Have compassion for your younger self
By: Thomas P Seager
Tags: Childhood Memories, Trauma Recovery, Compassion, Complex Ptsd, Sadness

Have compassion for your younger self

This is me, Little Tommy, circa 1968.

There is a passage in Pete Walker’s Complex PTSD (2013) in which he implores his readers:

Do not take the side of those who bullied and abused you when you were a child. — Pete Walker, Complex PTSD

For me, the advice was a revelation.

In reading his book, I discovered that the criticism I levy towards myself was too often not the well-reasoned voice of self reflection, but the echo of exploitation and abuse that I was subjected to in childhood.

I was so young at the time, and so malleable, that I internalized the criticisms I could not defend myself against. Thus, I carried the voices of my critics into my adulthood, and I habitually turned them on myself.

Walker suggests that I stop doing that.

But how?

When I was child, my parents told me that a corpulent, omniscient old man named Santa would pass moral judgment on my behavior, and communicate to me his verdict by placing items for my perusal in this stocking my Mother knitted for me. They were right. I always got an orange, some fake chocolate candy, small toys, and sometimes baseball cards and comic books. I always thought Santa’s communications were ambiguous, and I came to resent his intrusions into my own self-condemnations. Being omniscient, I expect Santa eventually learned to leave me to myself. Now I treasure the stocking more than any of the presents it once contained.

I have a few pictures of myself as a child. Although I grew up before the smartphone, and before the digital camera, my Mother bought a Polaroid camera and she used it sometimes to photograph her children.

If you can remember your Mother flapping the undeveloped photograph in her hand while counting off the seconds necessary to allow the image to develop, then you might be a Gen X’er like me.

I came across the photo above tonight, and it had a profound effect on me.

In this photo, I can see myself as child for whom I have compassion.

I know the little boy in the photograph is me.

I know the circumstances of his life.

I know his challenges, his vulnerabilities, his confusion, and his innocence.

And I know his future.

I don’t know exactly how old he is, but I remember his view back then… just tall enough to look over the table top and almost see the game his Father was playing with some graduate student — a game he didn’t understand and to which he was not welcome yet, except as a silent observer.

Why would my Mother choose that moment to take this picture of her little boy?

Could she see his handsome features in their nascent state of development, as I do now?

There are his big shoulders, already outsized relative to his height. And there’s the top of his deep chest from which will resonate a warm baritone after puberty drops his voice from the child’s to the Man’s.

But these features are nothing but the whispered promise right now. They are what he may yet grow to become. They are not who he is.

He is curious, fragile, intelligent, and sensitive.

He is not yet hardened.

He is not yet tested.

He is strong-willed.

He is not yet strong.

I can imagine myself picking him up and carrying him home when he falls asleep in the car.

I can imagine laying him down in his little bed and drawing the covers up to his chin.

I can imagine brushing the thin blonde hair on the top of his head, knowing that one day his hair will turn gray like mine.

This is also me, Thomas P Seager, PhD, circa 2020. I am grayer, older, stronger, and wiser now than I was then.

Right now, he is heavy.

But not too heavy in my arms.

I will carry him.