Emotional Trauma
When we think about abused children, we often have visions of spanking, hitting and even sexual abuse. We think of withholding food, cruel punishments or physical neglect. We have visions of kids in emergency rooms with broken arms.
While this kind of abuse is still too frequent, what is more chronic and quite honestly, common, is emotional trauma. It’s emotional abandonment. It's leaving a child to emotionally fend for themselves. It's not helping them manage their emotions. It's expecting them to have the factory settings of a fully grown adult in terms of emotional regulation. It's the lack of attuning to them. Therapists will often call this “relational” trauma. While I do too, I find that is often hard to connect to as an average, non-therapist person. But think of your emotional life as a child? For many of us, it does not take much to start to admit that it was not ideal.
There are lots of reasons why this happens; most likely your parents own emotional trauma as a child led them to not understand how to parent in a way to meet their child’s emotional needs.
But talking about the reasons why it happened begins to feel like defense. And when you do it in the same breathe as someone sharing what happened to them, it looks a lot like dismissing their experience. It's in fact a perpetuation of the same problem in the first place. It’s these kinds of comments: “Well we did the best we could”, or, “We gave you everything you needed”, or, “We sacrificed so much to give you the best things in life”. These are incredibly common things for people to say to their adult children. It’s incredibly common for people to say this to their teenage childen. It’s incredibly common for parents to feel this way from the time their children are little.
However, as I mentioned, it’s a perpetuation of the original issue. Highlighting what someone did right, does not change the fact that big facets didn’t go well. Imagine this: you make a mistake at work that negatively impacted your entire department and instead of taking accountability for it, you tell your team all the things that you did right in the past year. It wouldn’t go well until you addressed the problem at hand, right? In fact, you might end up with a lot more fallout from your defensive posture than simply dealing with the mistake.
The hardest thing I see as a therapist is when someone does this to themselves. That is, they say their parents didn't know any better, they did the best they could. And, again, that is likely true. Your parents likely did try their best. But that doesn't mean you can't express your pain about what happened to you. It doesn't mean you need to stuff your feelings down simply because there is an explanation for your experience. Both things can be true: they tried their best and you didn't have proper modeling or support for your emotional expression as a child. The good news is that this is workable. You can move foward. Therapy can help. Journaling can help. Working on re-parenting yourself can help. Aggressive self-care can help. Learning to sit with your emotions and not dismiss them is the ultimate goal.