Today was one of my coveted trips outside the house, my tattoo appointment, and picking up groceries. While sitting in the shop I noticed the music was just DMX, all DMX. Do not get me wrong DMX made some hits that spoke to me during my turbulent teens. So I asked my artist and he responds “Didn’t you hear, he passed away today.” Oh no I didn’t know. I had to one-handed Google it, that doesn’t seem right he was so young, oh he did pass away and he was only 50. Complications from an overdose.. Oh too young, too soon, too many people left behind, too much trauma that was not healed.
If you ever read or watched the behind the scene stores of DMX you get tales of his toxic childhood. Throughout his childhood, Simmons was beaten regularly by his mother and her many boyfriends, who knocked out his teeth and left prominent scars on his face. He was kicked out of school in the fifth grade and his mother sent him to a home for abandoned children for 18 months. By age 14 he was living on the streets to escape his mother’s beatings, and his only friends were the stray dogs. He had started using crack cocaine at age 14 and spoke freely about his cycles of addiction and rehabilitation, a pattern of drug use that is associated with young heart attacks (Scott et al., 2021).
Damn, was it my fault, somethin’ I did
To make a father leave his first kid at 7 doin’ my first bid?
Back on the scene at 14 with a scheme
To get more cream than I’d ever seen in a dream
And by all means I will be living high off the hog
And I never gave a about much but my dog
That’s my only, I had offered my last
Just another little, headed nowhere fastAy yo I’m slippin’ I’m fallin’ I can’t get up
Ay yo I’m slippin’ I’m fallin’ I can’t get up
Ay yo I’m slippin’ I’m fallin’ I gots to get up
Get me back on my feet so I can tear shit up
Lessons from DMX’s Short Life
On April 2, 2021, Earl Simmons (DMX) had a heart attack at his home, was comatose and placed on life support, and died on April 9, 2021. He was 50 years old.
You would have expected DMX to stop breaking the law after he was repeatedly arrested and jailed. His talent as a rapper earned him major adulation and tremendous amounts of money, but his success could not rescue him from the emotional damage of his childhood. People who repeatedly break the rules are often suffering from irreversible trauma that occurred in childhood. Since you are unlikely to be able to change their behavior patterns, you may just have to keep your distance. Emotional scars from a difficult childhood usually remain forever (Hovens, et al., 2017).
Trauma is universal
Trauma is an almost universal part of the human experience.
We usually think of trauma as a thing that happens in very extreme circumstances – rape, molestation, physical abuse, extreme neglect, assault, domestic violence, or natural disasters. But this is acute trauma, which is not the only kind. Even acute trauma is common. Research from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) found that one in five Americans has been sexually molested as a child; one in four has been beaten by a parent; one in four of us grew up with alcoholic relatives, and one out of eight has witnessed their mother being beaten or hit.
These are appalling numbers, far beyond what even most practitioners expect. Childhood trauma is a silent epidemic, with only one-third of respondents in the landmark ACE study (from which these findings are drawn) reporting no such experiences. The CDC estimates that overall costs for childhood and adolescent trauma exceed those of cancer or heart disease and that eradicating child abuse in America would reduce the overall rate of depression by more than half, alcoholism by two-thirds, and suicide, IV drug use, and domestic violence by three-quarters.
But even for those of us who experienced no such incidents, there remains a subtler and less graphic source of trauma: chronic emotional abuse and neglect. Research has shown that such abuse and neglect can be just as devastating as physical abuse and sexual molestation. Karlen Lyons-Ruth, conducted an influential study in the 1980s that followed children from birth to 20 years old. Their hypothesis was that hostile or intrusive behavior on the part of mothers would be the strongest indicator of mental instability in their adult children. Instead, they found that a mother’s emotional withdrawal had the most profound and long-lasting impact (Lyons-Ruth et al., 2013).
If your caregivers regularly ignore your needs, you learn to anticipate rejection and withdrawal. You cope by blocking out their hostility or neglect and acting as if it doesn’t matter. And all of this carries into adulthood. It doesn’t just go away on its own. A child who has been ignored or chronically humiliated is likely to lack self-respect. Children who have not been allowed to assert themselves will have trouble standing up for themselves. And many adults who were brutalized as children carry a smoldering rage they can barely contain.
The memory of the trauma acts like a splinter in the mind – it is the body’s response to the foreign object that becomes the problem rather than the object itself.
Back to my favorite quote that has come to be a huge part of healing past traumas.
“If You Don’t Heal What Hurt You, You’ll Bleed on People Who Didn’t Cut You.” -Unknown
In infancy and early childhood, we become wounded and get our hearts broken by our imperfect and often well-intentioned attachment figures, who are doing the best they can with what they know. This sets the emotional and physiological blueprint for the rest of our lives……we learn what’s safe and what isn’t, we learn about who we are and aren’t, and most importantly, we learn about what we can expect in close attachment relationships. And we return to this blueprint over and over again, no matter how much pain it has caused us…..we will always choose familiarity over change, regardless of how it’s serving us.
It’s an injury, a wound…..and it’s completely within our power to evolve and grow through the pain of our past. I’m no philosopher, but growth may be the whole point of it all, the reason we’re here in the first place. We’re here not just to survive, but to thrive! This is why it’s so important we do the work. What a waste it would be if we spent our lives unconsciously projecting our old shit onto other people. What a tragedy it would be if we spent our lives running away from authentic love and connection because we didn’t receive it as kids and now don’t recognize it as adults. What a sad state of affairs to spend a lifetime in the dull, grey “this is just how life is I guess” zone, because we learned somewhere along the way that we were worthless, and we continued to make decisions based on that story.
Look at your patterns and do the work. Do it as your life depends on it……because it does.
Manifest in the Midwest
References
De Bellis, M. D., & Zisk, A. (2014). The Biological Effects of Childhood Trauma. Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics of North America, 23(2), 185–222. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chc.2014.01.002
Lyons-Ruth, K., Bureau, J.-F., Easterbrooks, M. A., Obsuth, I., Hennighausen, K., & Vulliez-Coady, L. (2013). Parsing the construct of maternal insensitivity: distinct longitudinal pathways associated with early maternal withdrawal. Attachment & Human Development, 15(5-6), 562–582. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616734.2013.841051
Scott, M. L., Murnane, K. S., & Orr, A. W. (2021). Young at heart? Drugs of abuse cause early-onset cardiovascular disease in the young. Heart, 107(8), 604–606. https://doi.org/10.1136/heartjnl-2020-318856
