Keeping the Score

Musings on the human anxiety response to things that remind us of threats

“We all grow up to be like our parents.”

For some people, that bit of fortune telling stokes a flicker of hope. “Mom/Dad is so [wise/helpful/determined/amazing]! I hope I can be half what they’ve been for me.” For others, it’s a proclamation of doom. “Sorry, but nope. I’m going to do everything in my power to be the opposite of what my mom/dad was.” So far, my experience has led me to feel that the apple can only fall so far from the tree without some kind of huge intervening factor.

If I were my mom, I would lose my husband this summer. I myself would depart this world in just 11 more short years. Only one of my nine grandchildren would ever meet me, and he’d be too young to remember anything about me.

My loss of my husband would bring complicated grief, and probably a little guilt over the sense of relief at the years of struggle finally being over.

Psychology personality John Delony talks a lot about how traumatic experiences in our lives put a GPS pin in our nervous systems. Since I myself have turned 50 this year, I’ve been thinking more often than in the past about what that phase of life looked like for my mom. There’s an inexplicable thrum, deep in my chest when those thoughts arise—not exactly full-blown anxiety, but definitely a sobering moment. What if I had to press on as a widow? What if I only had just over a decade to live, unbeknownst to me? That GPS pin planted in my 13-year-old nervous system has left its mark.

But thankfully, I am not my mom, and a lot of the defining factors of her last decade of life aren’t part of my story. I’ve never smoked. I rarely consume alcohol. I don’t think I’ve purposely eaten margarine since I moved out at 18. Even with the chronic challenges I have, I’m on track to live longer than my parents both did. I’m under no illusion that things of that nature can’t change with a single diagnostic test, but so far, so good.

As of this October, Scott will also have outlived my dad. Logical me knows that there’s no connection between my Dad dying in his mid fifties and my husband’s lifespan, but the nervous system isn’t concerned about logic—it’s doing its thing scanning for potential threats, and it knows that something bad once happened to an influential man in my life when he reached the same age as the man now in my life.

Our bodies sometimes need reminders from our brains—things are different this time. And even if they weren’t much different, I have my faith now to reassure me that I don’t have to figure out how to survive untethered from any safe place to land. No matter my successes or failures, I’m thankful my kids, my husband, and I have a perfect, heavenly Father who hears our cries of fear and rejoices in our tears of joy.

Between tools I have that my mother never did to care for my emotional and spiritual wellness and my own efforts to avoid (most) self-destructive habits, I can confidently tell my little internal alarm system that it can stand down. Hopefully that will leave me some bandwidth to work on the things I DO actually carry over from my parents, like insisting on making my grocery list in the order of the aisles at the store or saying things like “How has eating out gotten so expensive!?”

What about you? Do you hope to emulate some of your parents’ traits? Are you working on changing the family tree a bit? Whatever the difficult places you have in your past that are “pinned” into your memory, I hope you have so many more that remain for the blessings they’ve been.