Bad stuff can happen to us at any age, but it is the early life stuff resulting primarily from the familial actions that dissociate us the most.

Bad stuff can happen to us at any age, but it is the early life stuff resulting primarily from the familial actions that dissociate us the most. At this stage of our development we are the most malleable. We experience later events through the lenses of these earlier traumas, such that the earlier ones provide magnification and distortion. Early life traumas often set the stage for the later ones to happen, such that people not infrequently unconsciously replicate earlier traumatic situations and relationships. You would think that this would give us more incentive to hold our families, educators accountable, yet often we do the opposite. We find comfort in blaming our life’s woes solely on later relationship traumas, as if they happened outside of our historic family context. This can allow us to still feel some of the pain and rage and sorrow of having been traumatised yet simultaneously maintain a close relationship with our abusive families. We place the blame outside our family unit and in so doing protect our troubled family system, never having to heal their root traumas, and never have to face that reality of our painful truth.