How A Messed Up Childhood Affects You In Adulthood

We are, all of us, beautifully crazy or, to put it in gentler terms, fascinatingly unbalanced.

Our childhoods, even the apparently benign ones, leave us no option but to be anything

else. As a result of these childhoods, we tend, over most issues, to list – like a

sailing yacht in high wind – far too much in one direction or another. We are too timid,

or too assertive; too rigid or too accommodating; too focused on material success or excessively

lackadaisical. We are obsessively eager around sex or painfully wary and nervous in the face

of our own erotic impulses. We are dreamily naive or sourly down to earth; we recoil from

risk or embrace it recklessly; we have emerged into adult life determined never to rely on

anyone or as desperate for another to complete us; we are overly intellectual or unduly resistant

to ideas. The encyclopedia of emotional imbalances is a volume without end. What is certain is

that these imbalances come at a huge cost, rendering us less able to exploit our talents

and opportunities, less able to lead satisfying lives and a great deal less fun to be around.

Yet, because we are reluctant historians of our emotional pasts, we easily assume that

these imbalances aren't things we could ever change; they are fundamentally innate.

It's just how we were made. We simply are, in and of ourselves, people who micromanage

or can't get much pleasure out of sex, scream a lot when someone contradicts us or run away

from lovers who are too kind to us. It may not be easy, but nor is it alterable or up for enquiry.

The truth is likely to be more hopeful – though, in the short term, more

challenging. Our imbalances are invariably responses to something that happened in the

past. We are a certain way because we were knocked off a more fulfilling trajectory years

ago by a primal wound. In the face of a viciously competitive parent, we took refuge in underachievement.

Having lived around a parent disgusted by the body, sex became frightening. Surrounded

by material unreliability, we had to overachieve around money and social prestige. Hurt by

a dismissive parent, we fell into patterns of emotional avoidance. A volatile parent

pushed us towards our present meekness and inability to make a fuss. Early overprotectiveness

inspired timidity and, around any complex situation, panic attacks.

There is always a logic and there is always a history. We can tell that our

imbalances date from the past because they reflect the way of thinking and instincts

of the children we once were. Without anything pejorative being meant by this, our way of

being unbalanced tends towards a fundamental immaturity, bearing the marks of what was

once a young person's attempt to grapple with something utterly beyond their capacities.

For example, when they suffer at the hands of an adult, children almost invariably take

what happens to them as a reflection of something that must be very wrong with them. If someone

humiliates, ignores or hurts them, it must – so it seems – be because they are, in

and of themselves, imbecilic, repugnant and worth neglecting. It can take many years,

and a lot of patient inner exploration, to reach an initially less plausible conclusion:

that the hurt was essentially undeserved and that there were inevitably a lot of other

things going on, off-stage, in the raging adult's interior life for which the child

was entirely blameless. Similarly, because children cannot easily leave an offending

situation, they are prey to powerful, limitless longings to fix, the broken person they so

completely depend on. It becomes, in the infantile imagination, the child's responsibility

to mend all the anger, addiction or sadness of the grown-up they adore. It may be the

work of decades to develop an adult power to feel sad about, rather than eternally responsible

for, those we cannot change. Communication patterns are beset by comparable childhood

legacies. When something is very wrong, children have no innate capacity to explain their cause.

They lack the confidence, poise and verbal dexterity to get their points across with

the calm and authority required. They tend to dramatic overreactions instead, insisting,

nagging, exploding, screaming. Or else excessive under-reactions: sulking, sullen silence,

and avoidance. We may be well into middle-age before we can shed our first impulses to explode

at or flee from those who misunderstand our needs and more carefully and serenely try

to explain them instead. It's another feature of the emotional wounds of childhood that

they tend to provoke what are in effect large-scale generalisations. Our wounds may have occurred

in highly individual contexts: with one particular adult who hit their particular partner late

at night in one particular terraced house in one town in the north. Or the wound may

have been caused by one specific parent who responded with intense contempt after a specific

job loss from one specific factory. But these events give rise to expectations of other

people and life more broadly. We grow to expect that everyone will turn violent, that every

partner may turn on us and every money problem will unleash disaster. The character traits

and mentalities that were formed in response to one or two central actors of childhood

become our habitual templates for interpreting pretty much anyone. For example, the always

jokey and slightly manic way of being that we evolved so as to keep a depressed, listless

mother engaged becomes our second nature. Even when she is long gone, we remain people

who need to shine at every meeting, who require a partner to be continually focused on us

and who cannot listen to negative or dispiriting information of any kind.

We are living the wide open present through the

narrow drama of the past. We suffer because we are, at huge cost, too loyal to the early

difficult years. We should, where we can, dare to leave home.

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