Exploring the Complexity of my Relationship to Family, by Ben

Childhood was a tumultuous time for me, rife with emotional chaos and isolation due to a lack of understanding from the outside world (parents, therapists, teachers etc) on how to properly support me. When I was younger, my sensory system would ignite from “zero to one hundred” at  sometimes even the smallest provocation. I didn’t understand my own wiring and felt out of control and at the mercy of these outbursts. I often felt immense guilt after I said or acted in socially impermissible ways. I was emotionally unpredictable and without the proper diagnosis found my family would walk on eggshells around me as they never knew what would set me off. I couldn’t comprehend why my emotions were so painstakingly visceral in my body. I was told that I was just being too sensitive or needed to find healthier ways to calm down.

With virtually zero ability to understand social context and being raised in an environment with people that, despite their best efforts, couldn’t understand the difficulties I faced, simply existing day to day was an emotional minefield. I would suppress my emotions as best I could in places like school in order to socially survive, however survival was the best I could muster to make it through the day unscathed. School (especially elementary school and middle school) brought about constant confusion and shame to me as to how to participate “normally”. After spending the school day just doing my best to not fall apart, I would have no capacity by the end of the day to regulate emotionally and oftentimes would end each day in a place of hopelessness and fear. I didn’t understand what these hyper-activated sensory alarms were trying to tell me, other than that something was very wrong with my situation. Things that my peers took for granted, to me, seemed to me like an unsolvable puzzle.

My perception of family and what it means to be supported by loved ones has changed dramatically and constantly over the course of my life. Particularly in more recent years, I’ve slowly begun to learn ways to “take a bird’s eye view” and to not always get “lost in the weeds” regarding comments or challenging social situations. I have developed the capacity to quell the anxiety that once roamed rampant in my nervous system in my interactions with family members. Being habitually misunderstood and not able to live up to the expectations of my environment contributed greatly to distorted perceptions in understanding the bigger picture. Learning to live in the gray of both recognizing the positive aspects of growing up with my family, while not invalidating the immense pain that arose from a lack of understanding continues to be an area I strive for improvement with. My family has been a steadfast presence in my life and has been an advocate for me in certain ways that did make a difference, despite not knowing my correct diagnosis. While a greater understanding of nuance in my relationships with my family has eluded me for most of my life, I still hold on to happy moments where I was able to escape my relentless head chatter and learn positive lessons from each of my family members. I now realize that these moments of reprieve acted as an emotional buffer of sorts, that allowed an excruciatingly painful situation from becoming even worse.

For my first blog post, I wanted to share a poem that I wrote about what my family means to me. Family has always remained constant in both the good and difficult moments. The structure of my family has changed drastically in recent years (an adopted sister, divorce, step-parents and step-siblings to name a few). I found these moments of familial transition were stressful because of my inability to predict how the new dynamics would reconfigure what I was already familiar with. My anxiety of losing the little emotional footing I had garnered certainly contributed to the difficulty in managing these shifts, but I’ve gotten stronger each time I’ve come out on the other side with my worst fears not manifesting. As I’ve gotten older, I can appreciate in a more acute and balanced way the happier moments of childhood that often were stifled from my consciousness due to an actively destructive and unregulated nervous system. These moments include warm recollections of summers playing blissfully on the beaches of Cape Cod, sleep away camps with close friends (whom I am immeasurably grateful to still be connected with today), winter sledding, rehearsing for theatrical productions, and most importantly, individual moments with each of my family members that strengthened our bonds of trust and collectivism. Reminding myself of these memories helps reinforce to myself that I had the innate capacity to take a pause from my perception problems and just be present, allowing glimmers of hope to override the old narrative. Additionally, these warmer memories allow me to view childhood and my relation to family with a wider lens of nuance. Ultimately, this lens allows me to savor the nostalgia of childhood without invalidating the past, in rain or shine, while simultaneously carving a path for a fulfilling future.