The picture is purportedly of me, although I only have my mothers word for that. It could just as easily be one of my two younger brothers. According to Mum I was a happy little lad, and while I’m sure I had my moments, the description isn’t really born out by my own memories of my emotional disposition at that time.
On the receiving end of counseling just now, I’m attempting to work through some pretty painful and very, very early stuff. Honestly, it ain’t easy. It’s also not easy listening for my counselor, who is witness to this sobbing, whimpering septuagenarian trying to make sense of events in his infancy. We’re talking post World War Two, early fifties child raising methods. By parents who were raised by post Victorian adults.
I don’t have any children myself, but I am a co-grandparent and quite an observant one at that. So I notice the difference between the attitude of contemporary parents towards their children and compare it to the attitude towards infants in the early nineteen fifties. For starters they seem much more attentive and engaged with them. Something I feel didn’t really happen for me.
I’ve written before about the sense of isolation I’ve carried all of my life, and of my firm belief that it was set in very early on. I’m now beginning to sense that more damage was done to my developing personality at that time than I’ve ever really considered.
Quite simply, I think I gave up. I exhausted every means of protest, every method I could think of to attract attention to my predicament, whatever it was, and decided there was no point in trying any more. I probably just shut down or drifted off to sleep. I don’t remember anybody engaging with me very much at all really. Adults didn’t read to me at any time, let alone at bedtime. Books were expensive and come to think of it there probably weren’t that many written with very young children in mind. I have no memory of them playing with me apart from my Dads vigorous tickling sessions when I was older. I don’t think there was much stimulus at all when I was very tiny.
So here I am at the opposite end of my life, wondering why I am the way I am; particularly at four or five o’clock in the morning. It’s the time I either begin to drift out of sleep, or I’m driven out of bed by my bladder; the latter being something that happens four or five times a night. It’s at this time I’m at my lowest ebb. The point that I feel so bad I’m wishing myself dead. Nihilism sets in and I can see nothing positive about existence at all. It’s becoming clear to me now, that I felt like this as an infant. If, for whatever reason, I didn’t get the message that I was wanted and valued, then why would I want to be here? This mindset and state of being has plagued me for most of my life.
Words have power. Particularly labeling and descriptive words. More than a few have been leveled at me; some of them not terribly flattering. Words like slow, or dull, or too nice, also depressed, anxious, morose, timid. I’ve been referred to as a bit of an “Eeyore”, a reference toward the miserable donkey in the Winnie the Pooh books. I’ve occasionally been called a glass half full person, which I usually counter with the self deprecating comeback that the glass also has a crack in it.
All joking aside though; when you’re that small, powerless and vulnerable it’s not going to be too difficult for the adults around you to begin to paint the canvas of your personality. And if the only palette they have themselves is a bit monochrome….well? I guess that’s why some mental health conditions and behavioral traits run in families.
I’m thinking that even my occasional bouts of self harm in my life, have their roots in those early weeks and months. They’re an attempt to stop whatever is happening to me, or what I feel is being inflicted on me. At those times I literally haven’t or quite powerfully feel I don’t have the resources to deal with or get away from whatever is happening.
So what do I do with all this insight now that I have it? I can’t go back and change anything. Am I not just recycling the same pain I felt as that infant? I guess that’s one point of view. Another is that I now have a lifetime of knowledge and experience to help me deal with and untangle the messages I grew up with. Meaning that if I find myself being overwhelmed by distress being triggered by some event in the present, I can mentally pause and hopefully step back and look objectively at what is happening. Ok, the feelings might be there but I can at least with new insight, hopefully, not allow them to affect my behavior.
Navigating Hades. 