And, moreover, this grief and mourning can be triggered again and again. Long after we think we’ve done the bulk of our grieving for our childhood. And even when we become parents.
Specific to the abstract grief of our painful, adverse, and lost childhoods, I’ve written before about what small moments and experiences can unexpectedly trigger us, but in today’s essay, I want to explore what, perhaps, the biggest trigger of grief about our own lost childhoods can be: becoming parents ourselves.
Why is becoming a parent triggering my own sadness about my childhood trauma?
“Why is having my own child making me feel so much more rage and anger towards my parents? I thought I was done feeling angry but now I can’t even answer their Facetimes because I feel so much anger. What’s wrong with me?”
If you’ve felt surprised by the resurgence of your sadness and anger towards your own caregivers after becoming a parent yourself, there’s a very good reason for this.
Most people who become parents experience a sense of unconditional love, devotion, and fierce protectiveness towards their child – feelings that, hitherto in life, nothing has ever rivaled.
Becoming a parent is a profound experience.
To love someone so much and to feel the gravitational orbit of your psyche and life shift from wrapping around you, to wrapping around them, it’s literally life-changing.
Becoming a parent is the biggest and richest human experience many of us will ever have.
And for many new parents, the love and devotion that they feel for their own child can kindle within them a greater appreciation for their own parents and how well they were loved.
But for those of us who come from relational trauma backgrounds, this experience of loving someone else so wholeheartedly can sometimes trigger different feelings for the people who raised us: renewed anger and grief.
Why?
Because our love and devotion and self-sacrifice for our child can more sharply contrast what we ourselves didn’t receive.
Becoming a parent can retrigger old wounds from childhood trauma.
When you feel such profound respect, care, and concern for your child and attempt to do everything – literally everything – in your power to make them feel loved, safe, accepted, respected, and well-cared for, this can evoke explicit and implicit memories about how you yourself didn’t have these very things you’re working so hard to provide for your child.
And as these memories are evoked, as this contrast is highlighted, thoughts and questions may bubble up:
“How on earth could they have possibly done that? I would NEVER let my child experience that.”
“I don’t remember her ever cuddling with me the way I cuddle him – that’s so sad.”
“In a hundred years I would never leave my daughter alone with a strange man in a room. Where were they? How did they let that happen?”
