You will never get what you didn’t get as a child.
Yes, I know. It’s a hard truth.
Your mom didn’t know how to handle how different you were from her, so she encouraged you to be more like her and you got lost in her identity;
Your dad had no idea how to express his emotions, so he couldn’t show you how to be a relational man and you became focused on success as a source of worth;
Your mom leaned on you and made you responsible for her needs, so she couldn’t tend to yours and you turned yours off;
Your dad worked so much and when he got home, he disciplined you with force, so you were afraid and believed you weren’t important to him;
Your family was big and loud, with no time, space, or energy to pay attention to little emotional you, so you got bigger and louder in order to be heard;
Your family consisted of only you and your parents, and everyone was focused on making everything ok, so you learned to stay quiet and invisible…
I know you can fill in your own examples of ways that your well-intentioned, and also very imperfect, human parents tried their best, while at the same time were not available to you.
Of course, as Wise Adults, we can give them grace and forgive them for doing the best they could given their blind spots.
Many of us find it hard imagine that what seem like minor infractions could have that much of an effect on us as adults.
We seem to believe that children are mini adults, and should be able to handle emotional mis-attunement using the skills that we would use in these circumstances.
But, children don’t have those developmental abilities…
We go back in our minds and come up with all the reasons our parents did what they did or didn’t do.
We justify, we rationalize, we explain…
Can you see that doing so is really yet another way our Protector Part keeps us from dealing with our pain?
If our Protector can give us the reasons we were hurt, it can re-direct us from the trauma of being ignored, rejected, manipulated, abandoned, abused, devalued…
Most of our parents would be mortified to understand that their inadvertent mistakes could have had that kind of traumatic effect.
If we are parents ourselves, recognizing this can make us swell up with guilt and regret.
Yet, in truth, being human means that none of us goes unscathed.
Being human means we all have trauma.
Some of it is little “t,” like the examples above.
And sometimes it is big “T” trauma like sexual abuse, addiction, sudden death or chronic illness, untreated mental illness, and/or natural disasters or acts of terrorism.
No one gets away trauma-free.
The solution is not to continue to let our Protectors convince us that no trauma exists. In fact this is the recipe for suffering.
Instead, we lovingly thank our Protectors for getting us through and helping us to grow in the best way we could.
Then we step into our Wise Adult Part and acknowledge the pain of our trauma.
We grieve what we did not get.
We allow the sadness to move through us.
We let the tears flow.
We put our arms around our Wounded Child Part, and let them know they are now being seen, heard, and loved in a new way:
Intentionally, consciously, fully…by YOU.
Wise Adult YOU!
Saying goodbye to the longings of the past can be really hard.
Yet, holding on to them (consciously or not), keeps us stuck, unhappy, dissatisfied, and repeating the same old patterns that we know we want to stop.
Are you ready to get off the treadmill?
Grieve and let the past go…
