Your grief about your childhood is legitimate.
If you come from a dysfunctional family, from adverse early beginnings, if you experienced childhood abuse, neglect, relational trauma, or dysfunctional that otherwise impaired your development as a young adult and adult, I want you to consider something: Your grief about your childhood is completely legitimate.
Sadness, anger, despair, longing, sorrow, rage, resentment… all of these are appropriate responses to the experience you had.
What do I mean by this?
All children, all babies, toddlers, kids, tweens, and teens deserve the experience of being unconditionally loved. Protected. Supported for being exactly who and how they are.
Every child born on this planet deserves the experience of relational safety, of being honored and respected as a person, and made to feel loved and nurtured in all ways.
If you didn’t have this, if, in fact, you had something quite different and the opposite (whether this was consistently or at times), your childhood was therefore marked. Marred. And possibly lost.
And this – the loss or rupture of your precious, irreplaceable childhood experience – is absolutely something you get to grieve.
You get to be upset that you didn’t have stable, functional, loving, devoted, and consistent caregivers.
You get to be angry that you didn’t experience a sense of safety. Both in the world and in your own home.
You get to grieve and regret and wish for something different to have happened to you.
Your grief about your childhood is completely legitimate.
It is, what I call, an abstract grief experience. Sometimes it is less socially-legitimized than, let’s say, the actual death of a loved one. But it is still 100% legitimate and worthy of feeling your feelings about.
So that’s the first thing I want you to understand: you absolutely get to feel the way you feel about your childhood.
Your grief (and all its attendant complex feelings) is totally, perfectly legitimate.
Like with real grief, it may never fully end. Not completely.
Now, you may be reading this essay thinking, “Okay, Annie, I get that I am allowed to feel how I feel about my childhood, but I still want to know when it will end. When will my sadness end? It’s so uncomfortable and inconvenient!”
