A therapist guides someone through a childhood trauma: at age ten, they were left watching a toddler named Joey who died. They never moved through grief, instead locking the guilt away. The conversation explores how blame from others and self-protection kept the pain frozen for decades.
When you cut people out of your life and you just move on, what you're really doing is you're protecting yourself from the feeling of grief and loss that accompanies losing any relationship. And protecting yourself from that feeling of grief and loss is something that you learned to do at 10 years old. Yeah. And let me ask you this: there's 5 stages to grief and loss. Do you know them?
I should memorize them because you did— I just went through this with my grandmother.
Um, yeah, it's the denial. It's DABDA: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. With the situation with Joey, you never got to move through those 5 stages of grief and loss. And you know what a 10-year-old boy— you know what a 10-year-old boy thinks when he's responsible at 10 years old for watching a toddler and that toddler perishes?
I felt a lot of guilt, brother.
Yeah, you felt like it was your fault. I 100% did. And you still do. Yeah, I do. Yeah. Even though consciously you know that it's not your fault, subconsciously you feel that it is because that's how the memory was left. That's how that file was stored away. It was stored away with a piece of guilt connected to it in that Rolodex, in that file cabinet. And that thing was closed and locked. Before we go forward, let's unpack that for a minute. Why was it your fault? And I don't want you to talk to me as the man you are now. I want you to walk me through, like, what you were thinking then. And like, what, why? Like, walk me into that.
Like, I was responsible for this little kid at the age of 10, and I, I felt 100% to blame for him, you know, squirting out the back door and, and running down to the creek, man.
Was horrible. I think it would be unreasonable to assume that anybody would go through that and not feel guilty.
The crazy thing is, is I can remember the day like it was yesterday with all of the— my dad, my mom, and the paramedics and everyone coming down there. And it was like this, this guilt. I don't remember how I was instructed to move forward as a child. I was left alone to deal with it.
Everybody probably to some degree had to project their anger onto somebody, and you probably got the cold shoulder, you probably got the side eye, you probably got the look, you probably got the like, what are you doing? You should have been looking after him. Like, what happened? It was, uh, and this isn't to blame his parents, but I mean, who puts a 10-year-old in charge of a 3-year-old? Yeah, why are you at 10 years old solely responsible for another human being? You're not old enough to take on that responsibility, right? Not to mention you were just doing everything you could. You're a kid yourself. You didn't even have a fully developed brain at that point.
