From a personal viewpoint I still recall those teachers and family members who treated me with great kindness. I am fortunate that, by and large, my whole family was warm and caring, albeit sometimes emotionally reserved – typically English? I cannot say the same for the many teachers I’ve encountered in my lifetime.
It is only when you meet dynamic, kind and passionate individuals either in your family or out in the world that you realise how much better your life might have been. This year I met a man who was at school with me and he is the first and only person to tell me that he was very aware, when we were 12 years old, of me being treated badly by one particular teacher and that he was also very aware that he could do nothing to help me. Observing such treatment profoundly affected his whole life. Despite the challenges of his own youth he became a man capable of giving of himself to his wife and family.
I am extremely grateful to have met him and come to know him and his wife more than 50 years later.
My father was the youngest child in his family of three children and beloved only surviving son of, by then, much older parents. He reflected that loving care his whole life.
My mother enjoyed a warm relationship with her younger brother, just two years younger than herself. They grew up in the days of having housemaids to care for the children, not in the echelon of ‘nannies’. She married my father shortly before he and her two brothers went off to service in WWII. I know her world collapsed no more than a year later when her beloved younger brother was killed when the Royal Air Force plane he was aboard crashed into a mountain in north Wales.
She was just 21 when she had to find her father at work and tell him what had happened to his 19 year old son. His colleagues knew by the look on her face what had happened, saying, “It’s the boy isn’t it?†When she finally reached her father and told him the sad news all he could say was “Poor Mum, poor Mumâ€. My grandmother is reported to have cried for days after the news was delivered – who wouldn’t? Her baby was dead.
Years later my mother told me that only one of her many aunts asked “How’s Joan?â€, enquiring after her own well being after such a loss.
This trauma was hers alone to endure until she died in July at 92.
What I now know is that just as that pain made my grandmother tough which was reflected in her distant care of us, I now think it had the same effect on my mother’s delivery of care. She could no longer love anyone with the passion she had loved her brother – something inside her had died.
I also feel it was a contributing factor to her having Alzheimers in the last few years of her life.
I was born 5 years after my uncle’s death.
I now know that I am the child of a mother with PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). Her brother’s death, coupled with various other traumas, stresses and anxieties she endured during her WWII service as a Land Girl (The Women’s Land Army) now makes it clear to me that she had undiagnosed PTSD her whole life.
Move forward 65 years and in my daily work in an early childhood care facility I’ve become aware of young women, some are mothers, who have endured some sort of childhood trauma – emotional deprivation or manipulation, alcoholic parents; sometimes unidentified pain – it runs the gamut.
Those women, and probably men too (I just see more young women in my work) aren’t really capable of ‘giving’ enough to their babies or partners or the children they care for. They are very clinical in their ‘love’, finding it easier to give material things like toys, blankets, bottles, food, than their very selves.
When Donald Winnicott spoke of ‘the good enough mother’ I don’t think he was thinking about people whose childhoods disabled them. He was genuinely thinking of women who were good hearted and trying their best, not those who had been crippled by their own childhoods.
Since I’ve also read a lot about autism spectrum disorders and even cared for babies and toddlers whom I’ve suspected might end up diagnosed as autistic, I’ve reflected a lot on whether such children had parents who were traumatised in their early years rendering them unable to ‘give’ of themselves. Through long-term observations and conversations I’ve learned that I am right. I received further information yesterday that confirmed my thoughts.
Next on my list is to buy the book that makes the connection between autism and PTSD.
PTSD cripples children and adults. Have you ever seen children who are struck dumb by going into the care of a perfect stranger? I’ve cared for one.
Have you ever seen a toddler adopted from China or Korea, for example, traumatized by their ‘phasing in’ in an American daycare less than a year after they arrive in the country – never mind what goes on in their new home? I’ve seen one from each country adopted by the same family. Not a happy sight/experience for child or teacher!
Such children have lived in the trauma of orphanage care in their home country (reportedly more than one orphanage), then get moved to a country where no one looks like them or speaks their language……and then they’re put into a US English speaking daycare because their new English speaking mother (from England) thinks it’s good for them! – wouldn’t you be traumatised at age 2? I suggest you read Silent Tears by Kay Bratt if you really want to understand what a Chinese orphanage is like.
Bettelheim’s ‘refrigerator mother’ does exist – I see them every day.
Those refrigerator mothers’ emotions were crippled way before they had their children – it’s just that no one recognised it.
Unless people recognise their personal trauma and how it has affected their emotions they will spend the rest of their lives in an emotional roller coaster.
And in that state they ‘attempt’ to bring up healthy children – it just isn’t possible.
I see it every day.