You Did Nothing Wrong
I realised the other day how many of my childhood memories centre around being shamed.
And how that has left me with a deep wound of feeling as though I am someone who - fundamentally - does, says or gets things WRONG.
Because the direct and indirect messages I absorbed growing up, were that there are no mistakes or accidents - there was always something that I could have done better in order to avoid or mitigate what happened.
There’s the time, for example, that I had to write a letter of apology to another child’s parents, aged 7, because I’d accidently hit her with my hockey stick instead of the ball…
Not pleasant for her of course and no-one else could have been responsible for my stick but was the fact that we’d only just learnt how to play, that I lifted it too high and that she was right behind me, all my fault?
Aged 9, I was made to write yet another letter (to the headmaster this time), saying sorry for ‘stealing’ sweets from the boarder’s tuck locker (when another, much savvier girl than me, had actually asked me to do it ‘on her behalf’ because ‘she just couldn’t reach’)…
I agree that children need to be taught right from wrong (and that this was definitely not my finest moral hour) but surely the fault here lay more in the naivety with which I executed someone else’s desires and acted without thinking things through, rather than in any deliberate intent to harm?
The overall sentiment accompanying the blame was always along the lines of ‘How could you?’ or ‘What were you thinking?’ etc - a stance that assumes that a child has the capacity to premeditate or weigh up the consequences of their actions and to not do so must therefore be a conscious act of rebellion.
Unfortunately, as a parent, my kids have been the ones to receive the brunt of my inherited need to project discomfort at not feeling in control onto another.
And when things don’t go to plan, we’re late for an appointment or something goes missing (in other words, exactly the same tasks I was blamed for failing to be responsible enough to carry out in a suitably mature way), my tendency is to seek someone or something to blame.
But the fact is, both a sense of responsibilty as well as a capacity to be aware of the potential consequences of certain actions, grow with you.
So just as I shouldn’t have been shamed for age-appropriate ‘irresponsibility’, so too should I refrain from shaming my kids.
But that’s how toxic patterns get passed on, isn’t it?
The key to breaking these dysfunctional cycles is:
to become aware of the root cause of your learnt behaviour (in my case, figures of authority from my childhood)
to process the pain that created your self-limiting belief (in my case, that I was always ‘to blame’) by feeling and releasing it, as a pyschologically-evolved adult who has the capacity to do so
to reframe new situations that remind your inner child/adolescent or young adult of feeling like they’ve done something ‘wrong’ with a) validation (“of course you feel this way given your upbringing”) b) reassurance (“it was never your fault, you did nothing wrong”) c) a reality check (“you are no longer a powerless child who can be hurt by adults”).
I haven’t entirely got rid of the wound: I still get triggered when something goes missing (I am taken back to being a ‘bad’ 9-year-old again), and I still feel guilty when I walk through the green, nothing-to-declare section of customs (even though I’m not ever carrying any contraband).
But I’m now (mostly) able to manage these uncomfortable feelings myself, instead of projecting them onto others by launching into a tirade of blame against an ‘irresponsible’ other.
And my current mantras are: ‘Sometimes s^%t just happens - it’s not always anyone’s fault’ as well as ‘You did nothing wrong.’
As they say here in Spain, ‘poco a poco’ (bit by bit)…because healing has its own timeline.
(amazing artwork by Christian Shloe)