Notes from Izi: Healing from trauma

Trauma affects our understanding of the world. To heal, we must build a new cognitive model – one that does not erase the wounds of the past, but rather views them in a clear light.

How does a person overcome an abusive childhood and build a healthy life into adulthood? The truth is, our society is living with a lot of damage. Many of us have survived challenging upbringings, with our parents so distracted by their own issues that they could not find the time or patience to love their children.

The emotional wounds continue to ache for a long time, even after physical wounds have healed. It can be incredibly difficult to overcome that past trauma, and exhausting to build a life that moves beyond those formative experiences. Sometimes we don’t even know how to articulate what happened, much less how we feel about it.

Confronting childhood abuse

For thirty years, I was torn. I vacillated between trying to convince my parents to treat me better and trying to convince myself that I deserved to be treated that way. Neither strategy worked. It was only when my friends started having children that it became so easy to say aloud: it is the job of adults to love and care for children, never hurt them.

I could not imagine hitting a child, like my own mother did – nor could I imagine waking them in the middle of the night to scream at them, call them names, shame them about their appearance, or purposefully destroy what they had worked so hard to create. If you love someone, you want that person to thrive. Even if you don’t care about someone at all, you would not bring down their hopes and dreams and self-confidence with this behavior. It takes hate to treat a person that way.

And hate is what it was. The hate burning in my mother’s eyes as she told me I made her life miserable. The hate burning in her eyes as she told me she had wanted a different child, not one who asked so many questions and challenged her beliefs. As soon as I became aware of the world and my self as an independent person, the punishments got worse. But my curiosity and my exploring brain were never intended to hurt my mother. I never wanted to make her feel bad or to make her feel uncertain. I only wanted her to love me, and to explore this world with me, and to find out what things meant.

Identifying truth

In the months before my fortieth birthday, earlier this year, I asked my mother to acknowledge the hurt she caused during my childhood. I needed to know we were on the same page, that physical and emotional abuse were not okay.

She did not deny hitting me or calling me names, but she categorically denied that behavior constituted abuse and refused to discuss the matter further.

There was my answer. She thought that awful behavior was fine. But I had learned to trust my own judgement, and I could confidently say that behavior was objectively not acceptable. This is no way to act, no way to treat children.

Moving forward

The first lesson you learn in life is to trust your parents – trust that they will love you and take care of you and help you to thrive. So what happens if the very first thing you learn in life is just not true? How do you build a cognitive model of the world – and of your self – if the entire foundation of your world is a lie?

How do you build a cognitive model of the world – and of your self – if the entire foundation of your world is a lie?

With nothing below your feet, you must step out into the void and trust that you will one day find solid ground. As you flail, you might find a hand reaching out to hold you steady, a friendly grip to help you find your way, and you use this guidance to build your path. And as time goes on, a different world starts to take shape. The color of kindness may be new and unfamiliar, but you will learn to recognize it.

How do you overcome the confusion? How do you create a new cognitive model from scratch? It is not wise to discard everything you have learned – that knowledge is precious and useful. It can help you to survive in challenging circumstances. But it is not wise to hold onto bad information either – that knowledge will lead you astray. Instead, it is necessary to rebuild carefully, observing what is true, acknowledging the way things should be, and accepting the difference between the two.

Parsing that conflicting information is the work that must be done, over time, to rebuild an understanding of reality. With this better understanding of reality, you can learn how to navigate through life effectively. The next step is choosing what matters to you, and what you want to change about this world.

Parsing that conflicting information is the work that must be done, over time, to rebuild an understanding of reality. With this better understanding of reality, you can learn how to navigate through life effectively. The next step is choosing what matters to you, and what you want to change about this world.

You may not have many allies at first. You may wallow in your pain, and you may find it difficult to climb out from a pit of despair and hopelessness and uncertainty. You may not feel strong enough to do the work. All you can do is a little bit each day, and forgive yourself when you cannot do more. If you are alive, you can give thanks for that; if you are healthy, you can give thanks for that; if you have food and shelter, you can give thanks for that. If you do not have those things, please ask for help. There are others who have struggled to find a way out, just as you are doing right now, and those who have found their way out are now working to build a world of kindness that will steadily replace a world of hate.

Building strength

There are people in this world who will offer you a path forward that helps you to flourish, and there are people out there who believe that your flourishing will be a threat to their power or their way of life. It is your job to recognize the difference between the two – first and foremost, to protect yourself, but also to work with other good-hearted people to create a world of shared power, a world where everyone has the opportunity to flourish.

By recognizing that everyone deserves that chance to find their own strengths – but some individuals have a lot less support in their lives to get started – we can recognize practical ways to close those disparities. But first, we must grow strong ourselves and we must understand how the world works, before we can change it.

We cannot be strong for others, and we cannot be net providers in society, if we are not strong ourselves.

We cannot be strong for others, and we cannot be net providers in society, if we are not strong ourselves. Building up this strength takes time, and it takes support from others. For those who have not received a strong foundation of time and support from their parents, there may be no strength to give.

And likewise, we cannot change the world unless we truly understand how it works. If we have received bad information from those we trusted most, we may not believe ourselves to be capable or worthy of love and support. For those who never received this lesson during childhood, it can be difficult to learn it later on. But it is worth observing the world, and opening the mind to change. You know, deep within yourself, that there are other ways to be, and you can discover these for yourself.

You know, deep within yourself, that there are other ways to be, and you can discover these for yourself.

I myself went searching for other ways to be. I watched how other families interact with each other. To watch my friends exhibit patience and gentle ways of teaching, even when their kids were being difficult, even when they themselves were tired and stressed, gave me such a deep comfort and relieved my mind. The next generation can grow up knowing they are loved and supported, knowing they have the strength and wisdom to face the world, knowing the people in their lives want them to succeed.