A lot of the transformational work I do with my coaching clients is around their childhood. Some of us know that the way we were raised messed up our capacity to have healthy relationships in adulthood. But many people tell me their childhoods were just fine, thank you very much, and they don’t really understand how the way they were raised keeps them from having intimate, close relationships now.
It took me many years to realize that I suffered from trauma, like so many of us do. A lot of my clients experienced trauma, too, often without being conscious of it. Many people think that trauma has to be Capital T Trauma – something terrible that happened to us, like severe abuse, death of a parent, or other horrific events. The truth is, small t trauma can be just as scarring: turning to a parent and not getting comforted, for example, or getting shamed, or being falsely empowered and parentified by a caregiver.
I always wondered why I had such a hard time connecting with people, why I never felt safe in relationships. Only as an adult did I recognize the impact that trauma had on me, and how I was shaped by the way my parents raised me.
My mother suffered from depression and most likely personality disorder – something I realized much later when I studied these things as an adult. I’m not surprised that she was an unloving, harsh, un-nurturing woman, because she was raised by parents who had lived through terrifying wars – my grandfather fought at the violent front at age 18, where he witnessed (and probably committed) untellable acts. Whenever we grandkids asked him about the war he broke out into tears and refused to talk for days.
My mother’s Mom was 15 years older than my grandpa and spent the war years in heavily bombed Berlin, where she raised an older daughter and lived a sketchy life as a “loose woman” (something my family never defined for us kids).
My mother sometimes told us stories of living in one smallish house with her parents and their many siblings, where she had to hide knives because her Dad and his brother tried to kill each other in drunken rages. Even as a little kid, I knew my grandfather had murder in him – he was known as an axe murderer in our neighborhood, having killed his dog and beloved pigeons with an axe when he was drunk. He kept telling us little kids that one day, he’d like to kill his wife, too.
So you see, this is a pretty heavy family legacy… No wonder my mother didn’t fare well. My father wasn’t any better in the nurturing and emotional availability department. He was a militaristic, strict patriarch who doled out collective punishment for his four daughters, ordering my mother to spank all four of us if one did something wrong. It didn’t help that initially I was the good and perfect one, but I still got hit… (Enter my intense rebellion as a teenager later.)
I’m not sharing this to elicit sympathy or shock, but rather to show you that we all deal with our own personalized pile of family history crap, and we can make choices to heal and grow from our experiences. But first, we have to explore our chidlhoods and how they impacted us.
Here’s a helpful resource I just listened to myself. It’s a Mel Robbins podcast episode exploring four signs of emotionally immature parents and how to heal. It’s excellent:
Four Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents and how to Heal
I hope it will get you started on thinking about what kind of parents you had, and how that impacted you.
If you found this episode helpful and would like to explore how the way you were raised impacted you, holds you back now, and if you want to move forward and transform your life, feel free to reach out to me and schedule a free coaching session.