The Stories We Loved As Children Contain Clues for Our Soul.

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The Stories We Loved As Children Contain Clues for Our Soul.

RELATIONAL TRAUMA • July 23, 2015

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

What do “Baby Boom”, “Miss Rumphius”, and “The Country Bunny And The Little Gold Shoes” Have To Do With Your Life?…

…Very possibly nothing. But they have everything to do with my own life.

The stories we passionately loved as children don’t stop mattering. They go underground — and then, when the way forward feels particularly foggy, they surface again with something worth paying attention to.

I’ve particularly been curious about how, in times of confusion, not-knowing, deep questioning, and despair, if we reflect on and re-explore the stories we loved as kids, we might find diamonds in the mud — clues and messages and guidance for our souls that can support us when we’re having a tough time.

In today’s blog I want to share more with you about how those three stories – “Baby Boom”, “Miss Rumphius”, and “The Country Bunny With the Golden Shoes” – have played a profound role in shaping my life and how they continue to provide guidance when the way forward feels particularly foggy for me.

I also want to walk you through some inquiries to help you reflect on your beloved childhood stories and explore some of the messages and meaning these stories may have for you, even today…

Why do the stories we loved as children hold such power over us?

Stories are an entry point to the soul.

Stories – whether in film, book, audio or oral form – have been, since time immemorial, one of the primary ways we as humans have learned how to be. How to live. How we’ve received guidance about what life is. And how we can skillfully navigate it.

Stories have this incredible way of bypassing our rational, logical, ego-driven minds. And speaking straight to the soul.

Stories are, in my opinion, psyche medicine and life guidance of the highest order.

While it’s rare for communities and families to sit around campfires today and pass on oral instructional stories, we can see that this kind of storytelling/soul instruction persists around the veritable campfire of movie screens and in our collective Netflix queues.

For instance, I’m guessing you – like I – maybe once or twice have gone to the movies and, for a few hours, really identified with that superhero or that post-Apocalyptic badass heroine on screen, so much so that when we left the theatre we felt filled with some of the nerve and grit and steely determination of Katniss Everdeen, or Hermione Granger, or Tris Prior or [fill in the blank]. Am I right?

That experience of fully identifying with a character, of getting swept up in a story is powerful and also deeply nourishing and instructional for our souls — particularly for those of us who grew up in homes where they wasn’t exactly an abundance of loving or helpful guidance from the adults in the our lives.

“Stories are wonderful vehicles for images, feelings, atmosphere, and depth because they lead the readers or the audience to identify with and learn from the characters.” – Jean Shinola Bolen, MD

What are childhood touchstone stories, and why do they still matter?

While stories are powerful and important for us at all ages, it’s the stories we passionately loved as children that I think can be particularly helpful to explore when we’re feeling stuck, overwhelmed, and filled with despair in life.

Whether it was a book, a movie, a TV episode or series, or even a fairytale you learned about from a friend or teacher, they are, I believe, certain stories that just *stick* with us as kids. Stories that just seem to strongly impact us for no logical, rational reason.

These are the childhood stories we want to explore to support us when life feels particularly tough.

Lately, I’ve been reflecting on how, from ages 8 to 13, I was passionate about three stories — two books and one movie: “Miss Rumphius” by Barbara Cooney, “The Country Bunny and the Little Golden Shoes” by DuBose Heyward, and the movie Baby Boom starring Diane Keaton.

On the surface these stories had virtually nothing in common: a onetime globetrotting, now-partially disabled eccentric old woman who walked the Maine coast flinging about lupine seeds; a mother bunny of 18 who worked her (cotton) tail off to become one of the kingdom’s elite Easter Bunnies; and a Harvard/Yale MBA corporate “Tiger Lady” who becomes guardian to an orphaned niece and opts out of the NYC Rat Rat to move to the New England countryside and discovers she’s a whiz at making baby applesauce.

What threads and lessons from childhood stories still guide you as an adult?

These stories showed me that:

1. It is more than possible for a woman to do and achieve more than “only” being a mother;
2. If she is very creative and persistent, a woman can craft a flourishing life on her own terms – irregardless of the opinions of others;
3. Self-confidence and following intuition to create said life is key;
4. When carving out a non-traditional life path, you may not always be understood, supported, or respected. Do it anyways.

As a child I passionately loved these stories and, despite the fact that I wasn’t seeing these lessons modeled very successfully by others in my real life, the stories told me that these things were possible and that one day they could be available to me, too.

Today, when life feels tough, I still turn back to these books and films for a kind of soul pick-me-up, to connect back to the messages they contain, like checking a proverbial compass of sorts as I journey through my life facing my own metaphorical dragons.

How do you find your own diamonds in the mud of your childhood stories?

Now it’s your turn. I want to invite you to reflect on the following inquiries to explore the childhood stories you passionately loved and to examine whether or not the messages they contained still have clues for you today.

• What books, films, fairy-tales or stories did you passionately attach to as a child (between ages 5-15)?
• What was the meaning of each of those stories for you? What are some of the lessons (whether implicit or explicit) that those stories taught you?
• Did you see yourself in one or more of the characters? What qualities and characteristics of those figures did you most admire? Can you see those qualities in yourself today?
• How did these stories shape or give hope to you as a kid? Are there any lessons in them that are still helpful to you even today?
• If you didn’t like the ending of any of those stories or movies, can you imagine rewriting it? How would you like to author the ending with the power of a do-over?

What does moving forward look like once you’ve excavated the wisdom of your childhood stories?

I love this quote by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. When I read it, I feel empowered to author and re-author the story of my life as often as I need and want to.

And so, as we wrap up today, I invite you to consider what you would like to author in the next chapter or volume or episode of your life and also to consider how and what the clues and messages of your very favorite childhood stories might influence, guide, support, nourish and soothe you.

Finally, please share in the comments below the stories you most loved as a child and what some of the lessons and messages and “diamonds in the mud” they provided for you.

I can’t wait to read what you share!

The stories that found you as a child weren’t accidents. Go back and look at what they were trying to tell you — there’s usually something there worth listening to now.

Warmly,

Annie

Frequently Asked Questions

You deserve a life that feels as good as it looks. Let’s work on that together.

References

• White, M., & Epston, D. (1990). Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends. W. W. Norton & Company.
• McAdams, D. P. (2001). The Psychology of Life Stories. Review of General Psychology.
• Green, M. C., & Brock, T. C. (2000). The Role of Transportation in the Persuasiveness of Public Narratives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
• Bolen, J. S. (1989). Goddesses in Everywoman: Thirteen Powerful Archetypes in Women’s Lives. HarperCollins.
• Gaiman, N. (2001). Coraline. HarperCollins.
• Estés, C. P. (1992). Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. Ballantine Books.
• Siegel, D. J. (2012). The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are. Guilford Press.

Both/And: The Stories Were Imperfect and Still Carried Truth

Many of the childhood stories that shaped our earliest sense of possibility are, by contemporary standards, deeply imperfect. The heroines were often passive. The stories often centered marriage as the culminating achievement. The narratives erased entire populations and reproduced the biases of their cultural moments. To return to them as adults is to encounter a genuine Both/And: these stories gave us something real and essential, and they were also limited, sometimes harmful, products of the systems that produced them. (PMID: 36340842)

This Both/And is worth sitting with, rather than resolving in either direction. We can recognize the limitations of the stories — their narrowness, their omissions, their cultural freight — without discarding the seeds of genuine truth they contained for us. And we can honor what those stories gave us without pretending they were more than they were.

Nicole, a documentary filmmaker, grew up devouring fairy tales that were, in retrospect, suffused with patriarchal logic. The heroines were beautiful and passive; their salvation came from princes. And yet Nicole had found, in these stories, something that her immediate environment was failing to provide: the idea that transformation was possible. That the girl in difficult circumstances could, through some combination of inner quality and outer journey, reach a different life. The mechanism was wrong. The message — that she didn’t have to stay in the circumstances she’d been born into — was real. She held both.

The therapeutic work of returning to childhood stories often involves exactly this kind of discernment: separating what the story genuinely offered from the cultural container in which it arrived. Taking the real nourishment. Setting down the packaging. And trusting your child-self’s instinct for what was true, even when the vehicle was imperfect.

The Systemic Lens: Stories as Cultural Transmission

The stories we loved as children were not only personal. They were cultural — selected, distributed, and valorized by the systems that shaped our early worlds. The books on the shelf, the films made available to us, the fairy tales handed down through our families — all of these were products of particular cultural moments, carrying particular assumptions about gender, race, class, ambition, and what constituted a life worth living.

The systemic lens asks us to be curious not just about what these stories gave us personally, but about what they taught us culturally — about who gets to be the heroine, about what constitutes a successful life, about whose stories are worth telling. Many of the stories that shaped Western girlhood centered particular kinds of heroines, particular kinds of happy endings, and implicitly communicated that certain lives — certain bodies, certain backgrounds, certain ambitions — were more narratable than others.

For some women, the touchstone stories of childhood were a profound act of cultural imagination: reaching for stories that didn’t fully reflect their reality but contained something they desperately needed to believe. Isabel, who grew up in a household that modeled quite the opposite, found in certain heroines a vision of female ambition and self-determination that she had nowhere else. That these stories came to her through the filter of a particular cultural system — one that simultaneously limited and expanded what she could imagine for herself — is part of the complexity worth examining.

This systemic examination doesn’t diminish the power of the stories. It deepens it. Understanding which stories we had access to, which were kept from us, which we had to seek out against the grain of our immediate environment — this is part of understanding who we became and how we became it. The stories we loved as children are not just personal artifacts. They are also social documents, telling us something about the culture that shaped us and, in our response to them, something about the self that was already, even then, pushing toward what it most needed to find.

Returning to the Wild Story: Myth, Narrative, and the Corrective Emotional Experience

There’s a reason so many of the stories that lodged themselves deepest in us as children weren’t the tidy ones. The stories that stayed — the ones we returned to again and again, that made us cry at something we couldn’t quite name — were usually the ones where the protagonist was lost, abandoned, misunderstood, or searching for something that had been taken from her. In my work with clients, I’ve come to think of childhood story attachment as a form of pre-verbal self-recognition. The child who couldn’t articulate “my mother doesn’t really see me” or “I feel fundamentally alone in this family” found that recognition in a narrative instead. The story became a container for feelings the child had no other sanctioned way to hold or express. This is why revisiting these stories in adulthood, particularly in a therapeutic context, can be so unexpectedly and sometimes overwhelmingly powerful — they carry the emotional memory of what we needed before we had language for needing it, and they often bring that memory back with a physical fullness that pure cognitive reflection rarely achieves.

The clinical concept that maps most closely onto this process is the corrective emotional experience, originally described by psychiatrist Franz Alexander in the 1940s and developed significantly in contemporary relational and attachment-based approaches. Alexander proposed that healing from early relational wounds doesn’t require endlessly revisiting the past — it requires experiencing something genuinely different in the present. In the context of stories, this means that re-reading a beloved childhood narrative through adult eyes and finding something you didn’t have access to as a child — compassion for the protagonist’s impossible situation, recognition of the structural injustice in the story’s world, or simply the knowledge that the lost character survives and finds her way — can itself function as a small but real corrective moment. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, PhD, Jungian psychoanalyst and author of Women Who Run With the Wolves, spent her career making exactly this argument: that myth and fairy tale and story are not decoration or escapism but medicine, and that their medicine is most potent for the woman who has been cut off from her own instinctual nature.

Estés is writing about addiction in the narrow clinical sense, but what she’s really pointing toward is the cost of disconnection from what is most essentially yours — your instinct, your imagery, the language your soul speaks when performance stops. The stories we loved as children were often the places where we stayed connected to that language even when the surrounding environment was asking us to abandon it for something more acceptable, more manageable, more useful. The driven woman who has spent decades perfecting her performance of competence may find, in returning to a childhood story, a self she quietly set aside somewhere along the way — wilder, more feeling, less edited. That encounter can be uncomfortable and clarifying and grief-inducing in equal measure. All of that is appropriate.

Clinically, I sometimes invite clients to bring in a story they loved as a child — not to analyze it symbolically, but simply to feel it again in the presence of another person. What I’m listening for isn’t a hidden key to unlock their psychology; I’m listening for the emotional residue the story still carries, and what that residue tells us about what they were longing for then — and what, perhaps, they’re still longing for now. The next section explores how this kind of self-discovery through narrative connects to the broader work of returning to the parts of yourself that have been waiting, quietly and patiently, for permission to come home.

Returning to Your Touchstone Stories as an Adult

One of the most productive — and for many clients, surprisingly emotional — exercises in personal history work is the invitation to return to the stories that mattered most in childhood and to ask them, with adult eyes, the questions a child couldn’t articulate.

What was it in this story that you needed? What question was it answering for you? What possibility was it holding open in a world that was, in some ways, trying to close that possibility down? What did the heroine of this story model that you hadn’t yet seen modeled anywhere in your actual life? And — the question that often produces the most productive discomfort — in what ways have you been living out this story, without realizing it, in the chapters of your adult life?

This last question is worth sitting with. The mythological and narrative dimensions of our experience are more active in our adult lives than we typically acknowledge. The woman who as a child loved stories of transformation and emergence is often, in her adult life, still working out some version of that myth — still in the process of the emergence, still orienting herself in relation to the metamorphosis she sensed was possible. The woman who loved stories of belonging and community is often, in her adult life, still building toward some version of the village she glimpsed in those pages — or still grieving its absence.

Isabel, a therapist herself who came to personal therapy after a difficult year, returned to the children’s book that had been her talisman throughout childhood: a story of a small, overlooked creature who possesses a gift that no one else can see, and who must trust that gift through a long journey before it is finally recognized. She knew the story nearly by heart. What she hadn’t noticed, until our conversation, was that she had been living it. That the long middle section of her career — the years of doing good work that went unrecognized, of trusting something in herself that the institutions around her didn’t value — had the exact shape of the story she had been rehearsing since she was seven years old. She wasn’t surprised. But she was moved. “I knew how it ended,” she said. “I just forgot I was still in the middle.”

Your childhood stories knew things about you before you did. Returning to them now, with the fullness of your adult experience and the new questions that experience makes possible, is not nostalgia. It is cartography. You are locating yourself — finding where you are in the story you have, all along, been living.

Related Reading

• Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976.
• McAdams, Dan P. The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self. New York: William Morrow, 1993.
• Estés, Clarissa Pinkola. Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. New York: Ballantine Books, 1992.
• Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence — From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books, 1992.

Why Stories Shape Us at a Neurological Level

The power of childhood touchstone stories is not simply cultural or psychological. It is neurological. Narrative, as cognitive neuroscience has increasingly recognized, is one of the primary ways the human brain organizes experience, makes meaning, and constructs identity. When we engage with a story — reading it, hearing it, watching it — the brain activates networks associated not just with language and comprehension but with sensory experience, motor simulation, and emotional processing. We don’t just think about stories. At a neural level, we inhabit them.

Raymond Mar, PhD, Professor of Psychology at York University, whose research examines the cognitive effects of narrative, has found that people who read fiction extensively demonstrate greater social cognitive abilities — greater empathy, greater capacity to understand others’ mental states — than those who don’t. This is because narrative, uniquely among cognitive activities, provides repeated practice in the fundamental human skill of inhabiting another consciousness: of seeing through different eyes, feeling through a different nervous system, understanding the logic of a life other than one’s own.

For children, this neurological function of narrative serves an additional purpose: it provides imaginative rehearsal for experiences and emotional states that have not yet been encountered in actual life. The child who reads about a heroine facing danger and finding courage is not just being entertained. At a neurological level, she is rehearsing what courage feels like from the inside — building neural representations of that emotional state that will, in some form, inform her responses when she encounters her own versions of danger and difficulty.

This is why the touchstone stories of childhood are not merely pleasant memories. They are, in a very real sense, part of the neural architecture of the self. The patterns of meaning they installed, the emotional templates they provided, the visions of possibility they offered — these are woven into the brain’s representational systems in ways that continue to influence perception, emotional response, and identity construction into adulthood. Revisiting them is not regression. It is a form of neural archaeology — excavating the earliest layers of how your mind learned to make meaning of the world you were living in.

Three Questions to Ask Your Childhood Stories Now

If you’re moved to revisit your touchstone stories with adult eyes and therapeutic curiosity, here are three questions that have proven generative in clinical work with clients who have engaged in this kind of personal archaeology.

What did the heroine have that you needed? Look at the central character in the stories you loved most. What qualities did she possess? What circumstances did she navigate? What did she have — internally, externally, relationally — that drew you to her so compellingly? Often the qualities we most loved in childhood story heroines are qualities we either recognized in embryonic form within ourselves or that we desperately needed to believe were possible. These qualities are clues — to what you were already, and to what you were reaching toward.

What was the story telling you was possible? Children who have been told — by their environments, implicitly or explicitly — that their ambitions are too large, their dreams too unlikely, their visions for themselves too much, often find in certain stories a counternarrative: evidence that transformation is possible, that the ordinary can become extraordinary, that a different life is available to someone who began without the traditional advantages. What was your touchstone story insisting was possible? And in what ways have you been living out, or moving toward, that possibility in your adult life?

Where are you in the story right now? Stories have structure — they have beginnings, middles, and ends, with recognizable phases of the journey in between. The call to adventure. The dark wood. The threshold. The trial. The return. Where in the arc of your own story do you locate yourself at this moment in your life? Many of my clients discover, when they ask this question honestly, that they have been living as if they are still in the beginning — still waiting for the story to really start — when, in fact, they are already deep in the middle of a narrative that has been underway for decades. This recognition is frequently both humbling and energizing: you are further along the journey than you thought. And the next phase of it is already beginning.

These questions don’t require formal therapeutic work, though a good therapist makes them safer and more generative. They require only time, a quiet space, the willingness to take your own interior life seriously enough to investigate it — and, perhaps, the specific books or films from your childhood that you’ve never quite been able to leave behind. Start there. They’re still telling you something. Listen.

The childhood stories that shaped us were, in the most literal sense, our first teachers. Before we had language for the concepts they contained — transformation, courage, belonging, longing, the particular texture of exile and return — we had these stories. We felt the truth of them in our bodies, in the way a held breath releases at a plot’s turning point, in the tears that came before we understood why we were crying. These stories knew us before we knew ourselves. Return to them with that same openness. They may still have something to tell you.

If what you’ve read here resonates, I want you to know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore my self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.

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