Self Care is a Revolutionary Act for Child Trauma Survivors

For adult survivors of neglectful, abusive or otherwise harmful parenting, one of the messages we likely received in our childhood experience is that our feelings and needs do not matter. This message is the unstated implication of our parents’ or caregivers’ behavior.

If a child’s emotional needs really matter to a parent or caregiver (if they are able to notice and connect with the impact of their behavior, or hear the child’s efforts to communicate distress to them) then the parent will make an effort to stop, listen, and work toward change in order to prevent further harm to their child. However, when harm continues unabated, the parent is usually accomplishing this by prioritizing their own emotional needs (avoiding the pain of both owning responsibility for their behavior and coming to terms with the harm they have been causing) over the emotional needs of their child. Neither the parent of child in this case may be conscious of the implied message, but the child nonetheless internalizes it as a lack of worth and frequently develops a worldview in which their needs feel less important or non-existent in the context of other people. This can lead to a pattern of codependent relationships in adulthood where the child, now an adult, attempts to gain self-worth through that path – by sacrificing their needs to others, and continuing to prioritize the needs of other people over their own in the hope that there will eventually be some extent to which they can do that where they will eventually receive love and acceptance from those people. It never happens – the promise hinted at by the parents or caregivers who caused harm (“If you can just get good enough then I’ll love you”) was not true. It is ultimately an endless path that results in being surrounded by people who take advantage of the recovering child’s well-intended but ill-fated efforts to attain love and self-worth.

It's a hard path to step off – there is a sunk cost fallacy operating where it’s hard to give up on a path that a person has invested decades in pursuing – it feels like search for treasure into which a person has invested their life savings and daily efforts for maybe 30 or 40 or 50 years. How do you just stop? It’s a search that is often filled with anger and disappointment, frequently turned back at oneself, but also often directed at the people close by – why can’t they see how hard I’m trying? When will someone finally offer me a helping hand? When will someone call me to ask how I am doing? When will someone bring me dinner, or take me to the doctor, or think about what I would like for my birthday, or visit when I’m sick? Why is it me pouring myself out for everyone else and nobody doing that for me?

So here’s the revolution.

You’re fighting somebody else’s war against yourself. It’s like you grew up in a dictatorship that taught you to give everything you had to the dictator, and that the dictator would suffer if you failed to offer enough – they needed you to survive and it took everything you had to accomplish that. The revolution begins when we understand that their suffering was at their own hand. We were not responsible for it, we could not alleviate it, and we also could not make it any worse.

That sense of enormous power and responsibility we carried and still carry for ensuring the wellbeing of others is an illusion.

That power does not exist.

In the face of the lie that our needs do not matter, the lie that our worth will only come through sacrifice and will only be fulfilled when we sacrifice enough to solve the despair and dysfunction of our parents, the arms that we take up are revolutionary acts of love toward ourselves. To begin to work toward ourselves as if we matter, before we even begin to believe it. That our needs have a place. That we can put ourselves ahead of other people. That the distress expressed by others as we withdraw from the path is of their own creation, and not our responsibility or within our power to resolve.

We need nobody’s permission or approval other than our own.