Reality in A Childhood Lost

There is an emotional reality present within all of us.
I say reality, because our emotional experience is empirical, objective, and involuntary. Just as I cannot will away the check engine light in my car until the problem or signal is fixed, I cannot will away any emotional state. I cannot choose what emotional experience I have, nor can I alter it.

For some of us, we were raised so confused and ignorant of our own needs, that the check engine light was a bewildering and alarming sign. When a child is shamed, punished, verbally assaulted, or otherwise traumatized for having an emotion, that emotion becomes problematic for the child.

What is the result of pushing away emotional reality? What happens to a human being who is trained to not have emotional experiences?

They die. Not physically, of course. Just where it counts.
I remember a time when my brother (2 years my younger) was a happy, open, bright, and enthusiastic little boy. He was no longer that way by the time he was 6 or 7. Just as I was not that way by that age, either. J, our mother, would often reminisce in seeming complete ignorance of his current state, about his congenial character and quickness to laughter when he was young. She would smile in remembrance- “Tom was always so happy!” she would exclaim to us, her wide-eyed children. Never did she once address our current sallowness, our in-the-moment depression and quiet terror. She never once asked me how I was doing.

I remember poignantly my own frustrated panic a year and a half ago, when I first began therapy in earnest.
“I want to know how to feel my emotions, please!” I said to my therapist. It was a mantra that I repeated to her at every single meeting, week after week, for months on end.
The closest we came to having an actual discussion about emotions was when I related to her some story- and felt something coming up my throat. It hurt and it was unpleasant, but more than that, I became utterly terrified, and bit it back.
“There was something there- just there…” she said to me “did you notice? You hid it very quickly…”
I looked at her in quiet disbelief, finally knowing that she was never going to help me.

A child who cannot trust their caretaker to accept them as they are must become acceptable in order to ensure that they will be taken care of. If becoming acceptable means killing off their emotions, then that is what that child will do. It is after all, better than dying.

But please know that this is nothing more than pure sadism. If a man built a robot that was solar-powered, made it so that the robot needed sunlight to live, wanted sunlight, and enjoyed sunlight, and also told the robot that it was evil for having pleasure in sunlight; we would condemn that man as a sadist and a torturer.
But when a parent does this to a child, it’s just called discipline.