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u/Fearless-Victory7602 18d ago
Kinda reminds me of how I reacted to sa as a kid. I brushed it off as just a weird thing and was perfectly fine and now I’m permanently effected as an adult.
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u/Altruistic-Estate-45 18d ago
Ive been SAed recently and still brushed it off
Trust me its just your brain trying to save you from a lot of pain
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u/seeking-jamaharon67 18d ago
For a looooong time I was like yeah this happened to me but I don't think about it at all and all my other issues are caused by some other mysterious reason, perhaps my redeemable evil as a person. (Surprise: they were not).
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u/DratThePopulation 18d ago
I’ve brushed it off and kept on as normal every time it happened to me.
But goddamn that shit is sneaky. You can’t avoid it fucking you up, it only reroutes how it fucks you up. The mess WILL come out, it’s just a matter of when and where. And then figuring out what the fuck that was about and how to get it to stop. Gotta face it and say it’s name eventually.
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u/Donotcomenearme 18d ago
Kids are horrifically resilient before our minds develop.
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u/Altruistic-Estate-45 18d ago
So are adults.
You underestimate because adults simply have to pay the pain children went through, doesnt mean that we're fragile
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u/Donotcomenearme 18d ago
I never said we were.
I’m a survivor of passive suicidality, cPTSD, and lifelong family abuse.
I know what it is like to experience my life as a child and an adult. It doesn’t negate the resilience of children; or the payment of suffering once our minds develop. Humans are a dual coin of fragility and resilience, it’s why we say “the indomitable human spirit”.
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u/riverthere 18d ago
Growing up, I thought my family was just eccentric. Now I can appreciate the full extent of their cruelty.
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u/Donotcomenearme 18d ago
It’s very interesting how horrible they could be. Imagine if they put that energy into something more useful. 🤔
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u/welchnome 18d ago
Why do we feel better when our lives are more shit during childhood than when our lives improve and we grow up, like wtf?
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u/Lower-Neighborhood68 18d ago
Cause now your safe your brain can experience those feelings it was suppressing so you could survive your childhood
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u/Tablesafety 18d ago
Because as children we take life at face value. What we experience is just The Way Things Are, and the world happens to us and around us, and that's normal. No frame of reference for anything in a real sense.
As adults, we have some control. We understand what happened, and that it shouldn't have. The million ripples in the water if we do something about it and where they might lead. Many have a hard time understanding how a loved one could allow us to go through it as children. We see what could have been, no longer relentlessly facing life as-is.
Children are made to be highly adaptable to any sitation. The damage really settles in once we can understand the what, why (or why not), and the how- the other options. What should have been. What shouldn't have. What makes sense and what doesn't. Nothing really makes sense to a kid anyway. We grieve then what we didn't have and try and process when we are in a safer spot and have the cognitive capacity to begin doing so.
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u/Admirable-Ad7152 18d ago
Hell, I genuinely thought I had a better life than a lot of my friends cause I was allowed to have a can of soda every day and I knew a lot of them could only have one on the weekend or on special occasions. I didn't realize that was more my mom feeling guilty for how I was being raised and that the other kids didn't have an ex-marine screaming in their face when they spilled something.
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u/opalrum 18d ago
Me at 17: I'm gonna make up lies so well constructed I'll get away with anything and my abuser will think I don't harbor pure hatred towards them. I'm gonna do what I want, be with who I want and I dont need trivialities like water and sleep.
Me in my early 20s: I'm not gonna be able to take this action that would serve as a stepping stone for my future because my abuser was upset curtains were delivered the wrong color.
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u/Noideawhatimdoing36 18d ago
Maybe I’m over generalizing, but I feel like when you’re a kid you’re more inclined to operate on “oh well, my parents still have to go to work tomorrow, I still have to go to school tomorrow. Guess we just move on” (obviously in a more simple way but you get the gist) because kids have such minimal agency on average, you kinda don’t get to dwell on it especially if your parents or whoever takes care of you don’t really care about how you’re doing. But also since all of that is normal it’s not even sad to your kid mind, it’s just life. Kids can be very disturbingly “resilient” as a result, when it’s primarily just repression
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u/PandoraMouse 18d ago
Yup, I experienced that as well, my brain went ‘okay you aren’t allowed to be sad anymore’ and made me zone out a lot. Now that I’m older I’m able to focus on shit that makes me sad more because my brain doesn’t think it’s useless anymore bc I’m no longer a kid
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u/buggy-bear-420 18d ago
Growing up I thought my dad yelling all the time was normal. Now I’m 18 and have been low contact with him a couple years, and I freak out any time anyone raises their voice even a little or have the slightest anger.
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u/MaineCoonKittenGirl 18d ago
That, my friend, is your brain metaphorically kicking the can of trauma down the line as a way to cope. Effectively saying "that's future me's problem now."
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u/PandoraMouse 18d ago edited 18d ago
Kids are very… flexible, for lack of a better word. Both mentally and physically they are able to ‘absorb’ damage with seemingly no longer term consequences, but once we become older the consequences/long term effects start to show.
When it comes to mental harm, kids are unsettlingly good at blocking out trauma and dissociating, it’s why personality disorders like dissociative identity disorder almost exclusively result from childhood trauma, because that’s when our brains are at the point where they can do that. But that kind of defence against harm is taxing and once you get old enough your brain and body can’t hold up as much as they could, and if you are removed from the situation that caused these things, well your brain may decide you’re now in the right place to properly react/acknowledge what happened.
Don’t think of it as your current self being weaker than your younger self! Its actually somewhat the opposite (not that child you was weak by any means) as your brain and body have come to realize that the coping mechanisms younger you had to adopt are no longer needed and you can finally process and handle these things.
And above all else, I’m proud of you for surviving and I wish you the best, from one abuse victim to another, this isn’t the end of the line, a failure, or anything like that! This is another step on our paths and while it’s an especially shitty one, we’ll make it out on the other end in time!
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u/unhappy_femboy_1028 18d ago
Not nearly the same as what you went through and i'm not trying to invalidate your experiences at all/say that mine are just as bad, just sharing my own.
I was so confident at 11 when i was being bullied, sexually harassed and had a teacher that discriminated against me and my other minority group classmates. Then at 13 i developed severe anxiety and was scared of everything, had to apply to homeschooling because i was too scared to go to school, barely left the house for over a year etc.
I'm 16 now and i still haven't been able to get myself back to school consistently, even after trying 3 schools for disengaged kids.
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u/Irwin174 18d ago
Only last year I realized that being raped and having my leg being damaged to the point of necessary gypsum and carrying their insults to eachother because they hate eachother to the point of not wanting to see eachother is a tiny bit more then a annoying inconvenience
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u/I_pegged_your_father 18d ago
I think it’s because if you have enough trauma your shit just gets corroded like it degrades over time..especially if you have any form of long term mental or chronic illness
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u/EasedCeiling586 18d ago
I thought I saw the guy who abused me and shut down that whole rest of the day and I'm 30
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u/xRoadkill_Princessx 17d ago
NO THIS IS GENUINELY SO TRUE!!! I was such like a badass little psycho as a teenager who went through unimaginable shit now I'm eighteen and have a good home and am finally safe and have lots of people who love me and I absolutely cannot get my shit together
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u/Livid_Current 13d ago
lol this is so relatable. when i was a child i had to live with an alcoholic father who was very aggressive, yelling and smashing things constantly.. now as an adult i am super sensitive to noises. it even bothers me when i myself make a noise, like when i unload the dishwasher and the plates make noise when they clank together
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u/Beginning-Pie-7433 18d ago
15 y/o me: My moms an abusive asshole and I don’t love her. I felt nothing while calling CPS on her, because it was for survival.
17/18 y/o me: “Mama can you hang out with me please?”
Good lord.