Trauma Echoes and Recovery
“Since young children read their emotions as important information about themselves, not about others in their environment, those who experience neglect or abuse are especially likely to feel responsible for their caretaker’s behavior.”
From Internal Family Systems Therapy for Addictions by Cece Sykes, Martha Sweezy, and Richard Schwartz
Photo by RDNE Stock project
This quote explains beautifully WHY I made the bizarre behavior of my parents my fault. As a young child I had no power and those that did have power often used it to hurt me.
IFS helps me make sense of my life. When I explore inside using the model, I now do so with confidence because I trust that somehow, what I’m experiencing inside makes sense. The model helps me learn from parts of myself that influence my perspective as well as my thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
Some of those parts got stuck in time somehow. They continue to view my adult life through the lens of what I experienced as a child. They react to my adult life as if I am still living in dangerous circumstances that I have no power over. When what is happening now gets their attention, I feel what I felt then and, if I’m not paying enough attention, I react as if I am still in danger.
As a child, I just assumed I somehow deserved to be yelled at, criticized, hit and humiliated. I also assumed that if I didn’t figure out some way to get my caretakers to stop, they wouldn’t.
The shocking verbal and physical assaults took their toll. They helped me design a lasting blueprint for how to survive the dilemma of living in an uncertain and unsafe environment.
Those blueprints stuck so well that unknowingly, I applied them to EVERY environment through my life until I began to recover.
IFS enables me see myself and my environment through a fresh lens because it helps me travel back in time and connect with the parts that designed the blueprints in the first place.
By understanding how my parts developed their strategies and appreciating how those younger, less resourced versions of myself helped me survive my childhood, the blueprints can be updated and modified.
Thanks to the work I have done to heal over the years which includes sobriety, therapy, and recovery of my True Self, I am now in a position to help the younger versions of myself let go of the old blueprints.
Memories of the past now occur to me as they are- past events that shaped me. But they no longer echo in my adult life as repeated patterns of suffering and survival.
What happened in my childhood environment wasn’t my fault. There was nothing about me that deserved what they did. When my young parts know they can trust me, they can accept me as the capable and loving caretaker they didn’t have.
