a simple example. So I was working with someone who was not heterosexual and grew up in a relatively toxic. household where people were unaccepting of who they were. And so the problem is that they grew up in a small community where they don't control like where they go to school. They don't control who their parents are. They don't control like where they spend their time.

Like they don't control anything in their life. So they just get knocked around with life. The good news is that as they grew older, they get more power to shape their life. If you've had a bad childhood, chances are it's because you lacked power, right? Like, that's all kids lack power. And the difference is that if you lack power in your surroundings are positive, that doesn't matter. Because people are watching out for you. But if you lack power and no one is looking out for you, then you're in trouble.

So the good news, though, is that every year that goes by, every year that this person grows up, they get a little bit more power over their life. They go away to college. They have more latitude. Parents aren't looking over their shoulder. they can explore their identity. They can meet other people. They can start to shape who surrounds them. That's a huge part of a crappy childhood.

It's like you don't get to control who's at school. Like you have to go to school. You don't get to set limits on people. You can't limit contact with someone at school. You just can't do that. And so every year that goes by, you can shape your life more in the positive direction. You can find a positive relationship.

You can work with professional. professional colleagues who respect you for who you are, you can start to build a family of your own. And so if you've missed out on a happy childhood, it's going to take work, but you can absolutely be happy and you can even build a life that is like phenomenal. And I've seen this happen time and time and time again. So that's the first thing is like if you've had a toxic childhood kind of sucks for you and every year that goes by, you can exercise more and more power to become to build the life that you want to. The next thing to remember is as we live, looked at and understood why childhood is so special, you can start to cultivate those things

in your life today. So you could start to be more present focused, and you will literally increase in happiness. There are numerous studies about this. What is anxiety? Anxiety is worrying in the future. Anxiety is future focused. This is in Dr. Kay's Guide, too. Like, you can't have anxiety about the past. People may think they have anxiety about the past, but it's technically impossible. There may have been an event in the past that you're anxious about the consequences of in the future, but anxiety is future focused. It's about things that have not happened yet. Regret is of the past. You can't regret anything in the present. You can only regret in the past, past actions. So joy is found in the present. That's what kids. Kids don't have a conception. Their brains literally cannot, their frontal lobes are underdeveloped. So their ability to anticipate things in the future. is like not developed neuroscientifically, which is why they live in the present. So as we train ourselves to live more in the present, we can reclaim some of the happiness of childhood. So there's all kinds of different stuff that we can do to sort of become happier

in the present and be more a childlike. Another thing that happens is novelty. So this is something that adults do. Adults don't engage in new stuff anymore. And so if you start engaging in new stuff, you can capture a piece of that childhood happiness. You know, a good example of this is something like, I don't know about people's dietary restrictions and stuff like that, but like eat a strange food. So I was probably in my 20s the first time I tried an oyster. Not a huge fan, but it was definitely an experience, right? Like you can try new stuff, but we don't do that.

And part of the reason we don't do that is because most of our experiences with new things are not things that we seek. They're things that happen to us when our kids. When we're kids are like, you know, our parents are like, here, try this food. All of the novelty in life, we're trained as children that novelty is handed to us on a silver platter. Literally in the case of oysters. Right? So like we, you can become more a childlike.

You can get some of the joy of childhood, but you have to learn how to seek novelty. The third thing that you can do to become more childlike or be happy as an adult. is be aware of your, like, cynicism in the way that you view life. Because as you start to view life with more and more expectations, it tanks your happiness. And a big part of the happiness of childhood is actually, like, being expectation-free. Right? So I had, like, I had three months of summer, and, like, I didn't know what I was going to do. And I was actually, like, pretty bored, but, man, it was a blast. So be free of expectation.

And the more that you cultivate, like, some of your, like, be careful about your attitude. like prune some parts of the attitudes that you have. And as you start focusing on your attitude and mindset, like life will become more fun. So if you're someone who's sort of fallen into this idea, like you hear this thing that, okay, childhood is the best, you know, being a kid is the most fun you'll ever have. And everyone says it, right?

A lot of people say it. And then you're kind of there scratching your head and you're sort of thinking, like, my childhood wasn't great. Does that mean that I'm basically screwed? Does that mean that the capacity for happiness in my life has been like the, the, the limit on that, the ceiling on that, has been like brought down.

Because that's what it sounds like, right? Because everyone says, happiness is the best years of your life. I mean, sorry, childhood was the best years of your life. And if you don't have a good childhood, that means that you're not going to have a great life. And if that's the case, then you're kind of like, well, does that mean I'm screwed? No, actually, no. So there's a different kind of life where childhood is actually the worst. And every year that goes by as you become more empowered to craft the life that you want to.

Do you want to go on vacation? Do you want to stay up until 2 a. do you want to stay up till 6 a.m. Do you want to eat cookies for breakfast? Do you want to have donuts for dinner? You can do all those things as an adult. And then there are a couple of actual attributes of childhood that we need to keep in mind. Present focus is number one.

Second thing is like how we're cynical, how we start to form expectations of the world. And those expectations take the glow and brightness away from the world. And so as we start to dismantle those and really understand like how we believe what we believe, we can become more childlike. So expectations and cynicism, got to do away with that. Be present focused and seek novelty. Because the whole thing is that novelty is given to us, right? Even if you think about playing a new game,

sometimes we'll go hunting for a new game, but most of the new games we play about are things that, like, get presented to us. So we see advertisements for it or, you know, there's a sponsored stream somewhere or like whatever, right? So we don't go seeking new experience. But if you seek new experiences, live in the present, and let go of expectations, like, you're going to have an amazing life. And by the way, being adult is pretty great for a lot of reasons, right? Like, you get to eat what you want to, when you want to.

You're a little bit more responsible, which is tricky, but, you know. So if you had a bad childhood, it doesn't mean that your capacity for happiness in this world has been artificially limited. Don't worry. You can absolutely get there. And it's absolutely worth it.