The Small 't' Traumas That Seed Our Growth
Plus fault lines and aftershocks. Part of the Writing Home Challenge

How do we grow? First, we suffer.
We are born these bright, brilliant, curious beings, full of love and wonder, and from almost the first moment, we get bashed about by life. Hopefully, not literally, although yes, babies get battered. Many of those don’t survive, or survive with profound damage.
But even very loving, well-meaning parents can hurt our little baby hearts. They leave us to cry to “sleep train” us, implanting a fear of abandonment. They leave us hungry to train us into their routines. Sometimes, they drop us. Sometimes, they forget us. As we get older and sleep less, they might get stressed and shout at us. There seems to be no way around it. In the words of Philip Larkin,
They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad, They may not mean to, but they do
My husband and I thought we were doing a stand-out job with my fourth child, our daughter. We raised her by the continuum concept. I breastfed her on demand until long past her baby teeth, long past when she had the words to ask for it. We practised co-sleeping until she was six. She never cried as a baby, and people constantly commented on this; on how contented she was. We were looking forward to meeting the first non-fucked-up adult human we knew.
But we fucked up. Of course, we did. We were so invested in her being this “super happy child” (our badge of great parenting, give us a medal!) that we dealt poorly with the sudden onset of tantrums aged eight, as her epilepsy medication propelled her into an early puberty (and let’s not look, for now, at the underlying causes of her epilepsy!). Plus, we sent her to school for a couple of years, and you can be sure if the parents are properly messing up a child, school will do it for you; the fucked up teachers, the fucked up other kids.
As my husband said to me when we found out she was self-harming in her teens, “I feel like we made this beautiful sandcastle, and then we put it outside, and the world stamped on it.”
So the point is, we can’t get away with not suffering. And I’ve come to believe that it is actually important that we suffer because it is part of our developmental process. The more we suffer, the more potential we have to grow in profound ways as human beings. Look at those inspirational people who have gone through enormous hardships and now inspire others to overcome perceived limitations. Look, for example, at Nick Vujicic.
I say, potential for growth because, of course, we can get stuck in our suffering. I was stuck in mine for decades (ages 9 to 36). But when we find the will and put in the time to start healing it, that growth begins. Post-traumatic growth is a well-known phenomenon.
But as I’ve written before, trauma isn’t just the big stuff. The small ‘t’ traumas shape us profoundly, all through our childhoods and beyond. The slaps and the put-downs. The insults and injustices. And it is this — small ‘t’ trauma (rather than diving into the stuff that scares us the most) — where we are going today.
Polling Your Thoughts
Last week’s poll asked you to tell me how many childhood homes you had. The snapshot (at 57 replies) surprised me: exactly a third of you (33%) said four or more. That “constantly moving” percentage definitely got me thinking. Me, I had two in the UK and two temporary ones in the US (my Dad’s sabbatical year at Berkeley), but I don’t think the number would matter so much if that second UK home hadn’t not felt like my home at all (it was very much my stepfather’s domain, and we four kids from the first marriage didn’t feel very welcome there).
For this week’s poll, I am asking something a little more personal, something in response to one of last week’s comments: how scared you are of writing parts of your past? I want to focus on this in our optional EFT tapping session next week, and I think it’s useful to start feeling our way into the dark corners — while not scaring ourselves too much.
Humans are understandably and appropriately self-protective beasts, and if this starts looking scary, I know you might run away, and I don’t want that. So there will be no pushing or forcing here. Just a gentle exploration, beginning with bringing to light your awareness of fear around writing your past. And then, if you like, you can join me in some EFT tapping next week in a live Zoom session, so we can bring that fear level down to the point that you might feel safer on that issue, maybe opening up the possibility to write about it and start healing some hard-to-reach areas.
I used to run a weekend course called Write the Damn Book, where we did exactly this, pinpointing what was getting in the way of our writing and removing the barriers via EFT. Next week, in a one-hour live session on Zoom, I’ll show you how to do this whenever you come up against a wall in your writing.
I’d love to work with you on real-life issues, so if you’d like to attend and be one of the people I work with, let me know: send me a private message (email is best), and we can talk through what’s involved. I’ll be recording it for anyone who can’t attend live.
The link to register for the call is at the end of this post.
But first, let’s get a sense (for you as much as for me) of where your fear (if any) might lie by answering this poll:
Structure going forward
As you know, I am experimenting in this Challenge with the best way to be responsive to your needs. My plan from the outset was that our 12 weeks would fall into two halves, with each of those halves comprising four weeks of prompts, followed by two weeks of reflection and writing development. This is week four, so we are about to head into the development fortnight, where posts (still on Tuesdays) will be paid subscribers only, for privacy reasons, with no extra content for free subscribers.
But for the second six weeks, I’m going to try something a little different. In an effort to stop sending so much into your inbox (I know we all need less of that), I am going to combine the second six weeks with my Friday posts.
The first half of each Friday post will be a short personal essay on the theme of the Writing Home challenge: an example of something crafted from the prompts, and this will be free for all to read. The second half of each Friday post will be paywalled and purely for members of the Writing Home challenge, with prompts and exercises to help you make the most out of this life-writing adventure.
So, expect two more Tuesday posts (one, the live Zoom next week), and then we will move the whole caboodle onto Fridays. Hopefully, this will be a pleasing structure for all of us.
Now, let’s dive in!
[This part is just for the paid community for privacy reasons, and because these gorgeous people help pay my mortgage so I don’t become homeless as well as jobless, but if you’re a free subscriber, I hope you found this post interesting and/or useful even in its curtailed form; feel free to like it!]
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