How Childhood Stories and Early Encounters Shape Our Spiritual Identity
A patient's mother once asked Dr. Ran D. Anbar something that caught him off guard: "How did you become so spiritual?"
It's an odd question to direct at a pediatric pulmonologist. But Dr. Anbar's initial answer came quickly enough. He'd learned his spirituality from patients, he said, especially once he began using hypnosis and started interacting directly with their subconscious minds.
That was his knee-jerk response. But when he actually sat down and reflected on it—when he looked backward across his own life—the answer shifted entirely. His spirituality didn't originate in professional expertise or hard-won clinical wisdom. It came from fiction stories he wrote as a teenager. And from simple childhood moments he'd barely remembered.
His spirituality, he realized, had been there all along.
Where Does Spirituality Actually Come From?
The question matters more than we might think. Is spirituality the result of education and years of life experience? Or does it take root much earlier—in childhood, even—long before formal schooling or conscious reflection kicks in?
Dr. Anbar's reflection suggests the latter. His earliest memories reveal a pattern: a deep, almost instinctive respect for life that predates any conscious philosophical framework.
At seven years old, living in Israel, he went to Tel Aviv with his mother. A street vendor had caught wild birds and was selling them for a Lira, Israeli currency at the time. Something in him refused to accept this. He used his allowance money to buy two birds. Then he set them free.
At five, his father bought him a fishing pole. On his very first try, he caught a fish. His excitement lasted exactly until the moment it landed on the ground. Then he wanted to throw it back immediately. "It was only then that it dawned on me that the fish might die," he later recalled.
These weren't calculated ethical decisions. They were spontaneous reactions. But they reveal something important: an early respect for life that may well have been at the core of his decision to become a physician. The question remains, where did this spirituality come from at such a young age?
His answer: subconscious input.
The Fiction Stories That Revealed His Own Mind
Here's where things get fascinating. Starting at age fifteen, Dr. Anbar began writing fiction. Not for publication. Not for anyone's approval. Just for himself. But these stories, written by a child, then a teenager, turned out to be remarkably prescient. They revealed questions he was asking about the nature of existence, death, and creation, questions he's still exploring today.
The Big Bang (Age 15)
His first remembered story involved an astronaut exploring the edge of the universe. The universe began collapsing into a small singularity. The astronaut realized that once the collapse completed, everything would cease to exist. So he did something drastic. He crashed his spaceship into the tiny universe, killing himself but causing a massive explosion, a Big Bang.
The story ends with Genesis verses: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was a formless void and the spirit of God hovered over the water."
The implication? The creator of the universe might actually be the astronaut. The spirit referenced in Genesis could be his. It's a provocative reimagining of creation, one that suggests the divine might be far more human, far more sacrificial, than we typically imagine.
Escape from Death (Age 17)
Next came a story about Harry Houdini, the legendary escape artist, who promised that once he died, he would escape death itself and return to Earth. In Dr. Anbar's story, Houdini finally succeeded. He escaped death and returned triumphantly.
But here's the twist: in his absence, the end of time had already arrived. Death no longer existed. So his great escape led to an outcome he never wanted, immortality without the possibility of death, which means the concept of death itself had vanished.
The story touches on something uncomfortable: sometimes achieving our goals leads to unexpected outcomes we may not desire at all.
The Potionmaker (Age 18)
His final remembered story explored immortality through three individuals offered eternal life by a mysterious Potionmaker. The Potionmaker had proven there was no existence after death, so the first person refused, living forever after accomplishing all goals would mean an eternity of boredom. The second person declined because he couldn't prove there was no afterlife and didn't want to miss it. The third person eagerly accepted because he'd killed a man and knew exactly where he'd go once he died.
The man drank quickly, faced the doorway, and asked, "Will I live forever now?"
"Yes," replied the Devil.
It's a dark, clever story. But notice what it reveals: even as a teenager, Dr. Anbar was wrestling with questions about the nature of death, the relationship between human action and creation, and how our deepest intentions can lead to surprising, and sometimes unwanted, outcomes.
What Narrative Identity Actually Means
None of this is random. It's what psychologists call "narrative identity."
Narrative identity is defined as "the internalized story we construct about our lives that provides life with some degree of unity and purpose" (McAdams & McLean, 2013). The research is clear: our deepest values and characteristic ways of making meaning appear early in life and often remain consistent throughout our lifetime.
Look at Dr. Anbar's teenage stories again. The questions he was asking, about death, about creation, about the consequences of our actions, are essentially the same questions he explores in his clinical work today. His spiritual framework wasn't something he acquired later. It was already there, encoded in the stories he told himself as a kid.
The Takeaway: Understanding Yourself Through Your Stories
So what does this mean for the rest of us?
Dr. Anbar's conclusion is straightforward but profound: as we think about our life stories, the ones we consider important, we can develop better self-understanding.
We don't need to write fiction to benefit from this. We just need to pay attention to the patterns in our own early experiences. What did you care about as a child? What stories did you tell yourself? What questions kept you up at night? Those aren't just childhood curiosities. They're often the very foundations of who we become.
Spirituality, it turns out, might not be something we learn. It might be something we carry from the beginning, waiting for us to notice.
