What you learn as a child will effect your adulthood

It's amazing how by the time we get to adulthood, or what's deemed as adulthood, that our minds are a bit swiss cheese-like after all the shit we've went through with our parents, our friends, and our acquaintances.

Would you believe it if I told you that the crucial time for children is from the ages 1-5, then after that the rest of their life is spent confirming what they know, or building on what they know? I was shocked when I learned this because it's a relatively short period of time that counts as the judge of character for the rest of your life.

Of course that's not all mind you. The extended family you have, the friends that you pick, and the people that you float around in has great significance too. I mean we all joked about "the nerds" or the "sporty" cliques, all whilst not realising that we were in our own cliques.

At my school I used to joke overwhelmingly about the "nerd" cliques but not realising that I hung around in my own peer social clique. I used to flit between the sporty kids and the druggies. Bound together by my love for football and golf, but my weakness for cannabis and alcohol.

I never really "fit" solidly anywhere because I had quite a varied hobby set which ranged from golf, to computers, and also alcohol. So um, yeah, I was a bit different. That being said I did bounce back and forth with the interest groups.

We also never really move from our social groups either when we progress into adulthood. If you analyse your friendships and social groups as an adult you'll notice that they are mostly the same type of people you were around as a child if it's not the exact same people.

And there's a reason for that. It's because your ways and means have already been hardcoded into your very being. What you learned from 0 to 5 you've taken deep inside yourself and through 5-18 you've built on that proof.

But what if what you learn wasn't that great? What if the worldly data you received was tainted? Let me explain:

My dad would leave me at home with mum and go out to work during the day. Which is fine and such but after work he'd go to the bar and get drunk, then come home and shout and scream, and sometimes smack me - even although I did nothing wrong. This was my childhood up to the age of 5, I still have quite bad memories of him at the age of 43.

Imagine my life growing up; that the man that was supposed to love me was an alcoholic and was heavy with his hands.

This of course was in stark difference to my mother who has always shown me abundant love right up until now as a middle aged man. So you can imagine the mixed set of crazy ideas I grew up with. It took a while to undo these.

We call them Paradigm's. If you've never heard of Paradigm before then it's a mixed set of instructions that your brain uses to live out your life. These can either make your life really successful, or happy, or both, but they can also make your life seem terrible and trap you in a hole that you can't get out.

Examples of paradigms can be buying a half a bottle of vodka every night after work and getting yourself very drunk each night; whilst you enjoy the feeling of being drunk you also can't fathom why you never get promoted or that you're ever successful in anything else you put your hands to.

I used that example because it was one of mine. Both my parents were drinkers and it was how I learned to cope with my insecurities. Mum had a bad day? Wash it down with wine. Dad had a crap day at work? Wash it down with vodka.

We grow up with lots of these and they are incredibly hard to shift. Several sets of ideas, goals, and beliefs working along side each other to achieve the common good - or what people would say a "good life."

Sometimes these ideas clash with one another though and can be quite conflicting. One of my major ones is that I really really admired my dad. He was successful, made lots of money, was also successful with women, and I wanted to be exactly like him. I wanted to be just like my dad when I grew up, but on the other hand I hated that he caused mum to leave when I was 5 years old, and I was fatherless for several years after that.

Mostly I hated the pain he had caused my mother, because my mother had always been super nice to me, whereas dad had been quite nasty. It was easy for me to take sides.

Can you see the conflicting paradigms here? And can you see why they are so hard to shift?

Shifting paradigms are incredibly hard. Sometimes it needs to be done though for people to get ahead and do what they want to in life. I mean not everyone wants to achieve greatness, some people just want 2.4 children with an any job will do attitude and they are fine and often what they grow up with is fine for what they want out of life.

But if you're like me and are looking at fame, fortune and the full nine yards then what I had working for me wasn't going to do me very well. For instance drinking every night isn't going to get me very far at all. There's extra wasted cost involved, and the wasted time. Instead of doing a whole number of things to get ahead I wasted it drunk.

I'll say it's not easy to do. It's all about creating new patterns in your head. When I stopped drinking the brain still wanted to drink, so I turned to writing and taking photos. Some nights I'd go out and take pictures of the sea (and early mornings) and other nights I would create a blog post on my blog.

Let's be real here, we all enjoy our addictions, else they wouldn't be addictions in the first place, so it's about training yourself to swap it out for something else entirely. Something that's productive rather than wasteful.

And that's how I changed my life. That's why I have all that I wanted now and I'm happy and content!!

You can be too if you think ahead and analyse your life in detail.

Hope that helps.

Peace!