I don’t normally talk about how my childhood circumstances affect my adult situation or behavior. And, usually, I discount those experiences as “not that bad,” or “could have been way worse.” All of that is true, but it doesn’t mean that how I lived during my formative years wasn’t traumatic or less of a force. The deeply disturbing events that have dominated the headlines for the last few years have been a constant trigger for the traumatized. I didn’t realize that I was among the triggered and traumatized until I actually verbalized it to another person. I said it. Out loud.
As a gawky, awkward teenager, I lived in a foster home with other girls whose circumstances made mine look like sunshine and flowers. One girl was from a wealthy family, but they rejected her because she looked like her father – tall, angular, masculine – she suffered from debilitating depression as a result and committed suicide at 19. Another was a survivor of every kind of abuse that you can imagine and practiced serial promiscuity of her own choosing. I guess she figured if that was what she was going to be used for, she would dictate the when, where and who. Yet another was a girl who had been institutionalized by her family because she was “slow” – I suspect now that she was on the autism spectrum – she was not stupid but she was odd, socially inept and had issues with personal hygiene. Again, another person rejected by her family because she didn’t fit their vision of what she should look and act like. I, on the other hand, was merely the recipient of physical and emotional abuse by a step-parent that I chose to leave. I did the rejecting, so my experience “wasn’t that bad.”
I believe that experience is responsible for my deep-seated need to be of service (that is the PC way of saying I have a savior complex.) To do good in the world, and in my personal life. To be the answer to other people’s problems. To improve other people’s lives. To be the light in someone else’s dark room. To care for the downtrodden, the underdog, and the unloved as I wanted to be cared for myself. Every choice I have made as an adult has been rooted in this need to be needed. From career choices to relationship choices, I need to be needed. I need to be the solver (and the salve) of problems. I once accepted a job not because it would be great experience (it was) but because my future boss seemed to be really stressed out and needed me to help him (he was, and I did.) I once fell in love with someone because they seemed to be untethered, lonely and in need of someone to regularly provide a healthy meal and a steady hand. The expectation, of course, was that I would be adored, respected and cared for in kind.
Experts will tell you that continually trying to solve other people’s issues will not, in fact, solve them; it will, indeed, create other issues and are likely to result in burnout for the person who is trying to solve them. The savior complex helps no one.
So this is the primary challenge: how to be of service, how to nurture and support, without giving so much that there is nothing left in the well to draw from?
Which gives rise to the next challenge: how to avoid the resentment that comes from having given without replenishing the supply?
Which then leads to understanding self-care, and the ability to articulate our own needs, and what happens when we don’t have the vocabulary, or the self-security, to express that which would avoid the burnout and the resentment.
Finally, facing the challenge of recognizing that each of us is living a singular experience – connected though it may be – and singularly impacted by that experience can help us realize our own truth: That we are each worthy of greatness and we need not settle for less than that simply because our current circumstances “could be worse.”
