Category: Healing

“What makes you not nice, is the fact you were told you weren’t.”

– And when you heard it, over and over again, there was no choice but to believe it. From the all-powerful all-mighty parents who know better. But you were. You were always nice. You were told a lie.

Early on, you were told lies about yourself – in the form of abuse (action) or neglect (inaction). This made you feel not good about yourself. Made you feel defective. Not good enough. Unworthy. Unlovable. Perhaps weird, maybe selfish, (…). Let’s group this all into “not-niceness”.

To overcome these lies, you adopted different behaviors other than your authentic ones. After all, your authentic ones are the cause for your not-niceness, you were told. So you need to fake. You need to act in ways that don’t come naturally, because what comes naturally is not good.

This fakeness is almost always unconscious. It has, unfortunately, also been normalized in society – this focus on changing someone’s behaviors. A behavior is just the superficial manifestation, the result of an emotion. But due to our fast-food, superficial, productivity-focused society, the short-term results-driven thinking is to change the behavior. So you adopted other ways of behaving. Acting. Even though you didn’t know you were doing them. You grew up in the midst of this. You didn’t know better. This is how you came to believe it is to exist, to be human.

Anyway, this fakeness manifests itself in several forms. People pleasing. Often acting weird and “off”. Maybe anger, lots of it. This fakeness takes a toll. It’s tiring, it’s exhausting. The brain wasn’t made to process all of this. Many people end up being easily distracted or clumsy. And of course. They aren’t clumsy. But a brain can only process so much. And if you’ve learned that faking is the only way to survive, then you bet the processing power is going to be diverted from other areas, including focusing on the environment.

This fakeness can often be felt by other people. A feeling that something is off. That they’re strange. Or too intense. Or that there’s something going on behind the scenes. And they’d be right, because there is. Paradoxically trying to fit in, makes you less likely to fit in. But this is only true in non-abusive environments. In abusive environments, it is the opposite. After all, this was learned as a coping strategy. Hence why it often can feel more relaxing, in a weird way, to be in an abusive environment that mimics the abusive environment you grew up in. The coping strategies will fit right in. You won’t be seen as weird, but like a puzzle piece that just cozily fits. Even when it keeps hurting.

As time passed on and you grew, you came to associate yourself with these learned coping strategies. You came to see them as part of you. As your personality. And of course you did. This is how you grew up. How could it have been any other way? The thing is, these coping strategies due to not being authentic, can never allow you to connect to others in a proper way. They don’t feel natural. They come off wrong, because they are wrong. They are not you. They are not what a normal human would grow up to be in a healthy environment.

The things that make you not good to be around, are learned. They don’t belong to you. They are unhealed wounds, scars. When you’re rejected. You aren’t being rejected – your trauma, your wounds are.

You, your core, who you really are beneath those wounds is good, and always was. That is what you’d believe had you been given unconditional love. And that would have been truth.

This is for victims of emotional abuse. I did Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) for a while before I realized it was actually harmful. And yet it appeared to be one of the most effective. For trauma, i would instead suggest Cognitive De-traumatization.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy says: Let’s find alternative ways of thinking to your distorted thoughts.

Cognitive De-traumatization says: No, let’s assume your thoughts are correct. Your thoughts may appear distorted in an healthy environment, but in an abusive environment they make perfect sense. In fact not catastrophizing, not having black and white thinking, not personalizing would be the distorted thoughts in an abusive environment. Because with an abuser, catastrophes are often created out of the blue, there are no shades of grey, and all the problems in the world are because of you. Extrapolate this to all the other “distorted” thoughts CBT claims to be distorted.

Example

You: This person seemed angry when I made an innocuous comment.

Helper: Now, what does their reaction make you feel? What do you think it says of you?

You: I feel awful. Like I must have said something really bad. What did i say to deserve such anger? But I’m not sure if I’m reading too much into things.

Helper: Let’s assume your thoughts are correct, that you did indeed read the situation correctly [This encourages the person to trust their gut feeling, their intuition. Victims of abuse ALWAYS suffered gaslighting and therefore distrust their intuition. It is not possible to convince someone of lies without destroying their confidence in their ability to correctly perceive reality. Even if the situation was read incorrectly, it wont matter in the end, because this exercise will diffuse your intense feelings. Also victims of abuse, most commonly have abusers still in their life. So this actually is not far-fetched at all, and in fact may be the most accurate read of the situation.] Instead of suggesting you’re “taking it personally” let’s assume the possibility that the person was indeed angry at you specifically [this is exactly the case with abusers].

You didn’t do anything wrong. Anger is not an appropriate response. Anger is more present in the presence of abuse. Either from the abuser, or from the victim in the form of reaction to the abuse. In either case you weren’t being abusive, so the angry response is not appropriate. A good person wouldn’t have reacted with anger or annoyance. You are used to thinking you are to blame, because you were told so over and over again whenever the abusers in your life got angry. Most likely they didn’t apologize afterwards for their anger, so that belief remained. Which you carry now till adulthood, till this very moment where this person is angry, and you accept what you’ve come to expect: That you did something truly awful that deserves someone to be angry.

But you didn’t. Their anger, is their trigger. It’s their problem, theirs to solve. It only says that they got triggered by what you said. But what you said is ok. [Let’s assume. It may not always be, but for someone who is used to being told all the time the lie that what they do is wrong, they now need to be told the opposite. Even if it won’t be correct all the time, let’s assume it does. Let’s err on the side of assuming the best for you].

Does this help?

• Knowing what abuse is and being able to identify it. Abuse can be very subtle. Any therapy that doesn’t talk about abuse will miss the cause. We need to know this. See the recommended resources page. Alternatively search for narcissistic BPD abuse, love bombing, abusive relationship recovery, trauma bond, manipulation techniques, gaslighting.
• Validate the abuse that happened to you, and mourning it, and all tb losses that came with it.
• Remove abusive people from your life, surround yourself with good people (also through videos, books, safe subreddits,…). It’s close to impossible to heal if you’re in an unsafe environment (that is with abusive people). This creates a series of obstacles for healing that make it near impossible to make progress.
• Learning to trust your gut feeling about people. Abused people had to learn to ignore their gut feeling in order to secure attachment with their parents. And it is key to re-trust it in order to be able to known when something is not ok, and not fall for further gaslighting, as well as to remove narcissists etc much faster when they try to enter our lives.
• Also knowing that abuse and neglect are different things, and we may have been subjected to both.
• See if parentification / emotional incest applies to you.
• Learning how and why we became inauthentic and what to do in order to become more authentic.
• Know what emotional mindfulness is, and practicing it.
• Naming and identifying your own feelings. Check if you relate to alexithymia.
• Learning about emotions in general, see the book How to Survive the Loss of a Love.
• Look into reparenting and connecting with wounded ignored, abused and neglected inner child. The Ideal Parent Figure protocol can be very useful. When you start paying attention, for an extended period of time, to how you feel, to your needs – and acting on it – to making sure you’re OK, that you put away toxic people, (…), slowly something in you will start to shift. It sounds strange as an adult to be parent of yourself, but unfortunately for those who didn’t have a good one, that’s the current solution in our society. We should’ve been loved unconditionally as children, but if that wasn’t the case, as an adult we have to give that to ourselves. I know, it’s not fair.
• Remember: (emotional) empathy for others is only possible when you have empathy for yourself. Empathy is the ability to emotionally connect with someone, and that mechanism is the same behind being able to emotionally connect with yourself.
• Becoming mindful of our own needs and feeling in your body how it’s ok to take care of them.
• Learn to love yourself unconditionally, and being able to have self compassionate self talk.
• Learning about boundaries. That you might have issues with saying no.
• Realizing that if you feel shame it’s because you were shamed. Using self compassion to eliminate it.
• A lot of patience and time. Our fast-food fast-paced productivity-based society doesn’t like it, but our ancestral emotions don’t follow the speed the capitalistic world desires from people to get back on their feet. You are more important than any one trend humanity happens to be following at a particular time in its history.
• Have a therapist that validates your emotions and experience, is empathetic, you connect with, makes you feel safe to express all of your emotions without judgment. Does not push you to do things, but listens to what you need. Nothing else in a therapist matters as much as these points. Your therapist will become your safe harbor with who you can talk about all the things mentioned here, cry with, vent, mourn,…
• Connecting with emotions stored in your body through yoga / somatic experiencing. Eg. when doing yoga, and when you’re in the mood for healing, connect with the emotions that arise in your body as you do different positions.
• Journalling. Writing helps many people putting down what they’re feeling making their thoughts clearer. In a simple way, trauma is the stored energy of this unspeakably awful thing that happened to us that was never expressed. Pour your heart out about whatever is still hurting you. Make it the center of your life for a while.
• Check MDMA assisted therapy.