We, the traumatized, are often inauthentic. We are not really saying what we want, what we feel. We are not behaving from our gut feeling. We are just acting or performing, too much in our heads, everything passing through an intellectual filter, without knowing, too afraid of being ourselves. We don’t stand up for ourselves, we don’t even know how to. We are fearful of voicing our opinion. We walk on eggshells. We can’t express any of what we would like, to the point we might not even know what we like and what our opinions are. We are not being true to our emotions, we might not even be feeling our actual emotions.
Why? For that you have to dwelve into the world of emotional abuse.
I discovered this because I was in an abusive relationship which opened my eyes to the emotional abuse I suffered in childhood. I always thought I just lacked social skills, and that there was something wrong with my brain, that my personality was just quirky, or that this is just who I am and I’m destined to have to only manage this weird condition of social awkwardness. I couldn’t somehow connect with others. Something missing. Nope. When you were abused for years on end how are you supposed to be happy, normal like everyone else? Imagine a soldier coming from war, a terrible war where he felt like he lost a part of himself. Friends. He suffered immensely. How is he supposed to be happy? At least if he never allowed himself to grieve that, to get support, to talk about. Well that’s us. I saw other people just having fun and I wondered, what’s up with me, why can’t I also be happy and have fun like them? Well… How could I?
If you see videos of children in orphanages (example 1, example 2) and how a lack of a stable loving caregiver affects them so severely it is tragic and it becomes clear. They are not as curious or playful or happy. They can’t focus on external stuff, and are either too scared, confused, agitated or silent and awkward. All because they lack love. The normal kids are playing with each other, discovering the word, bonding. Not the traumatized ones. Those live in a dangerous, scary lonely world. Orphanages are an extreme case, but we may experience somewhat less severe forms of neglect with less severe results. So instead of borderline, narcissistic or antisocial personality disorders, we may get “only” CPTSD.
Then when you cross the realm from emotional neglect to active abuse, i.e., when someone makes you doubt of your gut feeling, of your instincts and of your sanity with gaslighting, when someone mocks you – your tastes your opinions your way of being, criticizes you – the things you like how you do things, invalidates your feelings, manipulates, guilt trips you, makes you feel like you’re not good enough and everything you do is wrong or could be wrong and you get someone who has all the symptoms you describe and ends up being disconnected from their emotions, living in a state of dissociation and inauthentic. The ones that didn’t end up being awkward got better at faking. But there’s still a lot of awkwardness because faking is never truly a perfect copy. Those are the people we feel there’s something off about them. And often abuse is subtle and without malice. In the end most people just attribute all of this to just being awkward, lacking of social skills or having some brain defect.
My advice would be go to to therapy, perhaps trauma therapy. We can’t do this alone. And a good therapist who you can connect with and feel safe with will be amazing if not crucial to healing as they provide a safe haven for the first time to allow yourself to be authentic by connecting to your true emotions.
Some good books I would recommend are Whole Again and The Body Keeps the Score. Look into unconditional self compassion, into connecting with your emotions, into connecting with the little child in you that is maybe feeling lonely, sad, unloved, missing tenderness after all they went through. That child may be the key, because they are you, the authentic you, but the pain to feel the real emotions was too much, and dissociation occurred. And they’re there, wanting to be loved, heard, protected. Look into reparenting yourself. Look perhaps into internal family systems, CPTSD, and setting boundaries. Learn about emotional abuse and what it is, how it looks like so you can identify how it happened (and most likely still happens because we tend to surround with people that are familiar and are blind to it). The channels and people on the videos I linked are really good as well.