Working your trauma recovery will make you less easy to control.
Why?
Because working your trauma is going to require you to get real clear and serious about who you are— who you choose to be, not who they told you you were “supposed” to be.
For most of our lives, we try to operate on that basis: being who we were told we were, or who we were “supposed” to be.
Our earliest self-judgments are us comparing who we were to who our parents or teachers said we “should” be.
In the best possible world, childhood and adolescence are about breaking free of those ideas, and defining our own identity.
But what happens if our childhood and adolescence was mostly comprised of us trying to stay alive, physically or emotionally?
What happens if we lack the safety and support to do what we’d have to do to figure that out?
Speaking for myself, my childhood and adolescence was mostly spent just trying to not hurt (which, ironically, often involved literally, physically hurting myself).
I spent much of my childhood and adolescence— and young adulthood, and not-so-young adulthood, for that matter— trying desperately to manage emotional states that I didn’t understand, and didn’t have much help in understanding.
Figuring out who I really was, independent of the parental expectations I was constantly falling short of, wasn’t really on my radar screen as a project.
I was too busy hating myself for not being whoever I needed to be to keep my family and my peers from bullying me.
Which is to say, when I finally came around to understanding that my life had to be about working a recovery, I had some work to do in learning who I was and what I was all about.
As long as we’re unclear or conflicted about that, though— as I was, and as you may be— we are incredibly vulnerable to manipulation.
This has nothing to do with intelligence. It has everything to do with unmet emotional needs.
When we grow up abused or neglected, we often have at least one “part” of us that would do anything for validation and safety.
We feel the instability of never having had real safety or support, and that makes us vulnerable to “fawn” flavored responses that will have us people pleasing like our life depends on it (because “part” of us might honestly believe that our life DOES depend on gaining others’ approval or affection).
As long as “fawn” is a central organizing principle of our psychology, we are vulnerable to manipulation.
We’re vulnerable to false promises.
We’re vulnerable to love bombing.
We’re vulnerable to young, lonely “parts” of ourselves taking the wheel, especially when it comes to relationship decisions.
Working our trauma recovery doesn’t immediately solve this problem— but it puts compassionately, realistically managing that “fawn” trauma response squarely at the center of our focus.
Proving to ourselves, again and again, that we WILL be there for ourselves; that we DO have our own back; that we ARE on our own side— that’s what progressively insulates us against manipulation.
We are vulnerable as long as “they” have something— approval— that we really, really want.
We may still want approval— but the self-esteem work we do every day in trauma recovery keeps us from needing it to the point of self-abandonment.
Yes, the work involved in trauma recovery can be a hassle.
But it is infinitely less exhausting— and less dangerous— than letting our “fawn” response make our decisions for us.
Breathe. Blink. Focus.
And have your own back today.
