It’s Something I Deal With
A lot can come from a pivotal event in our lives. If it is a positive occasion, we may gain success, comfort, or joy. However, after a painful experience, we can become isolated, angry, or disillusioned. Either way, these times can affect us for years to come. For me, surviving childhood brain cancer, and living with its after-effects, has been one of a number of significant occurrences that have affected the way in which I see myself and the world. For you, it may be the loss of a loved one, financial or occupational difficulties, a serious mental or physical illness, an addiction, etc. I have noticed that long ago, in carrying the weight of my burdens through life, I started to define myself by them. Upon reflection, you may also realize the same. No longer are you the parent who lost a child or a spouse who lost their husband or wife; you are childless or a widow. No longer are you someone who lost their job; you’re a failure. No longer are you someone dealing with depression, heart disease, or a drug addiction; but, you can no longer define yourself apart from your illness. Speaking from my own experience, I have often struggled with aligning my self-image too much with my left-sided weakness, my vision field cut, and my surgical and social scars. In these instances, I reduce myself to just “the cancer kid.” Sometimes, I find it difficult to look past my limitations, instead of seeing myself for who I really am, to allow myself to discover who I ought to become. But, we are not defined by our struggles. We are who we are despite them, in the midst of them. Only once we stop confining ourselves to the crosses that we bear, can we truly see ourselves for who we are meant to be.
Our childhood plays an important role in our personal development. Not only is it fundamental for physical and verbal maturation, but our social and psychological states are also shaped during those integral years. Numerous developmental psychologists, including Bowlby and Ainsworth, Piaget, and Erickson, talk about how attachment, socialization, and various other psychological and social skills that we learn through our early life influence our mental condition and self image later on.
Also, significant difficult situations in childhood can alter the course of our self-evolution. A recent Wall Street Journal article titled, “What Children Lose When Their Brains Develop Too Fast” delved into the details of how Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) can negatively stunt the development of children. Examples of ACEs include “physical or emotional neglect or abuse; poverty; divorce; violence; [and], addiction or mental illness in the home.” Studies have shown that children who experience more ACEs are more likely to deal with anxiety, depression, or addiction, as well as have a higher risk of cancer and heart disease later in life. There is clearly a correlation between severe adverse stressors and physical health.
Interestingly, ACEs were also found to actually be associated with accelerated pace of physical development (e.g. the onset of puberty and adult teeth) and precocious and hasty brain development. When we are young, our brains are more plastic, meaning “more open to experience, better at learning.” The WSJ article goes on to describe that,
“As we grow older, our brains become more efficient but less flexible, better at exploiting but not so good at exploring, better at acting effectively but not so good at doing new things.”
The further we go in life, the more we get set in our old ways. Even neurologically, it literally becomes harder to form new neural pathways. This process is exacerbated by stress or trauma early in life. Therefore, someone who experiences more ACEs may find it harder to adapt in life, starting at a younger age, compared to someone with fewer stressors in childhood.
Additionally, it is more difficult to reshape our mental frameworks the harder and more quickly that we nail them in. To illustrate this point, the WSJ journalist mentions the concept of “life histories,” brought about by Willem Frankenhuis and Daniel Nettle. It is a biological term that defines different aspects of an animal, including, “how long it lives, how much it invests in its young and how long it takes those young to mature.” In the context of humans, the slower a life history, the more fully and completely a person is allowed to develop. Contrarily, when someone is forced to grow up more quickly, they are at greater risk of losing the ability to adapt as easily down the road. The article states that, “early experiences can influence these individual life histories. After all, what happens when you’re young tells you about the sort of world you will face when you get older.” They note that early adverse events may indicate to a child that life will be harsh and difficult down the road. The more this cycle repeats, the harder it is to break that mindset. This phenomena can be applied to whatever false belief we deal with, whether it be being conditioned to think that we are different, inadequate, undeserving, shameful, etc. It can be difficult to escape these learned schemas later in life, especially when they have been cemented in by the situations and experiences in which we were raised.
Unfortunately, often we cannot control our upbringing. Socioeconomic status, family environment, or unforseen tragedies may negatively affect our childhood. But, as children, we have little power to change these situations. However, one fantastic safeguard against the negative consequences of early traumas is strong families, as indicated in a past article of mine. The family is the first society, in which we learn about ourselves and how we ought to relate to others. Supportive families protect against poverty, violence, and outside aggressors. Still, there are unavoidable traumas that we all encounter. As mentioned above, these events can negatively influence our mental and psychological states for many years. However, when we come to a point in our lives when we must re-confront the consequences, we ought to find a way to adopt a new perspective. What it takes is allowing ourselves to step outside of our own shoes to get a more realistic view of our situation and re-adjust our mental schema.
Sometimes, in my own process of healing, people have encouraged me to share my struggles with others more. However, I’ve often found that it is hard to describe my troubles to others because no one is ever going to be able to fully understand what it is like to be a pediatric choroid plexus carcinoma survivor, who grew up in my family and who lived through my life experiences. No one will ever completely be able to step into your shoes either. However, people are often very willing to listen to, affirm, and learn from your life. It is important to learn how to open up to others about our struggles and receive their burdens as well. There are interesting reflections about the role that empathy plays in psychology and human relationships, by people like Stein, Rogers, and Pope St. John Paul II. But, that is a discussion for another article. Nonetheless, in addition to learning how to share our story with others more, I believe that it is additionally essential for us to better understand our own situation from the outside.
When we step out of our own shoes, we are allowed to see our situation without our distorted first-person lenses. As described above, it can be so easy to get stuck in our old, routine ways of thinking, especially when we’ve been conditioned to think that way for a long time. It can be hard to believe that things will ever get better or that there is even another way to look at our situation. The psychological technique of reframing can be helpful here. Psychiatrist Kevin Majeres has some great material on this. Basically, it is the understanding that by changing the way that we perceive something, we affect the way we experience it. Additionally, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy seeks to adapt our ways of thinking, to effect positive changes in our lives. For example, if we see a stressor as an opportunity for growth, instead of a painful or difficult situation, our experience of it will be much more positive; and therefore, we can more easily choose to accept it, instead of running from it. Similarly, Kelly McGonigal, in her TED talk “How to Make Stress Your Friend,” explains the health benefits of viewing stress in this uplifting light. She mentions various studies which indicate that viewing stress positively, instead of trying to avoid it, is actually associated with decreased mortality, and that stress interestingly makes us want to bond with others more, via the release of the hormone oxytocin. By taking a step back, and viewing our burdens with these new approaches, we can adopt a more constructive perspective of our struggles.
However, we must also recognize them for the extremely difficult situations that they are. For, if we do not mourn the loss arising from our particular crosses, we will never be able to move on. Someone once described it to me that when we bury our wounds, we bury them alive. The trauma still has to be dealt with at some point. The emotions still have to be felt. They have to be acknowledged. Even if our difficulties may seem insignificant compared to that of our neighbor or that of someone around the world, it is still a wound that needs to be healed. Sometimes, when people hear our troubles, they may want to fix them right away. But, first, we just need to be heard. Likewise, we need to allow ourselves to recognize our own scars and take our situations at face value. Only then can we say to ourselves, “Yes, my situation is extremely difficult. It is reasonable to feel hopeless. I have a right to be exhausted.” We can let ourselves experience our strong, bottled-up emotions. We can realize that we don’t have to immediately pick up the pieces. And then, when we’re ready, we can move on.
Finally, by taking a step back, we can better see where we’ve come from and where we’re going. When we’ve been trekking down the same path of our lives for a number of years, it can become hard to see the forest for the trees. It may seem like we’ve made too many mistakes or like things will never improve. Additionally, it may be anxiety-provoking trying to decide what next step to take, for fear of going in the wrong direction. However, when we step outside of our shoes, the course of our lives will come into full view. We can see where we’ve made similar turns before, for better or for worse. Comparable past difficulties can give us encouragement because we will remember that we have weathered this same storm before. But, most importantly, we can better see how all the pieces fit together into who we are.
The various parts of our lives — the good and bad, our actions and memories, our fears and dreams — are all intertwined into who we are. We can never fully eradicate one part of ourselves from the whole. If someone has wronged you or if you have harmed another, seeking forgiveness is essential in moving forward. However, there are still numerous traumas that are out of our control. Unfortunately, their presence or memory may never go away. The longer that we bear them, the harder it may become to separate ourselves from them, to see ourselves apart from them. However, by taking a step back, we can better recognize our difficulties for what they are, we can mourn the trauma they cause, and we can get a clearer idea of how they all fit into the grander picture of who we are. I heard someone once describe this reality as a large ball growing around another, smaller ball. It is not that the ball inside (the burden) shrinks, but that the outer ball (that is us) grows bigger around it. All the steps that we take, the people that we meet, and the external events that occur in our lives play a part in who we become. The bad aspects can often domineer and distract us from who we truly are. However, with my own struggles, the most fundamental principle that I’ve started to try to remind myself more is this: It’s something I deal with; it’s not who I am.
