If we grow up in a psychologically unhealthy environment where it is dangerous to speak our minds, we have to develop defensive strategies, adapt and suppress anger. In adulthood, this makes it difficult to get close to people and build trusting relationships. How to reconfigure your automatic reactions and learn to open up to others?
It is important for children to feel that they belong to the environment in which they grow up. Feeling of belonging equals survival. When instability is the norm, we get used to living in a frightening atmosphere. Learning to hide our feelings because confrontation is dangerous.
It is risky to speak frankly about your experiences and family problems. We can lose the love of those who care for us, lose our sense of belonging, and call our very survival into question.
Many children do not have a safe adult to talk to. If we grow up in an emotionally unstable environment where people cannot be trusted, we develop defensive strategies to stay safe. We learn to put up with what is not normal, to ignore and hide anxiety, anger and despair.
These coping strategies help while we are young. But when we use them in our adult relationships, they don’t work. Those feelings that we hid in childhood are always with us — just now they have surfaced.
People who grew up in an environment where this behavior was the norm often think about what they wanted to say out loud to a parent, but did not say, because it would only generate more anger and did not help at all.
As adults, we constantly think about how the other person behaves with us, swallow grievances and formulate what and how we are going to express. But in the end we don’t say anything. We replay the unpleasant situation in our head and thoughts about who hurt us. But we don’t know how to change anything. We are too afraid of the consequences or our own rage.
By acknowledging what is happening, we can treat ourselves with compassion
When we encounter other people’s inappropriate behavior as adults, our nervous system switches into fight, flight or freeze mode. The front of the brain shuts down and it goes into survival mode. Sometime in the past, we concluded that if you defend yourself, it will only get worse. And our nervous system remembered it.
But silence doesn’t work in adult relationships. It keeps us from growing. Moreover, this strategy no longer helps to stay safe, as it once was in childhood. Quite the opposite: when we do not say what we think and feel, and fight with our own instinct for self-defense, this harms us.
How to change if the nervous system keeps us stuck in the old defensive strategies? How can we make the instinctive process conscious so that we have a choice?
The first step — start paying attention to what is happening inside when a conflict arises. In this way, we recognize this pattern and notice that we go into reactive mode when faced with something that feels insecure in a relationship.
By acknowledging what is happening, we can be compassionate to ourselves and thankful for dealing with such situations in the past in the best way we know how. We can also remind ourselves that this strategy no longer works.
The second step stop and ask your frightened part what it needs to hear in order to decide to defend itself. Sometimes it’s important to be reminded that she doesn’t need the other person as much as she used to. When we understand that we will not die without it, that we have projected our childhood addiction into adult relationships, the risk no longer seems so huge, and we can decide to openly speak out.
Perhaps it is important for the little frightened child within us to hear that he does not have to explain why he is uncomfortable, or to get the other person to understand him or agree with him? Sometimes we are afraid that we will have to defend ourselves against the anger, accusations or defensive reactions of another person, and this is what scares us the most.
We are no longer children and can influence our own reality, moving from a problem to a solution.
But we don’t really need the other person to agree that their behavior has not been gentle. We can allow ourselves to simply say, «I don’t like it when you do this to me.» Dot.
To the question “What do I need to hear in order to decide to stand up for myself in a conflict?” there may be many answers. The most important thing is to carefully question the frightened part of yourself. And when you already know what your nervous system needs to get off the ground, you can give yourself that and go in the right direction.
Children forced to accept the unacceptable become adults who are afraid to stand up for themselves. We learn to suppress our anger and maintain peace at any cost, even if the price is our own psychological well-being.
But even if we grew up in an emotionally traumatic environment, we are not doomed to live with it all our lives. We can change, change how we react to unacceptable behavior, and in the process, change the situation itself. We can also get out of relationships that don’t work.
When understanding of our behavior comes, we have a choice. But we are no longer children and can influence our own reality, moving from a problem to a solution.
About the author: Nancy Collier is a psychotherapist.