What does it mean to feel safe as a child?

2 poems on 'little t' trauma

Hello fellow companions in these wild and troubled times,

Today : here’s a little poem that was short-listed last year in a prize.

I’ve tinkered with this one so many times, trying to capture the shock of that very first ever therapy session when she asked me questions about my childhood, and after saying to ‘go there’ in my mind, she watched me and then said, ‘What’s happening?’ And that’s when these words came.

The first sentence, ‘It’s not safe outside the home’ - well of course, that’s what I grew up with. Stay small, stay within the family. Blood’s thicker than water. Don’t trust the world.

And then that surprising second sentence - ‘And it’s not safe inside the home either’ - just appearing out of nowhere, or out of some place I had not known existed.

This was in my early thirties and it’s taken me another three decades to unpack the complexities of those words: not being safe to be me; not safe to express emotions such as anger; and even earlier than this, a sense that for at least part of my childhood my primary caregiver, my mother, was inherently unsafe in ways I couldn’t understand, and was so depressed that perhaps she might one day disappear.

Because when we think of safety and trauma we usually think about the Big T trauma — the events that involve intense and sudden fear for your physical safety or the safety of those around you. Violence, sexual assault, physical abuse, being caught up in catastrophic events, being involved in a severe accident, or major loss of those important to our wellbeing. Things that usually leave physical or intense emotional scars that are undeniable.

But these days we are learning more and more about the complex, deep and often enduring effects of ‘small t’ trauma. The million tiny cuts. The things that you can’t arm yourself against or reject or usually even talk about because it is so prevalent and so much a part of the water you swim in that you can’t put your finger on it.

Nothing happened. Or nothing happened that mattered.

Or nothing happened to anyone who mattered.

…The hidden subtle-violence within so many family dynamics and within the wider culture where certain ways of being are considered more valuable, more right, more deserving than others. Where ‘conjugal rights’ are paramount. And where so many things are unsayable.

Meera Atkinson writes in her memoir Traumata that patriarchy is inherently traumatic.

As is, I would add, colonialism, which we all participate in, in some way or another.

Obviously more traumatic for some than others. But this is the water we swim in, and we are all affected.

I was thinking this week about the phrase ‘nothing to write home about’. And I thought maybe that’s what I could title this (prose-poem-memoir) work-in-progress - Writing Home.

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The prize the poem above was shortlisted for is the University of Canberra Health Poetry Prize. A terrific project which aims “to inspire others through poetry to consider the journey to live life well. The poem may be focused on mental or physical health, and can investigate what living life well means. This may include barriers to living a well life, promoting a life lived well, or describe the experience of, or transition to, living life well.”

I was fortunate to have two poems in the long list, with the shortlisted one published in a beautifully produced booklet, with the title — If writing were a cure — taken from Angela Costi’s winning entry.

Kudos to Jenn Webb for overseeing such an great project, to Caren Florence for design, and to the judge Ella Kurz.

Here’s the shortlist, and as someone suggested, the titles make a kind of poem in themselves. (Victoria McGrath’s poem was the runner up.)

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Here’s another small piece. This one from Play, one of the Spineless Wonders annual microlit anthologies. (It’s just under 2mins, and my first attempt at adding captions so apologies for the errors.)

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It’s actually been quite triggering just writing this substack post and contemplating hitting send.

Some days I feel strongly that I want to get this book out into the world, that this kind of small t relentless loneliness and pain of childhood and its far reaching impacts is important to explore; and other days it just seems trivial — with all the Big T things going on in the world at the moment, and all the really Big T things that so many have experienced…

I guess the gaslighting — ‘it’s just you, you’re over-sensitive, get over it’ — is still powerful.

So we keep pushing the small child within us down, telling her to grow up, that none of it matters. And that the pain and anger and sadness she witnessed in those around her didn’t matter either.

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Christa Wolf — 'What is past is not dead; it is not even past. We cut ourselves off from it; we pretend to be strangers.'

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Thanks, as always, for reading.

Much love to you as we explore how to live in this strange new world. Fervently wishing and hoping that Australians choose wisely this week at the ballot box.

#CarefulWhoYouVoteFor

Keep connecting; keep creating.

Xxx Beth
PS - That first therapist sacked me a few weeks later! But that’s another story.