Celebration

This one is a little late and out of sequence, as the session referred to was weeks ago and I have now finished the series I had planned for.

I recently had one of the most significant counseling sessions I’ve had so far with my new counsellor. I really wasn’t expecting much as I’d been physically below parr all week. Suffering what my GP considered to be a post viral reaction, which was causing me considerable pain in every joint and muscle. Pain accompanied by general weakness and lethargy. I wasn’t a happy bunny.

My counsellor asked me, “Who looks after you?” At this point my mind went blank. It was as if it didn’t compute; it completely floored me. It wasn’t something I expected anyone else to do. It was always something I had to take responsibility for.

I started to think back to my infancy, this being the place where I consider most of my personality issues lie. I said something along the lines of never being able to figure out what happened back then. At this point I was interrupted by the counselor with, “No! It’s not what happened, but what didn’t happen! You were never picked up, never cuddled, never nurtured!”

At this point I burst into tears. She was right of course. I’d spent so much time speculating about a possible negative imposition from outside of myself, I’d never stopped to think that the damage may have started with not an action but simply, in-action. That my emotional development wasn’t something that the adults around me even considered to be part of the process of raising a child.

Back in the early 1950s, for many parents there were certain fixed rules about how you treated an infant. There were no child rearing textbooks, no net-Nannie’s or YouTube videos. Simply hand me down lessons learned from the older generation. Sadly, some practices hadn’t changed much since the Victorian era.

In my case, while there wasn’t any intended or deliberate cruelty, it wasn’t considered a bad thing not to respond to every cry from the crib. I think I cried a lot, for whatever reason I can no longer fathom. But I was in some form of distress that I couldn’t deal with. I think there was an attitude back then, that if you picked up a crying baby then you simply ran the risk of spoiling the child. It’s actually something I heard a lot in my childhood; mainly from other adults who had their own babies.

I think these events, crying for help, happened just often enough that I eventually gave up expecting anyone to come and give me the attention I craved. I simply learned to numb myself out from the feelings.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m confident my parents loved me. Like any parent they would have laid down their lives for me and my siblings. It’s just that loving and caring behaviour is different from generation to generation and even culture to culture. So I was well fed and clothed, had shoes on my feet and kept warm and safe in a physical sense. However, emotional development wasn’t even in anyone’s vocabulary back then. Correct behaviour had to be instilled in a child right from the start.

I think there was also a gender divide in this respect. So as a male child I had to be toughened up right from the beginning; crying was for girls. As for me, there was the threat of being given something to cry about if I started to whimper a little. I’ve never quite figured out the logic of this statement. As it seemed to me that I wouldn’t be crying if there wasn’t something already distressing me.

I became a fearful, anxious child. Quite withdrawn in fact, and learned to keep my anxieties to myself. Consequently, when anxiety was triggered by some event in my life, thoughts just churned around in my head. I was just trying to make sense of things that were totally beyond my experience, on my own.

On one level internally I was crying out for attention, while outwardly working at not drawing attention to myself.