Adam Young never thought he had a story to tell. He wasn’t carrying around some headline-grabbing trauma, no dramatic origin story of overcoming the odds.
But at 35, he started to realize something unnerving—his past wasn’t just a series of closed chapters. It was still shaping him, influencing his decisions, relationships and sense of self in ways he hadn’t even begun to unpack.
For a lot of people, the past feels like something to either romanticize or ignore completely. You might think that unless you went through something traumatic, there’s no real reason to dig into it. But Young argues that’s not true.
“All of us grew up in a family and our earliest relationships with our primary caretakers had a significant influence on the development of our brain,” he explains. “The way we experience the world now was shaped in the context of our family of origin.”
It’s not about confronting trauma for trauma’s sake; it’s about understanding why you operate the way you do. Why do you struggle with certain relationships? Why do certain situations trigger anxiety or frustration? Why do you have the same fights over and over again? If you never take the time to unpack those patterns, you risk carrying them forward without even realizing it.
So where do you start? Young’s advice is simple: pay attention to the memories that already surface.
“All of us have fragments of memories,” he says. “What if you treated that memory as a guest at your dinner table and welcomed it with hospitality? What if you brought curiosity to why you remember it and what it’s telling you about how you were shaped?”
Of course, self-exploration is rarely comfortable. Some memories carry shame, regret, or deep sadness. Some, even if they seem small, are painful in ways we don’t fully understand. But Young is clear that this isn’t meant to be a solo mission.
“We need one another to see ourselves well,” he says. “I need you to see me in the context of my stories and to name me in those contexts because I can’t do that by myself. I’m too close to it.”
If you’re the friend who sees someone stuck in old patterns and wants to help, Young suggests two things: curiosity and kindness.
“We all have places where we’re stuck and those places are often recapitulations of the core stories of our growing up years,” he explains. “So bring curiosity—what might this stuckness be inviting them to explore? And then bring kindness—not just niceness, but the willingness to name what you observe as they tell their story.”
One of the biggest reasons people hesitate to engage with their past is the fear of the emotions it might stir up. Regret, sadness, even anger—especially toward God. Young doesn’t shy away from that reality.
“I think God welcomes our upset, our anger, our disappointment,” he says. “There’s not a way to engage your story and not find places where you feel deep disappointment in God.”
The only way through it, he suggests, is to bring that disappointment directly to God, without sugarcoating it. “We aren’t angry in abstraction,” he says. “We’re angry about specific moments. So the question is, God, could we have a conversation about my disappointment in you in this particular moment or season of my life?”
Reckoning with the past isn’t a one-and-done task. It’s a lifelong process of discovery. “The goal isn’t for me to be healed or fixed, whatever that means,” Young says. “The goal is for me to become more fully myself.” And the more we understand ourselves, the more we can show up authentically in our relationships.
“When I break through to new levels of freedom in becoming more fully myself, that’s going to affect my relationships,” he says. “I’ll show up differently in my friendships. I’ll show up differently at work. I’ll show up differently in dating. And that can be disruptive.”
The more self-aware you become, the more it can shake up relationships built around an old version of you. But Young says that’s a necessary part of growth. “To the degree that I understand more about my family of origin, I’m going to experience new levels of freedom,” he says. “And that can cause relational disharmony.”
Still, the work is worth it. “It’s tragic to live as an adult without putting some serious reflection into how you came to be the person that you are,” he says.
It might be uncomfortable, but the alternative is staying stuck in cycles you don’t even realize you’re repeating. And if we don’t engage with our stories, we risk letting them shape us blindly, rather than stepping into the freedom of understanding who we really are.
The past is never just the past, Young says. But if we’re willing to look at it with curiosity, kindness and maybe even a little courage, it might just become the key to moving forward.
