On childhood abuse and neglect.

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 Herman, Trauma and Recovery

As we heal, it’s important to understand how childhood abuse and neglect impact brain development and how we understand ourselves and the world around us. 

When our earliest relationships are formed around unsafety (our caregiver is unavailable, our caregiver is neglectful, our caregiver is confusing, sometimes present, sometimes unavailable, sometimes terrifying, our caregiver actively harms us, our caregiver violates our boundaries but tells us this is fine), our brains are not yet developed enough to understand that there is a world outside of these experiences.

As children, we internalize our early experiences
as facts about the world. 

To survive, our little systems must find a way to make sense of this information and respond in a way that lets us keep going. Most often, this means internalizing a sense of our own “badness” in order to protect our caregiver’s “goodness.”

If we think about this, we can see how wise this strategy might be: which is more terrifying, “I’m a terrible person who deserves bad things to happen to me” or “I am a helpless person at the mercy of someone terrifying who will do bad things to me”? (Notice how your body responded to each of these statements.)

Survivors of childhood trauma have a very specific relationship to shame because shame about our own existence can, at one point, have functioned as a survival response.

The most devastating psychological effects of child abuse occur when the victims are abused by a trusted person who was known to them. If a child processed the betrayal in the normal way, [they] would be motivated to stop interacting with the betrayer... For the child to withdraw from a caregiver on which [they] are dependent would further threaten the child’s life, both physically and mentally. Thus the trauma of child abuse by its very nature requires that information about the abuse be blocked from mental mechanisms that control attachment and attachment behavior.

Jennifer Freyd, Betrayal Trauma (Italics, my own)

Our capacity to regulate and survive may have relied on dissociation, protective narratives, or deeply internalized messages about ourselves and the world. As we heal, part of our work is to start to recognize and respect the child that we once were and the challenges we may have faced.

Healing is gently addressing the faulty narratives so that we can stop listening to them; to learn, recognize, and engage with providers and relationships where it feels safe enough to form new beliefs about self, others, and the world.

What happened to you as a child is not your fault. Ever.

No matter what happened.

No matter if you feel like you asked for it, deserved it, wanted it, or caused it.

You were a child. Your brain was still developing. You did what you needed to do to survive.

And you survived.