One of my favourite analogies comes from Carl Rogers, the founder of Person Centered Therapy. He described a farmer storing potatoes in a root cellar. The conditions inside the cellar weren’t ideal. There was limited light, uneven surfaces, obstacles and restrictions. Yet despite these difficult conditions, the potatoes continued to grow. Their shoots twisted, bent and stretched in whatever direction they could find. They adapted to the environment they found themselves in. Rogers believed people do something very similar.
As human beings, we have a natural tendency towards growth. We want to connect, explore, develop and become more fully ourselves. Yet none of us grow in perfect conditions. We all develop within the environments we are given, and those environments shape the ways we learn to survive. As a therapist, I often find myself wondering about a client’s root cellar. What was the emotional environment they grew up in? What messages did they receive about themselves? How safe was it to express emotions? What happened when they made mistakes? What happened when they needed comfort, reassurance or protection? The answers to these questions often tell us a great deal about how someone learned to navigate the world.
One of the things I love about this analogy is that it helps move us away from judgement and towards understanding. If a child grows up in an environment where criticism is common, they may develop perfectionism. If they grow up in an environment where feelings are dismissed, they may learn to disconnect from their emotions. If love feels conditional, they may become highly attuned to other people’s needs, constantly scanning for signs of approval or rejection. These adaptations aren’t evidence that something is wrong with us. They are evidence that we adapted. The shape we grew into often tells us far more about our environment than it does about our worth.
The question isn’t what’s wrong with you. The question is what did you have to do to survive?
The same is often true for LGBTQ+ people. Many of us grew up in environments where our identities were ignored, criticised or actively rejected. Even when outright hostility wasn’t present, there were often powerful messages about what was considered acceptable and what wasn’t. As a gay man who grew up during the era of Section 28, I became very skilled at reading the room. I learned to monitor myself, pay attention to other people’s reactions and hide parts of myself when it felt necessary. At the time, those adaptations made complete sense. They helped me stay safe in an environment that didn’t always feel safe.
From a minority stress perspective, many of the difficulties LGBTQ+ people experience later in life are understandable responses to those early environments. Hypervigilance, self criticism, shame, people pleasing and difficulties trusting ourselves don’t simply appear out of nowhere. They often develop because they once served a purpose. They helped us reduce risk, avoid rejection or maintain important relationships. When we understand this, we can begin to see these patterns not as flaws or weaknesses, but as creative adaptations to difficult circumstances.
The challenge is that the strategies that helped us survive childhood don’t always help us thrive in adulthood. Someone who learned to stay quiet to avoid criticism may struggle to express their needs in relationships. Someone who learned to hide aspects of themselves may find intimacy and vulnerability difficult. Someone who learned that acceptance was conditional may continue working tirelessly to earn approval long after it is needed. What once protected us can eventually begin to limit us, not because it was wrong, but because our circumstances have changed while the adaptation remains.
What once protected us can eventually begin to limit us.
Trauma and relational trauma can have a similar effect. When important relationships are characterised by inconsistency, neglect, criticism or emotional unavailability, we adapt in ways that help us cope. Over time, these adaptations can become so familiar that we mistake them for personality. We stop seeing them as responses to our environment and start believing they are simply who we are. The anxious person, the people pleaser, the perfectionist, the one who never asks for help. Yet often these identities began as ways of surviving environments that required us to bend and twist in order to get our needs met.
This is one of the reasons I find the root cellar analogy so powerful. Therapy isn’t about judging the shape we grew into. It isn’t about asking why we aren’t more confident, less anxious or better at relationships. Instead, therapy invites curiosity. What did your root cellar look like? What conditions were you growing in? What did you have to do to survive? When we begin asking these questions, something important happens. We often move away from self judgement and towards self compassion because we start recognising that many of the things we criticise ourselves for were actually intelligent responses to difficult circumstances.
The goal of therapy isn’t to blame the environment forever. Rather, it’s to understand how it shaped us so that we have more choice about how we live today. Because while we can’t change the root cellar we grew up in, we can begin creating the conditions that allow us to continue growing. Perhaps that’s one of the most hopeful ideas in therapy. No matter what our early environment looked like, the capacity for growth never completely disappears.