If You Are Struggling Right Now, it’s Not Your Fault
Let’s try a thought experiment. Imagine that you were born in a completely different family. If you – like most people reading this – experienced trauma or neglect as a child, imagine you grew up in a kinder, more loving and functional sort of family. Stable. Sane. Safe.
Allow yourself to digest how different that would have been, for you as a child. Having parents who are reliable, warm and attuned to your needs is such a powerful determinant of your health and happiness as an adult, it’s impossible to overstate its importance. When we feel seen, loved without expectation and accepted for who we are, we can then love ourselves the same way. We feel confident, have a solid sense of self and expect good things in life.
If none of these things were true for you I am deeply sorry – no child deserves to experience trauma or neglect but, heartbreakingly, so many do.
But our thought experiment is intended to help you understand how profoundly these early family dynamics shaped you. And of course, none of that was your choice. You just landed on this planet, small and helpless and utterly reliant on these people to feed, clothe and keep you safe.
Try replacing fault with responsibility
Now let’s add some other factors that made you, you. Your genes, which determine everything from the colour of your eyes to your temperament (the building blocks of your personality, extrovert vs introvert, sensitive vs robust, emotional vs rational, and so on). Your nervous system, either highly sensitive (like mine), highly insensitive or somewhere in between.
The wiring and architecture of your brain, shaped by a combination of your genes and early experience, from your mother’s womb until this very moment. Your schemas and particular configuration of parts. Your experiences in life, whether traumatic and neglectful or happy and nurturing. None of these things did you choose, so your struggles today – all of which were shaped by this particular combination of factors –cannot be your fault.
I first heard this in a workshop from the great psychologist Dr Paul Gilbert, founder of compassion-focused therapy. He is one of the giants on whose shoulders I stand and many of his words remain with me to this day. Dr Gilbert then said that, although none of our struggles (anxiety, depression, lack of self-worth) are our fault, it is our responsibility as adults to do everything in our power to overcome this early adversity.
And this is a much more positive, hopeful idea, because fault is a negative, self-critical, shaming word. Responsibility, on the other hand, is empowering, because it means we can do something about our problems and are not a helpless, passive victim of them.
The practice: rewrite your life story
If this strikes a chord with you, let’s turn that emotional resonance into long-lasting, neuroplastic change. Grab your journal and look at your life through this lens. Here are some questions that might be helpful prompts:
Did you feel safe as a child? If not, who or what made you feel unsafe?
Did you feel loved? Did that love come from your parents, siblings, grandparents or friends? If you grew up in an unloving family, did you know that wasn’t right as a child, or did it just feel ‘normal’?
Were you an unusually sensitive kid? Did you feel things more deeply, see more fine-grained detail in your environment, have more sharply honed senses than most people? How might that have made you more sensitive to whatever tricky stuff happened to you?
Are you neurodivergent (on the autistic spectrum, have ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia, or have a brain wired in some other way differently from the neurotypical majority)? If so, how did/does that make your life more challenging? For example, was school especially hard for you?
As you answer these questions, try to build up a picture of all the things that shaped your mind and body, the way you think, feel and behave. And then see if you can stop berating yourself for every little mistake, or shaming yourself for all the things you did or didn’t do. Could you be a little kinder to yourself? More compassionate? More accepting?
If you get stuck on any of this, you may need help from a kind partner, family member, friend or therapist. Don’t give up – exercises like this, done often, really can change your life.
I hope you found that helpful – sending you love and strength as you walk the path toward a happier, healthier future.
Love,
Dan ❤️
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