Healing From Childhood: Finding Your True Self

Source: Katernya Hliznitsova/Unsplash

A few weeks ago, I got a message from “Tom” that got me thinking:

“Has anyone talked to you about discovering really late—like 37—that he had no idea what he was really like? This has happened to me and I wondered if it happens to other people. I am the youngest of three sons, the one who was always mocked and picked on by my brothers and Dad. I’m a big guy—over 6 feet—so I wasn’t bullied at school, but I had trouble making connections and friends. I figured it was just me. And I kept thinking that until I got married at 30 and my in-laws were like a family from the movies. I felt good around them and I knew they liked me. My daughter was born last year and I discovered that I’m not gruff but touchy-feely, and I am crazy about that kid. My wife says I thought I was born a Rottweiler but I am really a Golden Retriever. I think I learned to push off from my feelings or numb myself as a kid. Has this happened to other people?”

Apologies to Rottie lovers. Not my quote, and they can be gentle dogs.

Losing Sight Amid Dysfunction

This strange disconnect happens to many unloved children. In retrospect, I have nothing in common with the young woman I was in my teens and 20s. If you had asked me at the time—this was the 1970s, so think feminism—I would have told you that I was being “strong” and “proactive,” but the reality is that I was suffused with anger—angry at not having a loving family like others did, angry that my father died, and angry that I was left with a mother who ignored me and verbally abused me. By turns. I was in a perpetual defensive crouch, looking for those who might “manipulate” me, and pushing hard to make sure I always ended on top. Even though I was in therapy at various points, my anger never came up as a subject, perhaps because I was successful in my pursuits. But the truth is that the anger stopped me from seeing myself; ironically, in mid-life and later, while I do get angry, it tends to be a slow burn.

Unpeeling the Onion: Layer by Layer

Losing sight of yourself in a dysfunctional family is both literal and metaphorical; we internalize the messages communicated directly by parents and siblings—“You’re too weak”; “You’re too sensitive”; “You don’t have what it takes”—as well as those that are implicit and never said out loud. These can include snipes at body type and eating (I have hundreds of readers who looked for the fat girl in photos, including myself), negative comparisons to others in the family (“You’re the only one who complains”; “Your sister/brother is always willing to help”; etc.), and simply ignoring the child. As Joanne put it: “I didn’t need to be told my wants or needs were irrelevant. She showed it. If I said I wasn’t hungry, she’d plop down food. If I said I wanted some downtime, she’d pile me into the car. She had a thousand ways of making it clear what I wanted didn’t matter and she never had to say a word.”

Steps to See the Self With Clarity

Working with a gifted therapist is most certainly the best route, but you can, in fact, help yourself begin to see yourself with greater clarity. These steps are listed in no particular order and are drawn from my books Daughter Detox: Recovering From an Unloving Mother and Reclaiming Your Life and Verbal Abuse: Recognizing, Dealing, Reacting, and Recovering.

• Assessing how you manage emotions. Whether you learned to push off from emotions as Tom did or were flooded by them as I was, two important deficits of a neglectful or abusive childhood include not being able to emotionally self-regulate and being unable to identify what you are feeling. Attachment theory explains in detail why this is, but the task at hand is to get in touch with those emotions so you can manage them. In real life, this translates to either underreacting (pushing off from feeling as in the dismissive-avoidant style) or overreacting (anxious-preoccupied or fearful-avoidant).
• Getting off auto-pilot. If you’ve experienced a neglectful or abusive childhood, the chances are pretty good that you don’t even consciously recognize when a situation in the present evokes familiar patterns of the past and you react automatically. I’m deliberately avoiding the word “trigger” here because it’s so woefully misused and overused, so let’s just stick with “auto-pilot.” Once you begin unraveling your emotions, you should begin to be able to give yourself a time-out before you react. This technique, which a therapist taught me decades ago, I have called STOP. LOOK. LISTEN. The good news is that if you do it often enough, it becomes the automatic response. OK, you feel yourself getting agitated or reactive, so you take a moment to STOP. This is effectively the time-out. Then you LOOK and ask yourself what it is that you are feeling precisely; is it anger, defensiveness, anxiety, or hurt? Being able to identify your emotions is key. And then you LOOK and ask yourself questions as if this were happening to someone else: Are you reacting to what is happening in the moment or is this the old auto-pilot? What would you advise the person if it were happening to someone else?
• Working at seeing yourself objectively. Securely attached people are able to assess both the things they’ve done well and those they haven’t without feeling threatened or devolving into self-blame. That isn’t true of the insecurely attached and that, too, contributes to the inability to see the self wholly. For those with an anxious-preoccupied or fearful-avoidant style, self-blame and criticism are the default positions that prevent you from actually seeing not just how you did but what you might do better. Looking at yourself as if you were a stranger you know little about is one way of getting you to see what you can’t see while consciously turning off the default positions.

For those with an avoidant-dismissive style, what stands in the way of seeing yourself is your unfounded belief that you are somehow superior to other people and not in need of improvement. Truth? We could all use a tweak or two.

Looking in the Mirror (Literally)

What stance do you take when you see your own reflection? Are you there to nitpick or assess flaws or do you see the person who inhabits that body? Do you see the person your family of origin described (and picked on or marginalized) or do you see the person the people who love you see? Spend some time looking and see what you see.

The real you is there, and I think you'll find him or her rather likable.

Copyright © 2023 by Peg Streep