how to recover from a bad childhood?, part I
How to heal, find peace and move on?
PART 1 — Tapping our feet in the water: looking at the anger & hopelessness that a bad childhood bring into our lifes.
“Children begin by loving their parents;
as they grow older they judge them;
sometimes they forgive them.”
Oscar Wilde.
I meant to write this yesterday morning, but then I decided to posponed until today. Today is no better: I want to go to sleep, I am struggling to find a way to start writing about this and I am starting to think that my refusal to write on this subject at all is because, perhaps, there’s nothing to say.
In many ways I feel this is reflective of how hard is to address this subject enterely. We don’t want to look at it. We don’t wanna talk about it. Hence the root of the problem: children who come from an unstable, hurtful, abusive household often feel like they can’t talk about it. You wouldn’t even know how many times the phrase: “it’s a feeling I can’t describe” appears on my writing. Often it’s not about the same thing — the situation varies — but the feeling its the same: I can’t talk about it. I can’t explain it. I know how it feels like — I know how it makes me feel — but simply there are no words for it.
Jeanette McCurdy recently published a book about her childhood. Her provocative title — I am glad my mom died — seemed to divide people in two camps: one where people thought it was way too aggresive and another where people got it.
Her story — a childstar who shoot to fame when it wasn’t even her dream to begin with, but her mother’s — is heartbreaking, raw and unfair. It also has many ingredients of (many) other childhood stars that we know about: abusive or neglecting parents, an unstable envoiroment and a child star who, suddenly, starts rebelling in the public eye.
I used to watch ICarly as a child and like many, Sam’s character — with her aggresiveness, her wit and seemily desinterest in everything and everyone— spoke deeply to me. When I see Jeannete now in interviews, retelling details of what she was going through behind the scenes, I feel sad and sick. It’s hard not to feel for her — you get the idea that living through her childhood was a burden. And the details she shares with us— about the physical, mental and emotional abuse she suffered in the hands of her mother, and the chaos and danger she was summited to through her work envoiroment — made me understand why she chose the title of her book.
I think another reason why bad/difficult/abusive childhoods seem hard to address is because of the intrinsic vulnerability that exists within children. Since the minute we are created we depend enterily on our parents — and our parents faculties’ — to meet our basic needs and prepare us for the world. When they fail — when they are less than suitable for the job — they can make us feel like it isn’t fair. We have then to face many unresolved & uncomfortable questions: Why did it happen? How did it happen? How my mother or my father or my primal caregiveer didn’t understand that it wasn’t right? Why on earth is that my experience and why on earth was I born in that family?
Questions like these are hard to look at and hard to address and hard to accept, but I think its also hard (or even harder) to come to terms with what a parent did to you and held them up to the consecuences of it. Many people who were offended by Jeanette’s book title accused her of being way too violent. “It’s your mother”, one comment read, “how can you be glad she is gone?”. Maybe it’s time to sit with these incomfortable and honest truths — I am glad my mom died — as perhaps its exactly what we need to look at what happens when parents do fail and their children are left feeling hurt, hearbroken and alone.
As I decided I wanted to talk about this subject I sort of felt I had to mention my story too. It wasn’t an easy decision — actually, if I am honest, I almost take this section out — but I thought that if I was going to talk about bad childhoods and how one can come to terms to it, then I should be honest as well.
As I was growing up, I was sexually abused by my father.
For years, after I confessed to my mother what had happen, I spent a great deal of my time and energy pretending it hadn’t happen. Of course by that point everybody knew and I couldn’t hide myself from it, but I felt that if I really tried it — if I placed my head in the ground and ignored what was happening around me — then I could turn myself into someone else enterely.
I just didn’t wanted to live in my shoes. I didn’t wanted the burden of that story — of being that child, of having that father. Many children that go through painful experiences as they are growing up end up hurting themselves in one way or another. Many take on eating disorders (Jeanette was one of them). Sustance abuse is another big one. For me it was cutting — harming myself and trying to pretend that actually I wasn’t that girl.
It’s a very hard experience — to grow up in an abusive home, to have a bad childhood — because the experiences from it linger through time and can stay on your body & mind. That is why many of us then turn to drugs, sex, eating disorders and harmful techniques to come with terms of what we have lived through. When you are deprived of a happy home — when you don’t have loving parents who do their job right — then you might spent your whole life trying to move yourself out of your body, as if you were trying to change your whole narrative.
Like I said: it’s hard to live through a bad/abusive childhood. You don’t have an answer for it. What’s worst: other people don’t have an answer for it either. Many of them will tell you: it’s just bad luck and you can’t really say or convice yourself enterily that it happened because you were this or you did that or that happened. Surviving a bad childhood it’s hard because, in the end, you will have to look at the mirror and face the fact that a) you didn’t deserve it, b)it wasn’t fair and c) there is not many answers at why it had happened the way it did.
I was lucky. I had books and creative writing to escape. Eventually, after a few years, I stopped self — harming and I turned my angst and unanswered questions to my novels and short stories. I felt then that I had the power to tell stories I care about and what was best, in my stories I could ensure that the protagonist always made it through alive. She survived.
I began writing as a way to gain my power back, but in the end, my writing ended up emulating my life: many of my characters come, of course, of broken homes. They have horrible parents and absent love and they feel as I felt growing up: small, little, unsafe. Many of my stories tell impossible situations where the character has an impossible choice to make or bare. I started to feel that the more I wrote and the more I published and the more I gave those characthers my unsawered questions, the more ok I became accepting my past.
That is my story.
Five years after I confessed what my father had done to me, I went ahead and booked myself a therapy session. I was better — I wasn’t cutting and I was writing — but I too felt a dispassion with myself and my life. I remember I said to the therapist in that first meeting: “I don’t want to die — that seems excessive — but if this roof falls on my head I don’t care if I don’t make it.”
The consecuences that a bad childhood has on children are enourmos, maybe too many to name right here: it get us sexual issues, emotional issues, mistrust, misplaced anger, sustance abuse, suicidal tendencies, eating disorders. Sometimes it’s not as big as this — sometimes it causes us anxiety, and a profound need to be loved and approved by others to the point it becomes detrimental to our well-being. Sometimes it causes us fear of commitment and we end up leaving a string of broken hearts, as we might prefer to hurt someone before they have a chance to hurt us. Sometimes it gives us insecurity, body issues, a need of control.
Many years later after I booked myself a therapy session — and after going each week — I understood that while I hadn’t been five years old in a long time, I hadn’t left behind that scary and dark place of my childhood. I was a 5-year-old girl stuck in a 20-year-old’s body: I was anxious to the point I didn’t wanted to leave the house, I felt tounge tied and flushed every time someone asked me a question, I felt scared everytime a man I didn’t know sat close to me on the bus.
Even when I was tall and strong and quick enough to kick someone in the balls if they behaved badly, I was still scared shitless. I felt small, dirty, depressed. I felt the weight of the world was on my shoulders — but didn’t wanted to feel that way anymore.
This is when I started wondering the same questions I ask now: can this be healed? Is there such thing as ‘moving on’ from this? And if there is — how can I get it?
Another side I see often with people who had gone through bad times in their childhood, its the absurd need of comparing our wounds to someone else’s experiences.
Many of us, when hearing that someone ‘had it harder’ than we did, we use that as an excuse to (perhaps?) deflect our own pain: “oh — we say — “it wasn’t like that for me. Sure, my mom made me feel miserable but at least I didn’t went through that, so it couldn’t have been that bad — could it?”.
Why we compare — I don’t know. But we do: we measure our wounds and we try to convice ourselves that maybe “it’s nothing.” I don’t think its a coincidence that many of us do this. Maybe it’s because we try to find excuses to believe that our childhood wasn’t that bad. We try to squize our pain out of our lives and we say to ourselves: “mayve it wasn’t like that. Maybe it wasn’t so bad. Maybe it was me. Maybe still is me.”
I can’t claim that I know how you should feel, but I do believe that wounds can come in different ways, shapes and forms — and they are all equals.
I still remember one piece of advice that I was given long time ago: “the pain you feel its the only measure that matters — so why should you try to dismiss it?”. I understood what that person meant right away: how many of us see countries in war or people who are struggling in a different way that we are and we say to ourselves: “well, maybe I shouldn’t complain/feel sad about X because look at that!.” Sure, there are horrible and drastic experiences that are bad in itself, but if you never experience them — if the only pain that exists in your life its the pain that you know and its meaninful to you — then why should you not respect what you are feeling?
I had a friend who, for the outside world, lived in a pretty great household. Her parents were good and ate together every night and she was sent to good schools around the country. And yet her parents were cold towards her and dismissive of her feelings. They never kissed her goodnight and they made a point to compare her to her older sibilings, as a way to make her know she wasn’t doing as good as she was expected to do. To this day it has a profund impact on who she is and how she presents herself to the world: she wants — as she puts it — “to be & do good.” She deals with constant anxiety that prevents her from being who she truly is, as she feels like anything she does or says is not good enough. She often asks others what she should so with her life because she feels like she isn’t really smart or good or enough to handle herself on her own.
This is what I mean when I say that the wounds that we carry since our childhood are deep and meaninful. My friend knows that, when she is ready, she is going to have to face those fears and repressed emotions she felt since she was a little girl. She can’t ignore the influence her parents had in her life.
Many children grew up being yelled at, mocked at or facing emotional blackmailing from their parents. Many of them, like myself or my friend, come from a nice home in a nice neighboorhood and went to good schools. My father used to be a lawyer. Yet, its the impact that those childhood moments had within us that made me realize that it doens’t matter what the injury is — the injury might vary but the wound is still the same.
According to this survey, ‘when a child perceives they’re being neglected emotionally, they are twice as likely to develop psychiatric disorders by age 15, including the development of depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety, panic disorder, phobias, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)’. Many choose to get involved in risky sexual behaviours, abuse sustances and go on to struggle in academics. It affects our energy, how we dress, the relationships we have with others and how we present ourselves to the world. It’s a wound we can’t choose to ignore. Growing up children need love and stability and if one of them is missing — if the child isn’t taught he/she/they are loved no matter what, if they feel unsafe, insecure, like they can’t be themselves — then that can generate a wound that then festers and gets carried on into adulthood, and even to another generation.
I think if you are reading this is because, like me, you have an interest on the subject. Maybe (I hope not) you too had a difficult experience growing up that still, in some ways, is affecting you deeply and you are seeking for answers/help/guidance.
The questions that I had in my head when I was 20 are the questions I seek to answer now. I am now 24 years old. I thought I was going to die at 30, full of anger and shame and absolute rage at the fact that something so horrible had happened to me when I was so young, but the journey that took showed me that I could not only survive but live and thrive. This is why I am writing this: many of the things I discovered in my healing journey — such as books, ideas & things that can help you cope and release pent up feelings — are things I thought I might share, as it might help someone else’s healing as well.
By no means I think this is the only help you should get. If you are struggling and feel like need support, please get some help. Great part of the advances and the healing I was able to achieve was in and because of therapy, so if you feel like you are struggling, please reach out. These articles are only meant to be supportive, as I think that whenever we try to heal our past and face our shadow its both an external and internal journey, and because of it — because its both external and internal — your own healing journey will be unique to you. I will share in another article my own views on my own stuff, but what makes you thrive and comes to terms with your past only have to make sense to you.
To those who are here I say welcome. Facing the past and painful experiences we had as we grew up is never easy, but the paid off is worth it. Another thing I was told as I tried to get myself together is that the process of wating to heal itself makes you a better person than your parents. No judgment at what our parents did or tried to do, but its also true: if you are trying to heal and evolve and find some answers (any answers) its because you want to be a better person — towards yourself, your family, and the life you want to lead. To that I say cheers. I think its admirable and if you are in that journey, I applaud you.
Its not easy but it can be done. We might not be able to save our parents nor change our past, but we damn sure can improve and heal the wounds we carry from that experience — and therefore improve our future.
This is the first of three articles on the subject. More to come later.
See you then. Bye. SH. x
