I often think about the difference between understanding trauma and healing from it.
For years I was sure that understanding would bring with it some kind of resolution. That if I could make sense of my experiences, recognise their impact and understand why they had affected me in the ways they had, something would change.
And I would begin to feel better about my experiences.
I was wrong.
Understanding does not always mean the hurt disappears. It cannot change what happened, return the decades that have passed or provide conversations that never took place.
But what it can do is show us more clearly what we have been carrying.
And that has left me thinking about responsibility.
I am not responsible for what happened to me, what caused it, or the impact of what I was made to carry.
But when we are given nothing to work from and are left to live with the consequences of other people's choices, particularly when those consequences continue over decades, it can become difficult to distinguish between what belongs to us because we have had to live with it and what belongs to those whose choices caused it.
The impact may be ours to live with.
That does not make the responsibility ours.
They are not the same thing.
I can live with the impact of something without accepting responsibility for creating it.
And perhaps there is another distinction too:
I can take responsibility for my healing without taking responsibility for my trauma.
There are things that happen to us over which we have little or no control. There are choices parents make that affect our lives long after those choices were made.
The difficulty is that we can end up carrying both the consequences and a sense of responsibility for them.
This is true for me.
But they are not the same burden.
If another person's actions, silence or choices caused harm, acknowledging that does not mean refusing to move forward. Nor does moving forward require us to take responsibility for something that was never ours to carry or own in the first place.
Part of healing is learning to separate the two.
I can say: this affected me.
I can also say: I did not cause it.
Both can be true. And in my case, it is absolutely true.
Understanding what happened means recognising where responsibility belongs.
My parents made choices that affected my life.
Those choices were theirs.
The silence was theirs.
The decision not to explain was theirs.
The conversations that didn't happen were theirs.
The absence of the emotional and mental support I needed was something they created that I had to live alongside.
There was also the question of trust.
As a child, I trusted them to help me understand the things I could not understand for myself. When explanations did not come, I was left trying to make sense of experiences I did not yet have the emotional understanding to make sense of.
Over time, that can do something to the trust we have in ourselves.
When nothing is explained or acknowledged, and its impact is never discussed, a child can be left without the language to understand what they have experienced. They may begin to question their own interpretation of those experiences.
They may wonder whether they have misunderstood, or whether the problem somehow lies with them.
But a child's inability to understand what adults fail to explain isn't the child's failure.
That responsibility belongs with the adults.
It was not something I created for myself.
For decades I lived with the consequences without having the understanding to separate their responsibility from my experience of them.
I have been doing that for sixteen years.
Understanding their humanity does not require me to take responsibility for their choices.
Their responsibility belongs to them.
What belongs to me is the life I have lived as a consequence.
The impact is mine because I am the person who experienced it. The feelings are mine. The memories are mine. The anger is mine. I haven't grieved because I didn't know what I'd lost.
The questions I still carry are mine.
But none of that makes me responsible for what caused them.
I cannot make my parents take responsibility now. What I can do is stop taking responsibility for their decisions on their behalf.
And this is where something begins to change.
Their responsibility remains with them even without the conversations, explanations and acceptance.
My healing belongs to me.
This is perhaps the harder part.
Putting responsibility where it belongs does not remove the impact.
I am the person living with the memories, the unanswered questions, the anger, sadness and consequences. There is injustice in that which doesn't need to be softened.
We have to find a way to heal from things we were not responsible for breaking. That doesn't make the original responsibility ours.
It means the healing is.
Taking responsibility for my healing is not an admission that I should have handled things differently or prevented what happened.
As a child, I was not responsible for those things.
It is recognising that I am the person who has to care for myself now.
There can be a temptation to believe that healing requires something from somebody else.
An explanation.
Acknowledgement.
An apology.
Perhaps even an admission that things should have been different.
Those things do matter. Their absence can make understanding and healing much harder.
But what happens when they don't come?
I don't think the answer is to pretend we never needed them. Nor do I think we have to convince ourselves that they wouldn't have mattered.
But we have to reach a point where our ability to heal is no longer entirely dependent upon receiving them.
That is very different from saying they were unnecessary.
Their absence does not mean they didn't matter.
I am also beginning to question the idea that healing means being able to leave everything behind.
Perhaps for some people it can.
Trauma can be processed and resolved. Not every traumatic experience remains a permanent presence in someone's life.
But there cannot be one definition of healing that fits everybody.
Sometimes too much time has passed. Sometimes the consequences have become part of the life we continue to have to live. Sometimes there are things that cannot be repaired because the opportunity to repair them has gone.
Trauma doesn't always remain where it began. Mine began from the beginning of my life.
Other influences and experiences can continue to add to it. Healing then may have to mean something different.
It might mean being able to remember without being pulled completely back into the experience.
It might mean recognising anger without allowing it to dictate everything that follows.
It might mean accepting that a question remains unanswered without spending the rest of our lives searching for an answer.
And it might mean learning to live with something without allowing it to continue deciding who we are.
I don't think putting responsibility where it belongs is something we necessarily do once.
We may put it down and pick it back up.
We may question ourselves.
We may wonder if others are being unfair. We may even find ourselves going over old ground on the things we couldn't change. Perhaps part of healing is learning to notice when that happens and not taking responsibility.
Certainly not judging ourselves for it.
And then asking:
Does this belong to me?
No.
Healing belongs to me.
My feelings belong to me.
How I care for myself belongs to me.
The choices I make now belong to me.
My future belongs to me.
But responsibility for my parents' choices does not become mine simply because I lived with their consequences.
That is one of the hardest distinctions I've held onto.
I know that writing about my trauma has brought me to a place I couldn't have reached just by thinking about it. Putting experiences into words has made me look more closely at what happened, what it left me carrying, and where responsibility for it belongs.
It hasn't healed me. I don't think writing alone can do that.
Writing about my trauma has helped me understand it. But understanding it has also brought me face to face with something I hadn't expected:
I am not healed.
But it has given me understanding, and that is where healing has to begin, even if the answers I need still aren't there.
I've had to unravel it all by myself.
I don't yet know where the long road back to healing leads.
But I know now where it starts.
I am taking responsibility for my healing, but I am not taking responsibility for my trauma.
For now, that has to be enough.
