Someone recently made this so familiar comment to me:  …”in our life somehow things do happen but we need 2 let the past be the past in our life….”

When someone tells me something like this now, I know that they either have no clue what severe early child abuse is, they had at least one strong attachment that acted as a powerful resiliency factor in childhood even if they were abused, or they are trying to apply an inaccurate, worn out, unhelpful adage from the past to their own situation as they try to live a good life in spite of what they have been through.

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I continue to ‘fight back’ against the pressure and force that these kinds of comments create for me as they present impossible ‘as if’ fantasy solutions.  While I know these comments are meant to be ‘helpful’, they still bring out more and more of my fierce fight-for-life spirit because they do NOT fully address the situations of people like me and I am being asked to do the impossible.

The most important point I have learned in the past 5 years I have spent researching my own situation is that because the abuse I suffered started so early, was so pervasive, chronic and devastating, I do NOT have the choice to ‘let the past be the past’.  The adaptive changes that my developing brain, body, nervous system and immune system had to make in the hostile, dangerous and malevolent world of my childhood CHANGED me in permanent ways that cannot be altered.

I now know that I have very real, clear and definable disabilities within me as a result of my being so abused from the time I was born.  My disabilities are no less real or devastating than would be any other kind of serious disability.  Just because the scars of the abuse do not show on the outside, just because my body grew from that of an infant and child into an adult one, does not mean in any way that I do not have permanent, irreversible and serious consequences of that abuse within me — as I will until the day that I die.

Now I know that expecting myself to be able to ‘leave the past behind’ is at best a silly expectation, and at worst an erosive thought that corrodes my own hard-worked-for progress toward living the best life I can live IN SPITE of the damage done to me by the abuse I suffered.

We are not all alike in terms of the resiliency factors that were present for us as children.  Our experiences were not all alike in terms of the quality of attachments with caregivers within our early worlds.  Our genetics are not alike.  We cannot support one another the way we wish to if we ever believe that we simply KNOW what another person can accomplish.

I see the wordless image of a person waking in the middle of the night with their house on fire.  They grab a blanket from their bed and wrap it around themselves as they race out the door.  Just because they may have escaped the inferno within the house itself (our childhood) does not mean we are safe if our clothing and our blanket, even the skin of our body is still engulfed in flames even AFTER we get out alive.

In severe child abuse cases, we do not have the luxury of ever being able to ‘get away’ from the raging fire of destruction that our home of origin was.  We carry the burning flames right out the door with us.  Pretending that we got away unscathed, and pretending that we were not seriously damaged as a consequence of our abuse, will never give us the ability to realistically evaluate and assess what happened to us.

Pretending we are completely whole and safe once we leave our abusive childhood situations will never help us heal from the continuing woundedness within ourselves.  We need to learn as much as we can about the ‘exact nature’ of the damage so that we can be supremely realistic about what we can, as adults, expect of ourselves.  Having the specific FACTS will allow us to gain more and more conscious awareness and thus more and more POWER for good over ourselves and our lives.

Healing is not about being in a competition.  It is NOT about seeing who can forget their past traumas and ‘get on with living in the present’ the fastest.  It is not about shaming ourselves and one another because we can’t accomplish this impossible goal.  The reality is that the foundational attachment processes of being able to live as a self in the world have been damaged.  We need to know what that means, and we need to REALISTICALLY know what we can do about healing these attachment wounds as they manifest themselves in all kinds of later problems in our lives.

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As I described in yesterday’s post, my mother insanely demanded the impossible of me and then abused me for 18 years because I could not comply with her demands.  I could not let her invade and devour the essence of who I was.  Nature’s rules do not allow for this to happen.  When someone tells me to leave my abuse in my past and get on with living, they are asking me to accomplish an EQUALLY impossible task.

One can never leave their child abuse in the past if it was severe enough to change they way their entire being (and body) developed during those early critical growth windows of developmental opportunity.  Both these ‘demands’ are thus similar to me — whether it was my mother demanding that I allow her to invade and devour my soul — or whether it is a well-meaning person today who tells me to leave my childhood in the past.  Both of these demands could only be accomplished by the death of my body.  Otherwise, they are impossible.

We need to rethink and think clearly what we mean when we tell ourselves and others  to ‘get over it’.  Obviously I cannot live without a body — and that body is the same one that all my traumatic abuse is built into.  It is far more useful and possible for me to find out what that MEANS and what I can learn about living well in spite of the facts.

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As long as we pretend that we can leave our abusive childhoods behind us ‘in the past’, we will at the same time be allowing all the unconscious, unrecognized, unknown difficulties that our childhoods created in our bodies and minds to run rampant – uncontrolled, unchecked, not dealt with, and UNRESOLVED – to wreck havoc with our lives, our health, our futures, our relationships, and our offspring.

Denial is NOT what we need to solve our problems!  Denial allows trauma to rule our lives and spread out around us through our actions like the contaminating, destructive, contagious virus that it is.  We have no chance of living well with our woundedness or of finding a cure for trauma unless we open our hearts, minds and eyes to the TRUTH about the damage that abuse, neglect and malicious actions causes anyone — ESPECIALLY to infants and young children.

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A much more helpful response to make to a person who is suffering from long term, lifelong changes due to having survived severe abuse from childhood — or trauma of any kind at any time — is simply to communicate that we are aware of the trauma, that we care, and that we are willing to offer ongoing encouraging (appropriate) support.  I believe it’s that simple, and that’s what building safe and secure attachment patterns at any stage of our life is all about!

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