Getting Over Your Unpleasant Childhood
CW: mention of child abuse
Inspired by an exchange with my mother where she criticized me for behaviors she had taught me by example. When I told her that I learnt it from her, she laughed and said that she had left this behind, and I should too.
The Romanticism
It’s probably a result of an acquired cynicism, but the idea of childhood as this magical and protected time of pure innocence has never sat right with me. It always struck me as either very privileged or very delusional, more often rooted in distorted memories and selective — maybe even protective — amnesia than anything resembling facts. There are so many possible motivations for white washing your own childhood and so few reasons to be perfectly honest about it. And I won’t claim that all those are intentional or even conscious.
The western meta society, in which I grew up in, finds so many ways to make your feel inadequate, not good enough, and those outside of your control seem to weigh most heavily. The circumstances of your birth, your caregivers and their social and financial standing, the specifics of your physical and mental appearance and disabilities, bad things that happened to you or your inability to both cope with them and perform normativity for the society judging you. A bad childhood is nothing that people want to hear about. They might want to hear how you’ve overcome hardship and yet remained — or became — a conventionally attractive and successful person. Failure is a stain. Failure to live up to normative expectations doubly so.
As a half-way functional member of a social species, you will have a very hard time to resist internalizing the perspective of your social context. If they view you as worthless, you will feel this. It will bypass your defenses and no awareness of the arbitrary, unfair and unjust nature of their perspective will silence that certain voice in your head that will follow you through your life like the mark of Cain. And with this in your chest, we often convince ourselves, that it wasn’t all that bad. And we fix and patch — or sometimes make — up the parts that seem less presentable.
So we create and recreate and maintain the illusion of childhood as this special time when we’re sheltered from the cruelties of the world, in an endless loving embrace of our parents, laying the foundation for a well-adjusted and worthy member of society.
The Reality
Often there’s an even more harrowing factor at play, and that is that the most important social context we have during childhood are our caregivers, especially when they’re our parents. The people we depend on, that we’re entirely delivered to, that we look up to, that embody how we believe we should become and by whom we will be measured. But they’re regular flesh and blood humans, with all their flaws and imperfection. Perhaps that would be not such a huge factor in a society that does not have such a distorted view on humanity as the eurocentric one, which would live in peace with our fundamental fallibility and imperfection and see flaws and failures as a normal part of the human experience that’s to be treated with grace, instead of being a punishable offense. But we had no such luck for dozens of generations.
Abuse runs deep in the history of europe and for so long, that when we rediscovered egalitarianism, the vision of communism and the principles of anarchism around the 19th century, we truly thought we had come up with something new. For over a thousand years we knew nothing but domination and subjugation and we almost exclusively met the rest world with fire, sword and cross. Colonialism erased most of everyone else’s past and traditions and brought with it the european narrative of the savage and violent human, who can at best be controlled but never tamed. And at its heart of it all, the patriarchical and bio-essentialist “nuclear family”, which exists like a microcosm to the society it existed in, ruled by force and fear behind a facade of greatness, strength and providence.
In this family construct, children are not protected so much for their own sake, but because it reflected back on the patriarch of the family, which usually hoping for an heir to make their achievements immortal. And they’re not so much little people, but wardens and subjects to the will of “their betters”. Nothing could be more vulnerable than a small child, and that places it at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy relative to the standing of their family. Without even a blood related family, children are seldom graced by luck and good fortune. For their own safety children have to soak up the very essence of their society, to perform, to adjust, to fawn and to survive. And if they’re lucky enough to live long enough to have children of their own, that’s all they can pass on.
To add insult to injury, this constantly recycling of the same old traumas is then being passed off as the result of inescapable and untameable human nature.
The Stuff We Are Made Of
I was always irritated at the odd suggestions of “letting the past go”, of “growing up”, of relegating your childhood to a disconnected past that only your own melancholy and self-pity could keep alive enough to cause you problems, now that you’re an adult. What I took from them was that the person making such a suggestion was really not interested in hearing about unpleasant things that shaped me, because it would mean facing their own repressed memories, shaking the foundations of the lies they tell themselves to feel normal, or it was simply inconvenient form them to be bothered with the stain of my particular branch of suffering, which conveniently marked me as inferior and disposable in their eyes, as well as in the reflection of their eyes in the back of my head.
Don’t get me wrong, I know that not every childhood story includes the desecration by poverty, disability, physical, mental and sexual abuse, and oppression. But even in the best of cases, you’re being prepped to kneel before the powerful and do their bidding, whether by blunt force, skillful coercion or devious deceit. That is unless you’re so lucky as to be born into the upper echelons of the ruling class, which comes with its own dehumanization, but they’re not my primary concern.
The perspectives of our memories age with us and so it’s easy to project a fully formed person onto even the smallest children. As if we were born the person we’d become, as if we were not being assembled in a slow process over roughly two decades. Because that’s what’s happening. Besides some innate tendencies, we’re born blank slates, entirely alien to the world we’re born into. There is no innate sense of what’s normal or healthy. Every single emotion we experience comes as a surprise, as a great unknown, every experience we have is all the experience we have. The sense of normalcy and familiarity we come to rely on is acquired this way. It’s a layer cake of experiences that either resonate or dissonate with similar ones made before, or if there are none, they become the defacto standard everything else will be measured against.
In this way, experiences we have during childhood and adolescence are not comparable to experiences we make as adults. And even if they’re experiences we have first after becoming adults, our perspective and the reference frame we have could not be more different. Children are impressionable and vulnerable precisely for the lack of other experiences to compare new ones to. You cannot expect the same level of resistance to unhealthy influence from a child and an adult precisely because the ability to make reliable judgement about these experiences is something we only acquire over time. And we don’t acquire them as some sort of inborn achievement like talking and walking is for most of us. And the experiences along which we develop such judgement are not treated as a pool of equals either. Rather the oldest and most powerful experiences act as lenses through which to perceive those that follow.
The most of them are not even conscious. How we feel about things, how we cope with these feelings and what actions we take based on those feelings is so easily and so heavily reinforced during childhood that they are the only reality we know by the time we are able to even think abstractly about ourselves. And that means that about everything our caregivers and social context are and represent is seeping into us, forming us, creating us out of nothingness. The person that emerges out of it and becomes aware of themselves can never see themselves from a perspective independent of those that make them up. They will only ever be able to navigate all the perspectives they come across and are able to recognize (which many perspectives make rather challenging) in relation to this their first perspective.
Just like two people can reach the same place coming from entirely different starting points, we can find our metaphorical way out of an unhealthy or harmful perspective, but when this is our first perspective, it’s an unequally more challenging path than one from a first perspective not fraught with distortion, suffering and abuse. And it’s usually not a path we can go down without the help of others. And this represents another crucial factor, as not everyone is blessed with the right environment to meet the people that can help us. Even more tragically, some of us have never learned how to let others help them in the first place, they might not even recognize help, or worse, see it as a threat.
What We Have Become
The question of responsibility in the western meta society is mostly a question of guilt and failure. We are systematically discouraged from taking responsibility and being accountable for anything that isn’t flattering. This hits caregivers, especially parents, all the harder and they’re quite likely to blame about everything and everyone but themselves to are the beings we reflect back on them. We are who we are because of them, despite them, in spite of them. Never will we exist not in relation to who they are or were. Their dissatisfaction with us is a projection of what they see in the mirror. When they cannot accept our (alleged) failure, it’s because they continue the only tradition they’ve ever known.
But it’s in recognizing your responsibility in being part of someone else’s development with all the good and bad parts of you that you impart on others, not as a question of guilt or an accusation, but as the connection we share as humans who can never exist in isolation, who create each other, then I think we could heal. Or at least heal more easily. It will not undo anything, and it doesn’t have to. The wish to have our bad experiences undone is a foolish one, born from a society that blames the mirror for the image it reflects. There is no getting over your unpleasant childhood and all the suffering it brought. It has to be integrated as something that happened, something that set a however inconvenient starting point for our story.
And this starting point has to be honored, as painful as it might be, because if we deny it, repress it, push it away and pretend it never existed, we cannot find our way into being the people we’d much rather be, healthier and happier people. And no one deserves to have their childhood wounds and scars belittled, dismissed and relegated to some disconnected past that ought not burden us now. Becoming an adult on its own does not heal our wounds, it does not mend our souls, it does not supply us with the means, the will, the strength or ability to heal ourselves. It’s not a weakness, it’s not a flaw, it’s who we are, unique and invaluable, no matter how tragic we may have started out, no matter how trivial these things seem from a perspective that does not consider what it means to be a child, but feels superior to it anyway.
It’s okay. You’re okay. You don’t have to be like this forever, but it’s still okay if you will. You don’t owe it to anyone to be okay to be okay. To be good enough. To be enough. It can hurt to try, but do it anyway. It can get worse, but it doesn’t have to. And if in doubt, declare it an experiment, then there is no failure, just results. You’re okay.
