I'm Here

I think I made a minor breakthrough in my CPTSD recovery today. I was thinking about my emotionally immature parents' particular style of neglect, which involved providing for all of my physical needs while completely ignoring a child's need to be guided through developmental stages and to be taught age-appropriate skills. I was thinking especially about the very basic skills that my parents never bothered to teach me at a young age, like tying my shoes. I spent many years embarrassedly asking peers or teachers to tie my shoes when they came untied, sometimes pretending some reason I couldn't do it myself. As I got older, these missed skills, like cooking, doing laundry, dishes, etc., piled up, and I became adept at avoiding doing or talking about skills that my peers had but I didn't.

This isn't the breakthrough. I'd been thinking about that for some time, and I knew that I had some trauma around issues of competency and intelligence because of it. Of course it's hard for a kid to deal with that vulnerability, even more so completely alone, so that aspect is traumatic enough in itself.

The breakthrough today came when I realized that childhood me must have wondered why his peers had these skills and he didn't, and I wondered what childhood me thought the explanation was.

Of course, what childhood me actually thought is less important than what my inner child spontaneously blurted out when I first pondered the question, which was, “I wasn't good enough for my parents to teach me.” That is probably what childhood me thought. Now another thing I was thinking about today is how children can lose their sense of humanity when a parent is extremely neglectful or hurtful, because the parent's perspective defines the young child's world and sense of self. And then it hit me. By avoiding revealing my ignorance of those skills (which is the same as pretending I had them), I was doing much more than avoiding uncomfortable embarrassment. I was defending, or perhaps faking, my human dignity, which my parents' neglect seemed to confirm I never had. So my sensitivity about competence is really about this anxiety about falling out of the human community out of ignorance.

I haven't yet figured out how to really process this realization, but I feel I connected some important dots.