Why Reframe Childhood?

I’m writing this first blog post to mark the UN’s International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.

Having written reams and reams, and settling on none of it, I am permitting myself to post something that is as chaotic as my mind. Here goes.
…

I’m here to start a dialogue about what reframing my childhood has meant to me, and what it might mean for you and everyone close to you. Beyond that, I hope that it will lead to reframing childhood for future generations.

Reframing my childhood was an act of survival. It happened in my late 30s when my kids were still young. It has completely changed my perspective on what it is to raise children, and what it means to be a child. I wish I’d known 10 years ago what I know now – that who I was for the first 4 decades of my life was a construct, built on foundations of deceit.

At the age of 38, whilst crawling out of my second prolonged bout of depression, I came to understand that I had been a victim of intrafamilial childhood sexual abuse. My body let me know. I had, and still have, no conscious memories of the abuse happening. The moment I understood it was like receiving a shot of adrenaline to the heart… and I felt something shift in my body in a way that I cannot explain. Whether or not people believe this part of the story isn’t of much consequence to me. It is the origin of me being here, but not the purpose.

Part of me wondered whether I could start this ‘project’ without telling my story. But I’ve realised I can’t and I don’t want to. It’s important for me to highlight the pivotal moment at which I started to see everything differently. In that moment of clarity, the toxic shame that had so often wanted me dead, lifted. It now sat beside me. Even though I couldn’t let it go, I could see it clearly, and I could see the damage it was doing. Before that it had been me. It was so intertwined with the core of my being, that I was toxic shame. Now we were separate entities, and I started to see so much with absolute clarity.

I started to see how my abuser’s power over me had paved the way for others to power over me too. His power over me became my deeply scathing inner critic, and in turn my silencer. I recognised that my whole life I had struggled with anger. I started to see that whenever I felt anger I wouldn’t express it. I would turn it inwards, and it would become my problem – my stupidity or my weakness. After turning it inwards i would drop down the polyvagal ladder into freeze. A lot of my life had been spent in functional freeze.

Frozen.
Unquestioning.
Silent.
Breakable.

As a kid it all looked good.
An A student. Head girl.

What did it all mean? Who was it all for? I’d been convinced it was for me. Who else could it be for? I was the one with the bits of celebratory paper, the qualifications, the tickets to the next stepping stone.

But here I am now and none of it matters because my foundations were fucked. All the good schooling in the world wasn’t going to fix those foundations. And none of those qualifications were going to love me. They didn’t come to me when I cried myself to sleep as a baby. They weren’t going to hold me when i slit my wrists with broken bottles. They weren’t going to stroke my hair when I thrust a pen into my vein and blood spurted everywhere. Those qualifications, along with my privilege just served to show everyone I was ‘just fine’.

Not so.

I was built on extrinsic motivation.
Fuck that for my kids.
They’ll be doing things because they feel it from within. Mistakes or otherwise.
They’ll be listening to their bodies.
They’ll be saying no.
They’ll be asking ‘why?’
No more ‘it’s for your own good’
No more ‘it didn’t do me any harm’

Healing trauma. Raising resilient kids. Real learning. Living and loving authentically.

Reframing childhoods of the past, the present, and the future.


…

<sub>Read The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk if you’d like to understand more about body memories.

Read Alfie Kohn if you’d like to know more about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.</sub>