Healing the Wounds of Childhood

An ache used to whip around my heart when I reflected on my parents. Although there were colourful splashes of happy times, growing up with them formed a foundation within me that emanated sadness.

Living mostly apart, my parents had an on-off affair, finally separating when I was around the age of four or five—the ramifications of shared emotional wounds and social and cultural differences.

Nowadays, I often forget I have parents—my father disappeared from my life a long time ago, and I had to make the difficult decision of having no contact with my mother; boundaries have become vital for my mental health.

A few years back, I was fortunate to discover an intuitive therapist. I was eager to dismantle my childhood family paradigm that had fucked with my head for most of my life. We worked through my lifelong inner turmoil and the numbness that resided in my gut. I can now distinguish this numbness as emotional scar tissue — the final formation — after decades of grief, abandonment, and disappointment.

And during the many years before the long, arduous journey of my existential excavation, I had struggled to share the details of my dysfunctional past; the flush of shame and sense of awkward worthlessness would wash over me. The comments were always the same: my family backstory was complicated and weird; all those children my mother had, the husbands, the adoptions, the half-siblings, and the broken family dynamics.

In our current times, family life has superseded the traditional/nuclear family ideology. We have single parenting, co-parenting, blended, same sex, non-gender, gender neutral, and self-identification parenting approaches. Yet these were unheard of when I was a child in the seventies.

Work colleagues were unafraid to hide their baffled expressions when I failed to contribute to the conversations about upcoming family events — or mother-daughter shopping days; keeping silent, I had nothing to bring to the table. Closer friends couldn’t fully appreciate how my background deeply affected me. I wore a bravado.

From being an alcohol reliant wild child to the intoxicated party girl, gregarious, charismatic, sweet, and spiritual. I struggled to make relationships work, and often unintentionally used people for survival purposes, ghosting many others who got too close. Or too difficult.

From a young age, I'd always been embarrassed of my mother, an outrageously eccentric personality. Once, as a twenty-something, during a lunch break with colleagues, my mother happened to cycle past us as we waited to cross the road. Not being aware of who she was, the girls playfully jested with each other at my mother’s facial contortions from her cycling exertion. My default, set to my extreme self-consciousness of my mother being my mother and shying away from the shame of that, hid behind them so that Mum wouldn’t see me. I was wracked with guilt for months—how could I be this way!

I was about thirteen when my father happened to pop by to see me, which was rare; he’d always leave his coat on (and I felt that). As he sat at our old oak table, looking straight into my eyes, he said without compassion, “You’re on your own when you reach sixteen!”

I felt shocked but had grown to understand unwritten rules; I wasn’t expected to question his words, and he would have only turned it around, even though I was the kid needing her dad to love her.

I remember the whiffs of alcohol on his breath a lot of the time; our mother overshared so often, that he drank too much and that money was his idol. She believed loving money was the root of all evil, and I came to realise this influenced my hard-to-shift scarcity mindset. She didn’t have the self-awareness to question the reasons behind my father’s insecurities about poverty. How could she — she couldn’t even weigh up her own addiction to religiosity, with the notion of hell and God’s wrath — terrifying me forever.

Yet to be honest, Mum had a long list of criticisms for him! We were unprotected from their openly hateful criticisms of each other. It didn’t help that my father’s ego was so fragile that his self-worth was driven by external factors, like having a flash car, and how important it was that people perceived him in a good light. Inner shame destroys everything in its path.

Although we were young, we could easily sense that his aloofness and his open mockery of our mother instilled shame in my twin and me. He had tried to free himself from being a part of that before my unintended conception. On the days I get low and self-critical, I watch out for that sense of shame he gifted me — I have the choice to see it for what it was.

For a big part of my life, on the occasions I witnessed fathers giving away their daughters in marriage, whether fictional or someone I knew, my heart quietly wept. I had once yearned for a relationship with him, attempting to prove my worth, only to end up grieving, sensing his inability to even see me, let alone love me. It took many years to shift that sense of abandonment.

On my last milestone birthday, I found out he had given his daughter (my half-sister by blood) away in her marriage ceremony. It was ironic.

The decades that passed, each year celebrating Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, would press on my fragmented self, reminding me how much I would have loved to have parents who could have the ability to be gentle with me.

My mother has had kinder and softer intentions, offering me words of support, and I was always touched by this; nevertheless, in the end, she would manipulate me with the fear of the wrath of God and an array of curses on my life if I didn’t obey her prophetic words.

By the time I was nineteen, I sought therapy, and it has been hit or miss. Yet it was my most recent ‘couple therapy’ after a painful relationship and a long Dark Night of the Soul, that gifted me insight into my learned coping mechanisms of co-dependency, and my lack of self-worth and boundaries that prevented me from reaching a place to understand how healthy relationships work, including one with myself.

Many of us haven’t been given an inheritance of healthy love from our parents and other family members — yet there is love through our creativity, faith, children, partners, and friends. I believe the self-compassionate journey we take with ourselves is one of the most important relationships to build from, as it is key to how we will accept others into our hearts.

In editing parts of this personal essay, originally published in early 2024, I’ve been astonished to see how grounded I’ve become. Having deleted a good number of paragraphs that no longer felt relevant or necessary, show me how writing is a powerful healing tool, and has helped me lay to rest enormous amounts of stagnant energy from my past, extracted through sharing my story.

I edited this essay to be a lot shorter to highlight the takeaway:

Keep writing down your words ❤️

© Chantal Weiss 2025. All Rights Reserved