“Repeated trauma in childhood forms and deforms the personality. The
child trapped in an abusive environment is faced with formidable tasks
of adaptation. She must find a way to preserve a sense of trust in
people who are untrustworthy, safety in a situation that is unsafe,
control in a situation that is terrifyingly unpredictable, power in a
situation of helplessness. Unable to care for or protect herself, she
must compensate for the failures of adult care and protection with the
only means at her disposal, an immature system of psychological
defenses.”
―
Judith Lewis Herman
Tag: children
Children
who feel they cannot engage their parents emotionally often try to
strengthen their connection by playing whatever roles they believe their
parents want them to. Although this may win them some fleeting
approval, it doesn’t yield genuine emotional closeness. Emotionally
disconnected parents don’t suddenly develop a capacity for empathy just
because a child does something to please them.
People who lacked emotional engagement in childhood, men and women
alike, often can’t believe that someone would want to have a
relationship with them just because of who they are. They believe that
if they want closeness, they must play a role that always puts the other
person first.
— Lindsay C. Gibson, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents (2015)
“Many abused children cling to the hope that growing up
will bring escape and freedom. But the personality formed in an
environment of coercive control is not well adapted to adult life. The
survivor is left with fundamental problems in basic trust, autonomy, and
initiative. She approaches the tasks of early adulthood–establishing
independence and intimacy–burdened by major impairments in self-care, in
cognition and memory, in identity, and in the capacity to form stable
relationships. She is still a prisoner of her childhood; attempting to
create a new life, she reencounters the trauma.”
— Judith Herman
People who grew up emotionally neglected tend to carry some false beliefs about emotions in relationships. (By Jonice Webb)
Here’s a good, but not exhaustive, sampling:
1. Sharing your feelings or troubles with others will make them feel burdened.
2. Sharing your feelings or troubles with others will chase them away.
3. If you let other people see how you feel, they will use it against you.
4. Sharing your feelings with others will make you look weak.
5. Letting others see your weaknesses puts you at a disadvantage.
6. It’s best not to fight if you want to have a good relationship.
7. Talking about a problem isn’t helpful. Only action solves a problem.
Fortunately, not one of these beliefs is true. In fact, they are each
and every one dead wrong. (The only exception is if you share your
feelings with another emotionally neglected person, who may not have any
idea how to respond). When you grow up receiving consistent direct or
indirect messages that you should keep your feelings to yourself, it is
natural to assume that those feelings are burdensome and undesirable to
others.
“Children are initially wired to respond angrily to
parental abuse or neglect until they learn that protesting parental
unfairness is the greatest and most punishable crime possible. This then
renders their anger silent and subliminal where it percolates as an
ever accumulating sea of resentment, that fuels the critic’s prodigious
habits of fault finding and seeing danger in everyone. Viewing all
relationships through the lenses of parental abandonment, the outer
critic never lets down its guard. It continuously projects old unworked
through childhood anger onto others and silently scapegoats them by
blowing current disappointments out of proportion. It then cites these
insignificant transgressions as justification for relentless fuming,
silent grumbling and long resentful rumination. To bastardize Elizabeth
Barrett Browning: “How do I find thee lacking? Let me count the ways.”
When the displaced blaming of the wrong person becomes habitual, it
manifests as passive-aggressiveness. Common examples of this are
distancing oneself in hurt and irritable withdrawal or pushing others
away via backhanded compliments, hurtful teasing, poor listening and the
withholding of positive feedback and appreciation. Chronic lateness and
poor follow through on commitments can also be an unconscious,
passive-aggressive way of expressing anger to others.”
— Pete Walker, “Shrinking the outer critic in complex PTSD”
“Often children who survive extremely adverse childhoods
have learned a particular survival strategy. I call it ‘strategic
detachment.’ This is not the withdrawal from reality that leads to
psychological disturbance, but an intuitively calibrated disengagement
from noxious aspects of their family life or other aspects of their
world. They some how know, This is not all there is. They hold the
belief that a better alternative exists somewhere and that someday they
will find their way to it. They persevere in that idea. They somehow
know Mother is not all women, Father is not all men, this family does
not exhaust the possibilities of human relationships-there is life
beyond this neighborhood. This does not spare them suffering in the
present, but it allows them not to be destroyed by it. Their strategic
detachment does not guarantee that they will never know feelings of
powerlessness, but it helps them not to be stuck there.”
“Childhood trauma can affect a person so greatly because
of its prescence in the time of developmemt. Events that would normally
change a person become embedded in every fiber of one’s identity. It is
this time of life which is so crucial to your entire future. This is the
unique nature of C-PTSD, which doesn’t merely change a person, it
creates them. It builds every trait, interest, and understanding of the
world with this toxin. Nothing is unaffected or unaltered because all
there is to alter was created by the trauma. Moving forward is not
moving back to before the trauma, it is in every essence a rebirth and
reeducation of life itself. To move on we can not erase, because to
erase trauma’s effect we in theory erase ourselves.”
— Understanding Childhood C-PTSD
by Costas Balafas, Greece, 1950s.
“When I was about 20 years old, I met an old pastor’s
wife who told me that when she was young and had her first child, she
didn’t believe in striking children, although spanking kids with a
switch pulled from a tree was standard punishment at the time. But one
day, when her son was four or five, he did something that she felt
warranted a spanking–the first in his life. She told him that he would
have to go outside himself and find a switch for her to hit him with.
The boy was gone a long time. And when he came back in, he was crying.
He said to her, “Mama, I couldn’t find a switch, but here’s a rock that
you can throw at me.” All of a sudden the mother understood how the
situation felt from the child’s point of view: that if my mother wants
to hurt me, then it makes no difference what she does it with; she might
as well do it with a stone. And the mother took the boy into her lap
and they both cried. Then she laid the rock on a shelf in the kitchen to
remind herself forever: never violence. And that is something I think
everyone should keep in mind. Because if violence begins in the nursery
one can raise children into violence.”
— Astrid Lindgren, author of Pippi Longstocking, 1978 Peace Prize Acceptance Speech
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