Childhood Trauma: How What We've Experienced Shapes Us

I'm not gonna lie:  None of this is easy to deal with.  I may be able to tell some of these stories with a calm demeanor, but that's hard fought and not easily won.  I've ranted and raved and screamed into a bonfire a few times, mourned the energy wasted and potential lost as I spun my wheels for years and years asking the wrong questions.  "What's wrong with me?  Why am I broken?  Why am I doing all of the wrong things?  Why am I such a horrible person?"  

As a child of crappy parents, these were the questions I was trained to ask.  Every time I did something that my mom didn't like, or made her uncomfortable, she turned it around and asked me, "Why did you do that?  Why are you like that?  What's wrong with you?"  

Even these days, I still flinch if I think someone's going to judge me.  I still anticipate the possible blow.  I instinctively avoid doing or saying something if I can predict what they will say.

Let me pick apart that last sentence for you, and show you how limiting it can be.

"I instinctively" = the instinct is there, implanted.  I have been trained to immediately react in a certain way, and must train myself to stop, think, and react in a different way.  Anyone who has studied childhood knows how hard it is to retrain learned behaviors.

"avoid doing or saying something" = I'm stopping myself, not being limited by someone else, but by myself.  

"if I can predict what they will say." = Ooo there's a lot there.  "if I can predict"  NO ONE can predict.  I'm assuming a lot here.  "they" is the big one.  I'm taking my experiences with my parents, which were pretty horrendous, and projecting them onto whoever I'm with, and predicting that "they" whoever they are, will treat me in the same way that my parents did.  

And then self-limiting based on that assumption.

That's not good.  You can see that, right?

First of all, the general public will never treat me as poorly as my parents did.  I know that for a fact.  I've experienced it daily since I moved out of my parents house.  Twice.  

Second, even if they do, I know that they shouldn't be treating me that poorly.  No one should ever treat me that poorly and my parents shouldn't have in the first place.  Righteous indignation FTW.  

So what I'm doing in that beautiful sentence is presuming that everyone I meet is going to treat me horribly, and that I should not be myself around them because of how they are going to treat me when I do.

If I speak my truth, people will treat me badly.  Because I'm broken.  There's something wrong with me.  That's the lesson of my childhood.  

But no one can stuff themselves down for their entire lives.  Especially not me.  So I finally reveal myself to someone, and if something goes wrong, I'm left with those questions.  "What's wrong with me?  Why am I broken?  Why can't I ever do the right thing?"

These have never been the right questions to ask.  

When I approach it from this other angle, it makes sense.  What happened to me?  I was raised in a house where no one took care of me.  I was never acknowledged as who I was.  I wasn't supported as a person.  I was fed and clothed, but I was derided and chided and nagged and ignored but praised in public.  I never knew if I was coming home to happy parents or angry parents.  There was no safe haven, just the possibility of danger.  The car in the driveway dictated your fear level.  

I'm not broken.  Someone tried to break me.  

But I'm not broken.  I'm still here.