Looking to the past to heal the future.
My own healing journey led me back through a chain of early experiences, many that I had always known about, but had never understood in terms of their longer-term impact. Others that came as a bit of a revelation, and I can now see how those experiences coloured the way I viewed the world, and how I responded faced with certain circumstances or emotions.
I’ve also seen that from the other side. My daughter was born eleven weeks prematurely, and with hindsight I can see how some of what she experienced early in life has coloured her view of the world too.
Over the last fourteen years, these early years experiences have increasingly sat at the heart of my work, although it took me a long time to see that.
That is why I keep coming back to the importance of looking at these earliest experiences to understand the possible future impact. Not to create saintly, superhuman parents who never get anything wrong. Not to blame parents for every difficulty that a child will experience or how it affects them. The need is to understand more about why things may happen, and what may have shaped the way someone responds. Its not always the big traumatic things matter most its the chain of seemingly insignificant experiences that form the basis of our experience of the world and the people we meet.
We have been talking about the importance of early experience for years, yet we still don’t bring the topic of prevention rather than firefighting once we are in crisis.
That hit home again when I read an article by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, where figures showing a dramatic rise in children as young as six attending A&E in mental health crisis.
You can read more about that here: Six Years Old and Already in Crisis: Why Prevention Has to Start Earlier
And I have written more fully about why I think pregnancy, birth and early experience are roots we can no longer afford to ignore here:Birth & Early Trauma – The Roots We Can’t Afford to Ignore
This is also the subject at the heart of the book I am writing about the first nine years of life, the experiences that can seem ordinary at the time, but that continue to echo and influence our adult responses.
We need to stop firefighting mental health and look to prevention of issues, whilst simultaneously looking at the downstream implications of what happens if we don’t.
Today’s overwhelmed 6-year-olds are the parents of future generations, and if they do not get sufficient support now, their issues will continue to influence the way they parent later.
Each generation is becoming more deeply entrenched in overhwelm and there is a greater need to become better at recognising the chain earlier. Preventative measures should always come first so that there are less crisis to deal with.
Prevention today leads to happier more emotionally resilient future generations who have the capacity to better deal with anything life throws at them ~ that is the legacy I care about.