What’s Your Origin Story (and Why Would You Care)?

Your “origin story” is the tale of your early months and years of development. The events and experiences you had during this critical time set you up for developing limiting beliefs and coping behaviors that at some point will get in the way of your effectiveness and even happiness.

Your origin story tells the tale of how you related to your parents as a child and in other important relationships as an adult. In short, your origin story highlights how you developed your persona and personality and moved farther away from being your authentic self.

What is Your Origin Story?

The significant events of your early months and years of your life – from your time “in utero” throughout childhood help shape your origin story. These events form the context that shaped your interpretation of how you fit in the world and your responses to the world. Think of your origin story as the “nurture” aspect of your development as a human.

It includes influences from what was going on with your parents – even when in the womb as well as your experiences, events and relationships that stand out to you as positive, transformative (providing insight) or frustrating or difficult.

Think of yourself in the infant stage. You had no sense as a separate being and were very merged with your parents/caregivers. You thought of yourself as though the only thing in the world and lived at the center of that world. In other words, everything happens because of you. You as infant cried or otherwise signaled when you needed something like food, a blanket on or off, diapering, to be held, etc. In short, you were vulnerable and dependent on others for survival.

Physiologically, your lower brain was largely in control of your behavior -- all of your kicking, grasping, crying, sleeping, rooting, and feeding were functions of your brain stem and spinal cord. Your cerebral cortex wasn’t fully functioning, so you had no logic or ability to analyze information; instead, you processed all input through your brain stem and limbic brain (emotions and instincts).

Thus, if the bottle doesn’t come fast enough or that diaper change leaves you wet longer than is comfortable, you can’t logically think about it. So, you make up a story based on the brain function of an infant. Based on this infantile story, you start to adapt your needs and natural instincts to survive by developing beliefs and coping mechanisms to deal with your needs and discomfort in a way that helps you maintain the all-important attachment to your caregivers.

“I must be weak, or unworthy, or unlovable, or incompetent, so I’ll do things to act strong, worth, loveable, competent so my parents will continue to take care of me. For example, you might distract yourself with objects in the room, coo or smile more to charm them, or push your discomfort away and pretend the wet diaper or hunger doesn’t bother you. In effect, you deny or mask over your authentic needs and instincts with beliefs and behaviors that help you cope.

Around 7-11 months, you started to notice that your caregivers are not you and they don’t always keep eye contact and pay attention to you. This is when you start to notice you are separate from others. This is when many psychologist believe the ego forms to help you navigate the world.

Because the brain in infancy and early childhood is so malleable and learns a massive amount of information in a relatively short time, you create deep and strong neural networks for these adopted beliefs and behaviors. As you get older and more in dependent but are still a kid, you continue to learn how to navigate the world and give up more pieces of yourself to fit in and to remain attached to your parents and communities.

As Gabor Mate says it, from infancy, we learn to choose attachment to caregivers over being authentically ourselves because it boils down to a perceived choice between survival provided by caretakers on the one hand and being completely in tune with their bodies and intuition and instincts on the other.

Why Should You Care About Your Origin Story?

Your origin story is important because it resulted from wiring your brain with beliefs and behaviors that aren’t necessarily true nor authentically “you”. You could say you learned early on to be an imposter of a sort when you masked your pain, hurt, needs, and instincts. The origin story is made of adopt beliefs and behaviors that may help you through childhood, but start to turn against you as an adult

For instance, maybe you become a people pleaser and put your needs aside; maybe you developed the habit of distracting yourself when stressed, so you have a hard time concentrating as an adult; maybe you pretended to be the “strong one” all the time and cut yourself off from your emotions. There are many ways people learned to cope as a child and still show up that way as adults.

As an adult, though, those coping behaviors can come back to bite you – in your relationships, at work, and with your health even. If you put others’ needs ahead of yours, you may feel exhausted and even resentful of the people you are helping. If you are the distractible type, it’s hard for your focus at work, so you might not be as effective at your job or you may distract yourself with substances like drugs and alcohol. If you feel you need to be the strong one, you may alienate people by overpowering others verbally or physically, or you may have outbursts because you have repressed emotions that are easily triggered.

Your origin story, as a story you developed in infancy and childhood, is an import part of how you’re showing up as an adult. It could be the key to understanding yourself and dealing with old issues that just might be based on faulty beliefs and maladaptive behaviors you picked up to survive by staying attached to others.

So, what is your origin story,” and is it working for you or against you?