Hi Willow - I don't know the answers to your questions, but I do know I lost my beloved Grandmother when I was 13 and she was the most important person in my life - soon after I started to SI and no-one knew.

You mention a psychologist - was that someone you saw when you were 8?

But reading what you have written one question springs to mind - how do you know your childhood was normal if you can't remember it? Just a thought.

I used to feel the same way, but then I really started thinking about my childhood and I was surprised that it was more "off" than I had originally thought it was. It is so hard to trust your memory when you had nothing to compare it to at the time, and just sort of figured everything was "fine". Or in my case you were taught to say it was fine and not talk about your feelings. If you say it's fine often enough, it seems fine.

It's really hard for me to draw the line between "oh, it was fine and I'm blowing it out of proportion now" and "Crap, that's mighty weird-sounding, why didn't I view it this way before???" I am struggling with that quite a bit these days.

I also don't remember a lot of my childhood. I would have said it was happy though. I don't know why. Maybe because we all said everything was FINE, even when it wasn't. That sticks with you I guess. Things are popping up more and more lately though. It's bizarre.

I had an ok childhood up to the age of 8 or so, but don't really have access to it. I didn't realise this until one day, T and I were telling each other stories and she asked for a story from my childhood. Instead of looking back at my life, I realised I was turning the pages in the photo albums of my childhood, as if this was my only window. Later, I realised that probably wasn't 'normal'.

I think for me this has happened because I received very damaging 'treatment' in my early teens which effectively rewrote my childhood into lies. It took away something quite fundamental, and even though now I can separate truth from fiction, I don't feel like I ever got back the childhood I lost to that treatment.

I guess this doesn't help you much- sorry. I just wanted to empathise about how hard it can be not to remember, and to wonder why you don't remember etc.

I guess I'm wondering what a normal childhood looks like.

I'm not trying to be snide here (it comes naturally) but honestly, there is so much difference in the way we grow up, grow towards things, away from things.

Putting too much pressure on oneself in the interest of being "normal" or having "normal" things or experiences is just not always a great strategy, IME.

Nothing earth shattering, I know, but sometimes memory fails and nothing is "normal."

Can you give yourself a break on this?

I can't speak much to memories or lack thereof -- I guess I'm not sure what it means or what is normal. But I do SO relate to this in many ways. It reminds me of a session where I was sitting and crying and telling T that I did not deserve his help, and he asked me why, and I said, "Because nothing bad ever happened to me."

His response was something like: "You and I both know people who have suffered through much more traumatic things as children. But that doesn't mean that what happened to you wasn't bad. It doesn't mean that to have something more subtle going on in your home shouldn't affect you deeply."

And oh my goodness how I can relate to this. I think some kids are more private than others, and I know that I was INTENSELY private. I kept things secret almost compulsively. I had this problem of hiding stuff for a really long time, well into college and even now I fight it. Often for no rational reason, I hide physical objects.

I also had suicidal thoughts as a child, not triggered by any specific event (I think depression has a pretty strong physiological and possibly genetic component for me), but they were there. I, too, knew to keep those secret. What I'm putting together now in therapy is that that probably had a lot to do with the fact that my family had secrets, and were seriously not dealing with a fair amount of *****. I think that perceptive children pick up on the fact that there are secrets, and can extrapolate then to start keeping secrets themselves as it is modeled as the appropriate thing to do.

I used to beat myself up about how secretive I was back then, in part because I thought, "If I had just told my parents what was going on, maybe they really would have believed me [although this was also a problem] and would have taken me to a therapist." But I see it differently now that a couple of things have happened recently:

1. I saw my preschool report card. I was always an overachiever and this was reflected in much of the card (I knew ALL of my colors and shapes!) but there was one section where I FAILED. Miserably. That section was entitled, "Social and Emotional". It stood out really strongly because I only had the highest "marks" on every single other section, and only average to low "marks" in this one. It was like, really mom and dad? No red flags? I began to realize that there were warning signs before I even got to kindergarten that were selectively (although not maliciously, I fully believe my parents wanted me to be ok) ignored.

2. I learned a really disgustingly big family secret. I am still overwhelmed by it, still incredulous about how it has been handled (or more accurately, not handled) and the risks at which my own parents placed me that I had no awareness of. But you know -- I probably DID have some awareness, but my child mind filled it in in a way that did not jibe with reality, because I had no way of knowing the truth.

I too wonder how my parents could not have known there was a problem. There were lots of signs -- and even my teachers picked up on some of them. But I was always a good student, and I think the idea was that everything must be ok if I can handle my academics so well. I think my parents saw emotional problems as the one thing I was just not working as hard on. Or I was "just shy" or "just sensitive".

And you have to figure that family secrets lead to a fair amount of denial. I think my parents thought that because they were "protecting" me from the abuse and neglect present in their own childhoods, that I must be ok. Meanwhile, their unresolved issues just trickled down in indirect ways. There was a certain amount of, "Well I'm not neglecting you like MY mother did, so what's the problem? You must just be really sensitive/spoiled."

Do you think maybe there are some family issues and secrets that you might have sensed that would have caused you to withdraw? Can you think of something about your parents that might have contributed to their blindness regarding your not eating?

OK now this is insanely long, but I could just relate to what you said SO much. I know for me the secrets and the unresolved parental issues -- they wanted so much to keep me from what they dealt with, they didn't even entertain the idea that other problems might arise -- had a LOT to do with my extremely private nature. I wonder if something like it is at play for you too.