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“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” ~C. S. Lewis
I started life in a poor household with one parent who left when I was very little, never to be seen or heard from again, and another who stuck around but made it very clear I wasn’t wanted and I had ruined their life by existing.
For some reason, I never had any contact from either of their parents, my grandparents, and very little to no contact from their wider families.
So, as a young child, I knew I had no practical or emotional safety net. There was no one to fall back on, no one to soften the impact if things went wrong. I needed to stand on my own two feet to survive.
As an abandoned and scapegoated child, I was very independent and resilient, and I was driven by the goal of getting away and creating a life for myself. But I couldn’t take risks or focus on studying because I had no safety net.
During my school exams, I would work full time during the holidays beforehand and part-time during term time. I was then exhausted when it came to exams and had little time to revise. At points in my undergraduate degree, I was working almost full time to keep a roof over my head, always living off my overdraft.
I kept what had happened and was happening at home inside. I never talked about it. No one knew. All of my peers had two parents, and they couldn’t understand my life or provide support. In those days, teachers and other adults weren’t as knowledgeable as they are now, and I was never asked about my home life or offered support. So there was no emotional safety net either.
Since I was responsible for myself financially, I really learned to budget. This meant that when I started in a career in my twenties, I excelled much quicker than my peers. They were learning the world of work following university; I had already been in it for years.
Not Fitting the Mold
Well into my adulthood, when I found myself in a professional-class world, my friends would assume I was like them. They would talk about people from single-parent families and broken homes as those who would not achieve.
I wasn’t used to talking about my situation. It’s not something that comes up naturally in conversations, and, as with many difficult family situations, people are generally awkward in responding and can, unwittingly, say things that make you feel worse. (I’ve even heard “My father would never leave me!” as if they couldn’t believe it or focus on me at all.)
There isn’t a common toolkit for supporting someone who has been abused or abandoned by their family, and it’s a topic that has only recently started to be more openly talked about in social discourse. So I didn’t know how to talk about myself in an authentic way when it came to family.
On a daily basis, at work or at social occasions, at Christmas or on Mothers’ or Fathers’ Days, people talk about their families of origin and assume others have the same. It’s the norm for most people, and they struggle to support someone who has a different reality.
I realized a few years ago that many of my friends had no idea about my circumstances, so I felt misunderstood and like a core part of myself was unseen.
Filling the Void… or Learning to Live with It
As a young adult, I decided to build a friends’ family, or chosen family, with people I met while studying or through work because I needed to have people around me. Years later, I understood that all my relationships were affected by growing up feeling unwanted and unloved. So, I wasn’t discerning about who was in my life and didn’t understand that I had my own needs in relationships. If someone wanted to spend time with me, who was I to say no?!
This led to friendships and romantic relationships that were, at best, mismatched without real connection and, at worst, abusive. Also, when the holidays came around, my friends’ family would disappear to be with their real families. So I hadn’t filled the void in my life, despite my energy and efforts.
I was trying to distract myself from the pain of not having a family by developing new relationships. Through therapy, though, I realized that the key is learning to live with the void of what I didn’t have—processing it, facing up to it, and actually feeling that pain.
Reconnecting with myself, particularly my child self, was key. I had to take some of the energy I had expelled outward to please others and turn it inward to learn to cope with my loss, heal, and improve my choices.
An amazing therapist helped me understand that I was living with a form of grief. She explained, “Grief is being attached to something that isn’t there.” I now live with the void and the pain, grieving the feeling of loss and abandonment rather than distracting myself from it. Not trying to fix it or fill it but learning to acknowledge it as part of my story.
While the pain will never fully leave, I now make choices from a place of connection to myself, which has led to more fulfilling relationships and much more energy to put into meaningful activities.
Surviving and Even Thriving
Growing up without a safety net means focusing on survival. Throughout my childhood, I worked hard to get somewhere safe and secure with my own independence. Between these efforts and what I was enduring, I was exhausted. Well into adulthood, I kept working toward building a secure life of my own.
By my mid-thirties, I had some basics: a safe home, financial security, and some good people in my life. That’s when it crept up on me—that I was constantly imagining and planning for terrible things that never happened, that I was always on high alert in normal situations, and that I was exhausting myself with my incessant rumination.
I was still operating in survival mode when I didn’t need to. My body and mind hadn’t caught up to the reality that I was finally safe. I needed to learn to live, not just survive.
Some talk about recovering from trauma as getting back to oneself, but when you endured it throughout childhood, you weren’t given the chance to know who that self is. Who would I be if not in survival mode? I had to discover who the core of me was and learn how to just live.
Realizing this was the first step. I was lucky to have great therapists, a complete course of EMDR to process and re-install new pathways in my mind, group therapy, where I learned from others, and other treatments.
There was a moment during installation EMDR (a process that helps to replace negative beliefs with positive ones) when I was asked to imagine what would have helped me as a child during a difficult experience I’d had.
At first, all I could think of was changing what was happening to me and someone being there to intervene. But then I imagined giving my child self a hug. That’s what she needed in that moment, and in many others.
Since then, I have tried to focus on my needs and nurture myself, which has helped to shift me from just practical surviving to thriving.
It wasn’t easy or immediate, but after a while of going out in the world post-therapy, I noticed I had an abundance of energy. It felt like I had been carrying a dead weight around me my whole life that had lifted, and I suddenly felt lighter in my day-to-day activities.
I was able to identify and move away from unhealthy relationships, which reduced negative, depleting interactions and increased my positive interactions.
I put this energy into nourishing and meaningful activities in my time outside of work—volunteering, researching, engaging in active hobbies. In turn, I got energy from doing them and reached toward my potential. I became myself. Beyond being a victim of my circumstances, I could thrive.
If you’re also navigating life without a traditional family of origin, know that you are living with a little-understood form of grief, and as much as that will never leave you, a loving, safe, and fulfilled life is still possible.
The first step is understanding and processing what happened to you so you can give to yourself the care and nurturing you need. That’s what will give you the strength, resilience, and empathy to thrive.
About Nisha Wilkinson
Nisha Wilkinson holds a PhD in War Studies and has worked on international conflict and security for over fifteen years. She is interested in human behavior driving violence and insecurity, and advocates for socio-economic diversity of voices in state institutions.
