I think avoidants from tight-knit families of origin face special challenges.
I grew up in a stable Italian-American home. My parents were married for 50+ years before my mom died. We ate dinner together every night. Aunts, uncles and cousins were always around.
It all seemed normal, healthy – even ideal.
When I found myself struggling with relationships as an adult, it didn’t occur to me that the root causes might lay in my family of origin.
The seeming-normalcy of my family hid the depth of my wounding. I think it prevented me from understanding myself and my experience and getting the help I really needed.
As children, all we know is what’s around us. How could I, or any child for that matter, understand what is missing, what we need but aren’t getting?
All I had were clues.
For example, the fact that I moved far away from my family as an adult.
And the fact that my memories of childhood were sparse and laced with fear and anxiety.
And the most obvious one: the fact that I couldn’t maintain a stable healthy relationship as an adult.
For most of my adulthood, I chalked up those relationship challenges to not meeting the right person.
Whatever flaws I saw in my parents I dismissed and brushed aside. “That’s just how they are.” “No one’s perfect.” “It’s annoying but whatever.”
Though I wasn’t aware of it at the time, I am now aware that reflecting more deeply on my parents’ flaws would have felt disloyal, like an act of betrayal, a self-indulgent ingratitude and lack of appreciation for all they had done. This is the impossible position of a child of enmeshment.
Later, after decades of failed relationships and a marriage in crisis, I had no choice but to confront the reality that I had been deeply wounded, indeed traumatized, during my childhood.
My dismissive behaviors, my overwhelming triggers, my explosive rage – all made it impossible to deny.
For the sake of my marriage and children, I finally started to take my psychic injuries more seriously.
In recovery, I started to learn what children need to emerge as secure and grounded in adulthood. A stable home is important, of course. But fundamentally, children need so much more.
They need to feel their inner world is seen and respected and welcomed and encouraged. They need to feel safe in being themselves. They need to feel cherished and delighted in. They need to feel soothed and comforted through the enormous challenges of growing up.
I love my parents, but they were just incapable of giving me these things.
The climate in our home was fearful and anxious. It was not safe to share feelings. It was not safe to be vulnerable. We were always on edge, tiptoeing around my mom’s moods, terrified of her explosive anger.
My dad was distant and detached, around yet absent. Somehow it was like we were there for our parents but they weren’t there for us, not deeply at least.
As much as I tried to downplay these experiences, I learned their effects are not so easily dismissed.
The childhood need to feel safe and seen and soothed are not mere “nice to haves.” They are core needs, central to the development of a healthy experience of self and other.
When we don’t receive them as children, we end up having to stumble our own way toward wholeness later on.
And part of that stumbling will involve unpacking the deeper emotional dynamics that made our tight-knit families so difficult for us.