I’ve written before about the crushing weight of trauma people seem to have in response to events and experiences that are, objectively, not traumatic. Now, before someone objects, I am aware that an individual person might struggle with an experience more than another. However, I draw the line when having attentive, caring parents is defined as a here-to-fore unrecognized, menacing form of trauma. Yes, believe it or not, the affliction of the first-world, middle-class Millennial is having parents who tried.
Trauma over having regular parents often finds justification in the phrase: “The body keeps the score.” How many times have you heard this stated as a simple fact? There is, of course, some truth to the observation. Years of cigarette smoking will leave telltale damage. This truism about body scorekeeping, however, is often exclusively meant to refer to the residual effects of psychological experiences—and not good ones. Many people have accepted it with a determinism that belies the complexity of human experience.
“The Body Keeps the Score” is the title of a 2014 book by Dutch psychiatrist Dr. Bessel Van der Kolk. With decades of experience treating patients with disorders related to trauma, Van der Kolk developed an understanding of how attachment and developmental stage can affect the experience and lasting effects of trauma. Full disclosure, I have not read Van der Kolk’s book. A full decade after publication it still has a library waitlist a mile long. Without having read it, I can say only that the title captures the zeitgeist. Frankly, I’d venture to guess that many people proclaiming “the body keeps the score” have also not read it, so I will confidently contribute to the conversation despite my ignorance of this book’s particulars.
Why all the trauma? Childhood is a mysterious time of intense impressions. Events that occur can bewilder and overwhelm a child. If parents, the people tasked with helping the child integrate the experiences of life, fail to react and interact appropriately, it’s conceivable that even ordinary life could be quite traumatic.
Ernest Hemingway has a brilliant short story about this phenomenon. In “A Day’s Wait,” a boy of 9 falls ill. After his father tells him he has a fever of 102 and sends him to bed for the day, he does not understand the boy’s intense stoicism. The father only later learns that, while in France, the boy heard you cannot live with a fever above 44 (degrees Celsius), and, unaware that the temperature was taken in Fahrenheit, the boy spends the day awaiting impending demise.
Is that not what it is to be a befuddled child lacking context and experience to interpret events? The gentle parent reading this short story may clutch at her pearls and reproach the father for not delving deeper into the child’s emotional state. But is that always best for the child? As the child grows, his parents are supposed to fail him in small and manageable ways, because he is not meant to remain a child but to grow into a man who can provide for and nurture his own children, biological or spiritual. Moments when our parents fall short of perfection can be seen as the good and necessary way that we grow.
From the people who bemoan their parents’ supposed selfishness and thoughtlessness, you hear only about the moments of miscommunication, sharp words, and shortcomings. With focus magnifying these sad aspects of life, you’re unlikely to hear about what the parents did well. The moments, as in Hemingway’s story, when the father realizes the miscommunication and observes the boy bursting into tears the next day. In the austerity of Hemingway’s prose, we don’t know how the father felt about this display of pathos, per se, but he seems to care and to recognize the experience his son has. And he lets him have the experience. That is not necessarily neglect.
All too many of the unhappy Millennials of today are convinced that they have been shortchanged. This feeling is particularly pernicious when people argue that it is precisely because their parents were upstanding members of a community who, heaven forbid, tried to do what they thought was best for their children that they were traumatizing.
This accusation came up with discussions about unhappy women who fear human sexuality. It is alleged with increasing and unfounded conviction that having parents who displayed certain virtues but lacked others (the only possibility given their status as mere mortal beings) makes growing up more difficult and not less. Absolute nonsense!
Ah, but our critics persist, the parents who were looked up to by others and tried to do good, their poor children had to learn that they were not perfect and had to learn to question their judgement in the areas where they lacked. That is not some unique and complex new trauma; that is the universal experience of growing up. We all have to learn that our parents were not perfect. Some, in situations of acute difficulty, learn this at a developmental stage when it is a terrible blow that sets a course of stunted growth, possibly for life.
But even in these situations, there is hope. The body keeps the score, not just when it comes to all the bad that happens to us, but also the good. You will be laughed to scorn for suggesting it, but, truly, laughter heals (spiteful and scornful laughter excepted). Not everything right away, and not for everyone in every moment. But there are people who have found healing, a foretaste of the new creation that awaits.
There is a startling moment in life that many parents reach, if they let themselves, when they realize that if they only manage to do well the feats their parents accomplished, they will have accomplished a lot. It’s all too easy for the childless or parents of a lone toddler to scoff at their parents for not nurturing every whim, for not caring deeply about every passing emotional storm, for not treasuring you for the glorious creation you are. Here’s the rub: That was never their job.
We can have gratitude for what went well and cultivate a sense of humor for what went awry. We are stunted when we choose to pick at lingering wounds from childhood. Ideas are powerful yet immaterial. Even if we carry physical burdens from interior strife in our very bodies, we can begin to be free through the power of increasingly conforming our thoughts to the way things really are. Our life is a gift, and we owe our parents gratitude for that great gift. The particulars may be messy, but the facts remain the same.
