If you are a survivor of extended childhood trauma, you learned to maximize your safety through certain behaviors. You might have learned:
- to not ask for things or to have wants
- to be quiet and passive
- to dissociate so that you had no conscious awareness of what was happening to you at times of abuse
- to just accept whatever happened or whatever you were given
You likely even believed that you deserved to be treated so poorly. You might have been filled with shame and believed the things that happened were your fault.
Those were adaptive actions and beliefs at that time. As a child, you didn’t have lots of ways to defend or protect yourself. All of those things I listed were ways of making it less likely an abuser would become angry at you and hurt you even more. Those beliefs and behaviors allowed you to fade into the background as much as possible and go unnoticed as much as possible. In other words, these were smart and effective ways or protecting yourself when you had few options.
Now, however, you are an adult.
Where a slumped posture, eyes on the floor for a child might help them avoid being further victimized, what message does an adult with this posture send to other adults? What about quiet passivity, not having wants and just accepting whatever little you are given, or not standing up for yourself? Do these behaviors make it less likely you will be treated poorly, or do they make it more likely?
As an adult, these are signals to predators that you are an easy victim. It doesn’t mean everyone will treat you poorly, because most people aren’t predators, but there are some people out there looking for people they can treat poorly or abuse. And those predators are looking for signals like those.
The beliefs of childhood, the shame and the belief that abuse was your fault and you deserved it, becomes a trap in adulthood.
Then: Those things kept you safer by preventing you from fighting back, angering the abuser.
Now, as an adult:
- Those ways of reacting keep you immobilized and make it easy for someone to continue to treat you abusively or poorly.
- Those beliefs cause you to accept abuse and poor treatment as all you can expect.
- They keep you from fighting or fleeing and finding safe situations and safe people who will treat you well, as you truly deserve. And, sadly, they continue to keep you faded into the background so that the most likely people to notice you are those predators.
- These beliefs also can prevent you from engaging in a lot of activities where you might meet the good, caring, and kind people you’d like to have in your life.
It’s also a quality of life issue aside from the possibility of attracting predators into your life. If you are with decent people but you never make your wants or needs known, how can they meet those needs? If the nickname your friend has given you bothers you or hurts you, but you don’t stand up for yourself by telling them, you will continue to experience distress as they use it. Or it could be something simple like you really dislike Thai food but your partner loves it. You never tell them so you end up having to eat Thai food that you don’t enjoy when your partner might suggest getting takeout from someplace else if they knew.
So how do you change this? Unfortunately, it’s not something that you can change overnight or easily, but it CAN be improved. Therapy is, of course, one way to work on this. Another would be to find a course or workbook for assertiveness training. This should include learning about boundaries, including being able to say “no,” and how to establish boundaries that work for you. Learning to become more assertive and stand up for yourself is going to be easier if you’ve done work on those limiting self-beliefs first, which is where therapy can really help.