By Jerry Waxler, jerry@jerrywaxler.com
Watching my nephew put a coat on his two-year-old daughter got me thinking about the parts of childhood most of us forget. She was on the floor flailing and screaming. Sensing my curiosity, my nephew looked up at me and said, “She’s screaming as if she’s being murdered.” It was true. She appeared to be in real emotional distress.
At first I thought it was cute and interesting, a temporary inconvenience. I figured she would outgrow it. We all do, right?
But as I grew into my role as a therapist, I noticed many clients seemed to be troubled by a hidden stash of emotional baggage. Could it have come from childhood? And if so, what could we do about it?
Therapists have been asking those questions since the very beginning. In fact, Sigmund Freud, the granddaddy of the whole notion of therapy, focused a lot on early childhood. But by the second half of the twentieth century, this approach was phased out. When I went to grad school in the 1990s, there was little interest in the childhood origins of adult emotional distress.
Meanwhile, in that same decade, the field was preparing for a major change. A landmark study known as the Adverse Childhood Events (ACES) study showed that people who experienced chronic health problems later in life had an elevated likelihood of adverse events in childhood.
The adverse experiences weren’t just the obvious ones, of violent or sexual abuse. It included verbal abuse and emotional neglect, and other disruptions such as having a parent in prison or witnessing one parent hit the other. When children experienced a few of these events, they came to believe they had been born into an unsafe world.
As we grow up, we all eventually realize it’s necessary to put on a coat to go outside in the cold. And we can’t have candy every time we want. These smaller terrors gradually fade. But events that undermine our sense of a safe world create deeper, longer lasting impressions.
Children are not set up to process those scary experiences. And busy, unsettled, overworked, or even addicted parents are not in a position to sit with their children to restore confidence.
So instead of healing from the wounds, our only option is to compartmentalize them. Then, with bluster and intensity, we are thrust into adolescence where we must adjust to new body sensations, hormones, emotional intensity, cliques, and a desperate need to solidify our sense of identity.
Even as we grow into young adulthood, we are too busy planning for the future. So we ignore those earlier experiences. Social codes reinforce this forgetfulness by urging us to stay silent about childhood pains and fears. We become so accustomed to forgetting the vulnerability of childhood, we even hide its long-term effects from ourselves. On the surface, forgetfulness seems to insulate us from past pain. But deep within, it does little to help us heal.
Flash forward forty years
Throughout the bulk of our adult lives, we adjust, we have relationships, build families, watch our own kids grow, and get older ourselves. During this period, we have no real motivation to delve into our childhood memories. And since twentieth-century psychology taught that adult brains can’t grow, any attempt to heal from early wounds would have been seen as wishful thinking.
Fortunately, another scientific advance in the late twentieth century upended this discouraging point of view. Thanks to the acceptance of neuroplasticity, we now know that through conscious attention, we can modify those neurons that are causing problems.
So later in life, when many of the urgencies of nature’s mandates are behind us, we are at the same age as the subjects of the Adverse Childhood Experience research. Only now, we are the ones with the aches, pains, and chronic diseases. And we now finally have an opportunity to review the way our earlier experiences shaped us later in life.
Memoirs help dispel the fog of forgetfulness
Until recently, the only place safe enough to talk about vulnerable or painful childhood memories was in private conversations with trained professionals. But twenty-first century culture offers a new method that provides safety and structure.
On its surface, the memoir genre appears to be a mere publishing phenomenon. Yet the genre invites a radical review of each author’s inner life. By reading one memoir, you can gain insight into an individual author’s journey to resilience. By reading many, you can harness the ancient structure of storytelling to deepen your understanding across a broad spectrum of personal inquiries.
When attempting to write your own, you will realize that life happens in stages. With the broadening of your insight into the way human life unfolds in general, you can much more easily see the stages in your own inner journey.
By writing about those experiences, you stray into areas you’ve always vowed to forget. And you realize that to write a memoir effectively, you must acknowledge the dark unattractive places. Memoirs help you look directly at the pain, the way special sunglasses enable you to look directly at the sun during an eclipse.
By extending warm curiosity to explore your own vulnerable inner child, you can deepen your relationship with the parts of yourself you have previously glossed over. Getting in touch with your younger vulnerable self gives you compassion for all you’ve been through. Compassion is a much more healing emotion than forgetting, regretting, and blaming.
At first, you focus on describing the events just as you experienced them. Writing about some of those scenes might feel like you are voluntarily returning to prison. But as you return to the past, and then sit at your desk pondering sentence structure, revising and improving your descriptions, you realize that the door to the prison is open. You can come and go as you please.
By bringing your adult awareness to those times and seeing how these scenes fit into the overall story, you realize that after the painful chapters, you lived through more hopeful ones. You begin to find peace, not just in the parts of your experience, but in the whole process of becoming you.
There is another equally important benefit to doing all this introspective writing and revising. By becoming wiser and more understanding about your own vulnerabilities, you can cultivate one of the most important features of the human condition — empathy toward the difficulties of others.
Despite the humble, seemingly literary goal of developing a book length story of some aspect of personal development, the memoir genre offers all of us an opportunity to grow wiser about ourselves and about each other.
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