I’ve been hearing the term “de-normalizing” with regards to childhood events lately, but it never really clicked what exactly it meant. This occurred to me (though it is probably a synthesis of what I’ve heard thus far): “De-normalizing” is the process of realizing “the way things were” is not “the way things are.”

Pithy, isn’t it? What I mean by that is that the horrible things that happened to us when we were children obviously did happen–it’s “the way things were.” However, simply because they happened is not reason to believe that it’s “the way things are.”

So, if your father hit you, yelled at you, lied to you, criticized you, neglected you, and had no respect for you, that doesn’t mean that you should make excuses for his behavior. An individual who treats a child like that is not a good person. Any such individual has refused to face the pain in their own lives and has, instead, inflicted it upon his child. In so doing, he damages his child and hampers his child’s ability to break the chain.

By way of analogy, our bodies are generally healthy. When we get sick, that’s a deviation from “the way things are.” There are chronic ailments, of course, but we are aware of these primarily because we can compare them to “the way things are.”

We don’t really have any way to compare our childhoods to healthy ones, so it’s kind of like being a plague victim in a society where nearly everybody else is afflicted with the plague. Some people have it far worse, for sure, but nearly everybody is tainted in one way or another. Since nearly everybody you meet is sick with this plague, coming across somebody who has managed to beat the plague is startling, even frightening. “You mean you don’t have open sores all over your body? What is wrong with you???” Sure, the few who aren’t sick with the plague have scars, but they’re able to do so much more than those who are sick with the plague, their potential seems almost limitless.

The biggest difference between the plague and how we raise our children is that we determine whether or not our children will grow up infected or not.

I confess that I do not know how this will play out… if and when I become a father, will I be able to refrain from the negatives I listed above (all of which happened to me, by the way) and provide a loving home for my child, treating them as I would have wanted to be treated, not as I was treated? Will I be able to act automatically not from the basis of pain, but from the basis of strength and personal power? I certainly hope so; more than that, I fully intend to do so, and when I make mistakes (especially then) be open and honest about it, because it is a secret to nobody.