#childhood-trauma

#childhood-trauma

When you grow up in a house where nobody says what they're feeling, you become hypervigilant to every shift in mood, every sigh, every slammed cabinet door. You had to. It was survival. As an adult, this translates into constantly scanning your partner's face for micro-expressions, analyzing their tone for hidden meanings. You think you're being perceptive, but here's the thing: you're often projecting your childhood experiences onto completely different situations.

Research on parentification - the process where children are forced into adult emotional roles - shows that many of the people we admire for their composure developed it as a survival mechanism. They weren't born calm. They were made calm, usually by environments where someone's emotional dysregulation demanded that a child become the steady one.

They are known, as it were, from the neck up. The cellular memory of facts and experiences, however, connects mind and body: My body recalls that showing my true feelings in childhood led to a put-down. A slammed door meant that Dad was home and drunk. The specific fact/event may be forgotten, but the bodily reaction remains: Any slamming noise may induce terror.

Every time Elizabeth Lamphere looked at her daughter, all she saw was her late fiancé. Ian had died in an avalanche while skiing in the Colorado backcountry when Madelyn was just a baby. The tragedy had plunged Lamphere into single parenthood, changing diapers, making meals, doing the bedtime routine all by herself, all while trying to bring in what money she could as a massage therapist.

In childhood, we lack the emotional and cognitive maturity to fully understand the harm that comes from those we depend on for safety and love. To cope with fear, helplessness, and confusion, many of us blamed ourselves. This self-blame can create a false sense of control in a chaotic environment and allows us to preserve an emotional bond with caregivers, even if those caregivers are also the source of harm.

I've had a script running through my subconscious mind that says, "I am unworthy." I've written in this space about self-esteem, but now I'd like to dig a little deeper and get more specific about how low self-esteem is formed, and what you can do about it. I love baseball; when I was a kid, I asked my parents to let me play Little League baseball several times.

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.

My parents took me to see it in the theatre, under the impression that it would be appropriate for a seven-year-old. Princess Mombi's macabre wardrobe of disembodied heads; the psychopathic laughter of the wheelers, with all four limbs ending in squeaky wheels; Nicol Williamson's sinister, vicious Nome King all are permanent fixtures in my unconscious hall of famous terrors. And Fairuza Balk's Dorothy is eerie to match, a perfect uncanny heroine for a truly twisted children's film.