Growing up as an only child I was a shy kid. I didn’t make friends easily, yet I was fascinated by people. I had imaginary friends who I talked to and consulted about various important issues. Whenever I would go out to dinner with my parents (a rare treat) I would have to consult my imaginary friends before deciding what to order. What to choose was an important decision, not to be made lightly.
I was born in New York, but my parents moved to California when I was five years old. My father was having a difficult time making a living as a writer and actor in New York and they thought he might have better luck breaking into the newly emerging television industry. But he had little luck in T.V., became increasingly depressed, and tried to take his own life a few weeks before my sixth birthday.
He recovered and was committed to Camarillo State Mental hospital to get help. My uncle took me to visit for nearly a year. I was fascinated, horrified, and frightened by the people who were there. I couldn’t understand what happened to my father and the “treatment” he received there didn’t seem to be helping him. He eventually escaped and walked the 60 miles from Camarillo to Los Angeles.
I grew up wondering what happened to my father, what it meant to be “mentally ill,” terrified that I had inherited whatever it was that he had, and wanting to learn all I could about what made people “tick.” I listed and watched everyone I knew trying to understand why they felt what they felt and did what they did.
I graduated from U.C. Santa Barbara, spent a brief time in medical school because I needed to have medical training before I could become a psychiatrist to fix people’s heads. I transferred to U.C. Berkeley in Social Work because by then it was clear to me that the social environment had a major impact on how we thought and felt. I’ve continued to learn more about how to help people but many of my learnings came early. Here are some things I learned early in life:
- The stresses of life can impact our minds and emotions.
- Some people are more susceptible than others to having emotional breakdowns under stress.
- Men and women are different in how they respond to stress. My father’s identity was totally wrapped up in his “bread winner role.” When he couldn’t fulfill it, he broke down under the pressure.
- My mother was more resilient. She had similar pressures to support her family, but she had a broader sense of identity. She could give as a nurturer as well as bread winner.
- Children come into the world with their own identities and life-lessons they must learn.
- Early trauma can have a profound impact on our lives that have both negative and positive effects.
- Our purpose in life often begins when we have to deal with early trauma. Our responses shape our journey and guide the questions we ask and the life-work we engage.
In what ways has your life been shaped by your early experiences? Are you aware of the ways that early losses and traumas may have had a negative as well as a positive impact on how your life has unfolded thus far? In what ways are you continuing to learn from and heal old wounds?
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Dear Jed,
another interesting article. I only became aware of the influence of early life experiences very recently. I started to wonder why …. some things happen. I started to wonder why I always have this fear of abandonment in a relation untill I discovered that the roots must have been when I was almost 3 and my aunt married. I do not remember any of it. But as far as the story goes, my aunt, living in with my parents as my mothers youngest sister, was studying for teacher for children from 2 to 6 and I must have been the most perfect guinea pig. My mother at that time was busy helping my father, a doctor starting with his practice, and having a kynesiotherapist consultancy for expecting mothers in several maternity hospitals. So I guess, I was stuck with my aunt, my mother’s youngest sister. And when she married, I told (according to the story they have told me) that she had to pack my bed as I was going with my aunt. I think that, for a 3 year old, at the same time, feelings of abandonment, of despair, of rebellion, of feeling cheated, of wanting to take action but being frustrated, must have come into my emotions. And lately, I kind of believe that this fear of being abandoned has been determinating not only my childhood, but my adult life. Especialy when comitment between partners or friends are involved. I have a commitment that kind of includes the myth of ‘lifetime’ this towards my partners or friends. I always considered this as a natural and beautifull thing. But maybe, seeing it from the other side, it might have been suffocating and having exactly the result that I always, unconsciously, feared the most. Realizing this, on top of loosing people I love, gives me even a more difficult time, because at that moment, blaming someone stops being something rational. Nor me, nor the other, nor my past, nor anything can be blamed. But everything has to be restored and mended… so : how to begin ? How to begin, when everything feels like already lost ? How to begin again, when signs of decline because of age, are beginning to show ? How to assimilate losses of the past and consciousness and feelings of guilt and how to work with it to get over it ?
Beautiful post, Jed.
I was lucky in that my Dad had a very positive influence on my life, which I wrote about in the following:
In the summer of 1964 I was a 16-year-old sports editor in the small Nebraska town newsroom of the Alliance Daily Times-Herald. My dad, Hugh Bunnell, was the editor and thanks to him I started working at the paper when I was 12–first as a newspaper boy, then as an assistant ad salesperson, classified ads manager, court reporter, sports reporter and finally, sports editor.
My workday began at 6 am. After a quick breakfast of Folger’s coffee, toast and mom’s homemade jam or Wheaties and milk we’d hop in Dad’s aging Plymouth Valiant sedan and with me driving, head down to the office. It was a short drive and we usually didn’t see anyone else up, occasionally a cop car or our elderly neighbor, Mr. Stevenson, who liked to get his walk in before it got too hot. And it was hot and dry during the summers, but not stifling like it is today.
Everyone said my Dad was the smartest person in Alliance, and while we seldom talked about anything personal or relevant to my hormonally driven teenage reality, we had engaging conversations about safe topics. I loved to argue with Dad because he let me be a jerk, never losing his cool but always ready with an answer to whatever absurd thing I would think of.
“Nixon is a queer,” I remember telling him. “His marriage is a shame, his kids must have been fathered by someone else.”
“That’s just ridiculous,” Dad would answer, and of course, he was right. It made me laugh, got our energy going for the day ahead.
But mostly we talked about the Yankees.
We were in Nebraska and neither of us had been to New York, but we loved the Yankees. For myself, I can actually trace this back to a specific day–October 8, 1956. Dad and I were up on the roof of our house replacing some shingles, listening to the World Series on the radio.
I didn’t know what a perfect game was, but as the afternoon progressed, the announcers excitement and that of the crowd grew and grew until I could feel my skin tingle. Dad explained to me, eight innings had passed and not a single Dodger had reached first base, not even on a walk. One more inning and Yankee pitcher Don Larsen would become the first pitcher to throw a perfect game in World Series history. We stopped pounding nails into shingles and listened intently to that last inning. I jumped up and shouted when was over, it was a wonder I didn’t fall off the roof.
Once at the office, it was time to focus on the wondrous teletype machine. My first job was to match up the printed copy with the paper punch tape. By reading the codes on the tape I could tell where an article began and ended. I would roll up the tape for each story and attach it to the copy with a clothespin and then sit it in a basket. There was a different basket for national news, sports, local news including the weather, and feature stories.
Next, it was time to decide which of the Associated Press stories along with an articles I had written the night before would make it into the Sports section. The Sports section was the biggest section in our paper because the publisher loved sports and it was his perception that everyone else did too.
We always included the baseball roundups, American and National League, and naturally the headline I wrote for the American League invariably referred to the Yankee game unless some player in a less significant game hit 3 homers. And then there were the standings and all the Nebraska scores, every Little League game in every town and hamlet from Omaha to Kimball no matter how obscure.
Occasionally I changed the scores–the same team that won would still win but instead of 5-3, I’d make it 35-13 to see if anyone noticed.
No one ever did.