nataleesjournal

Have you ever been so focused on the hardest times from your past, that you completely forget the good?

When you grow up with childhood trauma, the past can bubble up out of nowhere. Little reminders of what you endured, return long after you’ve grown up…

For example, I was in a grocery store parking lot the other day. As I sat in my car and looked around I noticed a young teen daughter walking out of a store with her dad. And for a moment I remembered my dad. A memory popped into my mind of how he’d take me to the store and buy me new jeans. In that small moment I was just a girl again.

For adult women with normal childhoods and present fathers that are healthy and alive, seeing something like this wouldn’t even phase them. But for someone like me, it changed my whole entire day. I was reminded of the bad and the good.

You wake up one fine morning and can’t seem to recall if you smiled very much as a kid. If you laughed as much as you cried. If the yelling and screaming affected you as much as you think. And if the bad left its mark on you more than the best moments.

I recently discovered, when you let your past in… the bad will seem much greater than the good at first. But eventually, the darkness subsides. You’ll begin to see the good again, the giggles with siblings, the safe happy days, the family road trips, the late night movie marathons, the endless swimming summers, the family dog, and dinner together at the table.

Some victims of childhood trauma go through life barely able to recall what happened when they were young. Their memories wiped and their mind trying their best to protect them from the traumatic events. Among them are the rest of us, aware of it all.

It takes an immense amount of strength to look at your upbringing, hold the deck of cards you were dealt, accept it all for what it was, and keep going anyways. It’s a deliberate choice and a hard one.

There are hard days, where remembering is heavy, and other days where remembering is more-so a gift.

But on the heavy days, I turn on a comfort movie. I make my favorite meal. I cry if I need to and I go easy on myself. Those days can feel like pure survival. Because on those days I’m a little kid again, just needing to feel safe, not helpless.

On the light days I reach out to my siblings, I look through old childhood pictures, and I reminisce.

There’s something I’m realizing more and more as I grow older:

Even though we grow into adults, we’re still searching for ways to meet the needs of our younger selves.

This is true for so many people in this world. Even for those who didn’t necessarily experience childhood trauma.

A child wants to be seen, loved, validated, and protected. When a child doesn’t receive that, they cope as best they know how and often this can develop into perfectionism, people pleasing, self reliance, and dis-regulation.

A conclusion I’ve come to is: though we can’t control what’s been done to us, we can however control how we move forward and how we heal.

This is a small reminder that there is still good.