So they didn’t love us. And?

Something many CPTSD survivors have to come to terms with is, we were not loved by the people who were supposed to love us. 

That’s a hard f*cking pill to swallow. 

You’ll notice how many people want to deny and disown that fact. 

There will be people who want to make excuses and rationalize all day. 

They simply cannot process the fact that they weren’t loved. 

To me, it doesn’t even matter why we weren’t loved. I don’t especially care what “their” limitations or motivations may or may not have been. The result is the same. 

Harsh? Eh, maybe. But I don’t particularly care. 

We get all up in our head about what that fact means. 

We weren’t loved by the people who should have loved us, and our brain wants to make some kind of meaning out of that. Because that’s what brains do: they make meaning. 

It wants to tell us a story about why we weren’t loved— and very often that story focuses on how much we supposedly suck, how supposedly “unlovable” we are. 

You need to know: that story is BS— which stands for “Belief Systems.” 

Also bullsh*t. 

You and I weren’t loved. The people who should have loved us may have felt what they thought was “love” toward us— but they did not operationalize that “love” into behaviors that registered with our nervous system the way they needed to. 

And that is not our fault. 

That was not the result of us being inadequate or unloveable. 

That was not “evidence” of anything other than the fact that we weren’t loved. 

It was what it was. It is what it is. 

It doesn’t mean we can’t build a life. 

It doesn’t mean we can’t love and be loved now— although that’s probably going to be complicated, given what we didn’t experience and didn’t see modeled. 

The story your brain is telling you about why you weren’t loved is fake news. It’s what cognitive therapists call “mind reading”— that is, not so educated guesses, usually rooted in a cognitive distortion called “emotional reasoning” (i.e., “it MUST be true because it FEELS true”). 

To realistically recover from trauma or addiction, you and I have to get seriously unattached to the stores our brain makes up about the “why.” 

We may never know why we weren’t loved. 

And that doesn’t change anything. 

And it doesn’t, actually, matter. 

You are valid and valuable whether or not you were loved by the people who happen to share your name and/or DNA. 

Honestly, your parentage is maybe the least interesting thing about you.

Remember. Remember. 

Breathe; blink; focus.