One of my greatest fears is that I’m so damaged at my core that I’ll never be whole or “good enough.” This sense of defect comes from very early survival-level fears of being abandoned. This all began when my parents divorced when I was a baby, and my mom, older sister and I moved across country to be near my grandparents 4 states east of where I was born and my father lived. My mother remarried when I was 3 years old (the first of my three stepfathers), and I was instructed to call my new stepfather “Daddy.” So when at 4 I was told I was going to FLY to go visit my “real daddy,” I was very confused. I only knew my mother and only caregiver had just placed me on a commercial airline jet to go see someone I didn’t know as an unaccompanied minor, told to say I was 5 (since that was the minimum age required to fly alone), and instructed to “be a good girl.” But I wasn’t because I wet my pants waiting for my real daddy to reach the gate and he didn’t know what to do with me (and I was certain he wanted to send me to someone else for “messing up.”)

What parents would leave a 4-year-old to deal with that alone in this day and age? I didn’t even ask myself that question until I was 54 years old and trying to understand my “anxious” attachment style. Because it didn’t just happen once. No, I did this every summer and at least one holiday a year. I was constantly saying goodbye to people I loved at airports… throughout the entirety of my childhood and college years.

This early pattern of being flown from one family to another resulted in a grasping panic at the moment of leaving my current parent, preceded by a increasing tension and sense of dread and sadness about the impending goodbye. These goodbyes were ALWAYS hard because I ALWAYS bonded with whichever family I was with at the time. My dream all the way through high school was that my WHOLE family had a giant palace somewhere so that we could all live together. It’s laughable now that i never thought about their lives in their separate cities – and that I actually thought they would live together, essentially, because of ME. As if the concept of ME ever kept my parents under the same roof!

But I don’t want to go down my “rabbit hole” here. I want to think of all of the benefits I’ve received from being born to my parents when I was, where I was, and having the childhood and upbringing I had. It’s in my ENFP optimistic nature to have to find the sweet in the bitter, so these are the BENEFITS I believe I received from my chaotic formative years:

1. I was born as a sensitive child to begin with (not a ‘HSC’ highly sensitive child, just more sensitive than most). I realize if this trait had been absent, I probably wouldn’t have imprinted everything so deeply and suffered so much pain. Yet I would never change this part of me. Why? It’s ESSENTIAL to my personhood, wrapped around the double-helixes of my emotional DNA. I can’t imagine being me without my more heightened emotional responses to the stimuli of life.

2. That grabbing, clutching fear when leaving each parent at the airport is a major driver of my fear of abandonment machine that I have allowed to drive all OVER my adult life! And I think the reason I get that panicky and UNBEARABLE ‘what did I do wrong NOW?’ feeling when a relationship goes South is rooted in this SPECIFIC childhood trauma. It’s always ugly when it rears its head, and it always leads to the opposite outcome (push away) of what I intended in the moment (please draw near). I throw out these angry-seeming or equally gushing words in my begs for reassurance, and I’ve got the cringe-worthy texts to prove it. But the goal here is to look at what benefit, if any, I experienced from these traumatic experiences. And the main one that was fed by these in particular is my RESILIENCE; my survivability. I was always terrified that my heart would literally explode with anguish each and every time I said goodbye to my parents at an airport gate. I could never stop the tears as I boarded that long walkway to the plane. I remember one flight where I actually cried until halfway through the flight, but that was the exception rather than the rule. Usually I was no longer crying by the time I reached the cockpit, and each flight I completed proved I could survive the separation from my caregivers. I had to experience the pain of the separation in the moment; and in that moment, walk away anyway. Such bravery was expected from this scared cryer of a little girl who WAS and IS great big strong me! And just look at what a force I am now, people!

3. This is really a re-statement of #2, but here goes anyway: I learned at a very young age to adapt to my surroundings in order to survive. I believe this is why I’m still here – if not yet fully thriving, I’m at least energetically growing, learning, and becoming a better version of myself every day. And that’s not nothing!

July 30, 2021