Are you secretly sad?
I’ve just read an article about the cultural icon that is Audrey Hepburn. It talks about her enduring personal pain from her father’s abandonment when she was 7 years old: he went on a ‘business trip’ and never returned. She met him many years later and reports that the meeting left her even more bitter and disappointed. Hepburn said:
“The feeling of family is terribly important. Having my father cut off, or he cut himself off, was desperate,” If I could have just seen him regularly, I would have felt he loved me and I would have had a father … I tried desperately to avoid it for my children. You become very insecure about affection and terribly grateful for it and you have an enormous desire to give it.”
Our childhood can stay with us for years and stop us from enjoying relationships and life in the present.
Hepburn’s public face was very different to her private one. We all have a face we hide from the world – and often this is a very different and more vulnerable face to the one we put out, smiling and coping, to the rest of the world. We hide our suffering and put on a brave face. The beautiful, elegant and internationally-celebrated Audrey Hepburn is a clear example of this.
If you’re struggling with private pain, counselling can really help. We can’t change the past, but we can make better sense of it, gain insight to it and clarity about it… all of which is immensely helpful in helping us move on with our lives out of our inner pain and to places of joy and hope.
If you are struggling with your past and coming to terms with it, then I’d love to hear from you, please get in touch.