Many of the wounds I have from childhood are from incomplete stories. A simple example: my mother used to punish me severely for things that I had no idea were “wrong”. Not only did I go through physical pain, but I was tormented by the abrupt withdrawal of love, and the horrible confusion over what had happened and why.
In a vain attempt to complete my story and make sense out of it, I concluded at various times that I must be bad and must have deserved the punishment; that the world was a dangerous place where I could never predict what would make someone angry and hurt me, that I was incapable of trusting my insides to tell me if something was right or wrong.
Incomplete stories carry a deep passionate energy to try to make sense out of them, an allure to bring them to some kind of resolution. And in our attempts to make sense of them, we recreate a scene, set it up with characters from the present without their permission, and start to act out the roles, looking for answers. Thus, those battered as children tend to unconsciously recreate the drama by becoming involved with someone where the feelings of being battered are present once again - hoping this time to do it differently, to find a happy ending. They hope to finally get mother to love them, or to be good enough this time, or to not be weak, or not be strong, and maybe this time they will get what they really needed.
The process to try to complete my story went on unconsciously in my adult life in forms of vague feelings and irrational beliefs. I did not have the benefit of the conscious mind to guide me, with its logic, accumulated experience of the real world, wisdom we have accumulated about relationships. Instead, the unconscious mind tries the old child-like solutions once again - we are bad, they are bad, life is unfair, don’t do anything to anger anyone, get them before they get you.
Today, I now see that the story was not complete. There were many pieces to the puzzle I did not know as a child. My mother was unhappy and lonely, having a husband who could not talk about feelings any more than her own father had been able to. In her world, men were incapable of bonding, and she desperately wanted a girl to share her life with. Being the last of two sons, I became her last hope for the family she wanted to badly - and thus a disappointment.
Another piece to the puzzle came from studying the harsh child-rearing system popular at the time, and espoused by the church, which she was devoted to. She believed that harsh punishment was the best thing to do, and unwittingly injected me with fear of anger and violence that hinders me to this day.
As I have worked through understand my past and its effect on my present, and applying adult knowledge and reason to it, the story starts to make sense. Instead of the story illustrating how dangerous the world is, or about how bad I am, the story illustrates the tragedy of lack of self-awareness, and the pathos of destruction and pain wrought by it. It is about a mother who make horrible mistakes in raising her child, and how her disappointment at having a son transformed into abusive anger, that caused unmeasurable pain throughout her son’s adult life. The story is a greek tragedy, not a good-guy, bad-guy story - it is not there to teach simplistic moralistic lessons. Instead, it is the tale of human weakness and ignorance, and the harm that can come from it. It is there so we can fully absorb the pathos of tragedy, to feel again our own pain, and ultimately to know that it is just a story.
Today, rather than continually questioning if I am okay, I grieve over the tragedy of our family. Today, rather than the insecurity of the unanswerable, there is peace after a good cry.
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