how to recover from a bad childhood?, part III
Time heals all wounds…or at least they say it does.
“I am always trying to reach my mother…but I never can.”
John Lennon in an interview circa 1971.
“I forgave my father.”
Julian Lennon in an interview circa 2009.
When John Lennon was in his early thirties he started doing therapy. Not any therapy — primal scream therapy. The name is self-explanatory: this kind of treatmeant has its patients deal with their trauma by screaming their pain away.
If you think this is nuts — I am right there with you but John, for some reason or another, didn’t. He went to therapy because he felt it was time to be free from the pain of his mother’s abandonment and her subsequential death. It had been 14 years ago but he still felt like he did when he was a child: alone, vulnerable, needy.
In the course of these therapy sessions, John allowed himself to get in touch with the pain his childhood left him with. The sudden discovery of how much pain he was in — of how many wounds he was still carrying — left him feeling empty but with a degree of liberation. Not knowing what to do with his discoveries, he turn many of them into songs that later on appeared in his first solo album: Plastic Ono Band.
The point I am trying to make is that by the time John goes to therapy, he is in his thirties. His mother died when he was a teenanger and yet, the impact his childhood had on him was great enough to make him feel like it was yesterday. John was starting to heal — but it had taken him how long?
I’ve been meaning to write the end of this series for a while now. At first I was sure what I wanted to bring through: a closure, a really good ending. But the more I thought about it the less feasible it seemed. How on earth, I wondered, could I write a closure on a subject that seems so… well — alive, real and complex?
Newsflash: you can’t.
It’s funny. In the first article of this series I talked about how hard it had been for me to start writing about this subject at all— and how, in hindsight, that struggle seemed symbolic; it reflected the struggle people feel when they start to talk about their childhood trauma: “Can I say it? Is it okay if I say it? How can I talk about it? And with whom?”. My struggle to end this series — wondering how can I write it — seems to reflect how shaky we can feel as we move on and decisively put the past behind us. How small we can feel. Vulnerable. How we can feel like, in the blink of an eye, we go back to the child we once were.
In the end, just like in the beginning, I was able to write the ending I wanted. The only thing I needed was time, which is perfect because it is today’s subject: time, and how it is the final ingredient we all need to let go our childhood pain behind.
We all heard it before: “time heals all wounds”.
I don’t fully agree with this (it also matters what you do with your time) but it’s true that time, pacience — they bring healing in a way no action can achieve. It took me a long time to accept the fact that, in many ways, there is a deeper healing that I wouldn’t be able to achieve until certain time had passed. I can be very impacient; I struggle with waiting, but sometimes there’s nothing left to do. Sometimes you have done your inner work and you are moving on and the only thing left to do is letting time do its thing.
In many ways, growing up is like running away — the more you live and the older you get, the less close you are from childhood. If you work in yourself, then the rest is just patience. In some point the pain won’t be there no more.
“Sometimes all we need is a little time.”
We all heard that too.
Recently I came to understand that life isn’t a finish profuct but something that is always in the making — under reparations, I like to say. Our lives aren’t fully written until we die, so why our healing would be any different?
Jane Fonda has an autography that I really like in which she says: we live life searching for conclusion. We wait for closure: when we get married, when we get a job, when we move out, when we make such amount of money, when we reach certain age…We wait, we postpone, always waiting the perfect moment to arrive. But this is only an illusion: there’s no finish line. There’s only us, evolving through time — or resisting to evolve.
Our healing works the same: as much as we want to wake up one morning with everything behind us, it won’t arrive. As we continue to expand endlessly, our healing does too. There is no point to reach: there’s only evolution.
Time is also linked with cycles: there are seasons, monthly cycles, yearly cycles, school cycles, life cycles.
There’s something called karmic cycles, too. Its said that karma balances things out — so by paying our karma we balance the equilibrum of the universe. There’s too a well-spread notion that says most souls choose to pay their karma inside their family. I can’t say if this is true or not, but we can’t deny that all families have cycles — patterns — within them.
In each family tree we can trace a cycle of pain, of abuse, of emotional distance; addiction even — we can find out that, over generations, these cycles have appeared and reappeared into our families, untreated. It doens’t always happen in the same way, just like a lightning never strikes in one place twice, but it’s always there: the daughter who couldn’t connect
emotionally with her mom finds herself feeling at odds when she becomes a mother, because she never learned how a caring and nurturing bond with a child looks like. As we learned last time, this can be healed and learned, but it takes time.
In Lennon’s family there is an easy-to-spot pattern of abandonment: Julia walked away from John when he was only 5 years old; John walked away from Julian when he was around the same age. Julia didn’t reconnected with John until he was in his late teens and John was unable to talk to Julian until he too reached teenagehood. A similar pattern contains similar wounds: John probably felt as angry, frustrated, resentful and abandoned as Julian did growing up — and yet John was unable to spare his son the same destiny.
I mean, look at John: he is so heartbroken by his mother’s abandonment and death that he is going to therapy to try and fix it because he can’t live like this anymore. And yet — and yet — he is almost unaware that he is doing the same thing to his own son. This is why cycles are often hearbreaking, ironic and frustrating. John repeats the cycle not because he is a bastard, but because he doesn’t know better.
This is not an excuse. I know it sounds like one, but as we cover last time, it’s not. It just means that our parents can’t give us something they haven’t learn themselves. To fully close our wounds we have to accept that we live in an imperfect world, with super-flawed parents and that the pain we experienced growing up is also a pain our parents have inside of them.
Does this mean that what our parents did or didn’t do is okay? Of course not. Does it justify it? No! But it does explain it, and it can allow us to break free from the pain because we start realizing that what we lived through — as horrible and heartbreaking it was — wasn’t our fault; it was a generational wound that landed in our lap. This is why the work that you are doing — right here, reading this and so much more — is important because you are breaking the cycle. You are stepping away from your wound and looking within and what that does its that it lands you in a better place: by understanding that is not you and that it’s not a healthy nor right way to live, you can find a way out.
Our parents didn’t know better. That is how it happened: they didn’t know how to stop the pain, the cruelty, the abuse, the silence, the addiction, the ignorance: they just showed up (wounded) and they shared what they knew with you (the wound, the knife, the same pain).
Last week I addressed the anger and frustration one goes through as heals their childhood; I encourage you to read it — or re-read it — as it addresses the many complexities of our own healing. Our pain doesn’t just evaporates (oh, but I wish it did!!) and our healing can look like a messy line; one day you feel okay about it all and the next you feel so furious you can’t hardly breathe.
And that is good. Something as important as not having a great childhood needs to be grieved, spat at and even furiously expressed — as many times as needed. But I do believe that, with time, the storm passes and you find yourself ready to take the next step: you would like to fully move on, embracing who you are — stepping away from the trauma version of yourself — and discover what more is out there.
I find that many people struggle with seeing their parents — or any figure of their childhood — as victims on their own right. It’s not surprising: in our story, as far as we are aware, our parents aren’t victims. If anything, they aren’t particulary the good guy; in our story, we were the children who needed them — so if they dropped the ball — that’s on them.
But life is hardly black and white — life is messy and complex and I don’t believe people are just mean, just as I don’t believe parents who fail big time being parents, fail just because they are horrible people. Our parents are victims of someone else’s pain too. Once we start to look up in the family tree we realize that there’s no one to blame in particular; just lots of people who either were mistreated or who never learned to address their pain, therefore were doom to repeat it.
This is why is a cycle.
Until, that is, we break it.
This is why time is essencial in allowing us to come to terms with our past. If we are carrying wounds that have been in our family for generations, then is okay if they aren’t erased in two seconds.
I mean, Julian Lennon is now in his 50s. Only a while ago he found peace regarding his father — and John died when Julian was 17! That is a long time — but life is a cycle and while cycles can be heartbreaking, they are also freeing. John himself had found a certain peace by the point he was killed in New York; he had told Rolling Stone that he and Julian were finally “getting along”: talking on the phone discussing girls, motorbikes, music. Things weren’t as they used to — John wasn’t the same angry rockstar. It had taken him some time, but he was in a much better place.
For many of us, our childhood can represent a dark memory that we don’t ever want to revisit, and the grief can be so great that we can feel as if we will always carry within our hearts. But it’s not true. Life is a cycle and our childhood (as big, dark and messy it was) is just a piece of it all.
It can be hard to accept sometimes that life is process. There are things they are glistening in our horizons right now that we can’t see. There are chunks of our wounds that will be able to fall off only as certain time passes — it’s like the knight in the rusty armour: little by little the pieces that were smothering us and preventing us from having a great life, fall away.
Maybe it doesn’t sound so glamorous — to be patient and wait and just allow time to do its thing — but is real. For many, social media has accelerated our internal clocks, made us distortion time. Because we grow up watching what other people are doing and what their life looks’ like, we can’t help but compare and stress -thinking that because our lives don’t look in a certain way, then is wrong. No wonder why there’s often a degree of anxiety and nervousness around all of us.
But I think that, as much technology evolves, time will still work in the same way. We still have to wait. We still have to grow old. We still have to live our lives and that only happens one day at the time. Sure, many questions arises the minute you start to change your life — can I do this? Will I be okay? Can I become something else? — but you have time to answer those questions. Your childhood doesn’t have to be your only story — and it doesn’t have to determine where you end up. Life is a cycle, but it’s through the cycles that we grow and evolve and become someone else…
If I had one message to end this series, would be: healing our childhood doesn’t happen in a day, but it does happen. One of my favorite quotes by Steve Harvey says: “I know that if I wake up in the morning, its because God ain’t through with me yet.” Another way of saying: if I wake up this morning, my story isn’t finished. And my story doesn’t have to repeat the past.
Like we mentioned, we have to do something with that time — we need to apply our healing balms and make sure we are getting the help we need to cope; but as you do that, you’ll be able to improve your life in big ways and small ways, in big steps and small steps — and you’ll be able to get it in the right time. No need to rush. As long as you are healing it — you are okay.
You won’t leave your past behind immediately, but with time it will be behind you. And you’ll realize, with each passing moment, that your childhood wasn’t all but just a beginning — a starting line — and eventually you’ll find yourself looking back, amazed with your own growth, and you’ll think: “look how far I’ve come!”.
I thank you for reading this work. It has been a pleasure for me writing it.
I’ve written this with parents and children in mind, but this work can be applied if you are dealing with any traumatic event that happened in your childhood — whether it involved your parents or didn’t. After all, it’s in childhood were we are the most vulnerable so you will be able to find support / guidance in these articles.
Finally, nothing I say here beats a good therapy session. If you feel like you need help, please ask it! It’s what it got me in a good place. I send you love — coming to terms with your painful childhood its never easy, but I celebrate you for trying to get better. Feel proud of yourself for trying! This series are only intended to explore and hopefully offer some support to anyone who is dealing with these — as I’ve been there and I know that sometimes what you need the most its to find people who truly *get it*. I hope this gets *you*. I hope you feel seen. That is it for now. Please feel free to share, comment, clap... I feel ridiculosly happy when that happens :) . Will come back soon with another subject — Till then, have fun & take care.
From this week onwards you can also read me in here. No paywall — just love. Feel free to join.
Thank you.
Sending love.
S.H
x
