What You Didn’t Get as a Kid and How to Heal It as an Adult (Podcast Episode 380)

You probably know what an ACE is. Adverse Childhood Experience. Trauma, instability, the things that happened to you that you didn’t deserve and couldn’t control. Researchers have spent decades documenting how those early experiences affect your brain, your nervous system, your relationships, and your health decades later.

But there’s a side of that research that almost nobody talks about, and it may be the most hopeful thing I’ve ever read: the science of what protected you. Or would have. Or still can. There are seven specific childhood experiences, what researchers now call Positive Childhood Experiences or PCEs, that have been found to dramatically reduce the lifelong impact of adversity, even severe adversity. And the most important finding isn’t just about kids. It’s about you, right now.

In this episode, you’re going to learn what those seven experiences are, how to figure out which ones were missing from your childhood, and most importantly, the research-backed ways adults can actually build what they didn’t get.

12-minute read

What Are Positive Childhood Experiences, and Why Do They Matter?

The short answer is this. Positive childhood experiences are the relational antidote to adversity. Where ACEs accumulate harm, PCEs accumulate protection.

The landmark research comes from Dr. Christina Bethell and her colleagues at Johns Hopkins, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Pediatrics in 2019. They identified seven specific positive childhood experiences, and what they found is nothing short of remarkable. Adults who reported six or seven of these experiences had nearly four times lower rates of depression and poor mental health compared to adults who had only two or fewer, and this held true even when controlling for how many ACEs those adults had experienced!

Let that land for a second. Your PCE score didn’t just soften the impact of adversity. It was independently predictive of your adult mental and relational health. In other words, the presence of these experiences mattered on its own terms, not just as an offset to the bad stuff.

The research also showed a dose-response relationship, meaning the more PCEs you had, the better the outcomes. And the fewer you had, the more vulnerable you were, regardless of whether you’d also experienced adversity. This is the part that I really want you to hear. The absence of positive experiences can be just as damaging as the presence of negative ones.

What Are the 7 Positive Childhood Experiences?

Here are the seven experiences identified in Bethell’s research. As you read these, I want you to genuinely sit with each one and ask yourself, did I have this?

1. You felt able to talk to your family about your feelings. Not just that talking was technically allowed, but that it felt safe. That someone in your home was interested in your inner world and that you wouldn’t be shut down, dismissed, or punished for having feelings.
2. You felt your family stood by you during difficult times. When things got hard, whether a friendship fell apart, you failed at something, or you were scared, you felt like your family had your back. You weren’t navigating hard things alone.
3. You enjoyed participating in community traditions. This one surprises people. It’s about belonging to something larger than your immediate family: religious communities, cultural rituals, neighborhood events, seasonal family traditions. The sense that you were part of a connected world.
4. You felt a sense of belonging at school. Not necessarily that you were popular, but that there was a place for you. That you fit somewhere. That the social world of school wasn’t purely threatening or alienating.
5. You felt supported by friends. That you had at least one real friend who showed up for you. Peer connection in childhood isn’t a luxury; it’s a developmental necessity. It’s where you practice trust, repair, conflict, and belonging outside of your family.
6. You had at least two non-parent adults who took a genuine interest in you. A teacher, a coach, an aunt, a neighbor, a friend’s parent. Someone who saw you and cared about how you were doing in a way that wasn’t transactional. This one turns out to be enormously protective, especially when family relationships are complicated.
7. You felt safe and protected by an adult in your home. Not just physically safe, but emotionally safe. That there was at least one adult in your living environment whose presence made things feel more okay, not less.

Now, before you spiral about how many of these you’re checking off, I want to say something important, and I say this as a relationship psychologist with 40 years of experience. This list is not a verdict on your childhood. It’s a map. And maps are useful because they show you where you are, so you can figure out where you want to go.

How Do Missing PCEs Show Up in Your Adult Relationships?

Here’s the thing about childhood experiences, positive or negative. They don’t stay in childhood. They travel with you. They become the lens through which you interpret your relationships, the expectations you bring into every room, the nervous system responses that fire before you’ve even finished a thought.

I want to walk you through each PCE and give you a concrete sense of how its absence tends to show up in your adult relationships now. This isn’t about pigeon-holing, it’s about understanding why you do what you do.

1. If you didn’t feel able to talk about your feelings: You may struggle to name what you’re feeling in real time, or you may feel a deep, unnamed fear that sharing your inner world will push people away. You might overshare in an attempt to finally be heard, or undershare as a way of staying safe. Either way, emotional intimacy feels risky in a way that’s hard to explain to a partner who grew up differently.
2. If your family didn’t stand by you during hard times: You may have a deep-seated belief that you’re on your own when things get hard, even in relationships where that isn’t true. You might have trouble asking for help, minimize your own distress to avoid burdening a partner, or feel a confusing resentment when you need support but can’t bring yourself to ask for it.
3. If you didn’t experience community belonging: You might feel chronically like an outsider, even in groups that would welcome you. There can be a kind of rootlessness to adult life, a difficulty feeling fully grounded in any community, that traces back to not having had that experience modeled or provided.
4. If you didn’t feel like you belonged at school: Peer environments in adulthood, workplaces, social groups, even couples’ friendships, can trigger old feelings of not fitting in. You may shrink in group settings or avoid them, or conversely, work overtime to be liked in ways that leave you exhausted.
5. If you didn’t feel supported by friends: You may struggle to trust peer relationships, keep friends at arm’s length, or find yourself repeatedly surprised when a friendship goes deeper than you expected and doesn’t end in disappointment. Or you may have the opposite problem: investing so intensely in friendships that the other person eventually pulls away.
6. If you didn’t have non-parent adults who took a genuine interest in you: This one often shows up as an intense need to be truly seen by a partner, a boss, a mentor, anyone in a position of care or authority. When a partner seems distracted or disinterested, the response can feel wildly disproportionate, and now you know why. You’re not just reacting to today’s interaction. You’re reacting to years of invisibility.
7. If you didn’t feel safe and protected at home: Your nervous system likely learned that home, which is supposed to be the original safe base, isn’t reliably safe. This creates a fundamental wiring issue: the very thing that’s supposed to be the antidote to threat, closeness and connection, gets coded as a potential threat itself. If you’re insecure in a healthy relationship, this one is likely hitting home.

Can You Actually Heal What You Didn’t Get?

Yes. And I want to be really clear here, because there’s a lot of vague wellness language floating around about healing your inner child, and what I’m about to tell you is grounded in actual research.

The concept is called earned secure attachment. It was first identified through work on the Adult Attachment Interview, developed by researcher Mary Main and her colleagues at Berkeley. What they found, looking at adults who had genuinely difficult and inconsistent childhoods, was that a meaningful portion of them were classified as securely attached anyway. Not because they were in denial, and not because they’d forgotten what happened. But because of what had happened in their lives since. The positive relationships they’d built, the experiences in school or at work, the people who showed up for them in ways their early caregivers hadn’t.

Attachment researcher and clinician Dr. David Wallin wrote about this in his own work, describing how later relationships offer us second chances.

What defines an earned secure adult isn’t the absence of a hard history. It’s the quality of the relationship they now have with that history. Research using the Adult Attachment Interview shows that earned secure adults can tell a coherent story about difficult early experiences, one where the narrative holds together, the emotion is appropriate, and the meaning-making is integrated. They understand how what happened affected them, without being defined by it.

So what Creates Earned Security?

The research points to three main pathways.

1. Therapy. Long-term relational therapy is one of the most well-documented routes to earned security. The therapeutic relationship itself functions as a corrective emotional experience, providing consistency, attunement, and a safe base in real time. You’re not just talking about your relationships. You’re having a new kind of relationship, often for the first time.
2. A secure romantic partnership. A partner who is consistently warm, responsive, and emotionally safe can do something profoundly reparative over time. Research shows that secure romantic relationships can shift attachment patterns in adults who come from insecure backgrounds. This isn’t about your partner being your therapist. It’s about the accumulated weight of evidence that safety is real, that closeness doesn’t have to end in abandonment or humiliation, that you can be known and still be loved.
3. Sustaining relationships of any kind. Mentors, coaches, close friendships, faith communities, support groups, and any relationship characterized by genuine interest, consistency, and emotional safety contribute to what researchers call the accumulation of new relational evidence. You’re essentially teaching your nervous system, through repetition, that the old predictions don’t always come true.

One important note: earned security isn’t a transformation into someone with no past. The old internal working models don’t disappear. What changes is that they’re no longer the only option. New patterns, built through accumulated corrective experience, become available alongside the old ones. And over time, they become more readily available. That shift, from one single anxious or avoidant response to having a choice between that response and a more secure one, is everything.

Five (5) Ways to Repair What Your Childhood Missed

I want to get practical here, because earned security isn’t just something that happens to you in a therapist’s office. You can actively cultivate it. Here are the most research-supported ways to do that.

1. Name what you didn’t have. This isn’t about blame or self-pity; it’s about accuracy. If you grew up without an adult who made you feel truly safe, you didn’t develop certain relational skills and expectations that most people get almost automatically. Naming that clearly, without minimizing and without dramatizing, is the foundation of all the other work. The free download I’ve put together for this episode will help you do exactly that.
2. Deliberately seek out corrective relational experiences. Be intentional about building relationships that provide what was missing. If you didn’t have adults who took a genuine interest in you, look for a mentor, a therapist, a community group where that kind of sustained interest is possible. If you didn’t feel you belonged, put yourself in one community consistently over time rather than rotating through many. Breadth doesn’t create the deep belonging you need. Depth and repetition do.
3. Let people be safe with you. This sounds simple, and it is one of the hardest things on the list. When your nervous system has learned that closeness is risky, you’ll unconsciously do things to manage that risk: keeping emotional distance, testing people, creating conflict right when things are getting good, disappearing. The repair work involves noticing those patterns and staying, even when everything in you says to go.
4. Build your mindfulness practice. You knew I was going to say this. You’re never going to get through an episode of Relationships Made Easy without me mentioning mindfulness! But I want to tell you specifically why it matters here. You can’t interrupt a pattern you haven’t noticed yet. Mindfulness is how you build the observational capacity to catch yourself mid-spiral and make a different choice. If you haven’t already, grab my free Mindfulness Starter Kit on the Shop page of my website. It’s free, it’s good, and it’s the foundation for everything else.
5. Tell a new story about your history. Narrative coherence is one of the key markers of earned security. This doesn’t mean rewriting what happened or pretending it was fine. It means developing a story about your childhood that’s integrated: one where you understand what happened, why it affected you the way it did, and how it connects to who you are now. This is very often best done with a therapist, but journaling, the kind of deep identity-based reflection in today’s Therapy-to-Go bundle, moves you in the same direction.

Wrap Up

If you grew up with most of these seven experiences, your nervous system got a head start. You likely built some internal scaffolding for trust, belonging, and emotional safety that has served you, even if you’ve had other struggles.

If several of these were missing, you may have spent a lifetime trying to get in adult relationships what you didn’t get in childhood, sometimes in ways that made the very thing you needed harder to find.

But the research is clear, and I want you to hear this: the absence of these experiences isn’t a life sentence. Earned security is real! Your nervous system is plastic, and your brain continues to reorganize itself based on new relational experiences well into adulthood. What your childhood didn’t give you, your adult relationships, your community, your own deliberate work, can still provide.

You don’t have to have had a perfect childhood to build a secure life. You just have to be willing to keep showing up for the corrective experiences that are available to you right now.

Download and Bundle

Today’s free download is called the My PCE Profile, a self-assessment that walks you through each of the seven positive childhood experiences, helps you identify which ones were present or missing, and asks the right questions to start connecting what you didn’t have to what you’re experiencing in your relationships right now.

Therapy-to-Go Bundle

And if you want to go deeper with this work, I’ve put together a Therapy-to-Go bundle called Healing What Your Childhood Didn’t Give You. It includes practical tools to help you do the actual repair work, not just understand it. You can find that at the same link.

• My PCE Profile, a self-assessment that walks you through each of the seven positive childhood experiences
• Journaling Prompts for Healing What Your Childhood Didn’t Give You
• How My PCE Gaps Show Up Today: Connecting What Was Missing to What Happens in Your Relationships Now
•  My Corrective Experience Plan: Building What Your Childhood Didn’t Provide
• Asking for What You Didn’t Get: A Script Sheet for Letting People In
• Letter to Your Younger Self

Buy the bundle now for $10 and get all the above. OR join Abby’s One Love Collective for only $8/month, and get a Therapy-to-Go Bundle for each episode, plus ad-free episodes of the podcast, live Q&A’s with Dr. Abby, and access to an amazing community that’s all about real growth.

Related Episodes

If this episode resonated, these are worth revisiting:

• Episode 377: Why You Feel Insecure in a Healthy Relationship (Even When Nothing Is Wrong)
• Episode 324: Emotional Triggers: Understanding Your Brain and How to Keep It in Check
• Episode 206: How Your Attachment Style Affects Your Personal Relationships
• Episode 207: Attachment Styles: How Your Attachment Style Affects You at Work

Resources

Mindfulness Starter Kit

How to Make Mindfulness a Consistent Habit

Download the Bundle

References

¹ Bethell, C., Jones, J., Gombojav, N., Linkenbach, J., & Sege, R. (2019). Positive childhood experiences and adult mental and relational health in a statewide sample: Associations across adverse childhood experiences levels. JAMA Pediatrics, 173(11), e193007.

² Main, M., & Goldwyn, R. (1996). Adult attachment classification rating system. Unpublished manuscript, University of California at Berkeley. See also: Pearson, J. L., Cohn, D. A., Cowan, P. A., & Cowan, C. P. (1994). Earned- and continuous-security in adult attachment: Relation to depressive symptomatology and parenting style. Development and Psychopathology, 6(2), 359-373.

³ Wallin, D. J. (2007). Attachment in Psychotherapy. Guilford Press.

⁴ Saunders, R., Jacobvitz, D., Zaccagnino, M., Beverung, L. M., & Hazen, N. (2011). Pathways to earned-security: The role of alternative support figures. Attachment & Human Development, 13(4), 403-420.

⁵ Roisman, G. I., Padrón, E., Sroufe, L. A., & Egeland, B. (2002). Earned-secure attachment status in retrospect and prospect. Child Development, 73(4), 1204-1219.

⁶ Crandall, A., Broadbent, E., Stanfill, M., Magnusson, B. M., Novilla, M. L. B., Hanson, C. L., & Barnes, M. D. (2020). The influence of adverse and advantageous childhood experiences during adolescence on young adult health. Child Abuse & Neglect, 108, 104644.