blaming the past or understanding it?

I remember years ago, when I was still in denial that my life was out of control, shaking my head when I heard someone talk about how their childhood had some impact on the bad choices they were making as an adult. “Yeh, it’s always easier to blame our parents than take responsibility, isn’t it?”, I thought.

What I’ve come to believe in the intervening years is that the events of our earlier years does indeed shape our thinking, our values, and our beliefs about ourselves and others.

The child who is told that they are useless, a mistake, that the people who brought them into the world wish they had never been born – is it really surprising that they would either be hopeless or be extremely driven to prove long-departed tormentors incorrect?

The child who is never reprimanded, never corrected, never taught to consider others – is it surprising when this person turns out to be corrupt, criminal, incorrigible?

Okay, so there are extreme cases; but what about ‘normal’ people with average childhoods?

I would argue (as many do) that virtually everyone carries some wounds from their youth. The wound may not cut as deep for me as it does for someone else, but they are there nonetheless.

My dad never abused me. He was a “model father” of the 1960’s variety. He worked hard and provided well. He didn’t smoke or drink, was highly involved in church, saved for rainy days, and could spend a long day making corporate management decisions and come home and change the brakes on the family roadster.

He was also absent a lot during the years I was looking to him for guidance on becoming a man.

I see; it’s all his fault you strayed so far.

Hardly. My fault, my choices. During my teen years, I was figuring out a lot of things on my own, things some other kids learned from their dads earlier. I’m not blaming him – I’m saying that where I went to learn wasn’t the right classroom for the subject of being a Christian man.

Perhaps an analogy would help. My grandmother played the violin. Somewhere in her early adult life, she broke her left arm. I’m not clear on the circumstances, but for whatever reason, she never went to the doctor. The arm set, badly. It would affect one of the great joys in her life until she quit playing somewhere in her 70s. But the fact that it hindered her disturbed her less than the thought of the pain that would be involved in re-breaking the bone to set it correctly.

To me, that typifies why a lot of people don’t address the issues from their youth that so clearly affect where they are today.

It isn’t blame-shifting to recognize that the past has an influence on where we are today.

It is blame-shifting to say, “It’s all someone else’s fault,” but that’s a different animal than I’m talking about.

I’m trying to dig into my past a little more, trying to understand what I missed that may have helped set me up for the bad choices I’ve since made. There’s some pain in that. But I believe the music will be sweeter in the end.