Two truths…

For a long time, I struggled with the idea that there had been abuse in my childhood.

Because I also had a good childhood.

I was provided for, educated, there were holidays, experiences, opportunities and plenty of things I can look back on with genuine gratitude. I wasn’t a child who grew up believing that everything around me was terrible.

And strangely, I think that made some things harder to understand later on in life.

When I started therapy and began looking more closely at my childhood, I found myself resisting certain words. Abuse felt too big, too dramatic. Surely you couldn’t have had a good upbringing and have experienced abuse within it?

But I learned that two things can be true at the same time. I can be grateful for what I was given and still grieve what I didn’t receive.

And what I think I missed most was nurture. Everything felt so cut and dry. There was very little room for negotiation, explanation or understanding. Looking back now, I sometimes wonder how different things might have been if there had been more gentle conversation. A guiding hand rather than an iron one. A choice occasionally, rather than an ultimatum.

I wonder what it would have felt like to know that my best interests were at the heart of the decisions being made for me, rather than simply being expected to fit into what had already been decided.

None of that requires me to rewrite my childhood as entirely bad, and that’s something I’ve had to learn. Healing doesn’t require me to take every good memory and contaminate it with what I understand now. The good things were real. The love that existed in certain moments was real. The opportunities I was given were real.

And so was the harm.

Perhaps that’s actually harder to reconcile than a childhood that was simply awful. When somebody has given you a great deal, it can feel almost disloyal to acknowledge what they didn’t give you. Gratitude starts getting tangled up with guilt, and you find yourself thinking you don’t have the right to complain because other people had it worse.

But acknowledging what hurt me doesn’t make me ungrateful for what didn’t. I don’t need to choose between I had a good childhood and parts of my childhood damaged me. Both belong to my story.

And maybe growing older has allowed me to stop trying to decide which version is the truth…. Because they both are.