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[fence-setter]

[fence-setter]

Childhood trauma

Today I learned that if you have significant childhood trauma, the experience of raising a child can be extremely triggering. Apparently it brings you right back to those adolescent and teen years, causing your body to surge with somatic memories. It's very easy to get swept in the chaos of those triggered feelings, perhaps completely unaware that what you are feeling is a ghost-memory haunting you and not something based in the actual present reality.

As someone who is intimately familiar with the confusion and mind-fuckery that is a somatic flashback, my desire to become a parent is immediately put on ice. I have been that person to yell and argue and fight back against a projected enemy only to realize that no one was attacking me and my defensive reaction was totally uncalled for.

It is extremely embarrassing, but also devastating when someone actually gets hurt. The pain I've caused friends and loves is extremely depressing, sometimes literally causing me to swing into a depressive episode.

I am absolutely horrified at the idea of doing this to a child. I am terrified of being the source of their deepest wounding.

But there is still a part of me that desperately wants to become a parent, to teach my child all the amazing things I've learned about life, who wants very badly to pour my love and stability into a person. Because I am a genuinely stable and secure person - I am very good at making the world around me feel safe, probably a coping mechanism for the extreme isolation I experienced as a kid. Still, it is a strength and I know it would be invaluable in childrearing.

In some ways, I know the traumatic past is an advantage - there is a deep awareness of the ways you can hurt someone, a sensitivity to the importance of childhood, and the self-knowledge that you can survive devastation.

In other ways, it is a huge disability - feeling intense indescribable pain that renders you unable to be present; passing down traumatic behavior by example; constantly feeling like you are walking in a landmine of your own fucking misery.

...At this point, I wonder, what is the purpose of having children? Why do I feel so called to having a baby?