How Childhood Experiences Shape Subconscious Beliefs
Our childhood is one of the most influential periods of our lives. A child’s mind is so delicate, vulnerable, and deeply impressionable as they learn and grow. During this time of rapid development and growth, a child's mind is constantly absorbing and learning new data from their immediate environment. This data becomes written into the neural networks formed within their mind, creating an internal blueprint that filters their view of themselves and the world around them. Children live largely in a feeling world, feeling deeply while creating meaning from the world around them. A child's beautiful and curious mind naturally operates in slower brainwave states that share qualities with a hypnotic state: deeply feeling, imaginative, absorbed, and highly suggestible. This suggestible state of mind is brilliantly designed by nature to create the ideal environment for a child to learn at accelerated rates, absorbing behaviors, language, social cues, beliefs, and information from their immediate environment.
During these highly receptive years, a child's nervous system is also learning how to survive, react, regulate, mirror, and respond to the world around them, their brain wired for survival, regardless of the child's emotional state or happiness. Because a young child, especially under the age of seven, is still developing, the child remains heavily dependent on their parent or caregiver and may mirror the parent’s own nervous system and emotional states. The parent and child are deeply connected, especially the mother and child, as a child may experience themselves as an extension of their parent, mirroring the parent's stress, dysregulation, beliefs, biases, and responses as their own. A child does not yet have a way to discern and conceptually filter or fully separate their own inner experiences from those of their parents.
If, for example, the mother or primary caregiver has an unconscious belief that the world is unsafe or that people cannot be trusted, the child may begin to subconsciously absorb that worldview through the parent's subtle body cues, stress responses, emotional reactions, behaviors, and ways of responding to the world around them. This may lead to the child developing a subconscious belief that “the world is unsafe” or “I cannot trust people,” shaping how they perceive themselves, other people, and their worldview.
This entanglement is rooted in the child's need for survival and total dependence on their parents or caregivers. This may lead the child’s sense of identity to become enmeshed with the parent, often leaving the child to abandon themselves and develop patterns and ways of coping to meet their needs. Every child has innate needs to feel safe, loved, connected, significant, and celebrated. A child may subconsciously develop behaviors, roles, and ways of coping in an attempt to better meet those needs. This could look like a child becoming high-achieving, rebellious, overly sensitive and needy, extremely helpful, or even taking on parental roles in order to reliably meet their needs for connection, love, significance, or approval.
These roles can follow us into adulthood, becoming the only roles we’ve learned to play in our life story.
In adulthood, these patterns may appear as people-pleasing, perfectionism, overachieving, rebellious behaviors and self-sabotage, emotional dependency, overfunctioning, or simply feeling responsible for everyone around us.
Throughout this period of learning and influence, the child's brain and body are repeatedly learning what is safe and what is not safe, even when those conclusions are not logical or rational. Emotion often wins over logic, especially for a young child. Even for adults, this is typically true. This could look like a child perceiving something such as a harmless bug as life-threatening due to the strong emotional response connected to a past negative experience the child had with a bug, creating a pattern of learned danger and threat within the mind and body.
Most, if not all, of the challenges in our lives are directly or indirectly connected to what I call emotional wounds. Emotional wounds are deep, often unconscious imprints associated with painful emotions, beliefs, and experiences. Like an open wound that has not fully healed, the original emotional hurt remains unresolved and may continue to influence us beneath conscious awareness. These wounds often originate in early childhood, when the original emotional hurt developed yet never fully healed.
Rather than a wound existing on the surface of the skin, this wound lives internally, deep inside us as a painful meaning written within our psyche.
Within each child's mind is a vast and unique blueprint: a network of beliefs, assumptions, thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and conditioned responses that are brought into adulthood. These neural networks develop in the brain, shaped by the child's experiences and relationships with their parents or caregivers. This blueprint then operates on autopilot, unconsciously influencing our relationships, beliefs, ways of thinking, behaving, responding, and feeling, as well as our overall health.
The good news is that the brain is always learning and never stops changing. Neuroplasticity shows us the powerful ability of the brain to reshape itself, supporting new and empowering ways of believing, feeling, responding, and perceiving ourselves and the world around us.
These new ways of being then become familiar over time.
As the brain learns through repetition, the neural pathways associated with these new patterns are strengthened, helping what was once unfamiliar become familiar.
By using hypnosis, we can bring the subconscious mind forward to reactivate the receptive and suggestible state that we naturally had as young children and influence and update our subconscious mind toward a more empowering, positive, and desirable way of operating. Through RTT-Informed Hypnotherapy, together, we can update the parts of our subconscious mind that are operating and responding based on the beliefs we developed in childhood. Once we understand and review these deeper beliefs and emotional wounds, insight and freedom can be found, and the power to change them becomes available.
If you would like to explore the subconscious beliefs, emotional patterns, and conditioned responses influencing your life today, I invite you to book a complimentary consultation so we can connect and discover whether this work resonates with you and is right for you.
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Latia Holliday
Certified RTT Practitioner and Hypnotist
Subconscious Healing Practitioner & Coach
Reparenting ✧ Intergenerational Healing