Annie Tanasugarn, PhDAnnie Tanasugarn, PhD
Psychologist. Certified Trauma & Relationship Specialist. Consultant. Helping others build a solid sense of Self with a side of badassery.
Mar 13 (Medium.com)
Unlearning these is what leads to our empowerment
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 61% of adults report having had at least one Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) and 16% reported scores of four or more. If you’re interested in taking the ACE test, you can go here.
Childhood trauma comes in many forms, which commonly include: our emotional, social, or psychological needs going unmet, our physical needs (food, shelter, water, safety, warmth) going unmet, divorce/physical abandonment, physical/emotional/psychological/sexual abuse, witnessing violence, alcoholism/drug addiction, sexual addictions/other addictions, poverty, or a lack of consistent rules and boundaries. This list isn’t exhaustive, and other forms of childhood maltreatment are less common but are still documented, such as war, natural disaster, or gang violence.
Elevated ACE scores of four, or higher, exponentially increase risks of emotional, psychological, and physical disorders and diseases including reduced emotional empathy; low emotional intelligence; personality or mood disorders such as Borderline Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Antisocial Personality Disorder; Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD); and major depression or bipolar disorder. Additionally, it is reported that there are positive correlations with physical diseases and higher ACE scores, including asthma, high blood pressure, obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.
With facts like these, it makes it even more critical for us to examine how our childhood may have affected our adult lives. While it’s hard enough reaching a place of acceptance that adult intimate relationship abuse (narcissistic abuse) isn’t love, it begs us to look even closer at how our adverse childhood experiences may have set the stage for us getting tangled up in toxic adult relationships.
Unlearn Trying To Please People. The fact is, some are going to have an opinion — from parents and caregivers who may have abused you, to an ex who discarded you for whatever they had on the side. And, a hard truth is that their opinion will likely be based on self-preservation and misinformation. Others may base their opinion on half-assed information, or a Herd Mentality.
Will they gossip about you? Maybe.
Will they obscure facts or try to make you look “crazy” to spare themselves? Perhaps.
The fact is, people dismiss what they don’t understand or what they see as threatening to their Ego. If their lives have been arranged in such a way as to shun those with different lived experiences from their own, forget them. You don’ t owe them an explanation or an apology. And, you aren’t obligated to set space aside for them in your life.
The sooner we unlearn thinking we have to appease others, the sooner we begin healing.
Unlearn Believing You Deserved It. No one deserves it. No. One. Not even a parent who lived their life parenting us from a place of torture, captivity, or restraint. When we release ourselves from thinking that we deserved their abuse, it frees us. We are no longer held captive by their agenda. It’s the emotional scars that are carried with us, long after the physical ones have faded. It’s these emotional scars that fool us into believing we somehow “caused” their abuse, or “deserved” their mistreatment.
A hard truth is that inter-generational trauma is repeated and carried from one generation to the next because the older generation taught abuse as “normal” while the younger generation accepted it as something being wrong with them, or that this is just how things are.
Once we take a few steps back and see the crazy-making nonsense for what it is, it gets easier to release ourselves from the misbeliefs that we somehow “deserved” abuse.
We didn’t.
Unlearn Thinking You Can’t Heal. The reason we believe we can’t heal from our pain is because we wound up carrying it with us when it was never our burden to carry. It was our parents’ and caregiver’s burden. Their responsibility.
Our choices are a direct result of the things we were taught in our earliest years. Our attachment style, our beliefs on whether we think people are genuinely good, how we see ourselves, and how we engage in our world, are the messages taught to us by our caregivers.
And, they’re teaching us from how they see the world.
A hard truth is that there is a difference between can’t, and won’t.
Many survivors of abuse wind up living their lives in one of two ways:
They either wind up betraying themselves into believing that their opinions, feelings, and experiences are invalid and as a result, they become vulnerable for more abuse. These are the people who find themselves in one toxic friendship or intimate relationship after another and often question, “Why?” The answer: It’s because they haven’t learned their value or to stop betraying their sense of Self.
On the flipside are those who abandon everyone around them and hold tight to the misbeliefs, misinformation, and misguided agendas they were taught. They often find themselves bored, restless, disillusioned, and going from one relationship or situation to another. Never happy. Never seeing that they’re perpetuating lies that keep them unhappy and disillusioned. The result: They also wind up abandoning their sense of Self and take on the identity of those who spoonfed them lies and abuse.
But, there’s a third option. Some call it The Road Less Traveled. Some call it Fighting the Good Fight. There’s reasons for this; the road less traveled has many bumps, detours, and risks. There’s no roadmap, and many fear getting lost along the way.
And, the good fight will inevitably leave a few emotional bruises if we choose to get in that boxing ring. We can block, duck and run…but that only perpetuates what we were taught earlier. Fighting the Good Fight means taking that risk, facing it head-on, and standing our ground.
So, some won’t choose these routes. But, the thing is, no one really tells us that it’s the Road Less Traveled and the Good Fight that lead to empowerment, to growth, and to healing.
But, they are…
Unlearn Distracting Yourself. A hard truth is we distract ourselves from healing because distractions numb. They perpetuate feeling nothing or feeling a momentary high that pushes our pain to the back of the line. Then, another inevitable crash. And another distraction is turned to. This is how a cycle of self-numbing begins — whether its based on self-medicating, technology/gaming addiction, shopping, workaholism, perfectionism, or idealism— anything that catches our attention long enough to distract us from our pain is what we turn to.
Distractions all have us by the short-fuzzies. We live in a world of distraction. It’s a quick fix for anyone who isn’t wanting to heal, is afraid of the pain of healing, or is ashamed that they will be judged for wanting to heal. Walking away from distractions takes inner strength. We’ll be tempted and will have to resist being pulled back into it. Those who authentically care about us will support us in slowing things down, tossing out the video games for quiet conversation, or the noise and chaos for an introspective hike in nature.
The fact is, pain, anger, anxiety, and negative Self-talk are all there for a reason: to wake us up. And they beg to be healed. Why do you think depression, anxiety, and addictive behaviors are cyclic? Because they show up as manifestations of unhealed pain. Distractions are merely bandaids; not solutions.
And, as with any bandaid, it either needs to be replaced with another bandaid, or it has to be tended to, so it can heal.