In this series, I’ve been sharing different ways perpetrator-imitating alters may be attempting to help even though you may not be experiencing it as helpful. Today, I want to talk about how these abusive-sounding protector parts can be acting with your best interest in mind when it comes to other people.
Your actual abuser may have worked to keep you isolated and helpless by keeping you from developing caring relationships with others. Your perpetrator-imitating alters might also try to keep you from having relationships of any kind with other people, but for a very different reason. These parts watched your abuser or abusers and concluded, understandably, that what you can expect from other people is abuse and pain. The obvious and rational decision from this point of view is to simply avoid forming relationships of any kind. If you do not form friendships, you can’t be hurt when your friends seem to abandon you. These people cannot ridicule you and hurt you that way, either. (Never mind that true friends wouldn’t abandon or ridicule you; these perpetrator-imitating parts are working on limited information based primarily on your abuser or abusers). Your perpetrator-imitating alters might get very worked up at the idea of working with a therapist and this makes so much sense! A therapist can be seen as someone holding the power of a relationship and people who had power in the relationships you had as a child abused that power and traumatized you. It’s logical for your protector parts to conclude they should protect you by preventing you from working with a therapist since, as they believe, the therapist will abuse and traumatize you, too.
In short, caring about another person gives that other person the ability to hurt you deeply and your protective perpetrator-imitating parts are keenly aware of this and work tirelessly to try to prevent anyone from hurting you again. Their intentions are good but misguided because they don’t have all the facts that you as an adult have.
So, how does this land on you? Does it make a weird kind of sense? I would really love it if you leave your comments and I will reply to them.
In the Part 4, I will talk about two other motivations that may be driving your protector parts who imitate your abusers.