THE INVISIBLE CONTRACTS WE MAKE IN CHILDHOOD

October 4, 2026

Andre Agassi became one of the greatest tennis players in the world. Agassi’s father, Mike, a former Olympic boxer, forced him into tennis as a small child, building a brutal mechanical ballshooter called “The Dragon” that fired 2,500 balls at him daily. Agassi won eight Grand Slam titles, including Wimbledon (1992) and an Olympic gold. As a child, the tennis court became a place of discipline, fear and silent rebellion. As a child, Agassi signed a mental contract with himself to survive his father’s brutal training regime, that translated into adulthood as

“I play tennis for a living, even though I hate tennis, hate it with a dark and secret passion, and always have.” Agassi’s autobiography Open He ultimately transitioned from seeking escape from tennis to finding true peace through family life and philanthropy, notably founding a charter school for at-risk children in Las Vegas. Yet not all are as fortunate. For most, the torment continues, throughout life. This is the mystery. During childhood, when the mind is open to all impressions, we end up making contracts with ourselves.

Contracts that we unconsciously learn to live by without realising how we may have penned our own destinies, pleasant or dark. For example, the child who is ignored may become famous.

Yet beneath achievement, there may remain an old, frightened contract: I must keep proving myself, otherwise I am nothing. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF CONTRACT Childhood contracts are not written in language. They are written in the nervous system.

A child does not say, “I am now forming an unconscious liferule.” He simply feels shame, fear, abandonment, comparison or helplessness, and decides something about existence. These contracts are often intelligent at the time. They protect the child. A child in an unsafe home may survive by becoming pleasing. A child in an unpredictable home may survive by becoming watchful. The difficulty begins when the adult continues to obey the contract after the danger has passed. John Bowlby’s attachment theory proposed that early relationships shape “internal working models” of the self and others. Hazan and Shaver’s influential 1987 paper extended this idea into adult romantic love. A child who learns, “People leave,” may become the adult who clings.

A child who learns, “Need brings pain,” may become the adult who avoids intimacy. A child who learns, “I am loved only when useful,” may become the adult who gives until his soul is exhausted. Schema therapy speaks of early maladaptive schemas: deep emotional-cognitive patterns formed when core childhood needs are not met. A 2020 meta-analysis linked adverse childhood experiences with early maladaptive schemas and adult psychological distress. In simpler language, A schema is an old childhood conclusion that continues to behave like truth.

Felitti, Anda and colleagues found a graded relationship between categories of childhood adversity and later risks including depression, suicide attempt and several adult diseases. Childhood is therefore not merely a chapter that closes. It may continue as stress chemistry, relational expectation, self-image, health behaviour and life direction. Eric Berne and later Claude Steiner described “life scripts” as unconscious plans shaped by early decisions. Steiner’s Scripts People Live describes why a person may feel strangely bound even when circumstances change. The outer life has altered; the inner script has not. SAMSKARA AND VASANA Indian thought had already understood this through samskara and vasana. A samskara is the impression left upon the inner instrument by repeated experience, emotion and action.

It is memory that has learnt how to become tendency. From samskara arises vasana: the subtle inclination that pulls consciousness towards familiar experience. The contract says, “Do this, and you will be safe.” The vasana says, “Return to this, because this is what you know.” The result is bondage. Every childhood contract binds the soul to a narrower identity. The Atman is vast, but the contract says: I am the one who must please. I am the one who cannot trust. I am the one who must hide. Such identification is the subtle rope by which consciousness remains tied to fear, approval, comparison, injury and memory. The soul is meant to move towards freedom; the contract keeps pulling it back into the small room where the wound first occurred.

The Bible (Proverbs 22:6 / General Systemic Context) says: “Train up a child in the way he should go…” In the Bhagavad Gita (3.35), this danger of abandoning our true nature is explicitly warned against: “It is better to live your own destiny/ Dharma imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else’s life with perfection.” There is a luminous illustration in the story of Dhruva. The young prince tried to sit on his father’s lap, but his stepmother Suruci insulted him, saying he had no right because he was not born from her womb. The Bhagavata Purana records that she spoke with pride while Dhruva was trying to climb onto his father’s lap. That childhood wound could have become a lifelong contract of revenge: I will become greater than all of you. In fact, Dhruva initially went to the forest with that fire.

Yet under Narada’s guidance, the wound was turned towards tapas and devotion. RESCINDING THE CONTRACTS Carl Jung says that such childhood complexes shape destiny. The shamed child may become the perfectionist. The abandoned child, the anxious lover. The powerless child, the controller. What is not made conscious seeks expression through choices, attractions, aversions, quarrels and repeated suffering. He writes “The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of the parents.” Healing your inner child requires a deep audit of the implicit promises you made long ago. Recognizing this burden is not about casting blame; it is about realizing that you no longer have to live out an imitation of someone else’s unfulfilled destiny. You can put down the weight that was never yours to carry.

The Sikh tradition provides a method for rescinding such contracts. A technique for freedom. “Man tu jot sarup hai, apna mul pachhan” (O mind, you are the embodiment of Divine Light; recognise your origin) Ang 440/441, Sri Guru Granth Sahib This line from Guru Granth Sahib is traditionally associated with Ang 441/440 depending on edition references. The childhood contract says, “I am my wound.” Gurbani says, “You are light; recognise your source.” The contract binds the mind to story. Simran frees the soul.

Patanjali gives the method in one sutra: abhyāsa-vairāgyābhyāṃ tan-nirodhaḥ (Fluctuations are stilled through practice and detachment) Practice builds a new response. Detachment withdraws nourishment from the old contract. Both are necessary. How does one begin? First, identify the behaviour that has brought both success and suffering. Do not look only at failures. Look at the success that has become expensive. For forty days, sit every morning in silence- Ten minutes only. Place the hand upon the heart and repeat a sacred word: Waheguru, Om, Ram, or any Name that brings reverence.

Then repeat inwardly: “The pain that once protected me need not govern me now.” Freedom is the end of unconscious obedience to memory. Soul emancipation is the release from the false identity through which the world has been misread. The soul remains bound to this dimension as long as it keeps mistaking fear for wisdom, and old pain for truth. When the contract is seen, blessed and released, the same life becomes a field of liberation. The perfectionist may still work carefully, but no longer from terror.

The adult must release it to live. And the soul, relieved of an old burden, begins at last to remember its original light. “Children are bound by invisible loyalties unconscious contracts to settle the emotional debts and unresolved traumas of the generations that came before them.” Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy Parneet Sachdev, IRS is the Chairman of Real Estate Regulatory Authority and a leading author.