Didn't bond with parents - still affecting me?

LegacyUser

I recently found out that I was in a 'nursing home' in the 70's for the first few months of my life. My parents were ill and it was suggested to them that I stay there for 4 months. No one visited me etc - I've gotten my records and it has saddened me no end. It was quite common I believe.

It explains so much to me though. I've never felt close to my parents (particularly my mother) or my family. At one point I thought I was adopted because I've never felt a connection to any of them. I wasn't though.

I don't quite know where to 'go' with this information though. It has really made me think of myself as a young child and the fact that I obviously never bonded with my mother/father or family. I have a constant 'lonely' feeling no matter how many people I'm with, which I'm guessing now, is related to my first few months of life.

Has anyone any thoughts on this or ideas on how I deal with it? I don't necessarily want to dwell on it but I feel I need to at least make my parents acknowledge it??
Thank you

AARRRGH

That may not be the reason why you feel lonely.

Lots of people feel like you, yet weren't apart from their mother for any part of their early few months of childhood.

You should definitely start by talking to your parents about it, and maybe talk to a therapist if you think it might help.

Best of luck.

ManOfMystery

I'm aware of the mother-child bond formed during pregnancy and the first few months, but I can't imagine you being away for a few early months of your childhood would have had a long-lasting impact on your relationship with both your parents. There are a lot of infants who are separated from parents for various reasons for weeks/months - e.g. if they have to stay in hospital due to sickness - and still go on to form that bond. Equally, there are many children who are adopted when they are 1/2/3yrs old and still form the bond, many are even unaware they are adopted until much later in life.

IMO any bond you have with your parents is formed throughout your entire childhood and is based on your relationship with them and how you treat each other. I wouldn't get too hung up on missing 2 or 3 months when you were practically newborn.

LegacyUser

I was put in the NH on the day I was born - came home 4 months later, so it was the from day one.

This is a 'big family secret' thing and both parents are elderly now and I'm not sure I'm confident enough to bring itt up...my sister let it slip recently (she's older than me) but begged me not to tell my mother I knew, coz my mother has felt guilty every since...

prinz

I really don't think that really is having a major affect on you. Perhaps you're dwelling on it too much.

People who have been adopted as an infant have grown up loving their parents and having the connection etc. you talk about, as much as a biological child might have.

Spare a thought for how your parents might have felt, being too ill to look after you properly and having to leave you there in someone else's care.

LegacyUser

I'm really not trying to blame my parents here prinz. I'm aware it must have been awful for them. I just hate the way it was kept such a secret from me. I appreciate that back in the day, you just didn't visit your kids in these places (it was a magdelene laundry, that I got out of, luckily) and I'm sure my mother has been racked with guilt because of it.

I just dunno what to do with the information now I have it. I feel like I want to talk to other people who may have experienced this. It really explains alot of my issues, and alot of my life. I've always felt lonely like I said, and I've always felt like people have abandoned me (friends or family) in one way or the other...it's like I've nearly always been waiting for a boyfriend to leave me or a friend to not contact me again. I've always had the feeling...

Thankfully I've a wonderful partner and kids now so my life has turned out well but that 'feeling' hasn't ever gone.

Dizzyblonde

I really don't think that being in a nursing home for the first few months of your life will have had this long-lasting effect on you - unless your parents were cold and unemotional too.
Try not to blame them for not visiting you - back then parents were told it was best not to visit children in hospitals etc as it would only unsettle them - crazy, but that's how it was. Plus if they were ill maybe they physically couldn't get to you.
If I were you I'd have a chat with your GP about your feelings - you might benefit from some counselling.
Good luck

dudara

I think the only thing that may be affecting you is yourself. You need to figure out why you feel lonely most of the time, you are an adult now and in charge of your own emotions.

Don't mean to sound harsh here, but stop trying to push this back on your parents. Things were very different a generation or two ago.

Beruthiel

Unregistered wrote: »

I just dunno what to do with the information now I have it.

Why do you need to do anything with it?

I feel like I want to talk to other people who may have experienced this.

You were four months old. You cannot remember it, you cannot remember any experiences.

It really explains alot of my issues, and alot of my life. I've always felt lonely like I said, and I've always felt like people have abandoned me (friends or family) in one way or the other...it's like I've nearly always been waiting for a boyfriend to leave me or a friend to not contact me again. I've always had the feeling...

I don't believe for one second that something that happened between 0 to 4 months would have any lasting effect on a person. Not if after that time your family were loving towards you.
You are misplacing your 'problems'.
Go talk to a professional if you feel you have a problem, but do not blame it on this one thing.

Queen-Mise

I was seperated from my parents also when I was born. My mother had severe back problems - was in traction for 2/3 months. I stayed with my godparents until I was 4/5 months old.

It was acknowledged in my house, but there was never a big deal about it.

I wouldn't agree that it is the cause of the loneliness.

antoinolachtnai

John Bowlby came up with all the maternal deprivation and bonding stuff you hear about in the fifties. From this work arises the idea that this early period is critical to developing a relationship with parents, and later on with other people.

It was good work at the time, and it arose from the particular situations he was dealing with at the time, in the post-war years.

However, a lot of research has been done since, by Bowlby and others, and it turns out it is a lot more complicated than that. A good text on developmental psychology might explain the research a bit better. Names to look out for are Bowlby and Ainsworth, and Attachment Theory.

Reading might not help your feelings though. You could consider going to see a counsellor and talking about it some. It might be a chance to consider the best way to talk to your parents about it, if that's what you want to do.

The Sweeper

Yep, OP, go and do some research on neuroscience and the studies into the mother-child bond from infancy.

There is increasing evidence that physical contact, close touching, hugs and kisses and direct eye contact - the sort you get from your mom when she dandles you on her knee - are vital in terms of how they wire the pathways of your brain for future development. If you are put into care at infancy, new studies reveal it actually can have a lifelong effect on you - because institutionalised caregivers will most probably deliver very functional care - changing you, washing you, feeding you - but not the 'love' that a parent would give - hugging you, kissing you, making eye contact and faces at you, so on.

The first I heard of this myself was when I worked on a transcript of a guest speech that Ruby Wax, of all people, was giving at an event to do with child care. Wax has started studying neuroscience after achieveing a qualification in psychotherapy in order to better understand her own childhood issues and history of depression.

When you have all of the information it may help you to understand why you feel as you do.

kittenkiller

I didn't live with my family for my first few months.

It's never too late to try to turn things around.
Over the last few years I've grown so much closer to my mother by trying to see things from her point of view and sitting down and having random conversations about everything and nothing.

You're parents have probably come to terms with what happened when you were a baby and they probably need to believe that what they did was right for you and everyone involved.
I really don't think that trying to get them to admit that there's something wrong will help at all, it might only put them on the defensive and you won't get anywhere!

Let by-gones be by-gones and work on improving your relationship now that you're an adult and you have the power to do so.

Best of luck.

LegacyUser

OP here.

Seriously, this is not about me blaming my parents at all. None of my family are close to each other - both my parents were only children and grew up in rural ireland and were very isolated themselves. They're both elderly now and I understand why they didn't encourage us to be close, even as young children. Having lived the lives they led themselves, they couldn't possibly have known how to encourage closeness between their own children, and indeed themselves.

I accepted long ago that we would never be a 'close-knit' family and I've never blamed anyone.

Like I said in my orig post - I only recently found out this information about myself.

And of course, as someone said, I don't remember it. But having researched how newborns were dealt with in this places, it appears that (as another poster said) there was no affection, no love, no visitors and very little physical contact with other humans. You were 'swaddled' in a blanket and probably handled once a day (if even) to be fed or changed. I have spoken with a woman who worked in the place I was in when she was 17 and she still suffers nightmares at the way the babies were treated

I have read alot, and research has proven that the first few months of your life can have an impact on how you perceive human relationships. I find it difficult to get close to people, I don't 'do' hugs and like I said, I've never felt like I bonded with my mother (in particular).

Also like I said, I'm not trying to dwell on this. It all new information to me (2 weeks) so it's not like I'm obsessing about it. I just want to figure out if I'm on the right track in relation to how it may have 'shaped' me as an adult. For those of you who have said this shouldn't have affected me as a young child, I am just exploring the idea that it probably DID affect me. As a mother myself, I cannot even begin to imagine how difficult it would be to bond with my child, and him to bond with me, if I didn't see him from the day of his birth, until four months later.

I was abused as a child too and have spoken to counsellors in the recent past and dealt with this issue - it helped me more than I can ever explain and I am now 'cured' (wrong terminology I'm sure) of the feelings around that issue.

So when I heard about this issue, it was like a lightbulb moment (as Oprah would say)...I immediately thought 'Ahhhhhhhhhh, THAT's why I feel like this...'
Am I making sense?

Julesie

Unregistered wrote: »

OP here.
None of my family are close to each other ....

I was abused as a child too

OP it seems like there are more issues at play here than just your living circumstances for the first 4 months of your life.

There may be something in the theory that a lack of close contact with parents in the early days of a baby's life may have an impact in the sense f closeness they feel later on. However I think for most people this would be negated if the rest of their childhood followed a normal pattern.

In your case it seems to have been reinforced by:

a) Lack of closeness in your family unit as a whole
b) Abuse during your childhood years

So while the Nursing Home may have been a contributing factor, I highly doubt it is the only reason you feel as you do.

antoinolachtnai

Well, that's the sort of scenario that bowlby was talking about alright. But the lack of affection at that stage doesn't really have to do with your having or not having a 'bond' with your parents - it's not about the bond with your parents, it's more general than that -. Maybe that will make it easier to talk about with them?

Anyway, if this is an issue for you, you need to talk about it and deal with it. Maybe the fact that you now know this can free you from the constraints it may have placed upon you?

aare

From what you say, it may not have been just about not bonding with your parents for the first 4 months, but effectively, not being socially stimulated in any way.

Easily comparable with the Romanian Orphanage children who, even when adopted into loving families, began to develop symptoms not unlike autism.

Here are a couple of fairly informed links to get you started:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/r325152l79541537/
http://family.jrank.org/pages/1238/Orphans-Summary.html

Whether we like it or not, some of our institutions were once easily as brutal, even to innocent babies, as anything in Romania, and that was not so long ago. scars do remain in people who are adults now.

Lollipops23

i know someone who was taken into a care after being neglected by his mother for almost 2 years(he was never taken out of his cot, barely fed and shown no affection at all)
he may have only been a toddler but my god it has affected him now.he's 24 and is a very disturned individual who cannot make normal connections with people at all.
OP i reckon it prob has affected you but it's up to you how you choose to move on from it.

yaya*

I have to disagree with people dismissing the idea that the OP spending his/her first 4 months in this nursing home have led to problems later in life. There is a lot of research in the area of attachment, which other posters have pointed to, which suggests that the first couple of years of a babies life are important in terms of the development of a bond with a parent/caregiver. If babies were deprived of human contact on a daily basis in this home, then its very possible that this has affected the OP.

Many babies adopted from orphanages where they receive little in the way of human contact, care and attention (often places like Russia etc) are believed to be suffering from Reactive Attachment Disorder. OP, if you google it, you'll find lots of info on it.

The Sweeper

OP I'm glad this is shedding some light on the way that you feel. I hope you absorb the information, and something else that might help is cognitive behavioural therapy.

I know someone who was handed into care at birth by a mother who didn't want her. Her father went back and collected her after a year and they raised her from then. There were a LOT of dysfunctional issues in her childhood after the first year as well, but the biggest effect the first year has had on her life is that she has absolutely no coping mechanisms. She cannot cope with anything.

She is a complete catastrophist and can be exhausting to be around as a result. Cognitive behavioural therapy did help her, but the combination of other issues means she's the sort of person who becomes addicted to the attention that drama gets her - so she will deliberately drop out of helpful therapies or stop taking medication when things get too calm.

So yes, the first year truly is the most important (this is also linked to studies of post natal depression, and the effect that the negativity this brings to the mother/child bond can have on the child's life - did you know, they actually recommend to women suffering from PND that they don't look at their child if they feel they cannot put on a positive facial expression?)

I hope the information you find brings you comfort, and opens opportunities for you to perhaps start something to make yourself feel better and more connected to the people around you.

LegacyUser

OP here.

Thank you all for the kind words - particularly in that last thread supermod.

Yes, posting here has been cathartic (is that the right word??) - I will look at the sites you mentioned and do a bit more research on this.

I can't discuss it with my parents unfortunately - like I said, they are elderly and haven't changed at all in the past 40yrs. To bring this subject up with my mother could 'destroy' her (as my sister told me over the weekend). She feels bad enough about it already - for me to acknowledge that it may have affected my life in any way, would not be a good idea!

Once again, thanks - this has really helped.

Lollipops23

OP,without prying, where did your sister go while your mum and dad were sick?did they keep her at home?if so,why did they feel they could take care of her but not you?in my experience a toddler or small kid can be even more exhausting then a tiny baby!