From my readings, research, and therapy sessions I’ve had, most seem to agree that a major of our trauma comes from family and potentially friends when growing up.
A lot of parents are doing the best they can with how they’ve been brought up, what’s going on in their lives while trying to raise a child, doing what they can to help their child fit into the society they live in, or following in the same footsteps their own parents previously travelled to raise them. There are parents that (either unconsciously or on some level consciously) made bad choices or selfish choices that negatively impacted their children when growing up. Some children experienced horrible situations at the hands of adults their lives depended upon — so they had no other option but to suffer at the hands of someone else.
One of the common things families (unless they do embrace magic in some way) do to children is to discourage them from magical thinking.
The world is an amazing as well as a scary place as a child. We are more attuned to the what is around us and notice things that either parents or older children don’t notice due to being taught to disbelieve in themselves and what they sense or what they come across in their explorations and experiences.
Sometimes a child notices things others can’t see, whether is be an ancestor like grandma looking over the family, auras or energy around people which cause the child to respond to people in ways that aren’t what are expected such as staring at a beautifully lit up aura around someone or sensing something dark and scary about someone that others can’t sense.
Whether a parent or family member doesn’t want to have to deal with society judging them for a child that picks up on things others don’t (or have learned not to see and to unconsciously ignore), for talking about things that they shouldn’t know or understand at that age, or some other reason, many family members will think them squashing the child’s magical view of the world is something that will help them fit in (or even the family member fit in with whatever situation they might presently be involved in if in public).
The damage on getting children to not trust their own senses is something that takes work and rebuilding trust in how the world is magical in magnificent and mundane ways.
Some of the negative impacts are primarily around the child learning not to trust what they think and sense, while others might be more traumatic where they were punished for what they tried to share that they sense.
To move forward and deepen your magical or creative practice, you’ll need to reconnect with the inner witch child that believed in the faeries that he or she saw hiding in the garden, the strange things they saw around places that others couldn’t see, or believing in their long-lost belief in what magic they can do.
