For many years, I wondered whether something was wrong with me.
Even as a child, I often felt as though I were observing my family from the outside—as if I were standing behind a window, watching everyone else interact while trying to understand where I fit. I loved my family, but internally, I often felt disconnected. At the time, I did not have the language to explain what I was experiencing. I only knew that I seemed to notice things, question things, and feel things differently.
As I grew older, however, the question began to change.
Instead of constantly asking, “What is wrong with me?” I began asking, “What am I noticing, and why?”
That change in questioning became an important part of understanding myself.
When a Place Carries Memories
I can remember periods many years ago when I experienced depression and sadness, particularly while living in the home where I grew up. That confused me.
It was a nice home. From the outside, someone might have looked at the physical surroundings and wondered what there was to feel unhappy about. I wondered the same thing.
Why could I be surrounded by things that looked perfectly acceptable yet experience such difficult emotions?
As I became older and began studying psychology, neuroscience, human behavior, genetics, faith, and the effects of life experiences, I started considering a much larger question: Can what happened in an environment affect how we later feel in that environment?
Research suggests that context matters.
Human beings can learn associations between experiences and the environments in which those experiences occur. Research on contextual learning has demonstrated that environments themselves can become associated with emotional memories and responses. In other words, a room, house, neighborhood, smell, sound, or other contextual cue may become connected with experiences that occurred there (Kroes et al., 2017).
That does not prove that every emotion I experienced in my childhood home was caused by the house or by something that happened there. Human emotion is far more complicated than that. But it helped me understand that my response to a place did not necessarily have to be explained by what the place looked like on the surface.
The brain remembers more than appearances.
Stress, Experience, and the Brain
Neuroscience also gave me another way of understanding my past.
The brain is not a static organ. Experiences—including stressful ones—can influence how the brain responds to the world. Researchers Bruce McEwen and Peter Gianaros described how the brain both regulates our responses to stress and can itself change in response to stressful experiences (McEwen & Gianaros, 2011).
Other research has examined how social experiences and environmental influences can contribute to neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to change and adapt throughout life (Davidson & McEwen, 2012).
This became important to me because it meant that understanding the influence of the past did not require believing that I had to remain trapped by it.
The brain can be influenced by experience, but it is also capable of adaptation.
That distinction changed the way I thought about myself.
I began to consider that some of the emotions, behaviors, and reactions I once considered simply “normal” might have developed within particular circumstances. Once I left certain environments, gained new experiences, studied new ideas, and began questioning old assumptions, I could see my life from a different perspective.
Sometimes distance gives us the ability to define what we could not understand while we were living inside of it.
Curiosity Became Part of My Growth
One of the greatest changes in my adulthood has been the development of curiosity.
I never considered myself exceptionally intelligent, nor have I felt the need to prove that I am smarter than someone else. I simply became curious.
I wanted answers.
I wanted to understand why people behave the way they do. I wanted to understand myself. I wanted to understand trauma, relationships, culture, law, psychology, spirituality, the brain, human development, and the patterns people repeat without realizing they are repeating them.
Growing up, I questioned why education did not appear to hold the same value around me that it eventually came to hold for me.
Yet as an adult, I developed a hunger for knowledge.
Psychological research recognizes self-directed learning as something that can continue throughout the lifespan. Motivation, self-efficacy, cognitive abilities, and curiosity can all contribute to a person’s willingness to independently seek knowledge and expand understanding (Cronin-Golomb & Bauer, 2023).
For me, learning became more than obtaining credentials.
Learning became a way of understanding life.
I started defining words I did not understand. I researched theories. I compared what I read with what I had experienced. I examined psychology beside neuroscience, behavioral science, human development, and Scripture.
I did not accept every theory simply because I encountered it. I learned to question, compare, observe, and continue searching.
Sometimes personal growth begins with admitting, “I don’t understand this yet.”
Development Does Not End With Childhood
Lifespan psychology also helped me understand something important: development does not stop when we become adults.
Psychologist Paul Baltes argued that human development involves both continuity and change throughout the entire lifespan. His lifespan perspective emphasized that development is multidirectional and that human beings retain a degree of plasticity—the capacity for change and adaptation—throughout life (Baltes, 1987).
That idea resonates deeply with me.
We do not have to remain the person we were at 15, 25, 35, or even 55.
We carry our history, but we can continue examining it.
We can acquire knowledge we were never exposed to when we were younger. We can question beliefs we inherited. We can develop skills no one around us modeled. We can recognize unhealthy patterns without condemning ourselves or everyone connected to our past.
Growth does not require pretending the past never happened.
Sometimes growth means finally understanding what happened well enough to make different choices going forward.
Behavioral Psychology: Changing the Pattern
Behavioral psychology gave me yet another perspective.
Behavior is affected by environment, repetition, cues, consequences, and reinforcement. Research on habits shows that behaviors frequently become associated with recurring contexts. When a person repeatedly responds in a particular way within a particular environment, that response can gradually become more automatic (Wood & Rünger, 2016).
That means change is not always accomplished by simply saying, “I need to do better.”
Sometimes we have to examine the environment.
The cue.
The habit.
The response.
The reward.
The people surrounding us.
The information we repeatedly consume.
And the circumstances that keep reinforcing the behavior we say we want to change.
This helped me understand why changing environments sometimes changed how I felt and behaved. I began intentionally paying attention to the places where I felt peaceful, intellectually stimulated, spiritually grounded, motivated, and emotionally clear.
What I once described simply as a place having a different “energy,” I now understand more broadly as my response to the emotional atmosphere, environmental cues, relationships, expectations, memories, and experiences associated with that environment.
I began experimenting with my life in a healthy way: observing what environments helped me think more clearly, what relationships encouraged growth, and what habits brought me closer to the person I wanted to become.
Faith Gave Me Another Lens
My search did not stop with science.
I also searched Scripture.
Psychology helped me understand behavior. Neuroscience helped me understand the brain. Lifespan psychology helped me understand development. Behavioral science helped me understand patterns.
My faith helped me ask what all that understanding was for.
Romans 12:2 speaks about transformation through the renewing of the mind. Proverbs repeatedly emphasizes wisdom, knowledge, and understanding.
For me, those ideas became connected.
I began to see learning not as an attempt to become superior to anyone, but as part of becoming more responsible for my own life.
The more I understood, the more choices I realized I had.
Maybe the Question Was Never “What Is Wrong With Me?”
Looking back, I spent years thinking my differences meant there was something wrong with me.
Today, I see those experiences differently.
Perhaps the observer in me was becoming curious.
Perhaps the questions were waiting until I had enough life experience to ask them.
Perhaps leaving certain environments allowed me to recognize patterns I could not identify while I was immersed in them.
And perhaps one of the most important lessons I have learned is that self-understanding is not something we automatically receive with age.
We have to participate in it.
We have to be willing to question.
To learn.
To unlearn.
To observe.
To seek wisdom.
To examine our environments.
To challenge our habits.
To confront what hurts.
And to remain open to growth.
I still do not believe I know everything. In fact, the more I learn, the more I realize how much there is to understand.
But I no longer spend my life asking what was wrong with me.
I have become far more interested in understanding what shaped me, what I can learn from it, what I can change, and who I am continuing to become.
Sometimes becoming better does not begin with finding something wrong with yourself. It begins with becoming curious enough to understand yourself.
References
Baltes, P. B. (1987). Theoretical propositions of life-span developmental psychology: On the dynamics between growth and decline. Developmental Psychology, 23(5), 611–626. DOI: 10.1037/0012-1649.23.5.611.
Cronin-Golomb, L. M., & Bauer, P. J. (2023). Self-motivated and directed learning across the lifespan. Acta Psychologica, 232, 103816. DOI: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2022.103816.
Davidson, R. J., & McEwen, B. S. (2012). Social influences on neuroplasticity: Stress and interventions to promote well-being. Nature Neuroscience, 15(5), 689–695. DOI: 10.1038/nn.3093.
Kroes, M. C. W., Dunsmoor, J. E., Mackey, W. E., McClay, M., & Phelps, E. A. (2017). Context conditioning in humans using commercially available immersive virtual reality. Scientific Reports, 7, 8640. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-08184-7.
McEwen, B. S., & Gianaros, P. J. (2011). Stress- and allostasis-induced brain plasticity. Annual Review of Medicine, 62, 431–445. DOI: 10.1146/annurev-med-052209-100430.
Wood, W., & Rünger, D. (2016). Psychology of habit. Annual Review of Psychology, 67, 289–314. DOI: 10.1146/annurev-psych-122414-033417.
Leave a comment