In one of my other articles, “The Most Important Separation,” I talked about the concept of separating from our parents’ limiting beliefs and fears. This is also about separating from parents, but in a subtler, emotional way. This is about separating from the emotional burdens of our parents that we take on during childhood.

As kids, we are highly sensitive to our parents’ emotions, and extremely susceptible to taking on these emotions ourselves. What I mean by this is that the prominent feelings of our parents often diffuse into our psyches and we feel what our parents feel. This can be anything from pain and sadness to anger and resentfulness.

When I was a child, I took on a lot of my mom’s pain and sadness. My parents divorced when I was two, and I lived with my dad. I remember that the time I spent with my dad was very different from the time I spent with my mom. When I was with my mom, there was a perceptible fog of pain surrounding her, and she felt distant and sad. In the 7th grade we were assigned a metaphorical essay, and I wrote about how my mom was like my snow globe music box—like the swan inside the globe, my mom was trapped, and looked out on the world but was separate from it. Like the music that the snow globe played, my mom was beautiful but sad. When I shared this essay with her, she was embarrassed that I saw her that way, defensive, and disappointed in herself. Back then she didn’t realize how much I understood and how much of her feelings I internalized.

Recently I’ve begun to separate myself from my mom’s pain that I have carried since childhood, thanks to some old video footage. For my birthday, my dad transferred hours of home video footage into DVDs and sent me copies. I have had the unique opportunity to look back on my childhood and witness what I was like at age 1, 2, 3, all the way to age 8. I thought it would be great fun to watch these videos, but I had no idea what I was in for. Through watching these videos I have gotten in touch with some very deep and intense pain, sadness, and anger due to my my parents’ divorce. Watching the transition from the videos of my mom playing with me to the videos where she is not there anymore has triggered these feelings. When I was young I wasn’t able to feel my anger at my mom for leaving me because her pain took precedence, and as kids we don’t feel safe being angry with our parents. I learned from an early age how to “disassociate,” which is a way of leaving the body when emotions are too strong to handle; it’s a state of distance and removal from the world. The videos give me visual evidence of the burden of both my sadness and my mom’s. There are numerous instances in the videos in which my very young self is disassociating, staring off dazedly into the distance, quiet and unresponsive despite the activity around me. Only now, I can see that. These videos have helped me start healing my own pain from the past, and have also made me realize how much of my mom’s pain I felt responsible for as a kid.

Separating from the emotional burdens of our parents is essential for our development as self-assured adults. If we do not heal from our parents’ emotional burdens, we will have difficulty understanding the emotional boundaries between ourselves and the people we are close to, making intimacy challenging.