First You Take the Dough...

When I was growing up, this innocuous little statement was a humour detonation device in my family.

Whispered innocently at just the right time  - meaning the worst time - would put an instant smile on my dad‘s face…quickly from there devolving him to a shoulders shaking, eyes squeezed shut, fingers covering his mouth (as he tried not to guffaw inappropriately in the middle of some tirade of my mother’s) mess. And everyone would get in trouble and it was great fun. 

The line had come from a cookbook my first grade class had put together, full of recipes written by the kids.  My recipe was for the kind of buns my grandmother made. The first line of my recipe was “First you take the dough.”

As the legend went, my six-year-old self had proudly brought the mimeographed cookbook home and watched my parents reverently open the construction paper cover that I had lovingly decorated…

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And then it was all gales of laughter that my recipe had blithely skipped the bulk of what it took to actually make buns. In my innocent mind, you just took dough (somehow magically procured) and formed it into buns and baked it.

To hear my parents tell of this, you would think it was the funniest thing they had ever lived through. 

I have no direct memory of it and the only thing funny about it to me was the effect it had on my dad - especially - almost anytime it was mentioned.

But I wonder if I enjoyed it as much as my parents did at the time.

I’ve caught glimpses of the various social media trends over the years that seem to be focused mainly on humiliating children for fun. It seems everyone else is laughing except me. And of course, the child in the video. It’s hard for me to watch these little clips, in which the adults are rolling around, helpless with laughter, while the child looks on, dismayed at the raw egg running down his forehead. Or shocked that her Halloween candy bag has been raided empty. Or crying from the horror of having seen spiders all over her face in a Snapchat filter.

It is clear to me, looking at these small faces that they are not in on these jokes and it would be bad enough without the isolation of the surrounding laughter.

All of which is to say, it’s a good reminder that the negative experiences in childhood that shape us are not always recognized as such. 

I haven’t had that first grade cookbook experience show up in a tapping session and it may never. It might not have been mildly traumatic for me. I might have enjoyed seeing my parents laughing. 

Or I might have felt humiliated or confused or shocked at such an unexpected response to work I was so proud of. 

I may never know. But I am always so appreciative of the way EFT makes space for formative experiences to arise so they can be healed - regardless of whether they fit a conventional description of trauma.