Facing Childhood Trauma Led a Grown Son to Healing
If only rebooting your mindset was as easy as restarting your laptop. As part of a collection on shifting perspectives, writers share the struggles, revelations, and joys they experienced as they began to see themselves and the world around them from a different point of view—and experts weigh in with advice on how you can change your perspective on just about anything.
Picture me as a 19-year-old at a college party, chatting with a new friend or crush, hearing about their hometown, then trying to explain who I am.
“My short story,” I’d say, “is that in 1978, my mother was cut down by a brain aneurysm. It paralyzed her body on one side and scrambled her personality and behavior. She was 38. I was 12.”
Seeing the horror and pity in the other person’s eyes, I would rush to reassure them that my mother being permanently disabled didn’t strike me as particularly tragic. Sure, she never worked again, and her life, and mine, was never the same. But I soldiered through. With my brother, sister, and a family friend who was our caretaker, I adapted to the duties of dressing and bathing her, doing the cooking. I tolerated her frustrated outbursts, baffling logic, and memory lapses. Slowly, sadly, I came to understand this shadow of my former mother who could no longer mother me.
“Yes, it was hard,” I would say. “But taking care of her taught me responsibility. I grew up quickly, became a better person.”
I clung to that shiny silver lining, carrying this sunny twist on a dark story through my 20s and 30s. But over those decades, patterns emerged. Romantic relationships, friendships, and family ties drifted away as I hopscotched from place to place: Baton Rouge, Vermont, Paris, Boston. I couldn’t seem to make anything last.
Eventually, I saw a therapist, who suggested that I might have difficulty connecting, trusting, being vulnerable. I remember her saying, “Ethan, that 12-year-old was abandoned. It must have been a devastating trauma.”
“Oh,” I mumbled. Of course.
That truth hit me like a body blow. I soon started telling a different story about myself to myself. Losing my mother on the cusp of adolescence had wrecked me. And ever since, I had been withdrawing from others to minimize the risk of abandonment. Recognizing that freed me. When I realized the rosy outlook I thought protected me was, in fact, hurting me, I finally gave myself permission to grieve what had befallen her. Us.
As I acknowledged my suffering, I began to repair. I stopped sugarcoating other tough experiences. I no longer turned disastrous breakups into tales of romantic derring-do to amuse my friends. I didn’t need to spin being snubbed by a friend, a family member, or an employer as some School of Hard Knocks lesson whose impact I dodged by moving to another city.
Instead, I allowed myself to feel hurt, angry, confused. I came to understand more clearly what was brewing inside me and why. Most important, I began to tell a new version of my tale to other people: “I lost my mother at a young age. It was awful. I was traumatized. I’m a survivor.”
When I said that to my first serious girlfriend since my revelation, she accepted me for who I was: damaged goods, but on the mend. Eventually, feeling safer and more grown-up, I committed to the idea of something lasting. I married her, we bought a home, even acquired a dog (eventually, three dogs!), all as I entered my 50s.
I’m not pretending I’m now a fully evolved humanoid. Far from it. I know my emotional black holes and try to avoid their gravitational pull. I still may flinch at being vulnerable, and sometimes I can emotionally shut down—just ask my wife. But when I do, I find compassion for that nerdy 12-year-old inside me whose mother was torn away from him. Today, when this nerdy 55-year-old panics, I don’t insist I’ll be better off for the suffering. Instead, I tell myself the truth: “You’re afraid. But you’re going to survive. You’re going to be okay.”
—Ethan Gilsdorf is a journalist, an essayist, a teacher, and author of the award-winning memoir Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks.
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