Reparenting Childhood Trauma…

… is a journey of self-discovery and self-forgiveness.

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One of the traumatic childhood experiences that still comes back to haunt my memory is the middle school cafeteria. I was in the 6th grade, which means I was 10 years old when I was cast into the maelstrom of adolescence that was the inner city public school system of my native Pittsburgh in the 1970's.

Allow me to explain.

What traumatizes us when we are young might seem laughable from the perspective of our adult selves. I’m a bit ashamed to admit now that this was even a problem for me then — but the fact is that it was. I know it was, because over 40 years later, I still recall the anxiety.

One of the things that I learned from The Body Keeps The Score (van der Kolk 2015) is that trauma is gauged on a relative scale: the stress of the experience relative to our capacity to cope.

In 6th grade, at the new school where the City of Pittsburgh carried out their court-mandated, forced busing program of school desegregation, I was overwhelmed.

I have very few memories of school lunch time prior to the 6th grade. For example, the year I spent in 1st grade, I walked home from elementary school for lunch and I walked back in the afternoon. Every day. My Mother was always home to meet me and my older sister (2nd grade), but the only day I remember was when, instead of eating lunch, I went up to my room to read my Batman comic books and I stayed there all afternoon. I just didn’t walk back to school. Somehow, my Mother was OK with that.

In 2nd grade, my Father moved us (temporarily) to a small town in Massachusetts while he was on sabbatical from the University of Pittsburgh. I was in a new school, and the lunch practices were different. We were expected to bring our lunch and eat at our desks.

Kids could buy milk, if they brought 35 cents.

I never bought milk. I didn’t understand it. I’d started the school year late and I didn’t know what money was or something. I don’t know.

But one day, our teacher (maybe a substitute?) had milk money left over and for some reason she felt the need to distribute this among the students. She asked us something like, “Who paid for milk?”

I remember watching other kids raise their hands and I remember I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t want to feel like the new kid in this small town and so I raised my hand, too. 15 cents showed up on my desk, and I knew it wasn’t mine, but I didn’t have the guts to return it. I put it in my pocket to hide my shame.

That’s it.

I have no other lunch memories until 6th grade. As far as I know, I never ate lunch at school for the next four years.

But 6th grade was a doozy.

My parents decided that I didn’t need the new student orientation for all the 6th graders at my middle school. The orientation was for 6th graders only, and of course it was before the start of the regular school year, but my Father wanted to stay on vacation back in Massachusetts a little longer, so he thought, “Ahhh, the heck with orientation. Tommy will figure it out, and besides, his older sister went last year and she hardly learned anything that helped her. If Tommy has any questions, he can just ask her.”

My first day at school was particularly disorienting.

I didn’t know what lockers were. I didn’t know what it meant to change into gym clothes. And I sure as hell didn’t understand the school cafeteria.

Shazam! was both a super hero and the magic word that transformed the ordinary boy Billy Batson “ into a costumed adult with the powers of superhuman strength, speed, flight and other abilities” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Marvel_(DC_Comics).

My Mom had packed me a lunch (bologna and American cheese on white bread with mayonnaise and mustard), and put it in my square little metal lunch box. I think it was a Shazam! lunch box, if I remember correctly. I loved Shazam!

I realize that, in retrospect, this makes no sense. It was a terrible choice of affinity group, but there I was — none the wiser.

I didn’t understand school lunches, or cafeteria trays, or long folding tables with built-in chairs, or the importance of selecting a table at which to sit.

My middle school was violent.

Not violent in the old playground game ‘Kill the Man With the Ball,’ where boys get to test their strength under the protection of the unwritten codes of boyhood. I mean violent as in I’m 10 years old, in the unstructured Lord of the Flies that is a middle school lunch period and there are 15 year old post-pubescent boys in the 8th grade that want to hurt me and make me pay them money.

“Gimme quar’er,” they used to say.

“I’m sorry, I don’t have any money,” I’d say back, hoping to avoid a punching.

Sometimes, they’d let me go.

Sometimes they make me turn out my pockets.

Sometimes, by some miracle, I had a quarter, and I’d give it to them.

Those boys were not fans of Shazam!

For some reason, I never told my parents about the bullying that took place in my middle school.

I remember several meetings with the Principal, at which the Principal would say things to my Father like, “I don’t know why we are having this meeting. Tommy is not a problem!”

And my Father would say, “No, Tommy is not a problem. He has a problem. That’s why we’re having this meeting, to see what you are able to do to help him solve his problem.”

So my Father had some sort of sense that school was not going well, but I don’t know if he understood what was really going on, and I know that I never told him and I’m pretty sure the Principal wasn’t going to fess up about it.

Because my Father taught in the Education program at the University of Pittsburgh, it turned out that several of his former doctoral students were now administrators in the Pittsburgh public schools, including the Principal at my old elementary school. It’s not like my middle school Principal was a former graduate student in one of my Father’s classes, but he knew others that were, and he didn’t want to cross Dr. Seager.

By 8th grade, somebody figured out exactly what the problem was and found a sympathetic English teacher that allowed me and some of my friends to stay in her classroom and work on a cartoon mural during our lunch periods. Funny how that mural took the entire academic year. By then I was failing math and english, but nobody dared take me out of the advanced classes, out of fear for my safety, and maybe out of respect for my Father.

One of the things that I’ve learned about trauma is that we can sometimes break the emotional connection between the trauma and the memory by reliving the trauma from a position of control, and changing the outcome in our imagination. I wrote about this in both How to Change Your Childhood and Your Past Is Written In Your Body.

In my case, the trauma had two dimensions. The first was the constant threat of random physical violence. The second was the realization that my Father, as influential as he was in the public school system, was nevertheless powerless to protect me. I suffered both from stress, and from the grief of coming to realize that my Father was not the flying superhero I imagined him to be —and neither was I the boy that could speak the magic word “Shazam!” and transform myself into an omnipotent superhuman.

I was on my own when I reached 6th grade. I just didn’t know it yet.

None of this was clear to me until several months ago when I was wrestling with the issue of control and leadership in an important romantic relationship. I was trying to explain to my Lover why I needed to be the leader in the relationship. That to me, our safety required that I lead and she obey.

She didn’t understand this.

I explained that I grew up in violent, inner city schools. That I survived by finding a pack of older kids from my neighborhood whom I could count on. That we met every day after school by the soda machine at the general store to plot our walking route home together. (Although the City provided buses to most of the kids, we chose to walk the nearly two miles instead. I don’t remember why).

We’d choose a different route each day, to ensure that nobody could anticipate our route and decide to “jump” us (which was the word we used for ambush). We walked the girls back to the front doors of their homes, and the boys to the corners of their home streets.

My older sister and I walked home together. But here was the thing… if there was danger on one side of the street, then we’d have to cross together to the other side, or take a detour, or turn around. There could be no negotiation, no talking it over, no voting. Only decision and compliance, because her safety and mine depended on us sticking together.

That’s why I needed to be in charge in my romantic relationships, because when I love someone, it is my responsibility to keep her safe.

I explained about the cafeteria. I explained about the hallways. I explained about the bathrooms, which were the deadliest of all.

She may have asked me… it was only several months ago but I don’t remember.

She may have asked me, “Where were your parents?”

And I told her I’d have to think about that.

So I thought.

And I thought.

I knew about reparenting, but until then I didn’t recognize that this experience was a trauma to which I was still emotionally connected, 4 decades later.

I realized that I, as Big Tom, needed to have a conversation in my imagination with Little Tommy. The conversation that my Father and I never had.

I told my Lover about the conversation I was having in my imagination, where Little Tommy told Big Tom about the bullying in the cafeteria.

I told her:

Little Tommy said that he found some kids that he could sit with. He didn’t know them very well. They were the Jewish kids bused in from the other neighborhood, and they all had Hebrew class and bar mitzvah and a lot of stuff Little Tommy didn’t know about, but it was safer to be sitting with them that it was to be alone.

Big Tom said, “Little Tommy, when you sit at their table, you cannot afford to be your own person. You have to agree with everything they say. You have to pretend to like the things that they like. You have to pretend that you know the things that they know, because if you don’t, you risk their disapproval, and then maybe they will not let you sit with them.”

“But Big Tom! If I don’t sit with them, then the bigger kids will steal my lunch. They will take my lunch box and they will throw it back and forth like it’s a game. They will destroy me.”

“I understand, Little Tommy. I understand that. But how will you ever become your own person if you do not have the courage to be the King of your own table?”

“I don’t know, Big Tom.”

“You must sit by yourself, Little Tommy. You must decide which table is your kingdom, and you must sit there on your own terms.”

“But I’m going to get beat up, Big Tom. It’s not safe for me to be by myself. I will have to give them my sandwich, just so they can throw it against the wall to see if the bologna sticks. They won’t even eat it. They aren’t even hungry.”

“You must not allow them to do this without a fight.”

“But Big Tom… they will beat me. They will punch me. They will throw me on the ground. They will stomp on my body.”

“Yes, Little Tommy. They will… . Did you think they would grant you a kingdom without requiring you to defend its borders?”

“But Big Tom… it’s going to hurt.”

“It will hurt, Little Tom. You will be bruised. You will feel humiliated and ashamed. They are stronger than you and you cannot beat them… . But neither do you have to. You only need to cause them pain. One time. After that, they will learn to respect you and your kingdom and they will leave you alone. They will pick on other kids.”

“But Big Tom… I’m scared and I will be all alone.”

“No, you will not. When the other kids see that you fought back, and when they see that you were brave, and when they see that you can hurt the bullies, they will want to sit with you at your table. They will ask for your permission to sit in your kingdom, because they will understand that they are under your protection, and you will never be alone.”

She interrupted.

“I would sit at your table.”