Navigating Bumpy Patches in Life

The Long Arm of Childhood Can Bring Insights in Later Life

The experience of life is always full of wonder. Much of the time it feels that way for me. Yet the experience of my particular life doesn’t always seem wonderful. I regularly have bumpy periods that I have learned to navigate with the aid of faith, knowledge, and resources, both in and around me. Everyone’s particular journey on this front is different. There is no universal fix. In my case it is almost always the long reach of my childhood life that bubbles up to the surface and makes its presence known in the form of anxiety, sadness, or anger and is usually accompanied by a feeling of not liking myself and my life very much.

In his wonderful book, The School of Life: An Emotional Education, psychologist and philosopher Alain de Botton makes the point that despite our modern advances with the circumstances of life we have made very little, if any, progress on our inner lives. He writes that our childhood experiences give us emotional patterns that end up shaping our adult lives. How we were treated back then determines how we live our lives now, who we spend our lives with, how we treat ourselves and others, and generally how we value our lives and the lives of those around us. He argues that we must give robust attention to this lack of emotional education, not in the form of institutional reform, but mainly in the form of each of us devoting a generous amount of time and space to these dynamics in our inner lives. The benefits for me have been immeasurable, and I’ve found this time of life to be a catalyst in doing this work.

I have learned that my episodes of anxiety, sadness, or anger are not something “bad,” even though they can be pretty uncomfortable and unpleasant. And having gone through them and emerged on the other side with more understanding and more “light”, doesn’t necessarily make the next one any easier. I have also learned that the way to “fix” these feelings is to go towards them, to acknowledge and entertain whatever is happening rather than avoiding the feelings, distracting myself, or numbing the feelings, which I used to do with alcohol. (Read more in my book, A Life Yet to Live).

In fact, I have come to acknowledge that these episodes are gifts that my subconscious is presenting to me, mini-crises if you will, because I am strong enough to deal with the new emotions, insights, and information these feelings present to me. In this way I feel I have a “great guide” inside me that leads me from lesson to lesson. With each lesson I see more of my internal world, step by step, with greater freedom and breadth after each one. These are not intellectual or “thinking” lessons. Without the difficult emotions that accompany their birth they wouldn’t happen.  And the more I experience them the more insight I have about their reappearance. A therapist, or good friend, or support group can help with them, but ultimately the work that needs to be done is inside me and my responsiblity to deal with for my own well-being.

Getting Stuck and Unstuck

Here is an example of a recent episode where unpleasant feelings surfaced. Over a period of a few weeks, I noticed I was feeling “subdued.” It wasn’t sadness and didn’t keep me from doing anything, but it did slow me down and force me to pay more attention to the fact that I wasn’t feeling quite right. Mostly, it was a steady presence of somberness, of not being cheerful and upbeat, accompanied by a sense of apprehension. I also often felt very emotional, on the verge of tears. By accepting how this felt I learned to tolerate and appreciate being this way and resolved to see it through, not avoid it, and go on whatever ride it would take me.

My first big insight was to connect this feeling with the atmosphere of my childhood home. I realized I lived in a “house of sadness” for much of my childhood. My father first got sick with pancreatic cancer when I was 3 or 4. He had an operation and managed to live for another few years. But the atmosphere of fear, sadness, and anxiety about the future pervaded our house as well as my mother’s existence, before, during, and after his death. This same subdued, “non-joyous” feeling is what I was feeling now. I realize this pervasive feeling has been in the background for most of my life, and I have largely hidden from it, or avoided it, for much of my adult life. Once I realized this, I allowed myself to occupy that emotional world more fully, even though it was uncomfortable and unpleasant.

This “non-joyous” feeling lasted another week or two and led to many associations and memories from that time, mostly having to do with my fear and anxiety in my childhood years about what would happen to me, whether any of what was happening to my father was my fault, or whether I could somehow fix it. I was a frightened little child in horrible circumstances, which were no one’s fault. How I was feeling now, in my adult life, was a reflection of what was going on back then. As a child, I regularly wished for relief and insight to help me through that relentless, challenging situation.

I then had a day or two of more pronounced sadness. It was hard holding on and not trying to avoid the feeling or distract myself. I still went to the gym and did my other health practices, but I did them half-heartedly and without any spontaneity. Then one night I felt a new emotion that I don’t even remember feeling before, compassion and support for that little boy for the suffering he had to endure back then. I even hugged a pillow as if it were my little boy self and said, “You weren’t responsible for all that. You didn’t deserve all that. Life handed you a rotten set of conditions to live through at that age when you couldn’t understand or cope with them. Your mother and father were victims themselves. They suffered too. The whole family was lost.”

I went back to sleep, and when I woke up in the morning I was full of relief, with a whole new set of gentler emotions and understanding for what had happened, not the resentment and jealousy I had experienced for much of my life for having been deprived of a father and a caring mother.

I have abbreviated a much more detailed and longer story for the sake of this post. The full path to arrive at this insight involved conversations with my daughters, close friends, and my therapist as well as lots of reading and journal writing, which tend to help me make connections. But the point is that we all have our inner demons and dynamics as well as ways to handle them, or not.  These dynamics are also intertwined with and affect my current passion for life and motivation to stay healthy. And most of all they remind me of, and reinforce, the great power within me that helps lead me through this labyrinth of life. It is the same healing power that keeps me alive.

As Alain de Botton points out in his book, there is no expiration date on emotional issues. Just because we are adults, or seniors, these dynamics don’t stop. Later life, without the pressures of working and raising families, is an excellent time to allow these feelings to emerge and address them. Taking time to address my emotions, even the uncomfortable and unpleasant ones, is a big part of the extra freedom I now enjoy in living my life yet to live.