Legal / Law News: What Happens When the Past Haunts Us?

Doug Wallace, author of the December 2009 Indie Bound Next List Winner in the nonfiction category for his memoir, Everything Will Be All Right, asks his readers this question: How often do you see or hear something that brings back memories of your childhood? What most people don’t know is that many of us spend our adult life trying to forget the past.

Phoenix, AZ (PRWEB) December 18, 2009 -- Doug Wallace, author of the Indie Bound Next List Winner in December 2009 for his bestselling memoir, Everything Will Be All Right, asks his readers this question: How often do you see or hear something that brings back memories of your childhood? What most people don’t know is that children born into impoverished families spend their adult life trying to forget their childhood. In his website at Everything Will Be All Right, author Doug Wallace maintains an Author’s Blog at www.dougwallace.net/ in which he calls attention to the following:

A child living in poverty is often isolated, impaired and undermined by their surroundings.
Persistent adversity assaults them from their earliest memories, continuously reinforcing its destructive impact upon life at home and at school.
They were born into an environment of crisis and stress, yet additional stress is heaped them as they grow older.
One or both of their parents displays violent and/or criminal behavior.
One or both of their parents is an alcoholic or drug addict making steady employment unlikely.
Their parents are too drained to provide consistent nourishment, structure and stimulation of the type that prepares other children for school and for life—hence they behave differently at school.
Their older siblings experience failure as soon as they enter the world outside the family and rapidly come to the conclusion the future holds little promise. Low expectations are shared memories among siblings.
Consistent failure among siblings and other family members convinces them that they are also born to fail.
Failure is compounded and reinforced by not learning the social skills necessary to merge into mainstream society.
The child sees that other families live differently and have a stable family life, while their world remains bleak.
The child has no reason to believe that anything worthwhile will be lost by dropping out of school, committing crimes, or having babies as unmarried teenagers.
The culture of poverty teaches them to take immediate satisfaction over long-term gains..

One reader wrote the following to me a couple of weeks ago; “I have always felt alone with my past as a big part of who I am but I never had anyone who could really share or understand it.." In short, this wonderful person had only a few good memories of the past and those were drowned out by the bad. It is perhaps the one biggest thing they wish they did have- a good memory of the past. Without a useful and self-respecting past that gives them a sense of self-worth and a future worth anticipating, the child is missing a critical piece of the puzzle required for building a successful and happy life. No one circumstance, no one single event, is the cause of a rotten childhood memory, but add them all up and it’s easy to understand why our past can come to haunt us. What really makes us happy is good memories of the past. Our success may make us feel better about the present, but the past is never really far away.