Every one of us felt some pain as a child — whether it was from carelessness or abuse, the death of a parent, divorce or the loss of a sibling, or just simply from the experiences of growing up with all its inevitable disappointments, losses and let downs. Most of us were disciplined with shame and blame, by some if not by all of the adults around us at that time. Childhood hurts.
Wayne Muller in his best-selling book, Legacy of the Heart: the Spiritual Advantages of a Painful Childhood, poses that the hard-won wisdom born of childhood hurt can become a powerful source of strength and clarity. The key is in meeting the pain of it head on, without necessarily finding out the whys and wheres in an attempt to solve or ease it, but rather using the pain to navigate towards transformation.
I’ve noticed that my children provide me with an uncanny opportunity to face and heal my own childhood experiences in a way that sitting in a therapist’s office could never do. It’s not that these days I go out there looking for that healing. In fact, being a yuppy in the 80s meant that I spent a good portion of my paycheque on workshops, therapists and retreats. So I’m quite happy to leave my past well enough alone now; all’s seemingly been processed and catharted, forgiven and forgotten, or at least neatly tied itself into the story I tell myself about my life.
However, intimately relating to a child allows a window into our past to open, that might have previously been obscured.
Recent months have forced me headlong into a personal challenge the likes of which I have never been willing to encounter before. I say ‘willing’ because it seems that this challenge lay before me in various forms throughout my life, but running seemed the only safe option — until now. Now, for the first time in my life I have people around me — my children and husband — who I trust and love enough that I feel I can take a different tack besides bolting.
Before me, as in many times previously, lay an opportunity to face a painful period during my teenage years. But this time it came in the form of an emerging dynamic between my husband and my son (who is my son’s stepfather).
On the surface theirs looked like the stereotypical wicked step-father movie. And I, being the protective mother bear, fully inserted myself right in the middle of it, completing a nice triangle that resulted in plenty of discomfort on all sides. I was miserable, and powerless to make any change. And indeed the more I tried to create change, the more entrenched the system became. Like a rat in a maze never learning the lesson, I kept running into the same dead end, left only with my own hurt and pain. But the pain, when not moved from or strategised around, became a gift. In stopping and taking full responsibility for the experience I was having, a healing began to occur.
Echoes of the past are fairly easy to recognise when they overlay themselves onto a present situation. There are telltale signs: emotions are very intense and irrational and don’t exactly match the sense of what is occurring in the moment; the mind begins to obsess day and night; and current partners begin to take the form of past family members.
One particular poignant past family member was my own step-father. When I was in my early teens, my mother remarried to a rancher. The three of us, my mother, my younger brother Scott, then 10, and myself moved up to the high country of northern New Mexico to live with him and his family. His name was Bob, and he was just about as friendly a man you could hope to meet. That is, until you became family. My brother and I were hurled headlong into a new familial culture that was strange to us. It was one where men and boys were tough, and girls subdued. We didn’t know the rules, but that didn’t mean we were exempt. Like when the big Tom Bowler shooter marble is flicked into a circle of smaller marbles, Bob’s descent into our lives shattered us — our little family of three, annihilated.
We coped in our own private ways. For me coping meant abandoning my brother to fend for himself against Bob’s harsh criticisms and discipline. He opted for collapse, which made things worse. I opted for charm and it kept me fairly safe. To this day, my brother and I are worlds apart. A reality I never chose to really examine. That is, until my own son, Arun, turned 10 — the same age my brother was when Bob entered our lives.
Arun was born peacefully at home in 1995. Immediately upon looking at his face, I was shocked to notice that peaking through the bliss and joy was one isolated and rather odd thought. ‘He looks just like Scott.’ Well, that was a strange thing to think. Scott was the farthest thing from my mind at the time, as he was most times. Why would I think that? He doesn’t at all look like Scott. But subtly something had happened in that moment, and quietly, stealthily, an old unresolved guilt about abandoning my brother so many years before, lay itself over my newborn son.
I think this is how family karma and subconscious agreements are created. We inherit all the unfinished business of our ancestors. When it is our turn, we can either transform it, or create more pain and suffering with it, which will again pass down to the next. Unwittingly, the Arun of my perception became the bearer of my past, my childhood hurt and sorrow, as has been done for generations by so many families.
After my parents’ divorce, I heard my mother’s well-meaning friends speak about children’s resilience in an attempt to soothe the worries of my mother. People often say that children are resilient. I don’t believe this is true. In fact, I think it is one of those unexamined assumptions perpetuated to assuage people’s pain. I think children survive to carry on, but I don’t think they bend back to their original shape as the word suggests. Rather, I think we forever wear the imprints of mistreatment and pain pressed upon our hearts when we were children. Then at some point, as we mature, we are given the chance to visit and revisit those imprints and make one of two choices: we can gain wisdom from them, or we can imprint another. And when the chance comes to revisit again, there are again two choices. Never, I believe, do we finish that journey. Never can we say, ‘Yeah, I dealt with that one and it’s done.’ It’s a perpetual cycle of life. When seen in this way, as Muller suggests, these imprints become potential gifts — bestowing us with wisdom, strength, character and the ability to shine the light for others.
As the years wore on I often noticed that I had a habit of responding out of guilt towards Arun and I could never understand why. It undermined my parenting him with clarity and was frequently a hurdle to tackle. I used to tell people that when Arun was born, so was my guilt. It became especially noticeable when my daughter was born, because the sense of guilt did not apply to her. But oddly, I never connected it to my feelings about abandoning my brother. My guess is it was denial at work.
Fortunately denial could not have its way with me forever. The present situation with my husband and son gave me an opportunity to look at the pain and separation created in my own childhood, and more importantly look at how it was still being perpetuated with my brother and my own son.
Harriet Lerner writes in her book The Dance of Anger that strong emotions often point us to unfinished business from our family of origin. If we look back several generations at the larger family picture — births, deaths, illnesses, divorces, marriages, suicides — it sheds light on why a certain family member today has become the primary focus of our anger, worry or concern. Anniversaries of important events begin to appear and the unique family karmic story takes shape. We might notice, for example, that we are extremely moody or emotional during the anniversary of our parents’ divorce. Or we become hypercritical of our daughter when she turns the age that our mother was when she left our father.
Using my own anger at the situation with my husband as a guide, I discovered many patterns in both our families of origin that shed light on what was occurring with Arun. In my case, I am now the age that my mother was when she married Bob, and my son is now the age that my brother was during that time. I was, quite literally, reliving the time of my family’s dissolution at the hands of a stepfather who himself was at the mercy of his own family karma.
Such clarity allows for a broader perspective to be applied to a situation, and empathy for all the persons involved.
Often, however, we might stop there — ‘swallowing the whole frog’ as my German friend says, which means ‘taking responsibility for the entire situation in front of you’. But, it is not that turning inward and back towards family of origin leaves the others in the present situation off the hook. A current issue that provokes a healing of the past, still exists and still needs to be addressed! The healing of the past allows for my bottom line in that dynamic to be defined, free from the emotional tail-spin of projection. I think this is a very essential part of healing, and one that doesn’t get much air-time in this age where ‘non-attachment’ and ‘letting go’ are the catch phrases — especially for women.
The healing of my past has allowed me to define more accurately who I am and what I will and will not accept in the current situation. But now the bottom line is stated in a vulnerable, real, connected and respectful way. My bottom line is defined and stated. However, it isn’t used to threaten, hurt or push someone away. Quite the contrary, it is used as an act of love… ‘This is who I am. This is me showing up for you and in the name of love stating where I start and end.’ The paradigm shifts from one of blame and anger, to one of collaboration, connection and showing up.
It’s not easy. Most of us have learned flight or fight in response to stressful situations. We collapse and withdraw, or muster bold attempts of changing the other through blame and outrage. When I look back at how my mother chose to handle Bob, it was both. Neither worked, in fact, worse, it denied Bob the opportunity to hear straight but loving feedback about his behaviour. When she left him many years later, he was profoundly confused and thought everything was ‘great’ between them. My mother and I have had several conversations about those teen years in my attempt to learn more about her, and more about how she tried to manage the new blended family. Learning about what didn’t work pointed me towards a different direction.
In time, my attention rightly shifted from my son and husband, to my brother. Now, ironically and as if on cue, my son is in email contact with his Uncle Scott, and I am having a few good cries in the car when I am alone and I can allow the memories of my fourteenth year overwhelm me. It’s taken the heat off the once painful triangle, which in response, is resolving through honest and vulnerable communication.
Again I am shown the gift of negative emotions, of allowing the fullness of painful situations to reveal themselves without my manipulation to prematurely solve them — accepting their invitation to descend into the dark underworld where gifts abound. In this luxury society, where ‘pain-free’ is celebrated, and ‘freedom from suffering’ marketed by the post-modern gurus, pain and sorrow are misrepresented and feared. We can become a society of emotional cowards, and miss the gifts that suffering can bring.
However, I’m left with the question of whether a childhood pain- and imprint-free means a wise free-spirited adult, or if the wisdom is only bestowed upon imprints. I do not know the answer. I only know that everything in my gut wants to protect my children — and every child — from a certain kind of imprint, the kind that cuts deep and runs for generations. If my imprint can facilitate that to happen, then it was all worth it.
You can read more of Kelly’s writing at EQUUS, here.