@patrickteahanofficial: Healing childhood trauma is a long process. It can start with waking up to the idea that it was abuse actually after years of not knowing what it was - to then doing difficult processing work in therapy or otherwise. All of it involves the mess of: navigating intimacy in all kinds of relationships, dealing with triggers that get in the way of our being present and functioning, to our ongoing deeply set stuck places. It's a mucky process for a long time until it isn't. Underneath all that, if we dial into it as we try to make sense of our family in the context of our development, in a deep place is the anonymous feeling of not being known by an immature, abusive, or dysfunctional parent. If you feel abandoned, invisible or forgotten, that is the appropriate grief that will eventually need to be dealt with. While healing isn't always linear, I do believe that a later stage realization is that we might still be holding onto the hope and longing for that parent to actually see us as their child and want to know what we are feeling. That they would want to know what we do for work or if we're being treated well by our partners. They would want to know what inspires us or what we're working towards. Or simply, they would accurately know our spirit instead of seeing us as a role, or an object, or their savior or enemy. You might also know this grief when our inner child longs for a mother-in-law, teacher, boss, or someone in authority to take interest in you, which is highly common for childhood trauma. It's possible to get to a place where that longing passes away when we embrace knowing ourselves while helping our inner child grief that such parents aren't capable of seeing us, given how unsafe they are in distorting us. The other side is when we truly see that parent for who they are, not their potential, which manifests in the way our inner child rightly wonders if their parent could be proud about a win or concerned for us when it's tough. We can get that from other sources. Have you experienced this grief? How does it show up for you?

Patrick Teahan

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Wednesday 28 October 2026 16:00:39 GMT