I have many clients who are very smart and successful, but are plagued with issues like marital conflict, low self-esteem, parenting issues, trust issues, and a host of psychological (and often physical, e.g. migraine, IBS, back pain, sleep issues) effects of a stressful and dysfunctional childhood. These stressors range from emotional, physical, and/or sexual abuse to growing up with a depressed or personality disordered parent to experiencing sibling bullying to witnessing severe marital conflict. These people generally are consumed with ensuring that their own children are raised in a secure and stable environment that is 180 degrees away from what they experienced themselves, which is admirable. However, you might think this would mean that these people have accepted the impact of their own upbringing on their current issues. In fact, they often have not, instead choosing to minimize and deny the significant impact of their childhood on their current functioning. Why?
It can be very painful to think openly and honestly about your past childhood trauma. When kids experience a very stressful and chaotic home life, they often develop a false self as a coping mechanism. Their parents may aid in the creation of this false self as a way to convince themselves that their child is not suffering as much as they truly are. Here are examples of false selves and/or narratives that are created in order to convince both parent and child that the child is not impacted by the dysfunction in the home:
- The “old soul” or “precocious” mini-adult who supposedly doesn’t suffer from their parents’ continuous conflict and in fact can be relied upon to be a confidante for a struggling parent because they are “so mature for their age.” Later in life, this child becomes the enabler for a difficult partner.
- The “problem child” who is just somehow randomly a delinquent that acts out in school, starts using substances early, hangs with the “wrong crowd.” The story is that this kid is just “bad” and their actions have nothing to do with modeling the dysfunctional behavior of one or both parents and/or trying to escape a stressful home
- The sibling who bullies the other siblings because they are “just selfish and always have been,” with both parents never acknowledging for an instant that the sibling is in fact imitating the dynamic seen at home of one parent bullying the other
If you grow up thinking that you were not impacted by your childhood, think about how you would think about the impact on your own kids of things that happened to you. Let’s take some examples to show you how absurd this is.
- “I throw stuff at my husband during fights and my kids witness it. This will certainly not lead to any sort of stress response, trust issues, or increase their chances for getting into a volatile relationship later in life! I will keep on doing it. I mean, my daughter is very mature for her age and comforts me afterwards. Honestly she’s more of an adult than I am sometimes! I am sure she will never replicate this pattern with comforting dramatic abusive men after they act out.”
- “My husband calls me names and my son keeps watching video games so I am sure he doesn’t even hear it! I won’t worry about it at all. There is no way he will learn that this is how to talk to women!”
- “I am so depressed that I can’t get off the couch but I think it’s a great learning experience for my 12 year old daughter to learn how to cook dinner for her siblings! Later in life it is highly unlikely that she will be anxious and depressed feeling that she missed out on a childhood!”
You see how crazy that stuff sounds. No parent in today’s child-centered era would ever think of saying these things. Yet, these people will say about themselves:
- “My parents’ dramatic, violent fights didn’t impact me at all. I felt bad for my mom but that’s about it. There is no connection with my fights with my husband now.”
- “Yeah my dad was a real jerk but honestly I never could have known my husband would end up being a cheater, he seemed so different than my dad [for the first week I met him before he started being a jerk then I married him a year later anyway].”
- “My mom really struggled and I’m glad I was there to help out. My childhood has nothing to do with my constant severe anxiety and hypervigilant parenting, that’s just from my job and my husband being unsupportive and probably, I don’t know, the social climate of high intensity parenting?”
If you deny the impact of your childhood stressors on your current issues, you can never hope to truly address them. Confronting childhood dysfunction is often a necessary precursor to processing it and moving forward. If you don’t even allow yourself to think that your childhood is impacting you, then you cut off your ability to recognize patterns in your behavior that stem from your earliest experiences and shape your current expectations, thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.
You would never put your kids into the situations you experienced, and when you put them into anything even remotely similar (which of course you will, as you’ve not really reckoned with the past and are therefore likelier to subconsciously re-enact it, even at a less severe level), you are overwhelmed with guilt. Why, if it “wasn’t that bad”? Because on some level, you know it WAS “that bad,” but it is too painful and difficult to admit it, and to admit that the story you have been telling yourself about your ability to emerge from it unscathed is a fiction. That fiction was adaptive when you were younger and needed to power through the stress of your life, but it is hurting you now, because you are then unable to openly deal with the consequences of this childhood trauma on your current life. (Remember, childhood trauma most impacts intimate relationships, including marriage and parenting, not work or social life, which do not trigger most people as intensely.)
If this article speaks to you, perhaps it can be a wake up call to deal with the issues from your past that you KNOW on some level impact you still. You would never want your child to experience what you experienced. You were once a child that was the same as them, not “more mature” or “more selfish” or anything else that you make up in your head. You also deserve to have your childhood pain validated and to explore how it is still impacting you and subconsciously keeping you embedded in dysfunctional patterns. Till we meet again, I remain, The Blogapist Who Says, Treat Yourself With As Much Compassion As You Treat Your Kids.