“It is the lost possibilities of Marilyn Monroe that capture our imaginations. It was the lost Norma Jeane, looking out of Marilyn’s eyes, who capture our hearts.” Gloria Steinem

As an adult, I was blessed, unlike Marilyn, with the opportunity to go to school, to learn about the psychological underpinnings of backgrounds like ours. It helped me to understand my childhood. I learned that in the presence of neglect and absence of consistent parental care, a child learns to depend on themselves even when that self-reliance means guessing or pretending to know how to be and how to perform the most basic of life skills. Numerous studies show that if a child does not successfully negotiate through each developmental stage, they are subject to deep-seated feelings of worthlessness, shame, and mistrust. These types of core feelings often lead to a fundamental desire to disappear which can be played out in more than one suicide attempt. Now it is more understood that early rejections by adults and childhood peers have lasting consequences.