The Corners We Carry: On Childhood Spaces and the Architecture of the Soul

Somewhere in your childhood home, there’s a space that still remembers you.

Maybe it was a narrow closet, a shadowy corner behind the couch, or the third step of a staircase that always creaked under your weight. Wherever it was, that place belonged to you—not because it was claimed, but because it held you.

Held your fears.
Held your dreams.
Held the earliest pieces of who you were becoming.

In The Poetics of Space, philosopher Gaston Bachelard explores how the places we dwell in—especially as children—become more than physical structures. They become emotional and psychological landscapes. Each room, stairwell, and attic becomes a container for memory, imagination, and identity. They imprint us. And in turn, we internalize them.

“The house, even more than the landscape, is a ‘psychic state,’” Bachelard writes.

We often think of memory as a timeline—dates and events we can chart. But memory is just as often spatial. We remember through rooms, textures, angles of light. Through how it felt to sit in that quiet nook where nobody looked. Or the way the sun filtered through a bedroom window in late afternoon. Or the specific scent of a hallway that led to safety—or fear.

These spaces shaped more than just recollection.
They shaped our capacity to feel.
To imagine.
To retreat and return.

The Architecture of Inner Life

Think back to your favorite childhood hideaway.

Did it offer solitude? A sense of invisibility? Was it a place where your imagination could wander freely, undisturbed?

That place may explain more about you than you realize. Our current patterns—how we cope with stress, where we go in our minds when life overwhelms, how we recharge—can often be traced back to those earliest spatial relationships.

Maybe you still seek tight, enclosed spaces when the world feels too open and loud.
Maybe you crave a window seat when you need to sort through your thoughts.
Maybe the smell of wood or warm laundry brings unexpected comfort.

This is not nostalgia—it’s somatic architecture. The body remembers. And so does the soul.

Places of Protection, Places of Becoming

Children don’t just “play pretend.” They build inner worlds with real emotional architecture. A blanket fort isn’t just a game—it’s a symbolic container of safety. A stairwell isn’t just a place to sit—it becomes a throne, a refuge, a thinking bench.

These early experiences teach us how to be with ourselves.

So much of adulthood is about coming back to the self. And so much of that self was first formed in the subtle architecture of our homes—not just what they looked like, but how they felt.

Were they loud or quiet? Safe or tense? Open or confined?

Even now, when you feel overwhelmed, there’s likely an inner room you return to. One built long ago in the corners of your childhood, where you learned how to self-soothe, reflect, or simply be.

A Reflection Invitation

If you’re on a path of healing, creativity, or self-understanding, this practice can be illuminating:

• Close your eyes and revisit a meaningful space from your childhood home.
  Where were you? What did it look like? What were you doing?

• Ask yourself what that space offered you.
  Was it safety? Stillness? Power? Freedom?

• Now reflect on your present-day patterns.
  How do you recreate those qualities in your current life? Or how do you long to?

The house we grew up in never truly leaves us.
It becomes the metaphorical foundation of our inner world.

The question is not just where did you grow up.
But how did that place teach you to exist?

Final Thoughts

In therapy, coaching, and spiritual work, we often speak of “holding space.” What if that idea is rooted in the literal spaces that first held us?

To know yourself more deeply, return to those quiet corners of your past. Listen to what they still whisper. You might find that your inner architecture was sacred all along.

-MM