Most of us have experienced things in our past that we determinedly forget and keep sealed off in the dark undergrowth of our mind.

Some memories, and the feelings they evoke in us, are so painful that we feel existentially threatened by them, fearing that they will destroy the life we have built since the ‘bad things’ happened. We struggle to make sense of the ‘I’ we once were and what its relation is to the ‘I’ we have become. Most of us deal with this very human dilemma by shrugging it off, dusting ourselves down and moving on with life. This doesn’t always work, though.

What if the bad things from the past have consequences that we cannot shake off or where we worry that others may find out about the life we used to live, making us fearful of rejection by those we love and care about? What if some truths become a guillotine that hovers above the embellished or fabricated narrative of the life we’ve created?

This week, TV presenter, Davina McCall, interviewed on the podcast 'Happy Mum, Happy Baby', spoke candidly of her own past experiences with drug and alcohol addiction and how she shared the truth about this with her three children (now aged 16, 14 & 11). She said she’d had to be “totally honest” because her children have access to the internet and she worried that they might hear versions of the truth from others (who probably didn’t really know the facts, or even care about her struggle with drugs and subsequent journey into sobriety). McCall has been clear of substance abuse for well over 20 years – long before her children were born – but they grew up knowing that “mummy went to meetings” (Narcotics Anonymous) and accepted this as part of their normal day to day routine.

By the time each of her children reached 10 or 11 years, McCall sat them down and told them about her drug addiction, with an appropriate level and depth of explanation and disclosure. It takes courage and clarity of mind to open up to a child and be honest and she is to be commended for doing so. In the long run, it is likely to benefit her relationships with the children and provide a model for honesty and personal integrity in their own young lives. Still, it couldn’t have been easy for her.

Most parents are (and want to be) the apple of their child’s eye. For the very young child, mummy and daddy are, unquestionably, the ‘bestest’ people in the universe and for that reason the child adores them. They have no conception that mummy or daddy is capable of lying or doing bad things. Children themselves are unable to construct a lie until the age of four or five years. Cognitively, lying is quite a complex process, requiring a degree of theory of mind (the realisation that others can think differently or have a different version of reality). Kids, therefore, tend to believe everything their parents tell them up until this age. As they grow older and get established in primary school and the world beyond the family – especially in our internet age – children are influenced and shaped by others. They also become curious and start to ask parents about their lives when they were young. “What’s the naughtiest thing you ever did, Mum?” is a fairly common question for an eight or nine-year-old child to ask. Most of the time, kids relish their parents’ tall tales of daftness and mischief during their childhood. But if the parents’ early years were characterised by abuse, alcoholism or traumatic loss, it’s much more difficult to tell the truth. We never want to harm or disrupt the hopeful innocence of a young child, but we also need to be aware that withholding the truth of how it really was is, essentially, a lie. As a child grows older into late adolescence and adulthood, we owe it to them to tell the lion’s share of the truth about how we got to be who we are. If we don’t, we’re guilty of the sin of omission. At best, this can create a gaping hole where there is limited appreciation and understanding of the person their parent really is. At worst, it can lead to enduring problems in the relationship between child and parent. If we cannot learn from our mistakes, we tend, in the end, to be compelled to repeat them. For some families, those same mistakes get repeated for generations. Telling the truth – in an age-appropriate way – is one way of breaking that pattern.