The Inner Broken Child: Early Trauma And Lost Joy

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

The Inner Broken Child: Early Trauma and Lost Joy

Author: Iskra Fileva Ph. D

A bad childhood prevents us from developing a healthy personality.

When something bad happens to us, we use our inner resources to deal with it. This is what sustainability is all about: our ability to create and use an internal reservoir of strength.

If we experience too many adverse events, the reservoir is depleted. Then we consider further struggle useless and improvement impossible. This leads us to despair.

A bad childhood undermines our ability to cope differently because it is difficult or impossible for us to accumulate life-affirming energy from the beginning. Then we can stop prospering even without serious negative events. It is sometimes said that a bad childhood hurts us. Rather, it is true that it can prevent us from developing a healthy self with an intact, life-affirming core. We are not born with such a “I”, and a restless childhood does not harm him: it slows down his development. As a result, a person may experience emptiness or darkness in which others held hope.

We often cannot tell by looking at people what kind of pain they are carrying inside. In part, this is because they prefer to hide their suffering, but also because mental pain can usually be hidden. A broken self is not like a broken arm or leg - it can be invisible to others.

In some cases, the breakage is partially hidden even from those who wear it.

People who have a wounded inner child may feel that something is not as it should be without even knowing why. They may find that they cannot lie on the grass and enjoy the sun like others because they are constantly and seemingly inexplicably attacked by negative thoughts; or maybe they notice that for reasons they do not understand, they cannot bring anything to completion.

In fact, both trends may have their origins in childhood. Lying on the grass and simply enjoying life for someone with an early injury can be difficult due to the lack of an inner bank of life-affirming feelings. The inability to get things done can be the result of a deeply ingrained habit of fearing criticism from an overly demanding parent (even if the parent is no longer alive).

In some cases, people are fully aware of the consequences of childhood.

For example, the writer Franz Kafka.

In his breathtaking Letter to Father, Kafka describes a despotic father, completely devoid of compassion, who immediately undermines his son's self-esteem and instills deep self-doubt in the child.

It is said that at some point, mental wounds caused the young Franz to experience bodily symptoms:

… I worried about myself in every way. For example, I was worried about my health - worried about hair loss, digestion, and my back - because she was slouching. And my experiences turned into fear, and it all ended in a real illness. But what was it all about? Not a real bodily illness. I was sick because I was a destitute son …

Kafka also doubts his ability to achieve anything:

When I started something that you didn't like and you threatened me with failure, I was in awe. My dependence on your opinion was so great that failure was inevitable … I lost confidence in doing something. … And the older I got, the stronger the foundations were, with the help of which it was possible to demonstrate how worthless I was; and gradually, you became right.

There are also times when the source of pain is not a specific person or people.

Writer Thomas Hardy, for example, shocked his contemporaries when he portrayed an unloved child without a name, nicknamed "Little Father," in Judas the Incomprehensible, who commits suicide and kills his half-siblings to free his parents from their children. However, Hardy does not judge the parents. He portrays them as victims of a society whose morals do not allow people like them to live happily together.

Rise from the darkness

It should be noted here that some types of childhood trauma can have a positive side. It is possible that Kafka became a writer because early pain turned him into an unusually reflective person. Hardy's child character, Little Father, is also precocious.

But the inability to function or thrive in this world is often not a major problem for people whose childhood left them injured.

There is prosperity. What about the prospects for survival and happiness?

This is much more complicated. We will never get a second chance to live through our formative years and remain unharmed. We cannot find new parents. We can get away from our mothers and fathers, but in doing so, we become orphans.

The problem can be compounded by the fact that family members cannot tolerate our leaving, even when we are ready for it. Kafka, in one letter, says that his loving mother continued to try to reconcile him and his father, and that perhaps if she did not do this, he could crawl out from under his father's shadow and break free earlier.

None of this means that we shouldn't try to come to terms with parents who are responsible for the lack of vital impetus. I just want to say that reconciliation is not always an option. A parent who remains immature into old age may constantly encourage an adult son or daughter to return to the painful identity of a child who is not good enough - not good enough to succeed and not worthy of love.

Moreover, even when we leave, we always carry the child that we once were inside.

But healing is possible, although the road to recovery can be long. The missing inner joy can be found and a reservoir of well-being built up later in life through intimacy. Childhood without love does not mean that we are destined to live an adult life without love.

In a sense, not only the adults we are becoming, but the children we were, can ultimately find their happiness. After all, when two adults are connected by close relationships, they communicate not just like adults, but also like children - through play and frivolity, which causes intimacy, joy from being in each other's company without a goal; and a sense of fullness of life.

That we always carry the child we once were inside can thus be a blessing even for those whose “child self” is deeply wounded. Precisely because the child is still with us when we find a soul mate, Not only the adult that we are, but also the little boy or girl that we once were.