Life transitions during childhood like divorce, moving, death of a loved one, or family illness can profoundly shape us well into adulthood. As kids, we rely on stability, routine, and our caregivers to help us feel safe and secure. When big changes disrupt that sense of normalcy and security, it can be extremely difficult to process. We might grapple with fears, confusion, sadness, or other big emotions that we don’t yet have the tools or maturity to handle.

These early life shakeups often continue to impact us even after we’ve grown up. The way we were able to cope (or not cope) with major transitions at such a young age can leave imprints on our sense of self, relationships, and worldview going forward. While we can’t erase the past, there are thoughtful ways for adults to re-examine childhood transitions and minimize the lingering effects on current life and happiness.

My Mum’s Transition Overload

Over the last several years, I have been on a quest to both understand and heal some things from my childhood and adolescence. Like many, I don’t personally remember the earliest major transitions in my life, but I do recall how they impacted my mum, and how that in turn impacted me. Recently I wrote about transition overload, and how when life changes come rapidly and repeatedly, it can create a state of constant instability and uncertainty that takes a real toll.

While I’m not sure of the sequence of the following events, I know that they all happened in a two to three year period, before I started school. My mum was the youngest of 5 children, and the only girl. When she was 7 years old, her father broke his back in a mining accident, and he was bedridden for the remainder of his life. This threw the family into poverty, and my mum had to leave school and get a job at 15, to help make ends meet. As a result, my mother and grandmother were incredibly close.

My grandmother died suddenly before my 3rd birthday, and it hit my mother very hard. Around the same time, she slipped her disc badly when she was lifting me and my pushchair down off a bus. She was flat on her back in bed for weeks, and always had a lot of problems with her back after that. Also around the same time, she had a late term miscarriage, which she would tell me was the daughter that she’d always wanted. Somewhere in among all of this, she experienced a nervous breakdown, considered ending her marriage, and also contemplated suicide. On top of that, one of her brothers had a heart attack and died, when he was only 51.

So How Did That Impact Me?

I don’t remember any of those events, with the exception of my parent’s going to my uncle’s funeral. What I remember is my mum’s emotional unavailability. I remember her having ‘bad nerves’, taking ever-increasing doses of prescribed anti-anxiety medications (e.g. Librium, Valium, etc.). I remember her not having the time or the patience for me, and my dad stepping in and stepping up. By the time I was 9 or so, she was starting to have physical problems. These were misdiagnosed as ‘nervous stomach’, which was treated with even more anti-anxiety medications. What wasn’t known then was that this class of drugs (benzodiazepines) can be very hard on the liver, and so over time, she developed chronic liver disease. Her physical symptoms continued to worsen, and by the time I was 12, they decided that they needed to remove her gall bladder. During the operation, they determined that her liver was severely compromised, and she was finally diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver. While they were able to slow the progress somewhat, and manage some of the  complications via medications, it was effectively a death sentence. She died 5 years later, at the age of 49. I was 17. 

I remember deciding that my adolescence was over, and needing to jettison anything from my childhood. As the youngest of 3 boys, I’d been the one to inherit many of brothers’ books and toys, along many of my mum’s childhood books. All of these, in addition to all of my own toys  and books (so many much loved books) were summarily disposed of. I think that I just felt that they were too painful to keep. I understand why I did that, but often wish that someone would have offered to look after them for me, so I might still be enjoying them now.

For the longest time I felt cheated, because I’d believed that my relationship with my mum would magically transform when I went to university, and she died before we got to that point. While I didn’t use these words, I resented my mum for getting sick, for her illness being the centre of our family life for so long, and then for her dying before I was able to experience the relationship with her that I’d always wanted.

I wasn’t really aware of the resentment that I was carrying, but when I went into therapy after my 2nd marriage imploded, I realized that that was a pattern in my relationships, and because I wanted to break that pattern, I decided to dig deeper.

Tools and Techniques That Can Help

Major childhood transitions inevitably leave an imprint on the adults we become. Below are some tools and techniques that can really help us to revisit these events that are often ‘frozen in time’, allowing us to examine the lingering effects, process our emotions, and to adopt healthier perspectives. We can’t change our past, but we can change the way that we think and feel about it, minimizing the power that it holds over us.

A combination of writing and therapy started to unlock things for me. Therapy showed me that I had internalized some false narratives around my mum’s lack of emotional availabilty (I’d decided that it was all my fault, which resulted in me having self-esteem issues), which needed to be explored, understood, and then rewritten. When I relocated to Florida, the change of scenery led to some deep introspection. Diving deep into holistic healing modalities (e.g. meditation, sound healing, energy healing, yoga, acupuncture, breathwork, art therapy, etc.), I gave myself permission to go within, uncovering memories and feelings that were frozen in time, allowing me to revisit and reframe them. It sounds cliched, but I ultimately realized and accepted that my mum had loved me to the best of her abilities.

With that insight, I was able to both forgive myself and my mum. From that healthier perspective, I was able to talk about the past with my brother, who was able to fill in some of the gaps for me. One night he told me that he remembered that mum had ‘bad nerve’ before I was born. Mixed with the sadness of all that she went through, there was also this feeling of relief that I hadn’t been responsible for her mental health issues.

Lastly, I fully embrace that some positive things did come from that very challenging time in my life. Because I wasn’t getting that emotional nurturing from my mum, my dad became the one who gave me that, surrounding me with love.  He and I had a truly wonderful relationship, and he was my best friend. He was a supermarket manager, which he ran like a corner store. His employees were like members of the family. Given the difficult circumstances of his own childhood, he chose love, and never faltered in sharing that love with others.