Our lost childhoods

[Please help]

Some of you have been following my recent posts about my fantasy life. I am not sure if recent stresses in my life caused the "flareup" or if a new baby triggered it. Maybe both. At any rate, I am making breakthroughs and now realize even my childhood fantasies were to compensate for the loss of not having a childhood. My point being, even as a kid, I knew I was not going through the development stages properly

My recent fantasy was merely an old rehash of a novel I never wrote on paper but stayed in my head. The recent scenarios involved high school romance, an unusually strong emphasis on family, love, etc.

I read somewhere on this forum about the term of grieving the loss of a childhood we never had. I would say the happiest stage of my childhood was when I rented a room at 18 and spent time with my friends. Arguably, I was self-sufficient adult so I cannot say this was a care-free time. I had to feed myself and pay rent as well as work ft and take night classes. I do vividly recall having a crush on a girl who was my age and asking my friends if they thought she was still a virgin. I remember wanting to have a nice family with her and drive around with kids in a mini van. This tells me even at 18, I was looking for some sort of innocence of youth.

Another thing that has hit me hard lately is realizing all my old buddies have moved on and there was no one around. I felt like an old man living in the memories of the past as everyone had died. This has caused of bit of depression for me.

I want to get your opinion and ask you all if this could be attributed to not having an innocent childhood. How important is it for us to spend the years between 4- 15/16 knowing we are being cared for in a loving home? If we do not have that, is there a "layer" of human development  we miss out on that affects us later in life?

I seem to really be having trouble moving past this childhood thing lately. I feel there was some part of my development that as skipped and am fairly certain many of you unfortunately have experienced something similar.

I have even felt some old angry wounds resurface. Maybe this is part of the aging process when we look back and see what we lost and things we never had to lose in the first place.   Many people reminisce about their healthy childhoods and you can tell there is occasionally a profound loss as it as such a great time. Stable home, well-rounded friends and a healthy outlook on life. What happens when we as humans do not spend time slowly maturing into adults but instead are forced to become adults at the age of 5 or 6? Ask anyone who works in early childhood and they an almost immediately identify the kid's that come from good / bad homes.

This does something to us as I can tell something is missing for me. Even in poverty-stricken , broken homes there is usually at least one parent or g parent who loves the child. This connection lays the foundation for healthy development. Most kid's who spend the formative years in foster care or orphanages end up in Juvie hall then onto prison. There is a reason for this

I shudder when I think how many of us were viewed as pure evil for being born. It really hurts me to think of kid's who are throw away's (as my g mother would call me)  or kid's placed into sex rings etc.

My question is two fold:

1) Have you addressed the grief of not having a childhood? If so, how

2) How has this affected you as an adult?

Thanks

[Please help]

I would like to add that I cannot keep living in the past. It's getting in the way of the future. I realize the friends I had growing up ( I do love them) were by and large unstable people just like myself. This is why I get a tinge of jealousy when I see people who were childhood friends still hanging out and posting their photos on facebook. I can see how these people were stable kids, became stable young adults and are now functional adults who can maintain healthy childhood friendships.


I suspect some of us have examined ourselves looking for trades of PD's. i certainly have and found a few areas I always work on. I can see traits in a few of my friends. These people demonstrated instability growing up and this is what I probably gravitated towards.

As adults, their relationships with others are a bit off.

I guess what I am trying to say is I am going through life yearning for stable relationships (of any kind) from my past and have recently come to the understanding they simply do not exist.

I have 1 friend who lives 60 miles away I can count as a stable childhood buddy. The other 2 are far away. The rest want to put their past of drinking and criminal behavior behind them and have cut ties.

This may be part of the whole grieving the lost childhood process. Not having formed any type of relationships early on with people that would continue for a significant portion of my life is tough.

 

[Kwamina]

Hi please help

I just want to say that I notice the hard work you are doing here

Since you have already found your way to our feature thread about Grieving Our Losses, I can keep it short here