#childhood-trauma

#childhood-trauma

On the surface, my own childhood certainly looked idyllic. My dad worked, and my mom stayed home. I did well in school. I was involved. If I expressed interest in an activity, my mom signed me up. She schlepped me around town, to games and competitions, to art classes and orchestra practices. I stood out academically; my report cards always read "a pleasure to have in class." I was a rule follower by nature, seemingly clinging to the order and structure that school offered me.

A couple of weeks ago, I found myself crying in the park. It was supposed to be just a typical summer day. I was enjoying my usual stroll with my dog, Boni. The sun was shining, and the shade of the trees provided a very welcoming shelter from the burning sun. Children were running and laughing, and their joy drew me in. Two of them, tiny three-year-olds, were squealing, all happy, wearing Hawaiian-style skirts and flowers around their necks.

The room carried a quiet stillness that afternoon as the young adults gathered for the restorative justice session. Their stories held old wounds, many of them shaped in childhood spaces where silence felt safer than truth. Mateo, 22 years old, entered softly and selected a seat near the edge of the circle, his posture revealing the weight of years spent swallowing words. On that day, however, he chose to speak.

I have seen my mother slit her wrists. I have lived a life, my whole life of chasing her into bathrooms, trying to catch her throwing up. I've been around guns, the mafia, the racetrack. I've been through everything. I've seen her beaten with an inch of her life with a phone. Nothing compares to what my divorce was for 10 years.

Simon and I couldn't be more different. When we met, I was 38, he was 54, and his unabashed zest for life broke through my complicated caution. I knew I was in love when, after a lazy summer evening together, I lay on the stone beside a Trafalgar Square fountain and felt joy seep through my skin. I moved in with him, his rural 15th-century cottage becoming our home, workplace (me in medicine, he in shipping), and where I discovered previously unknown contentment.

She also doesn't understand why, as a woman in my 40s, I like certain things that she considers childish, like animated films. However, when I think about her childhood, I realize that she probably still has unhealed trauma that was never dealt with. She was born in France, just two months before the Nazis marched in, and spent the first five years of her life in wartime and economic struggles.

For most of my life, I have carried an invisible companion: a harsh inner voice that sounds like mine and tells me, over and over, that I am not enough. It's so oppressive that people close to me have often said they'd never met anyone so hard on themselves. Over decades of listening to that voice, I let it convince me that no achievement was ever sufficient.

Somewhere in the process of parenting, you begin to see your younger self in your child-and you are forced to face the parts of yourself you have either buried or never fully understood. I started noticing this mirror effect when my daughter became a teenager. Suddenly, her behavior-makeup, boyfriend, confidence -was triggering emotions I did not expect.

There are all kinds of things we could murmur to our brains to soothe the fear of being judged. You could point out that almost nobody is looking at you; mostly people are too wrapped up in themselves. You could point out that you already know you're competent from how you rise to occasions at work; there probably isn't much to mock about you. You can pat and soothe your brain with evidence that the thing it's afraid of is very, very unlikely.

I guess we probably all do, right? Especially at this stage in my life - a grown-ass woman with a tween and a teen who have the drama thing on lock in our house - I try to be pretty proactive about protecting my peace. And yet, somehow, chaos seems to find me. Or could it be that I'm subconsciously seeking it out?

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