The younger self — what therapy can and cannot change

The wounds formed in childhood do not disappear in therapy. They are roots — foundational to the structure of a person. What changes is the relationship to those roots: the adult self learns to accompany, reassure, and care for the younger self in ways the original environment could not.

The tree

People arrive in analysis wanting to be freed from something that has followed them since childhood. A person who grew up without financial security wants to feel financially safe. They would like therapy to resolve this.

It is important to be honest about what is possible.

That experience is not a habit to be updated. It is a root. It shaped the nervous system, the attachment style, the way uncertainty lands in the body. You cannot cut a root and expect the tree to survive.

What therapy can do is make the root deeper and the tree taller. The wound does not go away. But the person grows — in self-knowledge, in capacity, in the ability to hold difficulty without being consumed by it. As the tree grows, the root becomes proportionally less dominant. Not absent. Less overwhelming.

Come with me

The work is to mobilise the adult — to bring the adult self into relationship with the younger part. Not as a problem to be managed. As a companion to be accompanied.

Come with me. I will take care of you.

This is the work the original environment could not complete. The adult in therapy can do, retrospectively, what was not done then — offer the younger self the steadiness and protection it needed and did not receive.

Being realistic

The root will always be there. The question is not how to become someone without that history. The question is how to become an adult who can care for the child who lived it.

“People come wanting to cut the root. But you cut the root, you kill the tree. The work is not to remove where you came from — it is to grow tall enough that it no longer defines the whole of you. The younger self doesn’t need to be fixed. It needs to be accompanied.” — Philippe Jacquet

Book a consultation with Philippe Jacquet — psychotherapist and Jungian analyst, London.