Having a great childhood guarantees you nothing really except a good clean start to life. You travel through childhood, with all your baby angst, your fun kiddie times, your teen perils, to arrive into adulthood, hopefully with a fully formed character without too many major flaws, and ready and able to tackle what life will invariably throw your way as you venture forth. The good, the not so good, and the downright awful.
Having an unspeakably dreadful childhood, or one filled with the miseries of alcoholism, molestation, drug use, absentee parents, narcissism and the like, not only doesn't guarantee you a good clean start in life, but what it does promise you is a lot of work later on, if you are ever going to overcome those rocky beginnings. It's been on my mind somewhat lately, and this afternoon, watching Shawshank Redemption again with my daughter, a few sentences always seem to stick out to me. One is "Get busy living or get busy dying." The other is when Andy DuFresne crawled through a river of shit to come out clean on the other side.
Some will never enter that stinking sewer to attempt to find that redemption; they will simply quietly get busy dying, and drink or drug themselves to death. They will never really feel the pain and decide to address it, or die trying. But it is worth fighting the good fight, because the rewards can be enormous.
Narcissistic parents have a lot to answer for, although they never will do that, simply because these types are "wired wrong," and therefore will never know - or care - of the scars they inflict on everybody around them, including and especially on their own flesh and blood. Those who get to experience the fallout from being raised by a narcissist suffer lifelong from the experience, and sadly those who don't educate themselves about what this condition means, will wait forever for a redemption that never comes. At some stage, you have to put defective parenting firmly into the past, if you have experienced it, or it will slowly but surely kill your very being.
Adult children of narcissists and addicts and abusive parents never really feel whole. They guess at what normal is, not having grown up with it. They do not trust easily. They can be hard judges and jury, given that when raising their own children under normal conditions, they cannot relate to normal childhood angst and behaviour, because they tend to benchmark it against their own demented upbringings and find their own children's problems trite and insignificant by comparison. But our children are our NOW, and we need to always remember that.
So, the good news. Provided these adult children are not infected with the same narcissistic gene, as can certainly run in families, they can in fact turn out to be the most wonderfully caring parents, who although still frequently getting it wrong due to their own faulty radars, are driven to growth and learning and insight in a way that perhaps the more grounded simply don't need to.
There are a couple of wonderful things about growing up in those highly dysfunctional home settings, however, and these aren't often talked about. Certainly it's not the childhood trauma itself. It's the flip side of the legacy those adult children are left with; the huge resilience, the empathy, the determination to be so much better than what they had themselves. I mean, you can either look at it positively or negatively, like everything in life. The negative - and those who have suffered such a start find it very, very easy to go down this path - are the "Why me? What did I do to deserve this? Life isn't fair." These are all fair statements, coming from a child from that kind of unspeakably awful beginnings. Why indeed? Who knows? It is what it is, or more accurately, it WAS what it WAS.
The biggest hurdle of course is to not let that kind of pain and fear affect your NOW. The past, as horrible as it was, is in the past. It need not have any say in what you are going forward, except you can take all the strength, the courage and the compassion and love into your life going forward, to come out clean and joyful at the other end...
On this Anzac long weekend, I've reflected on the brave men who marched into certain death such a long, long time ago to protect our homeland for the future generations - we - who get to enjoy it every day. I am also two weeks into fighting an enormous battle, assisting an amazing group of women two states away, against a most unconscionable narcissistic adversary who needs to be removed from hurting more and more vulnerable people in the way he thinks its his God given right to do. That one is still a battle in progress, and that's not surprising because those always are, as they have no insight, no empathy, and therefore no ability to change. Textbook narcissism at its most grandiose. Sigh.
But I've also enjoyed the company of some truly marvelous human beings, one being my teen daughter, whose teen angst I need to keep treating as a whole new ball game, not a poor second to what I had to deal with at that age. Then I've had news of the death of a most awful man who was part of destroying my childhood, although he played second fiddle to those who should have protected me. And I've cried a few bucketloads of tears and been held and soothed by a magical human being who instinctively "knew" me, even before I myself knew where my intense sadness was coming from, or why. Miracles happen, and all the time.
Sometimes we just need to howl at the moon. And the Universe in all its wisdom, invariably sends us what we need to cope, to grow, and to move further into the light. And to love life, and to love again.
Yours in love and light, Carol Xxxxooo
Lest We Forget.
