Grief As It Relates to Childhood Trauma: Missing Something You Never Had #AtoZChallenge

Hi everyone and welcome to my letter G post in the #AtoZChallenge. Today, I want to talk about grief as it affects survivors of childhood trauma and particularly family dysfunction. I discussed grief in last year’s A-to-Z too. The thing is though, for many survivors of family dysfunction, the grief is not related to loss, but to missing something you never had. After all, for most people growing up in dysfunctional families, the abuse and neglect started before they were old enough to form clear memories. Because of this as well as other factors, many children also grow up to believe their experience is normal. After all, if you’ve never known any different, it’s hard to understand that your experience could be traumatic. This is one reason way too many people still believe that adversity experienced in early childhood has few effects because “they won’t remember anyway”.

I personally greatly struggle with this belief. Like I shared, I quite literally experienced adversity from birth on if not before. As such, even though my parents claim I was a happy child until around age seven, I have very few memories of a happy childhood.

I also struggle with the belief that “it wasn’t that bad” because it was all I knew. This means that, for a long time, I didn’t actually grieve my childhood trauma. This might seem positive, but the grief is all the worse now that I do know that my experiences weren’t normal. Besides, denial is the first stage in grieving for a reason. In other words, not knowing means I’ll never move on either.

Many people who didn’t experience significant childhood trauma, react to those grieving the happy childhood they never had with well-meaning but hurtful comments like “leave the past behind” or “everybody struggles sometimes”. In reality though, I’m not everybody and the past is part of my life.