Growing Old, Growing Whole


This piece was written in 2012, in two parts. Both dealt with the effects of trauma, with the first covering young adulthood and the second midlife and beyond—at least as I understood later life in my early fifties. Only the second part is included here. It stands pretty well on its own and fits on this site better than the other, now that I'm focusing on aging issues.


How does growing old affect the adult who suffered trauma in childhood? As I age, I’m beginning to learn, at least in terms of how it affects me.

In short, aging feels welcome. Why? Because it resolves some of the problems caused by formative trauma, problems that have troubled me much of my life. Growing old has helped me grow up.

Here are a few examples:

In summary, medical problems forced me into early retirement and made me feel older than my years. For a long time I mourned the loss of status and the trappings of success. Eventually, , I began to appreciate how early aging opened the door for early benefit from aging's gifts.

Perhaps this is the important lesson: we can’t judge difficulty by how it feels at first; we must wait until we’ve mastered its lessons and met its demands. In my case, a childhood that once felt tragic and unfair now feels...valuable. Not in every way, but in important ones.

Aging is a hardship we inevitably face if we don’t die young. It offers much of value, especially to those for whom the flowering of childhood was stunted by trauma, bereavement, and neglect. Later than we’d wished, but more than we expected, we regain what was lost at the beginning.