Grieving Your Childhood

What do I mean by grieving your childhood? Maybe you had an absent father, maybe you suffered from abuse or trauma and your parents were responsible or did not support you the way you wished they should have. Did this happen repeatedly leaving you blaming yourself? How do you move on? Is the goal to move on? This blog should give you some answers to these questions.

Here’s how to deal with grieving your childhood. One way is to forgive your parent or caregiver. For the sake of this article, I’ll use parents however this can be interchanged with caregiver like an aunt, uncle or step parent. If they were emotionally unavailable or emotionally immature. This issue can be one of the hardest things an adult has to face.

 Forgiveness is not just something you say over and over again, and then therefore, you have forgiven them. In fact, it’s more of a process rather than an action.

The process means it is going to take some time. It also means you need to create a story of your childhood. You need to give your childhood a story, a narrative, with a start and an ending. This may mean going to a professional to discuss what happened to you in your childhood. It may mean being more vulnerable with close friends. The process means sharing what happened to you with people that care about you.

This process also means giving space to feeling your feelings. Forgiveness does not mean you suddenly never experience anger towards your parent or caregiver. Forgiveness means you feel the feelings when they come, and giving space to what happened to you. Forgiveness does not mean what they did to you was valid.

A common reaction to adverse childhood experiences is to numb and to try to forgot. This might mean abusing substances like alcohol or cannabis. This may mean using food either by restricting food intake or binging large amounts of food. These are very common reactions, and it is not the answer. It is a band aid on a large wound. It is a bucket underneath a leaky roof. It is a temporary solution to a bigger problem.

Forgiveness is like pulling weeds. You spray an organic spray on the weed, it’ll get a little brown if you’re lucky and 3 months later, it’s bigger. Forgiveness is pulling the weed from it’s roots.

Remember the goal, grieve the loss. Grieve the loss that your childhood was not what you wanted, not what you needed, not what you truly wished for or deserved.

 This happens quite more frequently than usual. You realized that you survived your childhood and are stuck with not-so-perfect parents. How do you move on? First step, realize that your parents are humans and make mistakes. This doesn’t mean that what they did is valid however at some point the goal here is to realize that your parents may have not had their needs met from their parents. Again, this isn’t an excuse, just clarification.

In conclusion, the best practice is to talk with a mental health professional about your wounds and give yourself the space and time to process what happened and how to heal. Forgiveness is a process, a continued choice and perspective to practice. It’s a type of grieving that is not a black and white concept but rather a fluid state. I’ll leave you with a quote about grief by C.S. Lewis “Grief is a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape”.