How Could You Have Known Better?
Oh, honey, how could you have known better?
Yes, of course, it would be wonderful if you knew what you know now ten, twenty, thirty years ago.
Imagining the roads you might have taken, the choices you might have made differently, and the different lives you could have led if you didn’t have so much dysfunction in your background…
It’s SUCH a tempting thought, isn’t it?
To imagine a life that could have been if you hadn’t spent the first few decades in sheer survival and autopilot because your nervous system was so dysregulated and your brain architecture so negatively impacted…
Better still, it would be wonderful if what happened to you had never happened at all.
To have grown up with good-enough guardians, hit your age-appropriate developmental milestones and wrestled with the normative angsts of childhood and adolescence…
Angsts like:
Do they like me?
Do I like them?
Who am I apart from my parents?
What clothes symbolize who I really am?
What kind of college or university suits me best?
When should I go on birth control?
Why won’t they let me have more screen time?
Normative struggles.
Instead of…
Which version of him will show up today?
How can I get even a little bit of her attention and energy when she’s so tired and depressed?
Will we have to move again because we didn’t make rent again this month?
What’s the truth? I can’t trust anything anyone in this house says. I feel crazy.
Is it safe to go to sleep tonight? Will he come back?
Am I too broken for anyone to love?
I wish you had had those normative angsts versus the ones you actually had…
It makes complete and total sense that you’re upsetting and grieving all the lost time you might have spent answering the big life questions.
Who you wanted to be when you grew up.
Where you wanted to live.
Who would have made a better life partner.
Whether or not you wanted to become a parent and by what age.
It would have been wonderful to arrive into early adulthood with insights into any of those issues.
And, of course, let’s be real now, most 20-somethings struggle to answer these questions.
But some do it with more life energy.
Less trauma to work through.
More parental support.
Self-esteem.
More sense of an umbrella of love and relational and financial and logistical security underneath them if they make a wrong choice.
Fewer mental health issues they need to attend to first before attempting to answer these questions.
But for you, it was different.
You DIDN’T have that.
You didn’t have what some of your peers did.
An easier path.
