
01/08/2023
Happy Tuesday all!
Here's an interesting angle on the childhood of many people with addiction.
When we are children experiencing something traumatic, we nearly always think it's our fault.
There is a reason for this and it's a solution to something that most people can't see.
When you're a child it's almost impossible to take control of what's going on around you. You can't move away and you can't stop someone from hurting you. So you have 2 choices, you can admit that you're powerless and have no control, or you can tell yourself that it's your fault. If you do that, you actually gain some power, at least in your own mind.
Blaming yourself protects you from seeing how vulnerable you are. Also if you feel responsible for why you were hurt then on some level you must have felt you deserved it. And a person who thinks they deserved to be injured as a child won't think they deserve much as an adult either.
So this is a misfiring of a childhood coping mechanism... The birth of low self worth