I remember when the reality of my childhood started to hit me over the head. I was sitting in a somatic psychotherapy training with Ron Kurtz listening to others speak about how their childhood impacted them. I naively assumed every family was like mine. When I heard some were fun, others violent, I began to expand my reality.
From there, I started to see how my ‘perfect’ family was not so perfect. It was repressed, setting me up to be repressed. These new awareness’s set me on my lifelong journey to unpack my limited past and then help others do the same. A few years later, I read one of the most impactful books I ever read – the short book, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self by Alice Miller, a Swiss psychotherapist. She explained how as kids, we live out our parents’ incomplete lives. She wrote, “For twenty years, I observed people denying their childhood traumas, idealising their parents and resisting the truth about their childhood by any means.”[i]
As Miller explains, we learn to be that ideal child for our parents; we disconnect from our emotions and needs. We stop growing; we start living the lives our parents want us to live. I wrote in my book about a young doc who had reached the pinnacle of his professional aspiration only to realize he never wanted to be a doc. The Rolfing and its subsequent releasing of the body and emotional holding had him wake up one morning to his hard truth. He didn’t know what he wanted to do – he did know he would not pursue a medical career.
Our parents do to us what was done to them. They leave out incomplete lives from being trained to live for their parents. Because they are missing authentic parts, they are vulnerable to fill those needs by having their kids live out what they think will make the kids happy and unconsciously themselves happy.
Are you living your parents’ incomplete lives? If so, how are you doing it? We all have valid needs. Are you and your parents living them out intentionally or indirectly?
“This denial [of self] begins in the service of an absolutely essential adaptation during childhood and indicates a very early injury. There are many children who have not been free, right from the beginning, to experience the very simplest of feelings, such as discontent, anger, rage, pain, even hunger- and of course, enjoyment of their own bodies (Miller, p. 40).”
How has living out your parents’ wants impacted you? It may be like it was for me; you have to hear others speak before being aware of what you endured.
Can you speak to what as a child you wanted to do or be. Travel back to being the innocent child who wanted more out of life. Share your desires with someone from being that child. That means less explaining and more experiencing and expressing.
Go slow, go deep.
As a man speak, be the adults in the room that want to hear and support natural maturation. Invite and honor the innocence of the child.
[i] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Alice_Miller_(psychologist)#/citenote12
