Feeling lost in life? Turn back to the stories you loved as a child.

MENTAL HEALTH & WELLNESS • March 17, 2019

Maya Sat on Her Living Room Floor Surrounded by Boxes

The boxes were from her storage unit. She’d cleared it out that weekend on a whim — something to do with the restless energy that had nowhere to go. Most of it was junk.

But then she found them. The books from her childhood bedroom: A Wrinkle in Time. The Secret Garden. A battered copy of Anne of Green Gables with her name written on the inside cover in the careful cursive she’d used at age nine. She sat down right there on the living room floor, surrounded by the detritus of her adult life — the storage bins, the cardboard, the dust — and she read the first chapter of Anne of Green Gables without stopping.

When she was done, she was crying. She couldn’t quite explain why.

Maya, 38, is a senior partner at a consulting firm. By every external measure — title, salary, the kind of life people post about and others quietly envy — she has made it. But she’d been walking through her days for nearly two years with a specific and disorienting feeling she couldn’t name: the sense that she was lost. Not geographically. Not professionally. Lost in the way you feel when you’ve followed every right road and still ended up somewhere that doesn’t feel like home.

I hear some version of this story almost every week in my clinical work. Driven, accomplished women — women who have done everything right — sitting in my office describing a profound disconnect from their own lives. The titles, the income, the relationships, the achievements: all real. And underneath it all, a quiet question: Is this it? Is this really it?

What I want to offer in this post is a somewhat unexpected answer. Not a productivity system. Not a values clarification exercise. Not a five-year vision board.

What I want to suggest is this: when you feel lost, turn back to the stories you loved as a child. Because those stories weren’t random. They told you, at a very young age, what you believed about yourself, about what mattered, about what the world owed you and what you owed it back.

And in ways that psychology is only beginning to fully articulate, those early stories are still shaping you now.

What Is Narrative Identity?

There’s a branch of psychological research that’s been building for decades, largely outside mainstream self-help culture, that holds a deceptively simple premise: we are the stories we tell about ourselves.

Not just metaphorically. Literally. The way you explain your past, make meaning of your present, and imagine your future — that constructed narrative is, according to a significant body of research, a core component of your psychological identity.

McAdams’s work, along with researchers like Jonathan Adler, PhD, clinical psychologist at Olin College and a leading expert in narrative therapy outcomes, has shown that the coherence and quality of this personal narrative has measurable effects on psychological wellbeing. People whose life stories have clear themes of agency and communion — the sense that they act meaningfully in the world and connect authentically with others — tend to report greater life satisfaction, lower rates of depression and anxiety, and greater resilience in the face of adversity.

What does any of this have to do with the stories you loved at age eight?

Here’s where it gets interesting. Long before we have the cognitive capacity to consciously construct a life narrative, we are absorbing stories from outside ourselves — from the books we read, the films we watch, the fairy tales read at bedtime. And according to developmental psychologists, these early encounters with narrative provide us with the first templates for what a life story looks like. What a hero does. What safety feels like. What home means. What it means to be lost and then found.

We are shaped by our relational histories, yes. But we are also shaped by the stories that moved us — the ones we returned to again and again, that we memorized, that we wept over, whose characters felt like friends.

What the Research Actually Says

The connection between childhood stories and adult identity is well-documented in the developmental literature, even if it rarely makes its way into popular psychology.

Developmental psychologist Paul Harris, PhD, of Harvard University, has studied how children use imaginative engagement — fiction, fantasy, and story — to construct their understanding of the social and emotional world. His research shows that children don’t experience story as passive entertainment; they use it to practice and internalize complex emotional truths about identity, morality, belonging, and loss.

When a child reads A Wrinkle in Time and falls in love with Meg Murry — awkward, brilliant, overlooked, ultimately essential — she isn’t just entertained. She’s trying on a self. She’s saying: Maybe someone like me could matter. Maybe the thing I’m most ashamed of could turn out to be a superpower.

When a child reads The Secret Garden and aches for the locked garden and its eventual blooming, she’s encoding something about her own interior life — about the parts of herself she’s been told to keep hidden, and about what might happen if she tended them anyway.

These aren’t idle fantasies. According to Dan P. McAdams’s longitudinal research, the narrative themes adults carry — their sense of whether they are the protagonist of their own life story or a supporting character, whether their story is a comedy or a tragedy, whether redemption is possible — can often be traced back to the earliest stories they absorbed.

In my clinical work, I routinely ask clients: What did you love to read as a child? What were your favorite stories? What characters felt most like you? The answers are almost always diagnostic. They reveal what the client believed, at their core, about who they were and what was possible for them.

How This Shows Up in Driven Women

Here’s what I see most consistently in my work with driven, ambitious women who feel lost: there’s a profound split between their public narrative — the one they’ve been performing for two or three decades — and their private narrative, the one they’ve never quite articulated but that’s been running underneath everything all along.

The public narrative tends to center achievement. Milestones. Markers of success that other people can recognize and affirm. I got the degree. I got the job. I got the house. I built the thing.

The private narrative — the one encoded in childhood stories — often centers something else entirely. Belonging. Meaning. The particular quality of attention one person gives another. The courage it takes to be seen as different. The longing for a world that makes sense in ways this one often doesn’t.

Tessa is a data scientist at a Bay Area startup. She’s 41, has an impressive publication record, and by her own description has been “optimizing” since she was a teenager. When I asked her about childhood stories, she didn’t hesitate: The Phantom Tollbooth. She’d read it so many times the spine had split. The story of a bored boy named Milo who travels to a magical kingdom and learns, slowly, that meaning isn’t found by rushing past things — it’s found by paying attention to them.

“I don’t do that,” Tessa told me quietly. “I rush past everything. I haven’t paid attention to anything since I don’t know when.”

She wasn’t lost because she’d failed. She was lost because she’d been moving so fast toward external goals that she’d left behind the part of herself that knew what she was moving for.

This is the gap I see over and over. The childhood stories held a truth that the adult life, despite its impressive architecture, doesn’t always accommodate. And when there’s a wide enough gap between those two things — between the self encoded in early story and the self being performed in daily life — women start to feel unmoored. Like they’re living someone else’s narrative.

This kind of disconnection is especially common among women who come from complex trauma backgrounds — women who learned very early that their authentic desires, feelings, and identities were inconvenient or dangerous. For these women, the childhood story they loved wasn’t just entertainment. It was sanctuary. It held a vision of who they might become if they ever got safe enough to actually try.

When Stories and Identity Diverge

There’s a clinical concept I find essential here: the difference between an authored life and a scripted life. A scripted life is one where you’re following a story that someone else — your parents, your culture, your industry, your trauma — wrote for you. An authored life is one where you’re the one holding the pen.

Most driven women I work with have been living scripted lives for a very long time. The script often begins with something like: Be exceptional. Don’t take up too much space. Earn your place. Don’t need too much. They’ve followed that script so faithfully that many of them can’t quite remember wanting something that wasn’t on it.

Mary Oliver’s question lands differently when you’ve been living someone else’s script. It can feel almost accusatory — not because it’s meant to be, but because it’s pointing at exactly the thing you’ve been avoiding.

The clinical research on narrative identity suggests something important about this divergence. Jonathan Adler, PhD, has found in his research that the single best predictor of positive therapeutic outcomes isn’t a particular technique or modality — it’s whether a client’s self-narrative shifts over the course of treatment from passive to agentic. From “things happened to me” to “I made choices, even when they were hard, and I can keep making them.”

This is precisely what returning to childhood stories can facilitate. When you read the books that moved you at eight or ten or twelve, you’re not looking for nostalgia. You’re looking for evidence. You’re looking for the earliest version of yourself that knew, clearly and without equivocation, what mattered. Before the performance began. Before the credentials. Before you learned to want what other people wanted.

For women navigating attachment trauma or childhood emotional neglect, this work can be especially powerful — and especially tender. Because for many of them, the childhood story they loved was the first place they ever saw a self they actually recognized. A self that was worthy of a story in the first place.

That recognition matters. It’s not nostalgia — it’s a compass. And learning to read it again is some of the most important work a driven woman can do when the path forward isn’t clear.

Both/And: Your Story Isn’t Your Sentence

Here’s a tension that shows up immediately when I introduce this framework with clients: But what if my childhood stories were dark? What if the stories I loved were about orphans, or abandoned children, or girls who had to earn love through impossible tasks?

It’s a real question. And it deserves a real answer.

There’s a Both/And at the heart of this: the childhood story that moves you doesn’t just reveal what you longed for. It often also reveals the wound. The story about the orphan who finds her true family. The girl who has to prove herself over and over before she’s accepted. The child who can only be valuable if she’s perfectly good. These aren’t just plots — they’re the maps of old injuries, encoded in narrative form.

Mira is a 44-year-old attorney who came to therapy describing herself as “someone things happen to.” Her favorite childhood book was Jane Eyre — a girl who keeps being displaced, who keeps being told she doesn’t belong, who has to survive one exile after another before she can finally claim her own life. Mira had read it six times.

“I think I was trying to believe the ending,” she said. “I kept reading it because I needed to see her make it.”

This is the Both/And. Mira’s love for Jane Eyre revealed both the injury (chronic displacement, the sense of not belonging) and the resource (a fierce, almost defiant belief that belonging was eventually possible). The story she returned to over and over wasn’t trapping her — it was holding the hope she couldn’t hold herself yet.

Your childhood story isn’t your sentence. It’s a clue. And sometimes the most important thing it’s telling you is what you’ve always, somewhere, believed was possible — even before you had any evidence at all.

In trauma-informed therapy, one of the most powerful uses of this work is helping clients identify the protagonist qualities they most admired in their childhood heroes — and then helping them recognize those same qualities in themselves. Because in almost every case, the reason a child chose that particular hero, that particular story, is that she saw something of herself in it. Something real. Something worth saving.

The Systemic Lens: Why Women Are Told to Outgrow Their Stories

There’s a cultural reason that driven women tend to lose touch with their narrative roots — and it has everything to do with how female ambition has historically been shaped and contained.

Girls are socialized, often quite explicitly, to grow out of the imagination. Childhood stories are fine for children. But serious women in serious roles aren’t supposed to still be consulting them. The language of myth, symbol, and story — the language of meaning — is devalued in professional contexts, which tend to operate in the register of data, outcomes, and measurable ROI.

What this effectively does is strip driven women of one of their most reliable internal compasses at exactly the point when they most need it: during the transition from building a career to asking whether that career is actually building the life they want.

It’s worth noting, too, that many of the childhood stories girls are given — or discover on their own — feature girls and women doing precisely what they’re told they cannot do in adult professional life: trusting their instincts, following their curiosity, taking enormous risks for love and meaning rather than status and security. When Meg Murry wrinkles in time, she’s not doing a cost-benefit analysis. When Anne Shirley renames her world, she’s not optimizing. When Jo March burns her manuscript and then rewrites it, she’s following something that doesn’t have a line on any org chart.

Naming this cultural dismissal of feminine knowing is itself part of the clinical work. When a driven woman realizes that her feeling of lostness is partly a consequence of having been systematically disconnected from a valid form of self-knowledge — that it’s not a personal failure but a predictable outcome of being a woman in a world that told her to stop consulting the wrong kind of map — something shifts. The shame loosens. And the curiosity can return.

I regularly recommend that clients bring this exploration into their coaching work as well — particularly when the lostness shows up most acutely at career crossroads, during leadership transitions, or in the quiet aftermath of a major achievement that didn’t deliver the satisfaction they expected.

What I see consistently in my work with driven, ambitious women is that the body holds the truth long before the mind catches up. By the time a client lands in my office describing what isn’t working, her nervous system has been signaling for months — sometimes years. The tightness in her jaw at 3 a.m., the way her shoulders climb toward her ears during certain conversations, the unexplained fatigue that no amount of sleep seems to touch. These aren’t separate problems. They’re a single integrated story the body is telling about an emotional terrain the conscious mind hasn’t been able to face yet.

How to Find Your Way Back

If you recognize yourself in any of this — if you’ve been walking through your life with that specific, hard-to-name feeling of disconnection — here are some starting places.

Go back to the books. Not the books you were supposed to love. Not the ones you read for school. The ones you actually loved. The ones you chose. The ones you reread. Pull them out, or find them at the library, or order them secondhand. Read the first chapter. Notice what moves you now, from inside your adult body. Notice what still lands.

Ask yourself what you believed when you loved that story. Not what the story was objectively about. What did you take from it? What were you trying to tell yourself by returning to it again and again? This is the interpretive work — and it can be done in a journal, with a therapist, or simply by sitting quietly with the question.

Look for the theme, not the plot. It’s rarely about the literal story. It’s about what it encoded. Freedom. Belonging. Being seen. The possibility of rescue or the necessity of self-rescue. The idea that strange, awkward, overlooked girls can be the ones who save the world. Whatever it was — that theme is still operating in you.

Ask what gap the story was filling. For women from difficult childhood backgrounds, this question can be particularly illuminating. The story you loved as a child may have been giving you something your real relationships couldn’t: safety, predictability, hope, the reliable presence of a character who knew how to act with integrity even when the cost was high.

Notice what your life has drifted from. When you compare the values encoded in your childhood story to the values your current life is organized around, where is the gap? This isn’t an invitation to blow up your life. It’s an invitation to notice what’s been crowded out — and to ask whether there’s room for it again.

Finally: if you’re feeling lost, please know that this feeling, as disorienting as it is, is often a sign of something important. Not failure. Not breakdown. Often it’s the first indication that the life you’ve been performing has gotten too small for who you actually are.

The stories you loved as a child knew something about you that you’ve been trying to remember ever since. They’re still there. And so is the version of yourself they saw.

If you’re ready to do this work more deeply — to understand the patterns and narratives that are quietly driving your choices, your relationships, and your sense of self — I’d encourage you to explore individual therapy, executive coaching, or Annie’s signature program, Fixing the Foundations. You can also take Annie’s free quiz to identify the childhood wound most influencing your adult life — or schedule a complimentary consultation to talk through where you are and what kind of support might help.

And if you just want company in the meantime — weekly writing about the inner lives of driven women, delivered every Sunday — Strong & Stable is Annie’s newsletter, and 23,000 subscribers have found it worth their time.

The way back is rarely forward. Sometimes it’s all the way back — to the girl on the living room floor, reading a story about a girl who made it anyway, who believed for just one moment that the same could be true for her.

It still can be.

Stephen Porges, PhD, the developmental psychophysiologist who developed Polyvagal Theory, describes neuroception as the way the autonomic nervous system continuously evaluates safety beneath conscious awareness. (PMID: 35645742) For driven, ambitious women raised in environments where attunement was inconsistent, that internal safety detector tends to run on a hair-trigger setting. The room may be objectively calm, but the nervous system isn’t. Healing isn’t about overriding that signal — it’s about slowly teaching the body that the rules of the present are different from the rules of the past.

Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher and author of The Body Keeps the Score, has written extensively about how relational trauma changes the way the brain processes threat, attention, and self-perception. The amygdala becomes hypervigilant. The medial prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain that helps you contextualize what you’re feeling — goes quiet. The default mode network, where the felt sense of self lives, becomes muted. None of this is metaphor. It’s measurable, and it’s reversible. The therapies that actually move the needle for driven women — somatic work, EMDR, IFS, attachment-based relational therapy — are all therapies that engage the body and the implicit memory systems where this material is stored.

Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer