Carriers of the past: a child's look at trauma

We talk a lot of big words, as adults, but in the end, it's always a child who looks at trauma. Our first brush with sadness and loss shapes our roles in the greater battles yet to come. When you're weak, abuse can come from any direction, and everything can be deemed monumental.
What's interesting, however, is that, in the real world, childhood is supposed to end, at some point, whereas inside ourselves, it never does. All the events and actions that impact us resonate chiefly with the child we were once, the one whose bare etchings of suffering direct and decide our every later encounter.

One relationship shapes the next, and yet, what shaped that first one? Was it not the child within reacting to an out-pour, or absence of love? As children, we learn what the acceptable quotient of affection is in our lives, and it is also as children that we then react to anyone's attempt to alter it. For instance, children who lack love seek out an excess in their own maturity. Their desire is driven by need, which in turn, clouds their judgement, and often causes more trauma. Which then either confirms, or maims the child's initial grasp of their own worthiness.

If, on the other hand, you are smothered and coddled, you grow weak, and difficult. Assured in the knowledge that you are worthy not only of love but of outright adoration, you give up the struggle, to your own detriment. I will not stoop for your love, you say, for it would be your privilege to love me. This, I feel, stems from another type of insecurity, perhaps the biggest threat to any child's mental well-being - the discovery that your parents were, in fact, mistaken.

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Our lives are usually made of second chances, if skewed, and lackluster, but creating the stepping stone for what will be your life, only happens once. Hence, there is an overwhelming fear that your parents did it wrong, and that if, you are now crippled emotionally, that can never be fixed.

There are no surgeries or meds for a faulty upbringing, and when you look at things a little better, you find that all upbringings are faulty. Whether it is the absence of love, the plantation of insecurities, or so many other chips that our parents sprinkle into the mix, you are starting the race with a lame leg. But it's okay. So is everybody else.
The fault doesn't by any means lie with the parents, for they were once children, also. And if there is blame to be thrown, it lies perhaps with the first man and woman, the Adam and Eve, whoever they might've truly been. Yet if the Bible is to be believed, Adam and Eve were incestuous motherless (and in many way, fatherless) children, also. Talk about trauma.

There is a lot of focus, in our day and age, on mental health, and you come across more and more people who tell you they're working on it, that they're finding a fix. As if trauma could ever really be fixed. To me, this seems difficult, if not outright impossible, since we are, after all, talking about a plane higher than rationality, and thus more complex. You can acknowledge your weaknesses a thousand times over. You can, in fact, identify with painstaking accuracy the path you should take, the emotional responses you should be giving.

And still not give them.

Myself, a keen student of psychology, I've spent countless hours trying to decode my own reactions, and feelings, my wrong impulses, and my insecurities. Yet it seems for every single one I manage to find, ten more rear their ugly heads, and put me at a loss.

And I wonder, sometimes, as I'm sure other artists have before me, how much of this ties in with my writing. Because what is my writing, if not a directionless attempt to decipher my own story? Could you be a writer, and still be mentally grounded seems to be a question that often crops up in artistic circles. But who's to say anyone's truly ever grounded? Who is fixed, and who still needs fixing?

When your insistence on being sane and stable could be just another symptom of your instability, and ultimately your insanity, how do you ever find the strength to even open your mouth?

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