Childhood Trauma

Whenever I hear the words "childhood trauma", the things that come to mind were always physical abuse or sexual abuse.

However, upon doing some research, I've found that little events or experiences one has during childhood can accumulate and result to a bigger trauma that can affect a child as they reach adulthood.

This was what I experienced as a child.

As far as I can remember, my parents always fought. I was the youngest of seven siblings and at that point in the relationship of my parents, everything was already going downhill.

My father had his own demons that he had to deal with and this resulted to our family moving from one place to another. He never had a steady job and money was very scarce while I was growing up. Because of this, my mother had to work and provide for me and my siblings.

Some of my older siblings had to work too to generate more income for the family that my father should have provided. However, as a child, none of these things made sense to me.

Because of my father's inability to provide and all other problems that he had during that time, the relationship between him and my mother deteriorated as time went on.

They would fight about money and almost about everything else and this permeated during my elementary days, high school and even my college years.

Since my father was unable to provide, my mother worked hard to compensate for this lack of support. It was during my elementary years that this all happened. My mother's goal was to provide for us the basic needs that a child should need--food, shelter, and education. My sister helped along the way as well by providing us younger siblings with money for school.

I never had the support from my parents to pursue any hobbies I had as a child because money was tight and my parents didn't have the luxury of time to do so. My father was so engrosses in gambling, which he did to raise money to no avail, and my mother was always at work and never had the time to support my emotional needs.

At some point, my mother got sick and was unable to work anymore. My schooling was supported by my sisters from high school until college.

It was during my college years that my parents totally separated. My father was already seeing this other woman and all throughout my high school and college years, he never really cared if I went to school or not. I didn't really cared either. I thought that everything was normal. Until one day, I broke down and told my mother that I want to go away and live on my own because I couldn't handle the fighting anymore.

As an adult, I have always had problems with being too emotionally attached to any person I find. As I look back, this may have stemmed from my parents neglecting my emotional well-being growing up and I ended up looking for a person to look up to. As a gay man, my relationships always geared towards finding a male figure in my life that I could look up to and find a strong connection with, which I never had with my father.

I've had always had self-confidence issues, which I believe was caused by the lack of support from my parents while I was still young. I never had the push as a child to try new things and as an adult, this gave me anxiety to try on new things and to experience new things.

My mother died back in 2015. I was sad of course. However, I spent most of my adult life away from the cares of my mother and her absence never really affected me that much.

With the death of my father early this year, I thought that everything was going to be okay since I never had a strong relationship with him.

However, looking back at everything, I sort of put the pieces of the puzzles together as to why I have always had anxiety and this stems back to the lack of relationship with my father, the constant fighting they had and the lack of support from my parents when I was still young.

Even though my father is dead, his impact on my life still lingers on in me. I have always thought that he was just this person in our lives that really didn't matter because he was never really there when I was growing up. However, that lack of relationship with him still affects me and haunts me to this day.

I'll be turning 36 in a few weeks' time and I'm still in the process of dealing with all these childhood trauma I have experienced from way back.

It is hard to deal with and I am an emotional wreck most of the time.

I am hoping that one day, I will be able to get over this and find peace with my past traumas so I can fix my mental and emotional health and live a better and peaceful life.