Preparing For My Family Holiday
My Top 4 Tips For Processing Childhood Trauma
“Scared animals return home, regardless of whether home is safe or frightening.”[1]
Introduction
My adult life was going swimmingly until last week, when l started making plans to go to my parents’ house for the holidays. I had bought my flights to London, and with the trip a couple weeks away, I was doing the logistics. My parents’ house has 5 bedrooms. But with my aunt visiting, my three siblings and a refugee we’re housing from Ukraine, I found myself wondering: Where was I going to sleep?
That question struck me with an unexpected wave of depression. It lasted for days. I couldn’t get out of bed. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I couldn’t write. I felt like my creativity had dried up like a riverbed in summer. I couldn’t even numb my brain on YouTube videos because I had joined Internet and Technology Addicts Anonymous a couple months ago. This was the greatest challenge to my emotional sobriety that I had faced to date.
This time, I chose not to scroll down a newsfeed into oblivion. Instead, I decided to face up to my feelings. In this piece, I’ll explore the childhood trauma that came up for me, and how I processed it. This is a personal story about accidental neglect, as opposed to more serious physical or sexual abuse. I highly recommend working with a professional to process the deeper, darker shit. Unfortunately, I can no longer afford my amazing therapist, Barbara, in New York, so I had to face this challenge without her.
What worked for me might not work for you. But I hope something I’ve written here resonates with you, or you can pick up one of the books I’ve quoted over the holiday season.
The Tips
1. Identify And Communicate Your Needs
My parents had four children in five years, a feat which I find more staggering every year I get closer to turning 31 (the age when my mum had me). I am the oldest, and because my parents were so busy looking after my younger siblings, I was a pretty independent and self-sufficient kid who mostly relied on myself to get things done.
You can imagine that this has created a number of obvious problems for me as I entered adulthood. In the recent past, I have struggled to identify what I need, and I find it even hard to ask for it. But luckily, this year that all changed when I read “Nonviolent Communication” by Marshall Rosenberg. The book is filled with all kinds of goodies for learning how to communicate effectively with other people, but my personal favourite is this line:
“If we express our needs, we have a better chance of getting them met.” [2]
This phrase is incredibly simple and yet it was impossible for many previous versions of myself to implement. So, I have been practising expressing my needs. But how do I do that when there are mountains of complex, depressed feelings involved? Rosenberg instructs us to connect our feelings with our needs by saying,
“I feel…because I need…” [3]
When doing this, it’s also important that we only express feelings that involve our own emotions, and not how we interpret the actions of others. For example, we shouldn’t say, “I feel abandoned…” or “I feel unappreciated and rejected…” because these refer to how other people are evaluating us. Instead, focus on specific, personal emotions, like “I feel disappointed…” or “I feel annoyed…”
For example, when the issue of where I was going to sleep came up for me, I wrote in my family WhatsApp group,
“Can we please address where everyone is going to stay at Christmas in London? I feel disappointed that I can’t come home without feeling like I’m making everyone uncomfortable or inconveniencing them in some way.”
Technically, I could have written this better by saying something like,
“I feel disappointed that it isn’t clear where I’ll be sleeping over the holidays, because I want to feel welcome when I come back to your house.”
Expressing my needs at all was an improvement over previous years. But it didn’t help much with the giant barrage of my feelings that were still coming out. Not only did I feel lost, scared, dejected and anxious about returning to my parents’ house, but I also felt like a complete asshole for expressing my needs when the refugee from Ukraine who was staying in our house clearly needed the spare room more than me. I reminded myself that “What others do may be the stimulus of our feelings, but not the cause”[4]. So next, I decided I needed help to reflect on and express my emotions.
2. Get Support from Other Close Family and Friends
After days of emotional darkness, I called one of my sisters, as well as a friend and a close family friend, and expressed what I was feeling. My friend reminded me that I didn’t deserve this, considering I was flying halfway across the world to spend time with them for Christmas. This helped me feel less alone. Later, my family friend challenged me to go deeper and actually try to get to the root of the problem. After I explained the situation to her, she told me,
“Your feelings are coming from somewhere. It’s worth it to sit with them and understand why they’re there. That’s something that only you can do for yourself. Think back to your childhood and try to figure out where the wound is coming from. And have a good cry. I’m pretty sure it’ll become clear to you after that.”
I already started to cry when she told me this. I suddenly felt angry, like I had to defend my inner child and stand up for myself. I could feel the resistance of my darker emotions as I broke into tears of frustration. I said to myself incredulously,
“I don’t deserve this. My younger self did not deserve this.”
It was enough to get me to crack.
3. Take Care of Your Inner Child
“It takes an enormous amount of trust and courage to allow yourself to remember.”[5]
I felt nauseous with the gravity of my full feelings taking force. Later that night, once I got home, I knew what I needed to do. I lay in my bed with the lights off and focused. My inner child felt damaged and hurt and scared. Why was that?
I thought back to my childhood. As I mentioned, my parents had four young children. Only two of us could sleep in their room at night at any one time. So when I was about six years old, and my youngest two siblings were toddlers, they camped out in futons on the floor of my parents’ room. Meanwhile, my sister and I shared a room in the basement, a full two floors away from my parents. My sister was only a year younger than me, but I felt responsible. If anything happened, I as the older kid would have to defend us. At the time, there was a lot of petty crime happening in London at night, so my mum locked metal bars across the windows of the basement windows at night. Looking back, I realized that I was grateful to have always had a roof over my head. But I didn’t always have a safe place to sleep.
As you can imagine, as a child I was terrified of going to sleep. Almost every night, I worried: Would I be able to fall asleep? What would I do if I couldn’t sleep? Would I tiptoe up to my parents’ room as a last resort? This was also around the time in my childhood when I learnt that I was going to die, and that the universe was going to end. These thoughts only haunted me further.
I remembered one night in particular when I was about 7 years old. It was late at night on the weekend after my family had watched American Idol, and I couldn’t sleep. I tossed and turned as my sister slept soundly beside me. As a last resort, I made the terrifying trek upstairs to my parents’ door. I was crying. My dad opened the door and said, angrily,
“For god’s sake, Natasha! Just go to sleep!”
“Just let her come in,” I thought I heard my mum say inside.
“No, there’s no room. This is ridiculous,” my dad shouted back. He closed the door in my face.
At the time, I was completely distraught. I just remember sobbing and feeling like my soul had been ripped apart from theirs. I was so angry at my dad. I was so disappointed my mother wasn’t doing more to interfere. I slept on the carpeted landing outside their door that night. My tears dripped down my nose. The salt formed a thin crust of hurt around my eyes as I somehow managed to fall asleep.
I slept in various bedrooms in the basement for six years. I had a couple months here and there where I stayed in my own room, but I ended up sharing with my sister when she got a double bed in her own room a while later. Eventually we moved house, but I was almost 12 years old at that point. I felt ashamed of being scared and needing someone else nearby at night.
As I reflected on all this, lying in my bed this week, I cried. It was a deep, body-shaking cry. Even though I was getting some of the pain out, inside of me were years and years of my fears and feelings of distance and utter isolation. I cried some of it out, but I knew that a single crying session could not get rid of all of the pain of years of not feeling safe when I tried to go to sleep.
While I understood the root cause on a rational level, the fact that this similar issue was being presented to me some 20 years later was what triggered me in a deep, profound way. Lying on my bed, letting go of my resistance to my feelings by crying a lot, and giving these feelings words in my mind and my body helped me find enough strength to take the next step.
4. Talk It Out With Your Parents
“But if your parent was scared of deep feelings, you might have been left with an uneasy sense of shame for needing comforting…Such parents may even become nervous and angry if their children get upset, punishing them instead of comforting them.”[6]
After having a little meltdown in the family WhatsApp group, and then an even bigger meltdown on my own, I finally had a grip on this aspect of my childhood trauma. I now wanted to address the issue with my parents individually, in a way that they would be receptive to. To do this, I used tools in the last few chapters of the tough but transformative book, “Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents”[7], recommended to me by my wonderful friend Emilia. The tools I used are as follows:
A) “Focus on the outcome, Not the Relationship: Identify the specific outcome you want from each interaction and set it as a goal.”[8]
My goal was to get both of my parents to apologize to me, whether or not they remembered the specific night of me crying myself to sleep on the landing. My goal was also to express some of the pain I was feeling, and to show them how that was linked to the issue being brought up again this upcoming holiday. This was closely linked to another tool in the book:
B) “Expressing and Then Letting Go: Tell the other person what you want to say in as calm and non-judgmental a way as you can…Explicitly say what you feel or want and enjoy that act of self-expression but release any need for the other person to hear you or change.” [9]
This is exactly what I did, talking to my mum. My mum was sorry for the pain I had experienced when I was six, but tried to resolve herself of responsibility a little bit by saying something like,
“I was always happy for more of you to stay in the room. It was your dad that was keeping you out.”
“But as the little kid outside the door, I didn’t know that,” I said, “You’re both the parents. You make decisions together, and that’s how I interpreted it. I would like you to take responsibility for what I experienced.”
“I apologized. That is my way of taking responsibility. And plus, there was nothing more important in the world than me being a good mother to you. If there was anything I could do that would have stopped you from being traumatized, I would have done it.”
She was getting teary-eyed and felt bad for what had transpired. I was relieved to hear her apology.
C) “Keeping a Grip on Your Own Thoughts and Feelings”[10]
At points in the conversation with my father, he began to get angry.
“Did you expect us to keep a room for you in the house when you’ve been gone for the last 10 years?” he said on the verge of shouting.
I took a deep breath on the other end of the phone and tried to keep it together.
“I never expected you to keep a room for me,” I said, “I just need you to acknowledge that what I experienced when I was a kid might be related to these same conversations we’re having now. I’m traveling a long way to come home, so it would be nice to feel welcome, like a guest.”
I was glad to have done a lot of the processing of my own emotions up until that point. It meant that I could then keep my tone cool even when my dad expressed less than pleasant emotions towards me. He did end up apologizing, and I managed not cry too much, to keep the conversation on track. Both of them were able to relate to what my experience might have been like when I was a child. I told them I was grateful for their efforts to find places for us to stay for the upcoming holiday, and we all agreed we would find a way to figure it out.
Conclusion
“A central task for recovery from trauma is to learn to live with memories of the past without being overwhelmed by them in the present.”[11]
The tough thing about reflecting on childhood trauma is that there’s no way to undo the painful things that happened all those years ago. Maybe it’s a good thing I accidentally managed to address this part of my trauma before I even stepped on the plane to visit them for the holidays. Working through deep emotional issues with my family will never be perfect, but I’m grateful we were able to talk about the issues and that both of my parents apologized. It feels like progress was made, and hopefully now I’ll have more mental energy to enjoy my trip back to London, revisiting some of my favorite places and spending quality time with my siblings.
As Tolstoy said in Anna Karenina, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."[12] So, if you care to share, what issue can you see on the horizon for your upcoming visit to see family this holiday season? What other tools have you found helpful for working through emotional conflict? Leave a brave response in the comments! :)
Footnotes
[1] Gibson, L. C. (2015). Adult children of emotionally immature parents: how to heal from distant, rejecting, or self-involved parents. Oakland, CA, New Harbinger Publications, Inc.
[2] Rosenberg, M. B. (2015). Nonviolent communication: a language of life. 3rd edition. Encinitas, CA, PuddleDancer Press.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Van der Kolk, B. A. (2015). The Body Keeps The Score: brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. New York, New York: Penguin Books. Link here.
[6] Gibson, L. C. (2015). Adult children of emotionally immature parents: how to heal from distant, rejecting, or self-involved parents. Oakland, CA, New Harbinger Publications, Inc.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Van der Kolk, B. A. (2015). The Body Keeps The Score: brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. New York, New York: Penguin Books. Link here.
[12] Tolstoy, Leo, graf, 1828-1910. ( 1980). Anna Karenina. Oxford ; New York :Oxford University Press.