I Wish My Parents Got Divorced Sooner
Much of our collective generational trauma likely comes from staying in a marriage that clearly didn’t work.
My parents have not gotten along my whole life, and that is putting it very lightly. They got into screaming matches almost every day and couldn’t seem to agree on anything, from things as serious as disagreements with finances and disagreement on how we were parented, to things as trivial as how one person drove, how my mom cooked, or how my mom often forgot to close cabinets after opening them.
These fights would be the common cause of a freeze response I developed to drown out the noise through what kids those days did — video games and TV. The weekends were the worst since it was the period of time they spent the most time together in the house. It felt like the fighting and arguing would never stop — it would last all day From a very young age, I saw what my parents couldn’t see: they were not compatible, and the best thing they could do, for their own happiness, for our own well-being, and even for us as kids, was spend time apart.
People have different responses to trauma. There is fight, flight, and freeze. I often froze or tried to get as far away as possible. I thought that if I was the best-behaved kid, they wouldn’t have so much to argue…
