Don’t Go to Court
A common and distressing outcome for people who are in recovery from chronic childhood trauma is the sense that we have a hard time feeling confident about our interpretations of own experiences without validation from someone else. For example, maybe we had to give a presentation to a group of people about a topic in which we have experience, or perhaps we are assigned some kind of project or piece of work to complete that we know how to do, but we might feel very anxious about our performance afterwards and, despite our experience and capability, have a hard time believing that we did a good job without reassurance from the people around us that we were successful (and even then maybe still doubt it!).
Why is this such a common experience for survivors of chronic child or trauma or adversity? One of the things that causes chronic child trauma to persist is that when we try to communicate our distress to our caregivers, the response by caregivers is often to deny our distress (“you’re not hurt!”) and undermine our sense of judgment about what we are experiencing (“you’re always overreacting!”) and how we are interpreting the events that are occurring around us (“this is normal, you’re the one who is being difficult!”). It’s hard for children to intellectually defend themselves against their caregivers, so instead of recognizing that the caregivers are having difficulty taking responsibility for their behavior, children tend to mistakenly gradually take in the idea that there must be something wrong with their own instincts or judgment. One of the long-term impacts of this is to carry the belief into adult life that we are not able to read situations well or draw conclusions about them, especially when it is about our relationships, experiences, or emotional world. So we become dependent on other people for validation of our thoughts about these areas of our lives.
Consequently, as an adult, we can end up in situations where we experience injury at the hands of other people, but struggle to hold onto a sense of confidence about whether or not we were right to feel hurt in a situation, so continue to seek out the person to try to extract some kind of apology or surrounding people for acknowledgement that the person who injured us was in the wrong. This can happen in current circumstances (for example, if we felt mistreated at work by a supervisor and we continue to ruminate about the situation or tell others about it seeking validation) or in rumination about past events (seeking out family members or wishing family members would acknowledge wrongdoing or apologize).
The hope is that at some point we will receive a sufficient enough apology, or enough validation, that our uncertainty will resolve and we will be able to move on with our lives. However, this turns out to be an endless road where we never seem to be able to attain a sufficient apology or enough validation to put these experiences behind us. The reason is that the ultimate problem is that what we are actually seeking is validation of our instincts, but we are trying to accomplish this by giving this away to other people. It’s like going to court and placing the accused in the judge’s seat in the hope that they will pronounce themselves guilty so we can be released from the endless court case.
Recovery from this is about treating ourselves with respect and beginning to trust in our own instincts so that we can “know” what happened and not need other people to apologize or validate that in order to move on from an experience. Freedom from the endless court case is about learning that, even when we are invited, we do not need to go to court in the first place. There will not be a single moment of self-validation that feels satisfying at the beginning, but as you begin to tell yourself that you can trust your instincts and judgment about these kinds of situations and not seek confirmation or validation from others, you will begin to heal from the childhood experiences that caused this, and begin reconstruct the underlying sense of self-worth and competence that was taken away from you by the people who should have provided it in the first place.
