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- Getting Over Childhood Trauma At Forty Eight
William Deresiewicz / Image Credit: Mary Ann Halpin
Hey y’all. This is John.
This newsletter is about human flourishing. Ostensibly it’s about better parenting and fixing education, but ultimately what I really care about is helping young people flourish.
After Hakuba International School Founding Principal Chris Balme’s guest post last week, it’s back to regular programming. This week, I discuss a passage from the book Excellent Sheep - The Miseducation Of The American Elite & The Way To A Meaningful Life, written by former Yale professor William Deresiewicz. A passage that recounts the author’s childhood trauma seeking approval from an overbearing father, and how he only got over that trauma late in adulthood.
For years I rode the roller coaster of grandoisity and depression, struggled to separate myself from the need for my father’s approval. (He was both an immigrant and an Ivy League professor, a double whammy.) Even getting a job at Yale turned out to be, like every achievement, no more than a temporary salve. Within a few months, he was asking me when I was going to get my dissertation published. But he wasn’t the real problem anymore, and his death, a decade later, made very little difference. The real problem was, as one of my students put it, “the Frankenstein’s monster of ambition,” the insatiable need to be “the best.”
Time and again I’d thought I’d finally gotten over it, and time and again I would relapse. It was only when I read The Drama of the Gifted Child in the course of researching this book - I was already forty-eight, with half my adulthood gone - that I was finally able to find relief. Actually, it was only when i read The Drama of the Gifted Child directly after Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. (Thank you, Amy Chua.) Tiger Mother felt like relieving a childhood trauma; The Drama of the Gifted Child felt like going through the therapy to cure it. Both show, from opposite directions but in terms that are equally stark, what it was that I’d grown up with. Something broke in me, or rather, something broke loose. I suddenly felt - not only saw, as I had for many years, but felt - that I was missing my life. I was missing my chance to be happy, missing my chance to be free.
Take a moment to reflect on your own childhood experience. Were you constantly seeking approval from overbearing parents? Did you chase grades and prestigious schools because your parents told you that is the only path to success in life? Did you miss out on childhood because you were chasing the things your parents told you were important?
Are you genuinely happy? Do you feel joy? Can you look your closest friend in the eye and tell them ‘I’m flourishing’?
Are your ambitions truly yours, or are they your parents’ projected on you?
Now take another moment to reflect on how you are parenting. Are you doing to your child what your parents did to you?
I was also missing something else: the joy that comes when you stop feeling threatened by other people’s accomplishments and let yourself be open to the beauty that they bring into the world. For that is one of the greatest curses of the high-achieving mentality: the envy that it forces on you - the deperation, not simply to be loved, but to be loved, as Auden says, alone.
Milton, in Paradise Lost, has Satan put it like this - Satan, who is not a beastlike creature in the poem, but the brightest of the angels, the first in his class, fallen, precisely, from excess ambition. He has arrived in Eden to destroy the happiness of Adam and Eve, and looking around himself, he thinks:
the more I see
Pleasures about me, so much more I feel
Torment within me, as from the hateful siege
Of contraries; all good to me becomes
Bane, and in Heav’n much worse would be my state.
That’s how envy works: the better things are, the worse they are, because they don’t belong to you.
This is some of the most profound writing on life, ambition, happiness, and flourishing I’ve come across. Please let Deresiewicz’s message sink in. He spent decades trying to come to terms with the childhood trauma of constantly seeking his father’s approval. It was only when he was almost fifty that he got over that trauma and realised what he was missing in life.
So please ask yourself the following questions:
Are you still trying to live up to your parents’ expectations of you?
Do you feel joy?
Are you doing to your child what your parents did to you?
Will your child spend most of their adulthood getting over the trauma you inflicted on them?
Saturday Kids Unplugged Karuizawa 2024 is now open for registration. Two dates to choose from
10 June - 14 June
17 June - 21 June
Weekend of 15-16 June we will be arranging a visit to Hakuba International School for parents who want to learn more about the boarding school option at HIS.
Extremely limited number of spots for 4 to 6-year-olds for Unplugged Karuizawa, so please sign up early.