Childhood is Formative

Childhood is formative. Everything we say and do as we enter the world starts from childhood. It isn’t blaming the parents for the ills of the adult child. It is simply a fact.

How good (or bad) that foundation is, will, and does affect us our entire lives.

I know that, but I still feel weird continuously talking about my childhood. It was quite a while ago, after all. During a session, I told my therapist I talked too much about my childhood.

But, of course, I do, she said. It is the foundation of my life. And my parents built mine on a structurally unsound foundation.

And everything that I have built for myself sits atop that creaky-ass wonky shit they put there. So how the hell was I to make anything out of that shitty start? Beats me. But I did.

So, yeah, unresolved childhood shit. You got it.

“Scientists now know that chronic, unrelenting stress in early childhood, caused by extreme poverty, repeated abuse, or severe maternal depression, for example, can be toxic to the developing brain.” ¹

Repeating the Past

When you start with a rocky foundation like I did, I didn’t know that foundation is unstable. So I kept balancing new stuff on top of the old shaky crap. And then I would wonder why it kept falling over. So that was me for a long time. 

Until I figured out that, yes, I needed to go back into the past and resolve those things that haunt me. It was also admitting how bad things really were.

I would repeat the past if I didn’t figure out how to heal those old wounds. I saw what that has done for others (a whole lotta nothing, if you are wondering), and I don’t want that for myself. 

The most annoying part? I was repeating my past, my abusive past, all around me (that is my foundation, after all). I was doing the ONE THING I swore I would never do, be like my parents. Yet, I followed in their footsteps.

“…toxic stress is the strong, unrelieved activation of the body’s stress management system. In the absence of the buffering protection of adult support, toxic stress becomes built into the body by processes that shape the architecture of the developing brain.” ¹

Storms

Whenever a storm destroyed my stick house, I would rebuild in the same place, shaky crap foundation. It was all I knew. I was too scared to move and rebuild someplace else.

I am still scared. Everything I am going through is new to me, like boundaries. Boundaries are a thing that confused the ever-loving hell out of me.

My therapist would talk about boundaries, and one day I stopped her and said, “I don’t know what those are.”

Boundaries

Boundaries are one of those foundational childhood things that everyone should learn. But I never did. Boundaries would have been counterproductive for my parents to teach me. 

I rebelled against their abuse, and I didn’t understand boundaries. Imagine if I had that knowledge and the confidence to implement or implement boundaries. 

I understand boundaries now that I have worked on them in therapy. But now I wonder why people ignore or outright disrespect them.

So now I am trying to be a functional human being in a predominantly dysfunctional world. 

It’s fucking exhausting.

I don’t think there is a person who didn’t have something traumatic occur during their childhood. Therapy is where healing starts. Why not start your healing journey today?

I recommend Online-Therapy.*

Check out some of my other writings about alcoholism and sobriety. “The Slow Descent to Sobriety” starts my December series about addiction and my journey with sobriety.  You can also check out my recent poetry,  What Happened to All of My Words??

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