I don’t know if there are people who have listened to Placebo’s song “Song to Say Goodbye” and watched its music video. It first caught my attention when a client emphasized it to summarize their own situation, and after thinking about it for a while, I realized how meaningful the comparison actually was. And throughout the psychotherapies I have conducted until today, I noticed that it is not the adult themselves, but the child within that adult who brings them to psychotherapy. The one who is wounded is not the adult — it is the adult’s own childhood. The pains, the angers, the helplessness, the distress, and the source of the symptoms all stem from the emotional experiences of that childhood.
The child is the helpless one, the needy one, the one who is prone to being hurt. The child is dependent — surrounded by every form of dependency. They are fragile and powerless. Yet along with this dependency, the child also becomes the one who sometimes controls. There is a dialectical situation here: the one who is managed is the needy one, but at the same time, the one who makes others needy. The child can control the adult, taking the adult from a passive position to a slightly more active one. As the child grows and progresses toward adulthood, the adult starts becoming dependent on that childlike self and becomes managed by it.
An adult’s childhood takes the adult by the hand and brings them to therapy. It says: Listen to me, hear me, feel my pain, heal my wounds, relieve my helplessness, clear my shame and embarrassment, ease my guilt, free me from my dependencies, and liberate me. And it expresses these demands through symptoms. Symptoms become the voices we can no longer ignore. The voice turns into a scream — embodied through physical pain, reflected through unhappiness, expressed through suffering. Many people say things like “The child inside me is crying,” “The child stuck in those years is asking for help,” “That little girl/boy won’t leave me alone,” and these statements are not poetic expressions but deeply genuine, honest, and sincere. These are not exaggerations. They come with emotions so strong that they can no longer be ignored — emotions that must be felt. And the people who say them are not “crazy.” The adult must see, hear, and feel these things. Who doesn’t talk about their past in therapy? Who doesn’t mention memories from childhood? Which adult can separate their adulthood from their childhood experiences? When we speak of a person’s development, maturity, and growth, we are also speaking of what has not matured, not grown, not fully developed.
The jokes we sometimes make, like “going back to childhood” or “returning to childhood,” are actually attempts to soften the wounded parts of ourselves. Because the true material of therapy — the real work — is the child we think we left behind in the past. What is emphasized in the referenced song is also the adult’s own child-self. It is the child who carries the adult, helps them, leads them, supports them. The one who is helpless is the child; the adult trapped in their own turmoil cannot see it, perceiving the problems as adult wounds and wanting to interpret them that way. But they are actually being governed by their own childhood. If an adult listens, they can either raise that child or free them from helplessness. A child freed from helplessness, a child whose wounds are healed, finally releases the adult — and both go their own way.
Some people cry for the child they once were — for their experiences of powerlessness, the moments they were unprotected, the times they were vulnerable to harm. Children need protection; adults need the peace of their own childhood. Unless an adult’s childhood becomes calm, the adult will remain anxious, worried, sad, always searching for something in daily life. Meanwhile, their childhood continuously tries to reveal itself, but the adult cannot see it. The revenge of children is heavy. Children can hold grudges; they can turn adulthood into a kind of hell. A needy and painful childhood takes revenge in adulthood by never letting go of the adult’s life. It wants to be heard, to express what it went through, to be seen, to be acknowledged. A childhood that was abused, unprotected, neglected, overwhelmed by experiences “too big for its sense of self,” disrespected as a child, never valued — grows into adulthood somehow, surpassing the adult and turning into an adult-shaped wounded being.
These individuals must struggle with helplessness, powerlessness, social fears, emotional instability, inner emptiness, thoughts stuck in the past, and emotions that have never matured or been regulated. Some people notice this and listen to their child-self and repair them; once healed, a fuller and more meaningful life begins. But those who ignore it — who explain away their feelings and thoughts with superficial, present-day interpretations — end up, just like in the song, delivered to the psychiatric hospital by their own childhood, or left outside the door of their own childhood as hopeless, unhappy adults searching for meaning.
