Although I had done hundreds of psychotherapy sessions prior to these suicides, my core trauma had remained hidden for decades. In the care of a therapist, I regressed to being an infant, left in a crib with no support or care. A substantial healing process unfolded from there. The next day I asked my mother if anything had happened around my birth that she had never shared with me. She said “Yes, as we got home from the hospital, I felt faint and was rushed to emergency surgery for internal bleeding. The weird thing was that when your father came to the hospital to pick me up a week later, you weren’t in the car. I asked him, ‘Where is the baby?’ and your dad said he had asked a neighbor in the apartment complex to check on you if she heard a baby crying.”
Before going to prison, my father was an alcoholic, whose catastrophic financial decisions endangered my family throughout my childhood. I didn’t say a word to him for most of my 20’s. My father and I worked hard to earn the close relationship we have today. I now comprehend that his own unhealed trauma (and his parents’ before him and so on) was driving how he behaved with us and that he was not trying to hurt us. I have made plenty of parenting mistakes myself, driven by my own unhealed traumas.
