Childhood Disempowerment

These feelings of powerlessness, or even hopelessness, are almost always tied to my childhood experiences. They bring me back to feeling small and being unable to change the circumstances around me, in spite of my feeling responsible as a child for doing so.

I distinctly remember a time when my parents had been fighting pretty intensely when I was probably 7 or 8. I don’t remember the details all that well, but somehow my mother and I ended up on the outside of our front door and my father had locked the door and my older brother was inside the house with him. It was nighttime. I remember banging on the door and screaming. I felt this intense powerlessness, fear, and protectiveness. It may have only been a few minutes, but I remember the pain in my hands from hitting the door, screaming and feeling as though nothing I did was changing the fact that my mother and I were locked outside and my brother was inside with my father.

These intense feelings of powerlessness and fear have come back to me often as a parent and a partner. However, they are never connected to a situation in which there is any real danger. I remember one night Rob and I were arguing and I yelled at him to leave the room. He wouldn’t leave and my feelings of fear and almost hysteria were increasing exponentially. I was that 8 year-old girl banging on the door but no one was listening and nothing was changing. It wasn’t because Rob was in anyway endangering anyone in our family. My reactions were not about what was happening between Rob and I, they were about what happened when I was a child.

My desire to explore our feelings of disempowerment as children do not have to do with rehashing the pain of childhood, but to help us connect to the ways in which we can be brought back to those feelings in an instant. These feelings connected to disempowerment, when triggered, can be a huge barrier to being in the moment with children and others, in ways that are clear of our past painful experiences. Instead of being connected to the present interactions between Martel, Greyson, or Rob, I am reliving the past.

With Martel or Greyson, when I feel disempowered and triggered, I also imbue them with a power that is beyond the reality of the situation. I then put myself into the role of "victim" as opposed to owning the systemic power given to me as an adult and parent in our society. I impose on them a responsibility for my feelings that robs them of their experiences in the here and now.

Return to Home Page....