I'm one of the 30%

I found this article about the whole Adam Lanza/Lisa Long/mentally ill child fiasco: http://www.ahaparenting.com/_blog/Parenting_Blog/post/Nancy_Lanza,_Liza_Long_and_the_Rest_of_Us/#.UNOcjFGVRn4.facebook

In it she says something that totally rocked my world.  She says that she thinks about 70% of kids will turn out just fine regardless of how they are parented, outside of outright abuse.  30% of kids will really need parents to be very, very connected to the them to turn out OK.

I think I'm one of those 30% kids.  I think I turned out alright, so I'm not saying my parents totally screwed up, but my mental health issues have always seemed way bigger than they needed to be given my childhood circumstances.  I wasn't abused. My parents were even pretty good in some areas.  But yet, I ended up having very bad depression and anxiety, I was a cutter when I was younger, I ended up hospitalized a couple times, I've had eating issues, blah blah blah... 

Just recently I've been thinking about what the fuck happened.  Like I mean, really, what was so god-awful bad in your life, Andrea, that you need so much help and still feel like you are holding on by a thread sometimes?  What WAS  IT?  And you know, I can't put my finger on ONE thing, just a huge accumulation of things.

And I have friends who had it much worse than me, who do better than me.  And for the last few years I've felt like I don't deserve to feel this messed up sometimes. Like, just get over it, your life isn't that bad, pick yourself up.  You are fine.  But it doesn't work.  I'm not fine.  I'm better, but I'm damaged.  I'm in a slow recovery.  Better than I ever have been, but still not great.

I think I'm just one of those 30% that really needed really sensitive parenting.  I just needed more than I got.  Another kid might have been totally fine with my parents and life circumstances, but I wasn't.  I'm just more vulnerable for some reason.  And I can think of a few family members that are the same way.  There are a few who I look at their parents, and think they are fine people and even sometimes their other kids are doing really well, but they aren't.  They join me in this 30%.

I'm not going to dwell on what our parents could have done, maybe they couldn't have done anything, it's possible.  Or maybe they weren't capable at time time of doing anything differently. 

Anyway this statistic of the 70/30% totally made me feel like I understood myself more.  I think this is where the whole gene-environment interaction comes in.  I was born with a much higher predisposition to developing depression and anxiety.  It also gives me hope that most of us will be OK even if our parents really mess up, about 70% of us (again as long as some real abuse doesn't get in there).  And probably a good portion of parents are really able to create a super sensitive, nurturing environments for all.  Throw alcoholism and divorce and a few other things in there that we really don't always have control over and things get messy.

It also shows me why so many people say things like, "my parents did such and such and I turned out fine,"  Yes, YOU turned out fine, some of us had the same things happen and we did not turn out "fine."  We aren't mass murderers (most of us), but we are recovering.  And it can sometimes be hard to know if you've got a 70% kid or a 30% kid.  So might as well err on the side of caution and just go ahead and try to create a very warn, sensitive, nurturing environment for them as best as you can.