Healing the Messages You Were Taught: Deep Childhood Reflection Workbook

Before you can change your life, you have to understand what built it.

The way you love, the way you fight, the way you trust or pull away — it didn’t come out of nowhere. It came from somewhere. This workbook isn’t about blame. It’s about waking up, owning your story, and finally writing a new one.

Being a therapist since the dinosaur ages has blessed me with a few truths I know without a doubt. And no, these truths didn’t come from textbooks, graduate classes, CEUs, or theories pulled from someone else’s study. They came from the book of Becky — real people, real struggles, and real life.

There are certain things that have never changed in the more than three decades I’ve been doing this work: Family of Origin is deep rooted!

• Couples interact with their partner in the ways they learned as children.
• Individuals “do life” exactly how they were taught, whether they know it or not.
• Kids mimic their parents in how they talk, fight, love, disconnect, connect, and trust.
• Kids only do life the way their parents represent to them.
• Teenagers trigger their parents because they are repeating the same behaviors their parents did, even if they don’t realize it.
• Teenagers who hear their parents overly share about their wild and crazy behaviors as a teen will repeat or justify their own behaviors because “you did it.”
• As adults, we fight, argue, misunderstand, shut down, and lash out based on the models we watched when we were small.
• We treat our partners the way our mom treated our dad, or how our dad treated our mom…it might take time to surface but it will in time.
• We might not recreate the exact behaviors of our parents, but they are there, even if deeply seeded.
• Our family of origin isn’t just a memory. It’s embedded in our souls. It’s the blueprint we’re still living by.

What does “Family of Origin” really mean?

Your family of origin is simply the family you grew up in — the people, behaviors, attitudes, emotional climate, and rules (spoken or unspoken) that surrounded you as a child.

We don’t outgrow it. We carry it with us into every relationship.

You may have heard the old saying that women marry men like their dads. Well, here’s the part nobody talks about enough — men often marry women like their moms too. And it’s not always obvious, and it’s definitely not always healthy.

We don’t marry what’s “comfortable.” We marry what’s familiar. Even if it hurt. Even if we swore, we would never end up there.

Without realizing it, we can turn our partner into the very parent we prayed we wouldn’t become like — or poke hard and long enough until we trigger them into acting exactly like the person we were trying to escape.

If we don’t wake up to this cycle, we repeat it.

This workbook isn’t just about looking backward. It’s about understanding what built you — so you can decide what stays, and what you are finally ready to lay down.

No blame. No shame. Just truth, ownership, and freedom.

Now, let’s get to work.

Click Here to download “The Story You Didn’t Know You Were Living”. Then, return to this page for final remarks.

Final Reflections

We all have experienced the good, the bad, and sometimes even the horrific parts of our childhoods. This does not always mean abuse or intentional acts from our parents or caregivers, but we all have things we must identify so we can stop the familiar places we go in our own minds.

If we don’t choose to face the parts of our story we’ve forgotten or shoved under the rug, the past — the experiences, the things we were told, the assumptions we made — will continue to bleed into our everyday lives and into every relationship we have.

Take the time to explore, to determine, and to recognize what’s truly yours — and what’s not. Not to beat up your parents. Not to blame. But to take your power back.

You deserve to live a truly happy, peaceful, successful life — without the old chains weighing you down.

This is your work. This is your time. This is your freedom.

Ready to go Deeper?

Doing this work on your own is powerful, but working through it with a professional who knows how to help you connect the dots can change everything.

If this workbook stirred something in you — if you’re realizing there are deeper patterns you want to finally break — I would be honored to walk through this process with you.

Schedule a session today. Let’s not just understand your story — let’s rewrite it together.