When we understand someone’s past, we understand their present
Have you ever known someone whose behaviour is inexplicable?
As in, everything they do seems to be completely self-defeating, to go against everything they say they want? Someone whose relationships are nearly always dysfunctional and end in dramatic, sometimes bizarre ways? Maybe they tell extravagant lies or repeatedly get into dangerous situations but never change their behaviour.
Adults who behave like this don’t get much sympathy from other adults because from the outside it looks as though they’re just making bad choices. It’s easy to dismiss them, unfriend them and block them. There’s not much understanding that this kind of behaviour is often an adult using coping mechanisms they learned a long time ago to try and keep themselves safe from abuse. Even if people do understand that this behaviour is a relic, the leftover pieces from a broken childhood, they don’t understand how and why a bad childhood can affect adults so severely. So here it is, why traumatised people can behave in ways that seem to make no sense.
Children are survivors, they respond to their environment and find the best ways they can to stay safe. If the threats they experience are standard ones, they will find normal ways to cope and as they grow older, they can gently adapt to them. For example, a girl who is not that popular in primary school might learn that being funny is a good way to make friends. As she becomes a teenager she might learn that clowning around gets her friends but not respect, so she tones things down. When she becomes an adult she’s learned when and where humour is useful, it’s one of many social tools at her disposal.
If though, the threats a child experiences are extreme, the ways they find to survive will be extreme too. The irony is that the coping mechanisms I learned to survive were the ones I failed to recognise in other people when working as a mental health professional. I don’t want to talk about the details of my childhood, because there are people that would impact on who haven’t consented to have their story told; but what I will say is that I grew up with the belief that people close to you cannot be trusted and that people who care for you are dangerous. I held that belief very strongly, even when logically I could see it wasn’t true and when people desperately tried to prove it was false. It meant that when people were loving and kind to me, I did everything I could to make them go away. I said terrible things, acted in awful ways, destroyed positive relationships, and hurt a lot of people. I’m still living with the consequences of those times.
It can be difficult for people who don’t think this way to understand the behaviour of people who do, I see this all the time in mental health services. Many professionals cannot understand why the people they support react to them with hostility, ingratitude, and anger. They don’t know why the more kindness and understanding they show, the more the person rejects them. The simple answer is that for traumatised people, kindness is the mask abusers use to get close to them, care is the vehicle that danger arrives in; they aren’t things to be welcomed, they’re things to be fought against to survive.
I don’t blame people for not understanding this, the idea that care equals danger seems like a contradiction, but that’s because it’s a belief produced by behaviour that’s a contradiction: parents harming their children. I didn’t understand it for many years, but now that I do it’s transformed the way I understand the people I support. This is just my experience, there are many other ways of coping with trauma that violate social norms, know that each one is borne out of a violation far deeper: a violation of the self.
