Your Childhood Is Not Your Fault but It Is Your Responsibility

Image by lisa runnels from Pixabay 

I was having an interesting conversation my hairdresser, a young adult, about childhood trauma. It may seem like the kind of conversation to have with a therapist rather than a hairdresser, but she was fully engaged in the conversation and I love that it’s something she readily recognised as an opportunity for our collective growth.

The kind of trauma we were talking about is developmental trauma, the kind everyone experiences (as distinct from the big issues that are more readily recognised as traumatic). She is at a point in her own development, having recently moved out of home, where she is more readily able to express the impact her parents have had on how she feels about herself.

Like me she comes from a pretty normal family, and in fact her parents both work with people who have experienced the big-T trauma we all recognise, and they regularly have to deal with addiction, violence and abuse. But she can see how her parents, although well meaning, created limitations in the way she feels inside herself and interacts with the world.

That in itself is huge. From what I observe, most people do not want to be held hostage to their childhood if, in fact, they even think about it at all. I certainly felt it was something to put behind me when I was free to live as an adult, determined to be different in all the ways that had irritated or wounded me.

Well, there were two problems with that:

1. I still had to deal with my parents. They still had the same beliefs, ideals and expectations of me having brought me up a certain way
2. I somehow kept attracting unhappy and often difficult experiences into my life through varying relationships (be it a partner, a friend or a colleague or even institutions that I had to regularly deal with).

With enough difficult experiences under my belt, and enough distance from most of them, I could see the patterns. While it’s easy to blame others, I finally recognised that the common denominator in all my experiences was me, and I was the only part of any equation I could control.

Many people never really feel safe to explore whatever junk they have in their own trunk, but I knew that there must be something I was doing or a way that I was being that kept eliciting the same variety of responses, in ever increasing intensity.

I also knew that I had become someone that didn’t feel real to me, but I wasn’t sure what was real for me because I had been moulded and had grown accustomed to the way I interacted in the world.

Now with years of personal work under my belt I can readily recognise that I suffered from insecure attachment, a lack of attunement and enmeshment trauma . I had become a co-dependent, people pleaser with poor boundaries; susceptible to those, like narcissists, who care not for others.

That is a mouthful I know, and it’s all psychology-speak to most people, but what it comes down to is that I needed more positive emotional attention and connection from my parents than they gave.

This had nothing to do with my parent’s intentions, which were good. There is no mystery or malice about any of this; it arises from their own anxieties and ways of being, and the predominant beliefs in our society (for many centuries) about child rearing. That is to say, children are to be moulded rather than to be held as they unfold.

To give some examples, there is the baby who is left to cry, the baby or child who has to eat to a schedule, the child who wants their parent’s attention and will do anything – positive or negative – to get it, the child who is given no opportunity to explain their side of the story, the child who is left alone to think about their actions, the list goes on.

Even if I put my adult self in those shoes, if I am so upset I am crying and everyone ignores me, how do I feel? If I’m not hungry (or feeling sick) and I’m made to eat how do I feel? If I am trying to get someone’s attention and they ignore me, how do I feel? If I appear to have upset someone and yet they won’t communicate with me, how do I feel?

None of these feel comfortable; they actually make me question my very existence at one extreme (especially if they are regularly occurring situations) and, at best, make me feel isolated and unimportant in the moment.

Yet as an adult I have full mental and physical capacities that allow me to express myself, to reason out others’ behaviours and to take action. As a child, and as a baby especially, I have none of those things. It doesn’t take a huge leap to imagine the magnitude of devastation felt by the burgeoning human when ignored like this, especially if it’s the common pattern.

And it doesn’t then take a lot to understand that the chemicals that get released in response start to form our neural pathways, within our brain and nervous systems. The emotional reaction, in the form of chemicals released in our brain and body, starts to wire our responses to similar situations.

This is the essence of trauma. If a baby or child is questioning or worrying about its existence as in the examples above, those chemicals that form our neural pathways are in the survival category. This then creates an ongoing chronic trauma response to similar situations throughout the person’s life.

And, as I have discovered, that is generally what is at the root of all human dysfunction. It manifests from small-t trauma, the kind of developmental trauma pretty much most humans on the planet are subject to, resulting in unhelpful and self-limiting patterns of beliefs and behaviours. As it also manifests from big T-trauma, the reliving of horrific experiences again and again.

It would be easy to see myself, or anyone, as a victim of these circumstances. But what I’ve discovered is that I – and anyone - can form new neural pathways. I also realised that it wasn’t my parents’ behaviour that made me who I am, it was my reaction to it; albeit subconscious. And if these are my reactions, I can change them.

More than that, I realised if I didn’t change them, not only would I be living a life of limitation and chronic unhappiness, I would perpetuate the same thing with my own children through my own anxieties. I realised that the only way for me to be able to be fully present with my own babies and children was to take a good look at the junk in my trunk that was constantly distracting me and weighing me down.

In short, I realised that my childhood experiences were not my fault, but they are my responsibility.

​If we want the next generation unencumbered by the  often invisible chains that have held our families (and the family next door, and next door to that and so on) in bondage to unhealthy and self-limiting responses, then we have to be the one to make it a priority to get free of them by creating healthier responses.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Your Childhood Is Not Your Fault but It Will Be Your Limitation, Clear the Fog of Trauma to See the Magnificence of Your Being, In What Unseen Ways Are You Abandoning Your Own Free Will? Overcome the Greatest Human Fear – Be the True You and Why Projecting is the Best Tool for Self Awareness. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.