15/10/2024
(All credit goes to Patrick Teahan for this article. He has an interesting and informative YouTube channel that specializes in childhood trauma. I discovered him about two years ago and he helped me (triggered memories) understand what I went through as a child and how it adversely affected me as an adult. My words/writings will be in parentheses, the rest are his).
We don't attract abusive...
(I always wondered why cruel people seem to gravitate towards me and I end up a victim in the majority of relationships)
We don't attract abusive people. We grew up without anyone being concerned or aware of our safety.
(My parents absolutely could not care less about my safety and proved it on a daily basis whenever I shared with them something horrible that happened to me. This, in turn, transferred to romantic relationships, specifically my first boyfriend and my two husbands)
A good deal of childhood trauma survivors wonder if they willfully attract abusive people into their lives. While it may appear that way from the outside, I don’t believe we consciously look at someone and say, “Yes, let’s welcome this abusive person into our lives so they can ruin it.”
It doesn’t work like that. I think children who grow up in neglect and abuse are taught that their safety doesn’t matter. Many of us were left with, or exposed to, perpetrators.
Just like in childhood, we dissociate when someone tells us that abuse is normal and okay. Unfortunately, this pattern repeats in adulthood with difficult or abusive people. We aren’t focused on our safety because we likely don’t know how to do that.
When parents do not:
Model healthy boundaries
Use good intuition about their child’s safety
Choose a child’s safety over a perpetrator’s feelings.. the child grows up without the vital mechanism of self-preservation.
(I truly believe my parents were more concerned about the offenders feelings rather than the abuse their child endured)
How can we know who is safe when the adults welcomed danger? We need help developing a radar system that should have been there all along.
It’s more that abusive people happen to us because we don’t believe we have rights to happiness and safety. This issue is also mixed with dissociation, codependency in the form of not wanting to rock the boat, and magical thinking.
-Patrick Teahan
Childhood trauma specialist, fellow survivor, author, educator, and advocate for the Relationship Recovery Process therapy model.
(For years and years and years I have been manhandled by all sorts of cruel people that see me as an easy target because I have never been protected by the people who should be protecting me; my parents and then my husbands. But then again, why would my husbands protect me when they are the perpetrators of violence towards me?)
