No matter what the suffering, all healing involves grief work. (If we did, it would be tough to ever leave home.) The range of difficult childhood types is broad, from disastrous to disappointing, from physically or verbally abusive parents to narcissistic, or emotionally unpredictable ones, to parents who never really saw who their child was. Nobody has a perfect childhood, or a perfect parent-child bond. “Most of us enter adulthood with some grief work to do.” It does take work: One tool I find extremely helpful is “grateful grieving.” I did not coin the term, but I like the pairing of these seemingly opposite words. It’s also clear that part of the work of evolving emotionally is making peace with our own imperfect childhoods. Maybe the perfect parent was waiting at the Mummy Market!įorty years have passed since I read the book, and as a practicing psychiatrist who has worked with hundreds of clients, it is clear that no perfect mom exists. To a young child’s imagination, this was an incredible concept. Moms were literally on display there, and you could choose the type you wanted: the stay-at-home, cookie-baking mom the adventure-seeker mom the psychologically attuned mom, etc.
It was about three children who grow up with an efficient but gloomy housekeeper, and go in search for a mom at the Mummy Market. When I was a little girl, I was enchanted by a book called The Mummy Market. From Grief to Gratitude: Making Peace with Your Own Childhood Here, she explains the grateful grieving concept (you’ll recognize it if you saw her panel at In goop Health), and goes deeper to show how expanding our definition of a parent can fulfill us in ways we might not expect. The tool Berman finds particularly helpful for clients looking to make peace with their imperfect childhoods centers on grateful grieving: “It’s permission to mourn the childhood we never had, power to move to a place of gratitude for the gifts our parents did give us, and even appreciation for the wisdom we gained from their mistakes,” Berman says. These wounds-and how they affect the people, parents, friends, coworkers, and lovers we become-are the focus of practicing psychiatrist, Robin Berman, M.D., who is also associate professor of Psychiatry at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine. To varying degrees, we all come into adulthood with grievances, habits that don’t really serve us, and usually some holes in our lives-things we missed out on in childhood for one reason or aother.
While some of us had more idyllic-leaning childhoods than others, no parent (or person) is perfect, so everyone experiences pain growing up.
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