Getting Over Childhood Trauma At Forty Eight

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.

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.