If you were abused as a child, you may have developed some thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that you wonder about. You may even think of yourself as “really messed up.” But when you think these kinds of thoughts, you may be referring more to self-image than to authentic Self. Self-image is about how you view yourself, often even about how you view yourself through other people’s eyes. But the authentic Self is about who you really are.
Effects on Thoughts and Behaviors
Let’s look at some of the effects of childhood abuse (whether sexual, physical, emotional, or mental) on you as an adult. You may have thoughts that tell you that you don’t really matter, you are ugly, you should be ashamed, you are less than others, or you are always better than others. You may have fairly common feelings of intense anxiety even panic attacks. You may have frequent flashbacks, night terrors, or nightmares. You may have some pretty intense self-loathing. You may have angry, self-destructive, narcissistic, overly protective, over-responsible, or self-belittling behaviors. You may look like you have skated right through it because you are a super-achiever. You may need to put all your energy into rescuing others, or you may be the one who constantly needs rescuing. You may put on a happy face and always smile, and spend most of your life trying to make others laugh in order to stay out of touch with memory or pain. You may have developed some addictions in order to cope with or dissociate from your pain. You may be able to just run away from the pain, the shame, the memories by just moving far away and/or telling others and yourself to just “get over it” whenever they or you feel pain or have bad memories. You may attract and be attracted to people who need you to take care of them, without their ever having to know you as more than their caretaker. You may have identified with your abuser so that you become an abuser. You may have forgotten all about the abuse and tell yourself that you had a lovely childhood, and if ever your parents hit you, well, you deserved it.
Coping Mechanisms and Identity Formation
We often split off from the experience of abuse so we don’t have to live with it, and we identify instead with a way of coping that gives us a sense of “personality” so that we don’t have to live in a sense of nonbeing. But perhaps that personality is more like an identity than a definition of who you really are.
Identity is something with which we identify. For example, I might identify as a caretaker, so I go around taking care of everyone I know. The purpose of this is for me to be such a caretaker for others that I don’t need to know that I need some care too. The pain is just too much, so I’ll take care of your pain instead of mine and vicariously feel better because you feel better. Of course, that is but one example of many. But the idea is that a person may live into a false sense of self that is not at all who they really are. This false self is a coping mechanism, usually formed unconsciously and meant to protect the true Self.
Dr. D. W. Winnicott was one of the first to simplify and advance this idea of a true self/false self. Carl Jung also talked about a Self as differentiated from a self. (You can learn more by exploring books and other writings by either of these authors and psychoanalysts. The list is too extensive to include here.)
This false self becomes possible because of our ability to project onto other people unconscious aspects of ourselves, and for parents and caregivers to do this to us as children or even infants. What is an infant or child to do with these projections but internalize or “introject” them? These internalized projections then become self-definition. And that self-definition becomes thereafter the coping mechanism we use to survive in that family of origin. And if in that family of origin or surrounding environment we are also abused, that self-definition might literally spring from that abuse in the ways described above. We might then become the family golden child, or scapegoat, or superhero, or caretaker, or rebel, or invisible person, or any of several other possible identities. Some of these have already been described earlier in this blog.
But the most important thing to realize here is that it is possible to find a more authentic Self, and it is in finding and living that authentic Self that we find some healing. That doesn’t mean that everything will just magically go away, but it does mean that we can live far more meaningful lives in a personhood that is not encumbered with the projections and agendas of others.
Reconnecting With the Self
So then, how can we begin to live more authentically? Well, it might start with paying attention to what kinds of activities give us peace or joy. It might start with beginning to recognize and accept—as legitimate messages from the Self—our genuine feelings. For example, are you feeling a lot of resentment because you do so much for others who do not even seem to care about you? Perhaps that resentment has come up into your awareness to tell you that you are doing a lot of things because you think you should, rather than because you genuinely desire to do them.
Or maybe you are noticing that you are angry but haven’t let yourself know about that because you think that anger is a bad or “negative” emotion. What if that anger has come to tell you that you need to protect yourself, or that you need boundaries, or even that you need to get out of a toxic relationship?
Where childhood abuse is present, we are not being taught to pay attention to what gives us peace or joy. We are not being taught how to access difficult feelings and receive their messages as guidance. Rather, we are mostly being taught, by the abuse itself, to make ourselves small enough to fit into the box of an identity that suits our abusers and therefore seems to protect us from further abuse. We can thank these identities for helping us to survive that abuse. But as we grow into adulthood, these identities may stifle our lives in such a way that we are still choosing based on the identity rather than on our own authenticity. Such stifling can cause depression, anxiety, further repression, and even such things as addiction and other dysfunctional behaviors and relationships.
Authenticity puts us in touch with greater and greater access to our deepest essence, thus untangling ourselves from the spiderwebs of childhood abuse.
