Ages 1-3 Problems: How to Deal With Them?

Hi, Perna,

And thanks for your post. The literal facts of my first three years. I don't know that the literal facts (as opposed to my mother's personality) have all that much to do with it, but here goes. I was a 4-week preemie. Right now, I assume that late in April 1945, two months before I was born, my mother saw the same newsreels, photos and articles about the holocaust that everybody else did. We're entirely Jewish, and my mother was of the type that would really freak out on being faced with those facts. It's possible, I suppose, in addition to the fact that I was her first child, that that's what caused me to be a preemie.

For the first several months of my life until somewhere between six months and one year, we lived with my mother's parents, who had a huge house. So mom had support from her mother and from her sisters. At the time, my dad was starting a new business and working 12-hour days at that, so I don't think he participated much in taking care of me in those days. Some time in 1946 we moved into our own house and after that it was just me and mom. I think she tried very hard to be a "good mom" or at least her idea of a "good mom." They were on a limited income, so she made me toys and clothes. Sewing, knitting, etc. Observing her for the rest of her life, I strongly believe she had a life-long problem with intimacy, which prevented the kind of inter-communication which most mothers and pre-verbal infants do develop. Through that inter-communication come all kinds of assurances: that human relationships are rewarding, that the baby feels itself as a person of value, that one can communicate with others, and that mom really, really loves you and takes care of you. I came through it convinced that human relationships are terrifying; that I had no value at all; that communication with others is impossible, and that while mom may say, over and over, that she loves me, I have no idea what she's talking about. Then when I was 2 years and 7 days old, my next brother was born. While that was happening I was taken care of in my grandparents home.

So I didn't have the kind of obvious bad things happening such as happened to you. Just the imprint of mom's personality. The closest she could get to other people was as a teacher. She was a devoted teacher, and much appreciated by her students. But teacher/student was as far as she could go. I have no real idea of why my father stayed with her, but he was very attached to his four children and could never have left them.

Thanks again and take care!

I'm doing just that.

Thanks, Rainbow 8!

Take care!

ygrec, My adoptive mother was narcissitic and when I first entered recovery I heard other people telling their stories and thought I didnt deserve to be in recovery or to have any reason for why I drank like I did.

I also tinkled about with ACOA, adult children of alcoholics, not that my adoptive parents were alcoholic, but my adoptive mother was addicted to herself, and children of the self obsorbed suffer sutle often invisible wounds that are no less worthy then someone that had brusies. As I worked on myself more and more was revealed. I've also discovered that because my adoptive mothers drug of choice was herself, I spent a lot of my early yrs denying who_I_AM to become her mirror, and I found myself attracted to others like her and I would be that listening ear afraid of looking rude of I showed the fact that they were wearing me out with their me,me,me's and only now learning that I have a right to my own life and learning its not my responsiblity to make others feel important or interesting. Its hard, I tend to swing between being overly obliging to down right rude and blank people, yet to find my middle ground. But having a mother that only ever wanted her reflection reflected back and never seeing the baby or child is a deep, deep wound.

Are you sure about, "So mom had support from her mother and from her sisters"? If your mother didn't learn about intimacy, it's in that family she didn't learn it. Your aunts might have been vindictive, jealous, cold, etc. If your mother had come from a really supportive family, she probably would have learned supportive things? My mother was very loving so I am not anxious because of lack of love, I was born with an anxious disposition and I'm sure my experience as a young child didn't help. Two year olds are in charge of knowing where their mothers are and mine was inexplicably "gone" (in the hospital) and came home with aphasia when I was learning to talk! To this day when I get anxious, guess what? I lose words.

I would imagine your being early (back then when it was touch and go if you'd survive) and the War, and all those people who weren't best of friends/very good at supporting others are in the house, there had to be tension there that a baby would pick up?

Have you thought of or done any body therapies?

When your brother was born, you were taken away from your mother, back to the potentially "unpleasant" feeling house of your grandparents. If I had words at that age :-) that would make me angry? And, you're 2 so potentially right at the wrong time in your development (like me and learning to talk and my mother having aphasia) where you could potentially view it as a failure/punishment. You wouldn't have known what the setup was, that another child was coming, etc. All you know is you're separated from your mother. Surely you know about children separated from their mothers at that age? They don't like it much Some rage and some just get "quiet" and "good" or sad.

Why would you have recovered from that? I still have trouble being in other people's houses, I was only five when my stepmother got me and here's this strange new "mother" I wanted but still, strange/not familiar and we moved to her house and she took me with her most of the time but some times she would leave me at my cousin's house only it was her niece's, not my biological cousins; I didn't know these children and my aunts/uncles even as well as I knew her! She'd leave me to "play" but I can distinctly remember one day wondering if/when she was coming back for me? So I'm uncomfortable in even my son and daughter-in-law's house, babysitting the grandchildren; my husband has to go with me and we "both" babysit, I'd be really afraid (and hide it) if I had to do it by myself.

Well, I really don't have any strong convictions about WHAT exactly happened back then, which is of course why I want to go into therapy. Not that the point is remembering what did happen, it's not. The point is getting rid of the pain.

Take care.

This is the newer, milder mind body alternative health therapies: http://www.takingcharge.csh.umn.edu/...body-therapies

I was thinking more of body therapies like Rolfing: http://www.insideoutbodytherapies.com/rolfing.html#q6 (emotional release)

I've heard really, really bad things about rolfing for a long, long time.

Take care.

I'm going to raise a problem that just HAS to be almost a universal problem. Perna questioned the personalities of my extended family members, and she may well be right. For me, having been raised in that extended family, everything they did and were was, of course, accepted. It was a matter of faith that everything they did and said was okay. Was the right thing to do. Was the right way to be. I had very little contact, except school, with the family situations of my non-related friends. As a small child, I assumed that the world in which I grew up (largely shaped by my extended family, which in our case meant my mother's family) was the normal world. So when someone like Perna, who has good reasons for her statements, starts me questioning that extended family, I don't react negatively, really, I just feel very confused. It is very difficult for me to look back and transform Aunt Irene, Aunt Ruth, Aunt Norma and Aunt Frances into some kind of ogres. We met together for years every Sunday at my grandparents' house. Food, TV, games, lots of laughter, it was so warm and accepting. How could I ever think badly of these people? And yet they may have had the defects pointed out by Perna. Proved by what? Well, to me, at least, my maternal family had a large degree of not dysfunctional but completely nonfunctional members in my generation. People who either could not hold any job at all or, if they could, despite their obvious intelligence, had very low level jobs. (One of my cousins, with a significantly elevated IQ, was first a professional gambler and thereafter, for the past 20 years, has been a cab driver in New Orleans.)

The vast majority of us HAVE TO feel that what we grew up with was right. At the time, it seemed absolutely normal, even abuse. There's a big problem getting your head around the idea that these people, who you grew up to love and respect, did not have your best interests or those of their own children, in mind.

Take care.

Maybe an especially big problem, when one's T takes the line that "these people" really did the best they could, at any given time. It seems that there is a widely held opinion that accepting this statement is the only path to forgiveness and therefore healing; but very unfortunately, when it is something that truly cannot be said about some things that "these people" did , being in the position of trying to convince one's T that it can't be said can be.... exhausting.

I should know. Just my own $0.02.

I haven't the SLIGHTEST DOUBT that they did the best they could, nor have I any doubt that their best could have been wanting. But in terms of "heart," in terms of sincere care, that's where I have the problem. THEY WERE SUCH NICE PEOPLE!

Take care!

I think "the best they could" is just shorthand for learning to accept our childhood situations and the people in them as being human. I think we have to re-connect to even the bad stuff, and realize that we could have been/could be that too.

Yes, my stepmother struck me in the face, tried to spray-paint my hands black (because I bit my fingernails), scared the bejeezus out of me in her rages, belittled me (I left home because she called me "stupid" one time too many) and other, more unspeakable things but it was a bit of a war; I was not all goodness and light, was very passive-aggressive which, I'm sure, didn't help her raging.

Many of us have had affairs or spent too much money or been so depressed we couldn't get out of bed to take care of children, pets, others under our care, have leaned hard on those who love us because of our illnesses. We often feel badly about that but we "understand" that because we have our whole history, and it's ourselves whom we see more clearly. And yet we, for some reason, don't extend that understanding to our parents or, sometimes, our children; our parents wrecked our childhood but there's no sense that their adulthood might not have been one they could deal with, that we might have been fall-out from their illnesses and problems. Or, we might understand that intellectually but not with any experiential sense that they might have been as we find ourselves now. No, 99.99% of us would not think of molesting a child but some of us married spouses who have or might or have other sexual problems equally as worrisome. That's not different. We don't know things as parents, don't learn things until it's too late, have spouses abusing us and don't realize that that is often similar to what our parents were dealing with.

Ygrec, I think you had a good-enough childhood. I don't think you will find anything very dramatically wrong, but you might. Thinking of my aunts and uncles and cousins and growing up, the aunts and uncles all pretty much gone now, one cousin's mother committed suicide (didn't learn until I was an adult) and she and her stepmother got along as unwell as me and mine. What's funny, is I liked her stepmother and went to her for help and she liked my stepmother, her actual aunt by birth, and came to her for help; I now remember being jealous after my stepsister's children, my nieces and nephews were born, my stepmother's grandchildren; they "got away with" things I didn't when I was growing up. My looking at them from the outside, it looked to me like they got more love than I did. But what the situation looks like and what's "true" is all as it appears to me; I could have gotten equal or greater love by independent standards, but if it didn't look like that to me, than it wasn't that way for me!

Your whiff of brimstone and anger seeping up could just be from your point of view and that can be changed and is/will be changed (most things change over time). You didn't have that earlier in your life because it wasn't there. I think it's great that you're going to try therapy now to see if you can find where it has come from and why now. But it could just be from you looking and thinking about things that you never really looked at and thought about and realizing how you "actually" felt.

My aunt told me a couple of stories about when I was 2. We moved across country from Rhode Island to San Francisco in August of 1952, I turned 2, October 26. My mother was sick all the way across country, my aunt says she was "gray" when we arrived in San Francisco and she was immediately hospitalized for many months and operated on. They opened her head and found the inoperable cancer, closed her up and said, "Nice knowing you, you're dying," there was nothing they could do back then, especially for that kind of tumor. Anyway, a couple stories my aunt told me about myself; Halloween that year, she took me around; now I was 2 year olds so hadn't done this before. We went to the neighbors but I wouldn't carry the plastic jack-o-lantern that we using for the candy collection, I wasn't thrilled about going, had no clue. We get to the neighbors and they open the door, the women does the "Trick-or-Treat!" thing and drops a piece of candy into the Jack-O-Latern. My aunt says I looked in the bucket, looked at the lady, looked back in the bucket and a lightbulb went on over my head I grabbed my aunt's hand and dragged her to the next house. I can feel the truth of that story in my bones. That is Me. The other story is merely about washing my long, heavy, wavy hair:



Apparently I wasn't big on other people doing it, would cry and carry on. My aunt's solution was to let me do it myself and she says that was wildly successful. . . until the soap got in my eyes

I think it's the little, personal things that tell you about yourself and your outlook on life at any given time or over the long haul. I connect with the stubborn 2 year old who wants to do it herself, too. I'm still very much that child. I think you might be able to look at your attributes now and trace them back to what little you know that actually happened, little conversations you remember with Aunt Norma, some time you suddenly remember she gave you/didn't give you something and from then on became your least favorite aunt :-) Rank your aunts, individualize them and then ask yourself why you ranked them that way? Who was the most fun, the most serious, the easiest to be around, and why? My aunt, the one who told me the stories of myself, I always liked but my stepmother did not and was always warning me about growing up "to be like Aunt Nancy". Of course, she didn't explain what was wrong with Aunt Nancy and I didn't learn until I was in my late 20's, early 30's (she never married and, for women of her/my stepmother's time and age that was a no-no in my stepmother's book, something to be pitied and avoided at all costs). But I always liked Aunt Nancy despite anything my stepmother said and the uneasiness that engendered in me because Aunt Nancy treated one like an individual, their own person. She didn't see one as a "child" or other furniture :-) What were your aunts like individually and did you and your father ever share any conversation about them? How did you feel about sexual roles and tensions; yes your father had to work a lot but what did you see of any interaction between he and your mother? My father often patted my stepmother on the bottom and they kissed hello (and I wedged myself in between them crying "Me too! Me too!" turning the poor adults limited time together into a group hug, LOL).

My childhood was a "happy" one too, despite what I and my T call abuse, despite my constant anxiety (over being left or abandoned or not wanted); yes I have some horrific memories but I think they're larger-than-life because they're like nightmares, more startling than the good stuff. But I think there's a wealth of stuff there and that it's necessary to look at bunches of it in all directions, including possibilities for what our parents lives were like and our children's/grandchildren's, cousins, etc. I have a "lonely" but wealthy cousin, she was an only child and her father was diagnosed as bipolar after she was grown. I remember her room when we were children, she'd removed everything from it, it was empty by her own choice. She was sent to alternative schools and just grew up "different" than the rest of us cousins. What impact did my uncle have on my stepmother, his sister? On his child, this cousin? There's a lot of things that went on when we were children that we weren't privy to and couldn't have understood if we had been, our world was too small, was all "us". But the actual world wasn't ever like how we perceived it, only "our" world was.

I don't believe that at any point in my childhood I was "abused," as that term currently means, by any relative or anyone else. Something went wrong, very wrong, in one of three ways. First, genetically. I have no idea what I could have inherited in terms of neuroticism, proneness to anxiety or depression, or any other feature of my adult personality. Second, I don't know the technical term for it, but there are chemical and other influences that affect the developing foetus, that may have affected me in some negative way that contributes to who I am now. Third, there is the early relationship between my mother and myself, a relationship that I feel (without scientific confirmation) was not a good one, was in fact toxic and left out many things that attachment theory now tells us are necessary for normal development. But I do not know for a fact that it was that maternal relationship that caused adult problems, rather than genetic or "womb-related" developments. I'm prejudiced because each of my three younger brothers also became "walking wounded" and did not develop into people without serious, serious problems, despite the fact that we all have different personalities. That CAN'T be genetic. Four at a time? No. Everything points back to Mom's personality.

Take care.

Don't feel you have to push it too fast, though. That can get you into something that is more harmful than helpful.

Well, my take is that people always do "the best they can" -- and for some of them, that isn't saying much! That was the best that they could manage, and it wasn't what you needed at all!

I think you have to read this very carefully. It is not something (accepting and forgiving) you can "intend" and then just do it. I think it is something that you may come to in the course of your own healing, when you begin to really understand them. But feeling, or being told, that it is an obligation is not the way towards healing. Accepting may come after much healing; it is not the path to healing.

The path to healing is to know that you count, your feelings count, they have always counted.

I don't understand, Pach. I'm 65. I need speed. What is it that "can get me into something that is more harmful than helpful"? I frequently feel that it's a quixotic attempt, that someone of my age simply has to live with what they have, however painful that may be. But that brings back all those constant thoughts of self-termination, which, if I'm to live, I desperately want to get rid of. So what's "more harmful"?

Take care.

Pach, I agree with you.

Take care.

I know the need for speed (since I am old too). It doesn't work! Sometimes relaxing in the face of what seems to be an urgent need is the thing that works best, even when that seems like a crazy idea!

Of course, if the saber-tooth is after you, disregard what I just said.

More harmful can be a massive breakdown, regression, etc. I should know.

Have you had such?: "massive breakdown, regression, etc." As the result of undue speed?

Take care.

As a result of panic, feeling that I was losing all my gains into maturity, that I had no support in trying to recover them, and pushing myself to get them back.

Well, I wouldn't want that. Didn't you feel support from your T?

Take care!

I think we all agree, these days, that our personalities (and "problems") arise from a mixture (and the interaction between) of a combination of (a) genetic effects, (b) pre-natal chemicals, and (c) the post-natal relationship between mother and child. Not to mention peer environment later on.

Not knowing or having thought very much about genetics, I thought that the problems of my brothers and I were all the result of bad mothering. Then, thinking about it in the last few days, I wondered. My mother was one of four sisters (no brothers), all married with children. There were a total of 14 cousins in my group, ten boys and four girls. Of the boys, five were complete mental wrecks (in which group I include myself), with two more having serious problems. All the girls, however, were fine. They all, without exception, grew up to be full-functioning adults, all are professionals practicing in their fields, and all are either the main or an equal financial support for their families.

After thinking over the above, the thought occurred to me that there must be a recessive gene or genes on one of my mother's and her sisters' X chromosomes, expressed only in boys. None of my aunts, including my mother, displayed any gross abnormality. Then, I thought, that for whatever reasons, my mother and her sisters did have enough of their own problems to be unable to help their boy children overcome the boys' inherited difficulties. So the mothers wouldn't necessarily have to be very ill themselves. They just could be unable, instinctively, to give their boys what they needed because of the bad gene(s).

Does this make any sense to those of you out there who know anything about genetics?

Take care.

The actions of the T at that time, or leading up to that time, were what caused me to go towards the breakdown. He saw, or projected onto me, what I thought was an advance towards health (and I still see it that way) as an advance towards mania, towards mental illness. He could not believe that I could do anything right. His peers, as nearly as I could tell, backed him up.

I described to him an instance where I had stood up for myself, in a quiet but firm way. He saw self-assertiveness as aggression -- even though he had not been there to see what I had actually done. He assumed I had been the provocateur in an interaction, when (I thought) I had done everything in my power, short of surrender, to avoid that.

And since he was the "authority", I thought he must be right, he must see some fatal flaw in me that I was completely unaware of. It led me into a horrible spiral downward.

Sigh. Decades ago.

Not sure we could tell if it were genetics or environment...

What a lousy T! How long did you stay with him? I really am sorry you had to go through that. What a terrible time it must have been. I've had some bad T's, but nothing as bad as you describe. Take care.

Ygrec, these facts alone could cause all sorts of problems for a child.

You speak of anxiety issues. Anxiety develops when a person grows up not feeling secure.