“My childhood was fine… there was nothing wrong with it.” “I was loved.” “It had its moments, but overall it was a great childhood.” I’ve lost count of the number of times I've heard these types of statements, and have had to spend time trying to convince someone who is obviously hurting that they’ve had difficult things happen to them.
Note that I said difficult – not bad.
We have so many hang-ups around admitting that we’ve had trauma. Sure, if someone has had something truly heinous happen to them, we have no problems looking at that and saying they have experienced trauma. But when it comes to our own lives, we tend to have a problem with that admission. It took me a little while to figure it out, but I finally got to the bottom of it.
Because admitting we had trauma suggest that people were “bad”.
And let’s face it, unless something terrible happened, nobody really wants to label their parents as bad. And I’m going to tell you that in most cases, parents who were responsible for childhood trauma weren’t “bad” people (although some very definitely were/are, and we will talk about that in another post).
Chances are they were human, probably doing the best that they could, often under incredibly difficult circumstances and while trying to deal with the nightmare of their own trauma that wasn’t recognized.
I know it was that way for me.
If you had asked me about my childhood when I was in my 20s, I would have told you that it didn’t really affect me, and that I just chose to be who I was. The incredible lack of self-awareness of that comment honestly still makes me cringe. It wasn’t until my 30s that I began to fully understand that there were parts of my childhood that probably left some scars.
To be honest, it took me a lot longer than it should have done to recognize that, because I didn’t want to admit that I’d had trauma, because that meant that I was ‘scarred’ or ‘damaged’. But when I finally came round to the fact that there were some things in my head that I really needed to work on, I sadly took the easy way out. I chose to blame rather than dealing with it.
And if you had talked to me in my late 30s and early 40s, I would have happily told you how angry I was at some of the things that happened. I sadly had that victim complex down to an art form, and it cost me several years of personal growth.
But over time, I finally came to the realization that my parents were never malicious. Sure they had some issues, and there were things that could have been a lot better, but with all the knowledge that I have now, plus having done a lot of my own work, I can tell you that they were probably struggling after living through significantly worse childhoods than mine.
I’ve had to work through quite a bit of guilt over how I felt towards them. Sorry Mom and Dad.
Let no one tell you any different… Doing the work of self-awareness and self acceptance means understanding your flaws as well as, if not better than, everybody else’s, and that can truly suck sometimes.
So when I’m working with someone, and we’re starting to dig down into the roots of their trauma, there’s almost always this conversation that we have where they try to convince me that nothing happened, and that they had a wonderful childhood. Then we slowly and carefully start to pick apart the threads of the psychological blanket that they been holding onto for so long.
Which is when it starts to get painful.
Because most trauma is not what I call “overt” or “obvious” trauma, but it’s quieter, it’s more insidious and it scars us in ways we can’t even see. I decided to call it stealth trauma because that’s really what it’s like. It’s this thing that’s causing damage to you and you can’t even see it. Especially if it occurs while you’re growing up, because you have no sense of normal to evaluate it against.
In fact a lot of the time our response to those traumas is so much a part of us that we don’t even realize that it’s a problem. It’s just “who we are”.
So please do me a favor if we ever have a conversation. If I tell you that you’ve experienced trauma, please try listen with an open mind. I can pretty safely guarantee that almost everybody has had some kind of trauma. It might not be terrible, it might not be horrific, but it’s there, and unless you’re aware of it, it’s probably affecting you in ways you can’t even imagine.
It can be hard realization, but I’m here to tell you that admitting that you have trauma doesn’t make you broken, and it doesn’t make you shameful.
It just makes you human.
And when you can accept that, you’ll have begun your journey out of your own personal hell and into the light of a better and happier life.
May you come through your storm, and may you find your pathway to happier life.
Because you deserve it, you really, really do.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings