An Excerpt from Light on the Pond Scum: A Memoir
By: Julie Little
Tags: Healing Emotions, Spiritual Growth, Wellness, Family, Wellbeing

“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” Anne Lamott

To My Inner Child



Several years ago, I decided to do some “inner child” work in an attempt to heal some of the hurts that I still carry with me from my past. This was an activity recommended in the book Reconciliation: Healing the Inner Child by Thich Nhat Hahn, a teacher that I had been following for a number of years. The healing practice “combines the two practices of writing a letter and listening to what the child has to say. In doing this practice, it’s helpful to ask the child, ‘How did you feel?’ rather than reviewing the details of all that happened to you as a child. And also to ask, ‘What do you want from the adult that we’ve become?’” [1]



I started by writing a letter to my four-year-old self. At that age I had already experienced a great loss as this was the year that my mother, my brother, and I had left my father behind in South America. My fatherless self continued to suffer for many decades, and I hoped healing was in my future if I did this exercise.



I wrote to young Julie that I was alive, that I was a mother now, that I was a teacher, and that I was doing OK. I wrote that I knew her life had been hard, but life has gotten easier in my time. I asked her if there was anything that I could do for her.



Then I sat down a bit later and allowed her to write back to me. I just let my pen flow without much intentional

thought, and she wrote through my pen onto the paper, “Hello, I’m glad you are alive at that age. In fact, I am shocked that you are alive! I really didn’t think you could be. I am glad that you have taken care of us. The one thing you could do for me, I’d like a stuffed animal on the bed. I didn’t get to have one in my time. Can we have one?”



I was stunned. I felt bad that I didn’t have a stuffed animal on my bed, but I also felt like my young self was proud, proud of what we had done, that we had survived so many decades. So, I put a wonderful stuffed Teddy Bear on my pillow that day.



Growing Up



Some people never really grow up and some people don’t get to be children at all. Many of us have been raised in

homes that were not so conducive to becoming healthy and successful adults.



When parents are not there to help children grow up, there is a significant impact on their psyche, self-confidence, and self-acceptance. Parents who are absent, distracted, and even neglectful can create trauma because children grow up feeling unloved, struggling to deal with chaos, inconsistency and stress. One Reddit forum called Raised by Narcissists has 622,000 members and adds around 10,000 new members each week. Many adults raised in such a home feel as though they are most likely ruined for life. They have very little hope of change or improvement as they get older because they believe it’s too late to get what they needed as a child. Many feel stuck, and they tend to repeat the same patterns over and over again with relationship, career, financial, and lifestyle issues. Even when they reach out for help, there may not be anything out there that feels like a solution.



I speak from experience.



I grew up in a world of crazy moves, changes, and loss, which often made me feel completely invisible and

unimportant. I was twelve years old when I learned that my mother had gotten married over the weekend, had not told me, and what I thought was a family trip was actually her honeymoon! I felt so betrayed, and I remember thinking,How could she get married and not tell me?I literally shut down. I lost all faith in her. Emotional walls went up and stayed there. I didn’t have a real conversation with her for the near four years they were married. All I could think was, How could you? I am compelled to write my story because I’ve many other women who were hurt, damaged and discouraged by the type of upbringing that I grew up with and experienced. I hear these types of stories many times a year from the clients that I work with now as a life coach.



Often people tell me of their mother wounds or difficult marriages, terrible loneliness and feelings of not being

enough. When I speak about ways to become who you want to become in spite of your past, I speak from experience. I grew up with many different feelings that kept me down, lost and discouraged for years. I grew up afraid, feeling alone and unloved, invisible and unimportant and betrayed. There are many reasons for this, as you will learn. To some extent, this came from my parents’ own needs to be who they are. I now see my story with more compassion than I ever did. With forgiveness, and understanding. But it wasn’t always that way.



Even though some time periods in life seem like they are about just getting by, we can use the ‘mud’ of those hard times to create the “lotus flowers” of our next era or phase. The mud represents the hard stuff, the struggles when we don’t know what we are doing or where our lives are going. The lotus flower symbolizes the good times, the gifts that arrive when we least expect them. We learn from what we endure, if we are willing to look deeply at ourselves and at what has been our trial.



A Case for Hope



In spite of how you might feel, I believe that your upbringing, your losses, don’t have to determine the rest of your life. I know now that with a hand to hold, a mentor or a coach, and people to look to for help, we can crawl out of the darkness we’ve experienced and come out the other side much better off than we ever believed possible. We can surprise our four-year-old selves!



Many intelligent, creative, capable people feel stuck either in the past or in life because of their own experiences. The world needs these strong, courageous folks today, and I believe if we can transform, we can get unstuck and grow into the people we want to be.



Change takes work and persistence, but we aren’t doomed to remain as we are forever. I now work with women who have suffered and are trying to get unstuck in their lives so they can move forward. As a wellness coach, I focus primarily on issues of well-being for businesswomen, helping them learn effective self-care that will support their accomplishments in their businesses. It has been so powerful to see what listening and being there for someone can do.



My lesson from this life and these years of self-discovery can be summed up in this concept from Buddhist philosophy — the idea that where there is no mud, no lotus flower grows. It is harder to grow and blossom and emerge as a precious gift to the earth without having lived in some form of mud. This struggle and suffering is what makes you unique and even more valuable to your fellow beings and to yourself.



For over twenty years, I have been learning and gathering tools to pull down some of the solid walls that I have carried with me for decades. I have worked with mentors and read many books. I have done a great deal of work on my mental outlook, self-talk, and the stories I tell. One part of my process has been to write this story.



I now see that my life has unfolded in three distinct phases. When I was a youngster, before the age of twenty, I was focused on survival in my own life and in my mental health. As a young adult, before the age of forty, I focused on becoming as independent as possible, on having a life of my own. This meant I created distance between my new life as an adult and my old one as a youngster. Over the last two decades, from age forty-one to sixty-one, I have been working on the tenets of compassion, forgiveness, and understanding found in the teachings of Thich Nhat Hahn, as well as many other spiritual teachers. This phase has made it possible for me to reach out to my family after almost twenty years of silence. For a while, distance and silence felt absolutely necessary for self-preservation. Now I can show compassion once in a while in a way that felt impossible a decade ago. This feels like powerful progress to me.



From My Story to Yours



This book is for all those who have dealt with — or know someone who has dealt with — the aftereffects of childhood trauma of any kind and feel lost in their life, their career, or their relationships. This book may help you to see a way forward, a way to let go of the things that have held you back in the past.



If you feel like you are alone, as though your life experiences have left you feeling stuck, invisible, or unimportant, I hope you will see your own story somewhere in these pages and discover that we are all visible, important, unique treasures who have something to share with this planet and the people on it.



Welcome.



I hope you enjoyed this post — if you enjoyed it and want to connect, you can reach me here via email (julie.little52@gmail.com_ or connect with me on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/Jlittlehealth) or my website (jlittlehealth.com). Also, you can find my book on Amazon — here is the link to buy it: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1636765858.



1. Thich Nhat Hanh, Reconciliation: Healing the Inner Child (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 2010), 161.