27/06/2025
Why I Use a Life Timeline in Therapy! 💙
One of the things I often do with my clients is create a timeline, a map of their life from birth to now.
Now, to a client, their life is just their life. It feels normal. ‘It is what it is.’ But so often, they don’t realise how much their early experiences are still affecting them today.
I could be working with someone in their 50s who feels not good enough, unfulfilled, or stuck in an unhappy relationship and they don’t understand why. So we gently go back through their life, at their pace, and we explore:
🔹 What was life like as a child?
🔹 What were their early relationships like?
🔹 How was school?
🔹 What jobs have they had?
🔹 Who’s come and gone in their life?
🔹 How were their parents’ relationships?
🔹 Have they experienced grief, loss, or instability?
Often, even people who describe their lives as ‘nothing out of the ordinary’ begin to realise why they tick the way they do.
Here’s why this matters:
1. We learn emotionally long before we can think rationally.
2. Our emotional brain develops from birth but the logical, reasoning part of our brain doesn’t fully begin developing until around age 8 or 9.
So to give you an example, if you grew up with emotionally unavailable parents (even if they were physically present), your emotional brain may have learned that people aren’t fully ‘there’ for you.
If your childhood was chaotic, unpredictable or distant, even without obvious trauma — you may have internalised beliefs like:
🔸 People leave
🔸 I can’t trust others
🔸 I must not be good enough.
And those beliefs still live in the body and brain decades later, showing up in relationships, self-worth, and emotional responses, until we gently bring them to the surface.
That’s why I love the timeline, it helps people connect the dots. It helps them stop blaming themselves and start understanding themselves.
And once that understanding is there, we can begin building safety, confidence, and trust in themselves and in others.
I have the absolute privilege of watching people’s lives transform before my eyes — and it never stops being one of the most meaningful parts of my job 💙.
If this resonates with you, or someone you love, please get in touch. You deserve to understand yourself — and to feel better.
