The developmental view is central to the Western psychotherapeutic approach. It’s based on the idea that experiences we have as children, mostly in our family of origin, have a profound impact on the rest of our lives. In response to difficult experiences, we create strategies or behavioral patterns to help us deal with what we experience as threats to our emotional and sometimes even physical survival. What we first use for our survival, we later use as a generalized and familiar way of engaging in life.
These formulas or strategies are usually very intelligent and appropriate at the time they are created and are often of very real benefit to us. As a result, they tend to become habitual and then to persist long after they are needed. Because they are responses to disturbing and even dangerous realities, they are usually associated with quite a bit of anxiety. We avoid feeling this anxiety by pushing these strategies out of our awareness. They then continue to operate without our conscious participation, potentially for the rest of our lives, unless brought into awareness and challenged once we are adults.
Often in developmental work, the first step is to help clients see that the recurring patterns they’re experiencing are not caused by, or really about, current life circumstances or current relationships. Moreover, these strategies do not arise from pathology or bad intentions. Instead, they represent our young efforts to take the very best care of ourselves possible. Usually the issue with these strategies is that they are several decades out of date.
The ways in which our necessary childhood strategies become our unnecessary adult neuroses is a basic theme in Western developmental work. These strategies were usually worth the price tag when we were young, dependent, immature children in our families of origin. But as adults, the benefits we get are no longer worth the price we pay.