Dear Jennifer:

You wrote: “My childhood wasn’t perfect but it also wasn’t so detrimental I thought it could produce these behavioral problems I seem to have”-

Children and adult children are heavily invested in viewing their parents and childhoods in the best possible light, making believe any which way that it was not so bad, or way better than it was.

Your brother’s behavior is also indicative of a detrimental enough childhood.

Children recover very well from childhood of poverty, divorce, wounds if there is at least one person to attend to the wound (to see the distress, to ask the child, to listen, to validate, explain, empathize, teach, comfort; someone the child can trust, feel SAFE with). But if there is no such person, then a wound (seen later as not-so-bad) will keep bleeding and bleeding because there is no adult to tend to it.

anita