Surviving our Childhoods and Self-Compassion

I am, along with most of you, a member of the tribe of “low self-esteem.” Going along with this are challenges with self-compassion. There is a favorite story amongst therapists about a Westerner asking the Dalai Lama about low self-esteem or self-hatred during a question-and-answer session. Turns out, there are several versions of the story since the question came up more than once over the years. But each time, it seemed to confuse him. There would be a back and forth with his interpreter trying to make sure he was getting the question right and surprise that this was a problem in the West. When Sharon Salzberg, a noted therapist and teacher on compassion, asked the question in 1990, the Dalai Lama was incredulous and asked the audience of Westerners how many of them personally struggled with this, and the majority raised their hands.

There are many layers to this problem. For some of us, it might even be inherited. Generational trauma can likely get into our DNA. But certainly, the roots of it are in our childhood. As part of many psychiatric interviews, there is often the question “Did you suffer any childhood abuse?” One of my patients told me this story: “My Mom had schizophrenia. And she self-medicated with alcohol. When Mom was in a rage, I remember hiding in my closet praying “Don’t find me. Don’t find me. Don’t find me.” If she were drunk enough, she might fall asleep before she figured out where I was.”

Most of us were far less challenged by our childhoods than this patient of mine. Other stories that play on my heart as I think of needing to survive childhood include several patients molested or raped by a parent, the all-too-common story of patients with a parent who stood casually by as a step-parent groomed then abused them, patients who were beaten so often that running away into the streets at 15 years old or into the military at 17 were good options. It’s not hard to imagine how needing to cope and survive this type of abuse might screw someone up emotionally, psychologically. But as it turns out, even idyllic childhoods can be a challenge to survive.

My childhood was on the idyllic (ideal, easy) side: a dad and mom who stayed together and rarely fought. A dad and mom who took me and my two older sibs on vacations to the beach every Memorial Day weekend where my Dad and his sibs and cousins would bring their families to a big lodge, an extended family of upwards of 50 or more of us gathering to cook together, and hunt clams at low tide, and play together, and share songs and stories by the lodge fire together. But I remember sharing a story from my childhood with my therapist, Bert: “I would sometimes get really mad at my parents, especially when I was accused of and punished for something I didn’t do. And I remember being in bed at night, plotting how I would run away and show them. They’d be sorry for treating me so meanly! But then I realized if I did this, there was a good chance that my parents would move away, taking my sibs with them, and if I wanted to return home, I would never be able to find them again.” Finishing the story, I caught the look of horror, or at least dismay on my therapists face, and I ventured a “Oh. So this isn’t an idea that most kids have?” And Bert responding, “No, Bill. Not everyone.” Well, not everyone had THAT particular story. But the foundation of this story IS a universal story understood in each child’s own way that boils down to this: “I’m a kid (baby to teens), and I cannot survive on my own. I need bigger people around me to feed me and shelter me and protect me.” We don’t have these words for it as a child. But its instinctual. We know it at a very primitive but foundation level. And what this means when a parent is chasing us around the house, beating the crap out of us; or a parent has just made us eat soap for eating Cousin Marty’s brownie, even when Marty said I could have it; we know that we cannot divorce this parent. We cannot choose someone else who will treat us better. There is a relational and emotional equation that needs balancing here.

Big, strong, needed parent being mean – Small, vulnerable, little person, in need, being valuable.

It doesn’t balance. As an adult, we generally don’t tolerate being treated meanly. We fight back physically, verbally, or passively. Or we tell the person to get lost. These are not options for our little kid selves experiencing the injustices from our care givers. This equation balances:

Big, strong, needed parent being mean, but their human, too, and behaving badly -- Small, vulnerable, little person, in need, being valuable.

But we don’t have the perspective, the maturity, the distance to get here. My own story about my family moving away was code from my inner wise self that goes like this: “Bill: your family does not do anger well. Bad things happen when you get angry. Don’t get angry! Don’t run away. Don’t even mention that brownie again! You’re little. You need them. Don’t take the risk of pushing them away.” And here is the zinger: “You aren’t worth enough. They’ll move away. Their love is conditional on you being good. If you’re angry, you’re worthless.” This balances the equation:

Bigger, stronger, needed parent being mean - Small, vulnerable, little person who must not be worth much and must deserve being treated this way.

When the injustices are bigger than hurtful accusations and eating soap, when they are about physical and sexual violence, about witnessing physical or verbal abuse over and over (whether towards ourselves or towards a beloved family member), the self-doubts about worthiness about value are correspondingly hit harder, and the language of the labels we take on are darker: “I’m bad.” “I must be seductive.” “I’m damaged goods.” “I’m evil.” And we go from feelings of being anxious about something out there to internalized feelings of frustration with ourselves, of anger towards ourselves, and even self-loathing. All of this is about balancing the scales. As vulnerable children, we know we need to live with the abuse because we cannot survive without the abuser. So we figure we must deserve it, that we are not worth anymore than that.

There is an element to this that is about trying to retain some sense of control. If the problem is me --that I’m not good enough-- then, maybe, someday, I can be better. I can do something that might make me valuable. By changing me, maybe I won’t be abused anymore. Learned helplessness (= no matter what I do, I’m screwed) is a horrible place to come to. It’s a cruel bargain we make with ourselves to concede worthlessness as a price for a possible future of worthiness, but as a child, we have few other bargains to strike.

The tragedy is that this all becomes habitual. There is an anxiety that develops with feeling angry towards someone we cannot afford to be angry with. We relieve this anxiety by deciding by internalizing the problem as “I must be the problem.” This is a pathway that becomes easier and easier and self-reinforcing (“see! I really am bad”). It occurs not just in the home but at school: Matt chose me to be on his team with his second to last pick! I thought he was my best friend (anger at the betrayal arising then anxiety about what might happen if confronting him. Maybe he wouldn’t want to be my friend at all! I need friends. School would be so hard without friends. I see how hard it is for the unpopular kids)! You know, maybe he didn’t choose me because I am no good. Because I suck. Oh yea! I know this about myself. I don’t deserve more than this! I do suck! I don’t need to be angry at Matt. I need to work at getting better!

It becomes habitual and ordinary. We no longer even notice we are doing this. We stop taking certain risks. We lose our sense of a healthy entitlement to being treated with respect. If we can hear our inner voice on this, it’s mainly a “that’s just the way things are for someone like me.”

So we come to be members of the Tribe of Low Self-Esteem honestly enough. But what can we do to address this? Just being here, reading this, opening yourself to considering this is a powerful step. Insight into how our brains have become wired can lead to self-compassion as we come to realize we did not have a lot of choice in all this. We were just doing the best we could with what we had. Scrambling. Hiding. Sucking it up. Surviving. A funny thing about insight. Sometimes it will unlock change. Sometimes it is just an interesting fact but does not lead to anything. I noticed in my teens that I hated toy poodles. I regularly had a chance to know this. My Aunt Julia had a long line of toy poodles to notice my antipathy with – Zsa Zsa, then Princess, then…. I remember in early adulthood sharing with friends how my toes would start to itch when seeing a small, yappy dog, reminding me of a toy poodle; I would imagine myself drop-kicking the poor little animal through some goal posts. My friends would look at me in horror and move a little distance away, and I learned that not everyone has these impulses with toy poodles. (“No, Bill. Not everyone.”) So I learned to keep these impulses private. In my early 40’s, my Mom shared with me a story from my 3rd birthday. “Of course you remember that birthday on Aunt Julia’s patio, how we all went off to pick raspberries, and when we got back to the patio, Zsa Zsa had gotten into your birthday cake and completely destroyed it. And you had put your hands stuffed in your pockets and jutted out your lower lip and declared “Not going to have no more stupid birthdays!” I had no explicit memory of this. I only held an implicit memory in the form of disliking toy poodles. Upon hearing this story, my dislike of toy poodles completely vanished! Insight led to a change in feelings and behavior. This can happen. It doesn’t always.

There are many practices involved in awakening self-compassion besides insight. At their heart, most of my blog posts and videos are about the work of self-compassion. I’ll just mention one more here as I’ve already set the stage for it. I’ve mentioned how I would take myself out for lunch prior to my therapy appointments with Bert. To begin with, and probably for a good year into this practice, it was quite uncomfortable. This was the type of thing that privileged people did, not Bill Brown from Portland’s northeast side! I listened to the discomfort, and I heard a disturbing inner voice. “You don’t deserve this. It’s too extravagant for someone like you.” And so taking myself to lunch became the work of challenging this inner narrative, this habit of putting myself down. It became this tangible act of bringing some inner grace and self-compassion to my one, wild and precious life.

The Summer Day

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean-

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

—Mary Oliver