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Mental Health | Trauma
My Next Step After Trauma
I am seeing and appreciating how many things went right in my childhood despite the things that went wrong.
I saw my parents after spending a year and a half apart. I had done a lot of emotional work and therapy in that year and a half, focusing on processing many childhood traumas. Seeing my parents again after all that internal work was in some ways like seeing my parents as my fifteen-year-old self again. I acutely felt my father’s emotional unavailability and stoniness. I felt the anxiety simmering in my mother. I lost touch with these impressions of them over the years when I went off to college and started my professional life, but they were still there. They were buried under all the tensions that accumulated over the years in my relationship with them.
The emotional unavailability I sensed from my father made me quite sad and it clarified for me why I had so many difficult moments growing up. I was not mad at him though. I had worked through many difficult memories with a caring and skilled therapist. Those moments are now small afterthoughts that I did not need to talk about anymore. I was not a helpless child anymore; I am an adult who confronted her past trauma and has overcome them. I felt much more like a capable and…
