Don’t let an emotional child turn YOU into an emotional child.

You’re gonna run into people who make you feel young. Anxious. Scared. 

You’re gonna run into people who make you feel like everything— and I mean EVERYTHING— is your fault. 

You’re gonna run into people who explicitly BLAME you for everything— and I mean EVERYTHING. 

When we’ve had certain experiences growing up, it’s really easy for certain people and behaviors to push our buttons. To trigger us. 

One of those buttons is shame. 

You WILL get people coming at you intentionally trying to evoke the experience of shame. 

Why? Because they know: shame tends to make us more compliant. 

When we feel shame, we very often will bend over backwards to NOT feel it.

Shame can very often be used to control us, because it WAS very often used to control us, sometimes over the course of decades and in our most important relationships. 

Shame can make us feel young. Helpless. Unresourceful. 

The people who intentionally evoke shame often do so with the intention of making us feel or believe we are dependent upon them for safety and self-esteem. 

After all, the narrative they’re trying to advance is: if you don’t do what I want you to do, I will continue making you feel this way. And you don’t WANT to keep feeling this way, do you? 

The people who try to use shame to control us are intentionally creating a power dynamic in which we necessarily feel “one down.” 

When people try to evoke shame in us, they are communicating that we are “less than;” and if we ever want to NOT be “less than,” we need to change our behavior to…whatever they’re trying to get us to do. 

Here’s the irony about those people who attempt to evoke shame in us: they’re actually the ones acting like children. 

Spoiled, petulant children. 

Kind, compassionate adults do not attempt to control other people via shame. 

Kind, compassionate adults do not throw temper tantrums when other adults don’t do what they want them to do. 

Kind, compassionate adults do not leverage their perceived interpersonal power to make other adults feel “less than.” 

That’s not grown up behavior. That is behavior that reflects the incomplete, impulsive interpersonal toolbox of a chid. 

In essence, people who attempt to evoke shame in order to control us are emotional “children” who are trying to drag us down to their developmental level. 

This is REALLY important when we get dragged into emotional flashback by these people. 

It’s REALLY important to remember that WE are not children. They are the ones behaving like children. 

It’s REALLY important to know that these people are engaging in a form of what psychologists call “projective identification:” they are projecting qualities of themselves, in this case emotional immaturity, onto others, and then they are behaving toward those others in such a way as to evoke the feelings and behavior they projected. 

In other words: they are emotional children who can be really good at making the people around them feel like emotional children. 

Setting boundaries with people who make us feel this way is essential. And hard. 

Setting boundaries with ANYONE can be fraught for trauma survivors. It’s not about you; it’s about what trauma does to our self-esteem and how primed the “fawn” trauma response is in our nervous system. 

But setting those boundaries can START with acknowledging, again and again, inside your head and heart: you are not a child. You are not lost. You are not unresourceful. You are not “bad.” 

Don’t let an emotional child turn you into an emotional child. 

Remember who you are.