CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - Grieving The Childhood You Never Had: How To Let Go And Grow Up

Episode Date: May 20, 2025

You were the responsible one. The quiet one. The one who didn’t need much. And now, as an adult, you feel stuck—like you never got the chance to just be a kid, and it’s holding you back. Grieving a childhood that was chaotic, neglectful, abusive, devoid of emotional connection, or overly parentified can be challenging. You may feel like you’re stuck in your childhood or your child self, and like you can’t seem to let go or move into adulthood. In this episode, I explain what it means to grieve your childhood, the impact of a missed childhood, and how to become the adult you need. Join The Family Cyclebreakers Club: www.callinghome.co/join Have a question for Whitney? Call in and leave a voicemail for the show at 866-225-5466. Follow Whitney on Instagram: www.instagram.com/sitwithwhit Subscribe to Whitney's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@whitneygoodmanlmft Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When you're with Amex Platinum, you get access to exclusive dining experiences and an annual travel credit. So the best tapas in town might be in a new town altogether. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at Amex.ca. www.ca.com. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Calling Home Podcast. I'm here today with a solo episode, and in this episode, we're going to discuss the deep

emotional pain of losing your childhood to neglect, abuse, or adversity, and how you can take control in adulthood to create the life you want to live. But before we get into that, I want to ask you, are you dealing with the pain of complicated family relationships? probably because you're listening to this podcast. You can join the Family Cycle Wakers Club this month and get new resources every Monday dedicated to grieving complicated relationships. We have expert articles, worksheets, and interactive support groups.

You'll gain clarity and a sense of community instantly. Visit callinghome.com to join. All right, let's dive into this episode. If you're listening to this, I would bet you were the responsible one, the quiet one, the one who didn't need much. And now as an adult, you feel stuck, like you never got the chance to just be a kid and it's holding you back. If you are grieving a childhood that was chaotic, neglectful, abusive, didn't have any emotional connection, or you were overly parentified emotionally or physically or both, it's challenging. You may

feel like you're stuck in your childhood or your child's self and like you just can't seem to let go or move into adulthood. And I think a lot of you that feel this way are grieving the loss of a childhood that you never had. And it's very hard to move out of that lack of childhood and into true adulthood where you have agency and options and power when you're in that grief stage. And grief is really what happens when we experience a loss of safety, connection, innocence, play, or protection in childhood. It is when you feel instantly and immensely lost as a child. And children who grew up this way, often become adults who don't know how to relax or have fun. They feel like life is always about

survival and they might be over responsible or even underdeveloped in emotional skills and feeling like they're so far behind. This comes up a lot in our groups at calling home that people will be like, I can't believe I'm just learning this at the age of 50 or I feel so embarrassed that I didn't know that this was a thing. And this is common. This happens to kids who didn't have a childhood. And in these moments where you get triggered or overwhelmed, you might feel even like younger than your age, especially during stress, or you've had this feeling that you've always been an adult and you don't know what it's like to be a kid. And that can actually inhibit you from stepping into like your actual adult self in adulthood. Having a childhood where your needs go unmet has a lot of

different impacts on the adult version of you. If you were parentified, you likely became a care ticker way too soon. And this may have meant that you were physically taking care of your parents, the needs of your household, your siblings, taking care of yourself in a way that was not developmentally appropriate. I always like to say here, this is not about you having like chores as a kid or having to put your plate in the dishwasher, whatever it is. This is about having tasks that are foreign adults, not a child, and that get in the way of your social, emotional, and physical development as a child and stopped you from being able to experience those developmental milestones that are crucial to you becoming a healthy, functional adult.

if you were neglected, you were emotionally and or physically ignored. And because of that emotional or physical abandonment and being ignored, you may have developed some strategies to make yourself be seen less to kind of squash how you were feeling. Or you may have been someone that got really loud and had to find ways to get attention that some times are are not the best ways of getting attention and may have led to you actually being further neglected or abused or you became the scapegoat because of a lot of those symptoms that you were showing in your childhood. And those patterns can really persist into adulthood if you aren't taking care of that and acknowledging it and figuring out where it came from and deciding

what to do with it. People who grow up in these types of homes also typically experience a lot of instability. So you're growing up in chaos. You're fearful. You don't know where your next meal is going to come from or who's going to be sleeping at your house that night where you're going to be sleeping, who your parent is going to be dating, whatever it is, that there's this constant need to be on edge and on high alert. And we have an entire content module on the website dedicated to growing up in chaos that's really popular. You can just go to callinghome.com and type in chaos and all of those resources will show up if you need some more help with that. These different things, parentification, neglect, instability can all show up in adulthood in a couple of different ways, right?

You can struggle with boundaries, self-worth, decisions. making. You might have a lot of inner criticism or self-doubt. You have difficulty maintaining stable relationships or trusting others. And while yes, these things can be attributed to a variety of causes, if you are someone that's like, I really didn't have a childhood. And I notice all of these things happening in my adulthood, this could be one of the more likely causes. So you can relate to this. You're an adult who feels like you need to grieve the childhood that you didn't get, how do you do that? Let's talk about some actual strategies that you can use and implement in your life. First of all, I say this with every issue that we cover, you need to acknowledge

and name what was missing and what happened in your childhood. So when you can get honest and admit it, you are actually giving yourself the ability to validate what you experienced. And that is required before you can do any type of like healing or work or growth. Okay. So you can say things like I never felt protected. No one took care of me. I missed out on being a kid because I was parenting my parents. No one saw how hard things were for me. I was taking care of others. No one was taking care of me. And when you can have that actual clarity, especially if you do not have adults from your childhood that are willing to do this, it can be so helpful to kind of look at that child version of yourself and even pull out a picture of yourself at that age or write a

letter to that person, look at yourself in the mirror and be like, I was not protected. If I had a child right now, I would not do that to my child. I know that that was not the right thing to do. And this doesn't mean that you have to totally fault your parents or blame them or get angry at them, but you can call out what was actually happening for you and what you were experiencing. Then you have to allow yourself to mourn this. And this is where a lot of people get stuck.

but like can I sit with those feelings and say this child part of me feels anger and sadness and grief and pain and I feel like I want to yell and I want to say that it wasn't fair and I feel like a victim because I was a victim and can I get in touch with that child part of me so that I can see it and acknowledge it and validate it so that it doesn't have to get so loud and take over and like rule the adult version of me now because that's what's happening to a lot of people that gets stuck in this place is that they're not allowing that child version of them to be heard and understood and validated. And so that child part of them is like trying to sit in the driver's seat and take over and demand to be seen. And they do that

in some ways that are not very adult like and not very conducive to have. like adult respectful conversation. And so if you want that to happen less, you need to let that child part of you be seen. And I know that seems counterintuitive. And it's just like you want to press it down and shut it up and get rid of it. And that's what you were told a lot of the time in your childhood maybe. But the more you allow that part of you to come out in safe, good ways, the less that that part will demand to be heard when it is triggered, and the less loud and overbearing it will be, and the more adult-like you can behave in these situations. This is also where it is important if we think about those two parts, that if you have

this 10-year-old or whatever age version of you you want to imagine, and you have this adult version of you, that you can say, I'm going to give that child version of me the things that it didn't get. And that might include, I'm going to have a home that is safe and peaceful and calm and clean and where I know where things are. And I know who gets to come in and out of my house. And I have locks on my doors and I'm safe here. And I get to decide who gets to disrupt my peace and my energy, right? And I get to give that child something that the adults around me could not give me. And while I may not be able to give it this like perfect replacement for what I didn't get, I can give it something pretty close. And when I give

that child version of me that, it feels safe and protected. And so again, it doesn't have to get in the driver's seat and yell and kick and scream and throw tantrums when I feel triggered. My adult aligned self can step in in those moments, right? And for some of you, it might just be that like, gosh, you need to let yourself have fun and have joy and enjoy life because you've been an adult since you were five years old and taking care of everybody. And so maybe you need to do less therapy and less self-help and cut this podcast off and go, like, learn how to do pottery and paint and run around in a field and like play and actually enjoy your life. Not everybody needs more analysis and more understanding. Some people actually need to like get out of their

heads because of what they experienced as a childhood, as a child. And I also think you got to start speaking to yourself in the way that you wish a caregiver would have spoken to you. And so when you let that voice play out in your head of, you know, you're stupid, you're worthless, everything is wrong. You never do anything right. You're just replicating. what was done to you. And you don't want to be that person. So how can you step out of that and instead say, I am actually going to break the cycle by speaking to myself in a different way and by treating myself with compassionate and understanding? And that really, I think, segues into the next step, which is just like being good enough, like being a good enough parent to yourself and to your kids

and being compassionate, just saying, like, I've got you. We're safe. We're good. I can take over from here. You do not need to control my life anymore because you are a child. Like, it is okay for me to let go of that part of me that kept me really safe for all those years and is no longer keeping me safe in that way. And with that is where you can start to shift in to that adult version of you, right? So you can grieve your childhood and you can say, my childhood is over and I am an adult now. And I can be an adult, like a true, true adult, not a child trying to masquerade as an adult who doesn't have the capability or the awareness to do that. But like really an adult who has power and agency and rights. and I can do that while caring for the child inside of me.

And this is where I really want you to think about, like, what does it mean to me to be actually an adult who has power over their life? What does that look like? And if I have free will and agency and power, how can I be the adult that I want to be for myself? You get to grieve the childhood that you didn't have and create a life that you want to live now. And you are all you need to protect yourself. And you can give what you didn't give to yourself now. And the last thing you want to do is remain stuck in a role where you feel powerless and

terrible like you felt as a child, especially when you're not being forced like you were to be in that role any longer. I want to remind you that you do not have to go. go through this grief and this work alone. It is especially important that you join us this month at Calling Home while we are grieving, complex, complicated, and hurtful relationships. And you can always join us for a group every month inside the Family Cycle Breakers Club or get access to all of our content and resources that build on top of this podcast to actually help you take this work and implement it into your life. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with someone that you think could also benefit from it. Leave us a review or subscribe to the podcast and comment on the

episodes on Spotify. I always read those comments and respond to every one of them. And I love hearing from all of you. Thank you again so much for listening to this episode. And I'll see you soon. Bye. The Calling Home podcast is not engaged in providing therapy services, mental health advice, or other medical advice or services. It is not a substitute for advice from a qualified health care provider and does not create any therapist, patient, or other treatment relationship between you and Colling Home or Whitney Goodman. For more information on this, please see Calling Home's terms of service link in the show notes below.

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