In 2024, I thought a lot about

I’m 66 and I’m no psychiatrist. Before this year, I believed behaviour was largely a matter of choice and that some people simply made bad choices. Then, in April, I picked up Luster, a novel by Raven Leilani and read a line that caused me to drop the book in shock: 

“When my father was a soldier, his prefrontal cortex wasn’t yet complete.”

In other words, because Leilani’s father character was so young when he became a soldier, the part of the brain responsible for informing his emotional responses and making good decisions hadn’t fully developed. 

Those 12 words cast light on the story of my own life. It was like the author – a stranger with no knowledge of my childhood or my relationship with my Dad – had handed me the missing piece to a jigsaw I’d been stuck on for decades.

I laid the book aside and began my own research. I learned that, yes, if we are exposed to significant trauma before the prefrontal cortex has reached maturity, there will likely be a significant impact on our personal development, and our subsequent behaviour. And here’s the most salient part: our behaviour – of course – has a knock-on effect on the people we are close to. 

Here it was: evidence that simply making bad choices was less responsible than I’d believed. I began to think of my Dad through this lens.  

After Dad died, I learned about the terror of his World War 2 experience. He signed up at 17 years old, and wound up on the Arctic Convoys which sailed from the UK to the northern ports in the Soviet Union. Churchill described these journeys as “the worst in the world” because of the perilous Arctic conditions, and heavy German attack from sea and air. Dad’s ship was torpedoed several times and he survived the last attack by clinging on to a plank of wood. He was one of only six survivors. 

His mother was informed he was missing, presumed dead. When he returned, her hair turned white overnight from shock. 

When Dad married Mum, he was 30 and she was 18. She couldn’t cope with his rage. Nor could any of their children. I knew about post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), though no one talked about it when I was a child.

If the prefrontal cortex is typically only fully developed around the age of 25 (and this is often later for males than females), Dad’s emotions – already reflexively aggressive – must have matured amidst staggering trauma. Given Mum’s age when they wed, I guess hers wasn’t properly developed either, and is probably why her own reaction was to disappear to another room and leave it to her offspring to be dragged from their beds to pick up the pieces from his drunken tirades. And of course, as children, our own prefrontal cortexes weren’t fully formed either.

Might this go some way to explaining why I developed a fear of anger and an unflinching need for safety, which informed my reactions as I became an adult? My father’s instinct to settle what he saw as scores with his fists – usually spurred on by alcohol – taught me to regard anyone consuming more than a couple of drinks with disdain. As a result, I dismissed anyone crossing the invisible line known only to me. As time has passed, I’ve learnt that listening, and hearing, followed by discussion is the best way to move disagreements forward.

After finishing the novel, I began to analyse recollections that friends and family members had mentioned to me over the years. Incidents in their younger life, which I now see had quietly lodged in their brains, unconsciously dictating a blueprint for their emotional future. 

Take, for example, a friend who, as a child, their teacher wrote that he had: “performed extremely well”. He had, in fact, achieved a hundred percent in a subject yet his report insisted he must “always strive for more”. No wonder he grew into an adult who never felt quite good enough. 

Then there was the woman who – when her father returned from war to meet her for the first time – she was sent to boarding school soon afterwards, and her parents moved abroad. In the holidays, she was dispatched to trusted friends. Having never experienced demonstrative parental love, she married at the earliest opportunity, and, even within the relationship, continued the lonely life that was seeded in her childhood.

And, at 21, I married a man I shouldn’t have. As I walked up the aisle I wished someone in my family would intervene and halt proceedings. But why would they? He was so familiar to us all. When I got out seven years later, he asked me why I was leaving. “Because I am frightened of you,” I said. 

That was when I decided not to let the past dictate my future.

But it was reading someone else’s story in 2024, that opened a window on my past, letting in air, allowing me to look back with less anger.

I can’t eradicate anything that happened in my childhood. I can’t discuss it with my dead parents, but I can now make sense of why it might have happened. And perhaps alongside ‘prefrontal cortex’, I can add empathy to my personal lexicon.

And maybe even forgiveness.

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