TRANSCRIPT
I’m thinking about an odd sort of trauma I had as a child. Something that I think a lot of children experience, maybe even most children, and that is the trauma of witnessing your parents fighting. My parents fought fairly regularly as a kid, once a month, once every couple of months. There wasn’t violence at all from what I remember. I don’t think there was any violence, but screaming at each other, real raging at each other.
I remember as a child going through one of my family’s photo albums, and there was a picture of my mother. She had a look of bitterness and rage on her face, and my father had taken the picture. He had taken the picture of her in the middle of one of their fights. I must have been a year old, something like that, because we were living in a one-room apartment all together in the same room. And that’s when it was, when we were there. So I can only imagine how many of their fights I witnessed. I remember some starting when I was like four, five, six, seven, and then it went on forever, as long as I lived with them. These awful, nasty screaming fights, bitterness, manipulation.
But I think where it really affected me most was when I was a baby. And I think about how it affected me first. It’s like my mother and my father were the two people that I loved most in the world and depended on most in the world. My stability was directly related to their stability. And when they were screaming at each other and hating each other, it was a horror for me, an absolute horror.
And then I think of another thing. It’s like if my mother had had an argument or a fight with anyone in the outside world, it would have overwhelmed me. If my father had had an argument or fight with anyone in the outside world, it would have overwhelmed me. And yet here they’re doing this with each other. So I think it really actually scrambled my brains to witness my parents going at each other, psychologically trying to destroy each other. And these fights were about control and about power.
My mother was trying to control my father. He had a lot of weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and he was younger than my mother. And she picked him for all these reasons. She picked a man who she could control psychologically, and she needed him for this. She was dependent on a weak man to control because she was vulnerable and she was weak. And my father picked her for exactly those reasons. He wanted someone who he could manipulate and control in different ways. And they were jockeying for power in their relationship with each other, both trying to be the dominant one. And once in a while, it would really explode.
And here I was, someone who compared to them was much, much more vulnerable. And I was overwhelmed by this. I remember four, five, six years old being terrified when they would fight, really being horrified and terrified. Two real things that you need to feel to have it be called trauma, to have your experience be called trauma. And this is when I was four or five. What about when I was a baby? I can just imagine. I can just empathize with little me, shivering in terror in my bed, being totally overwhelmed.
Now, age 51, almost 52, thinking about some of the nightmares I still have of that level of infantile terror. It’s that, it’s remembering this horror that I went through, this and so many other things. But it really went into the core of me, and I see this in so many people. They just don’t have a fundamental base of stability in the core of themselves because their parents didn’t model it. Their parents, like my parents, modeled instability.
And also, another thing that all this fighting did to me at a very deep core emotional level is it did not teach me how to resolve problems with other people. It modeled for me manipulation. It modeled for me aggression. It modeled for me trying to harm someone who you say you love. And another thing that it modeled, because this is what they did, is once their fights were done, nothing was really resolved. Maybe a little bit of external resolution about some external part of the problem, but then it was all just brushed under the carpet. It was all forgotten. It was all pushed into the unconscious and buried.
And I think what they would do is afterward, they would smoke marijuana, probably have sex, and then just pretend it never happened. And then once I got old enough and I wanted to talk about it, then they would both tell me what happened was a family secret. You are not allowed to tell anyone. And so what they in essence made me do was bury it in my unconscious. So they also modeled for me what to do when you have conflict afterward, and that’s do nothing. Just split it off emotionally, dissociate, forget your feelings, deny everything, and certainly do not talk about it.
And that is another thing that is traumatizing in and of itself because trauma is the unspeakable, the unsayable, the unknowable. And if you can’t think about it, if you can’t feel it, if you can’t speak about it, if you can’t talk about it with anyone, then one thing is for sure, you most definitely cannot heal it. And so through this, and this is just one area of the ways in which they traumatized me, just one area in which the ways so many parents traumatize their children through this, it set me up to become an adult who truly did not know how to resolve relational conflicts.
And in fact, what it taught me to do is to do what they did: manipulate, use power, dominate. And for me, going into the world as a young man, young adult, it was like I didn’t know how to have relationships, certainly romantic relationships, even healthy deep friendships. And it was very confusing and very painful.
Now I consider myself very fortunate in some ways, very rare, I think, in that I realized I’m not in a position to have romance. I have to have a relationship with myself. I have to bring this stuff up. I have to look at it. I have to speak about it. I have to know it. And I knew nothing about the word trauma then. I didn’t know anything about healing from trauma. None of this anybody taught me. I wasn’t reading about it, but intuitively I felt it.
And I started doing the opposite in my relationship with myself and with the people around me of what they had modeled for me. And I began healing. I began developing a loving, not crazy relationship with myself. And as an extension of that, I started learning how to have relationships with other people where I didn’t demonstrate this behavior that my parents demonstrated for me. And I say thank God because I can have a life that I love now.
But I was thinking of one other thing on the subject of parents fighting with each other, couples fighting with each other in these ugly ways. Something that I hear fairly regularly, something that I read about fairly regularly. I read about it from therapists actually all the time. They say, well, you know, it’s really normal for couples to fight. Every couple fights. And I think, no, they don’t. No, they don’t.
And I think what I have observed, I mean, I was a couple’s therapist for a while. I was a therapist for a long time, and sometimes I saw couples and actually to some degree liked it. And also, I know a lot of couples. I have a lot of friends who are couples. I observe a lot of couples in my travels. I live with a lot of couples and families. And what I do see, yes, it is fairly common that couples do argue and fight. And sometimes, like my parents, they fight like that in really ugly, sick, traumatized, unfair ways. They’re acting out their own childhood traumas in their relationship.
So in a way, the therapists and psychologists who say, oh, every couple fights, they’re kind of right in a way. It’s kind of true, but it’s not healthy and it’s not good. And I think that’s where I differ from the norms of conventional society because what I see is that when people really learn to love themselves more, when people make great strides at healing their traumas from their own…
Childhood, they don’t fight like this. They don’t fight like my parents do. They couldn’t, and they wouldn’t, and they don’t want to. And there’s so many other things, other tools that they have at their disposal when their unresolved issues come up. For starters, they can look at it, they can deal with it, they can know where it’s coming from, and not just act it out on their partners and destroy their relationships with their friends and their partners, and ultimately destroy the relationship they have with the people who are witnessing this—the young and vulnerable people, their children.
Because that’s what my parents fundamentally did. They destroyed their relationship with me in many ways. They destroyed my own relationship with myself. It’s taken me a lot of years, and a lot of decades, to make massive strides at healing my relationship with myself. That has come back, that has developed. My parents did not walk that healing path with me, so I had to let them go so I could keep growing, keep healing. And they’re still stuck in their old and troubled ways.
What I’ve seen with couples is if they don’t heal, they’re going to continue fighting. They’re going to continue the power dynamics—these crazy power dynamics—unless one member of the couple gets totally subjugated and gives in and becomes so broken that they don’t fight back anymore. But I do see some couples, rarely, that really do grow, really can work out their issues and don’t have to fight like this. And don’t to that agree that my parents did have to traumatize their children.