Four

Wounded Child, Wounded Adult

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

—RUMI

As we grow into adulthood we believe that we leave our childish behaviors behind. We interact with other adults, make adult decisions, and hold more responsibilities. But emotionally wounded children become emotionally wounded adults. Even as adults, we sometimes react impulsively to external events and are later embarrassed or ashamed by our behavior.

After the storm has cleared and emotions are calmer, the responsible adult self will assess the damage and think, That didn’t feel like me. Why would I act out in that way? We are often confused after acting out. It doesn’t make sense. We understand what we did, but we don’t know why. The memory of the event is coated in shame, and we often can’t imagine forgiving ourselves because the shame is so loud.

You do not have to live with this shame, and you can break the pattern of impulsive reactions. But until your core wounding is healed, you will carry around your wounded and lost inner child everywhere you go, vulnerable to inappropriate and impulsive reactions coming from your lost inner child at any time.

In this chapter you will begin the deep dive into the HEAL process. You will better understand why core wounding happens and how to heal the lost inner child so that it can integrate with the adult self. Once the core wounding is healed, it will no longer be triggered, and you will no longer repeat the same unhealthy patterns over and over. The wounded child will no longer control the wounded adult. This part will integrate with the responsible adult self, bringing a calm, peace, and freedom you may have never known.

Repeating Patterns

People who seek to develop healthy relationships are often frustrated because they know at some level they are using outdated emotional responses and repeating the same patterns, but don’t know what else to do. They earnestly want to move on from the pattern of getting in bad and unfulfilling relationships, but they haven’t healed their emotional wounding. They have what I call a “bad picker,” where they consistently pick partners based on their unacknowledged core woundings. This is another version of hurt people finding other hurt people. They say they don’t want to be with someone like their ex, but then they start dating another version of that person. The new person may look and act differently, but the dynamic is essentially the same, and the person who wants to change will still use the same impulsive reactions in this relationship as they did in the last.

Their unhealed emotional wounding is looking for someone with whom to complete or play out the original wounded experience. At a deep level they want to heal the wounding pattern. They might subconsciously think, for example, I really want to heal this hurt from my teenage boyfriend. Their wounding then translates this desire internally with, “Oh, I know, I will choose a narcissistic wounded person and be codependent with them, even though they will treat me poorly. It won’t matter because I know how to adapt to that kind of situation—I have the tools.

Of course we don’t consciously think these things, but we do subconsciously. This is why some people will have a “bad picker” until they heal that part. They are picking partners based on their emotional wounding in an unconscious attempt to get past this relationship-replication cycle. Hurt people find hurt people, and healed people find healthy people.

Story: Bridget, a Forgotten Little Girl

Bridget has done well in her professional life, but her personal life has been challenging. She is divorced with two teenage boys, and shares parenting time with her ex-husband. When she first came to see me, she didn’t have any interest in dating or getting close to anyone. When things were calm she felt OK, but most days she was disappointed, scared, and lonely.

When anything went wrong, or she got an unpleasant surprise, or her sons were driving her crazy, she would get really tense. Her core wounds would get triggered, causing her to become filled with rage and to verbally attack others. She used alcohol, pot, and prescription drugs to temporarily help her feel better.

Bridget recognized the recycled pain and wanted to stop the pattern. She didn’t feel like herself when she was in an acting-out state. The feelings and behaviors she described were those of an upset child throwing a temper tantrum. This was not the language or action of her accomplished professional adult self; it was her wounded self lashing out at those closest to her.

Bridget identified her wounded inner child as about four years old. Early in her therapy, she hated the fact that she even had a wounded inner child. She learned through the HEAL process why this younger wounded part was showing up, but she was sick of the wounded part and the recycled pain. She said, “I just want her to go away! I hate her.”

The HEAL process is not about ignoring or discarding the younger self, it is about integrating this part with the adult self. Bridget learned to identify the triggers that would set off the acting-out and how to develop a communication with this part of her. She created a list of her impulsive reactions so that she could identify when this emotionally frozen part of her was triggered.

One day, when she was mad at herself for even having this wounded inner child, I asked her what it was like where that little girl self lived inside of her. She stated without hesitation, “It is a cold, dark place with rags on the floor and no windows.” “That sounds miserable,” I said. I asked her what she would do if a four-year-old girl were standing in front of her feeling all these feelings and living in such a place. Bridget said that she would hug her and clean her up and get her to a better place to live. With this, she imagined a loving place for her little girl, with windows and no rags on the floor. By personifying this part of herself, she was able to stop rejecting the part that she most needed to embrace.

When her wounded little girl got triggered, Bridget felt nervous, antsy, wary, and controlling. She created functional tools to use when this part shows up. We came up with words her responsible adult self could say, such as, “It’s OK, I’m going to make sure nothing bad is going to happen. I am calm, and I trust myself to do the right thing.” This was all she needed to say for her wounded self to be reassured and calmed. The more she set these internal boundaries with herself and external boundaries with others, the more her younger self knew that her responsible adult self was in charge.

Today Bridget continues to work on setting boundaries with herself and others. Her life isn’t perfect; her boys still drive her nuts, and she is not dating anyone, but that younger part of her is no longer as impulsive and reactive. She works hard to recognize when her wounded parts show up, and she uses her functional response tools to give herself encouragement, reassurance, and self-love, knowing that this keeps her as grounded and authentic as she can be.

Your Impulsive Reaction Tools

As you learned in chapter 1, you developed impulsive reaction tools in childhood in order to cope with your family situation and environment. You looked at some of the impulsive reaction tools you developed when you were a child (see “Exercise: Your Impulsive Reactions” in chapter 1). We are now going to honor these tools and examine them more deeply.

Honoring your impulsive reaction tools may seem counterintuitive, but they helped you adapt, respond, navigate, and make sense of the hurt, pain, and confusion when you were young. You used these wounded tools, now all battered and worn, to try to make life more manageable. Based on everything you knew of your world at the time, these tools were the best ones for the job.

The work you are doing here is one of self-love, not self-hatred or rejection. You can still use your impulsive tools, but now you will want to begin to use tools that help you expand instead of contract into a smaller version of yourself. The goal is for you to consciously know all of the tools you have developed and then discern what tool you want to use for a specific situation.

Think of a wounded tool you use, and hold it in your mind. For example, perhaps you overcompensate and try too hard to please others. Thank this tool for being available when you needed it in the past, and then ask yourself if you still need it or if you just use it out of habit. Can you put it down for now? Can you heal it and let it go? You may start to feel something stirring deep within. This is normal. Let this emotion wash over you like a storm going across a valley. It is just a storm, just a feeling. Let it pass over you and move on.

You may not be ready to give up a wounded tool that you have relied on for a long time because you don’t know if you are going to need it again. This is a valid point, and in therapy we don’t want to expose someone emotionally until they feel safe and know how to protect themselves. If you think you still need this tool, don’t give it up. Just acknowledge this, and become conscious of when you are using it. I can still access my wounded tools if I want to, but I also know the price I pay in my relationships if I use an impulsive reaction tool instead of a functional tool.

Your emotional response tools, both impulsive and functional, are always available for you to use. Going forward, you will be asking yourself, Is this the best tool for me to use right now?

Exercise: How Your Impulsive Reaction Tools Developed

This exercise is a continuation of the exercise you did in chapter 1, “Your Impulsive Reactions.” Before you start this exercise, please review the list of impulsive reaction tools you wrote down in your notebook for the earlier exercise.

To give you an example of how to work through this exercise, let’s use the impulsive reaction tool of, I yell at others when I feel out of control. If this is one of your impulsive tools, ask yourself why you needed that tool in your early life. For example, I needed this tool to fight back when I felt defenseless. Think about what, where, why, and who you created this impulsive reaction tool for. Think about the times you felt helpless, uncertain, scared, and worried. For example, I created this tool as my defense when my older brother would beat me up. Write down your answers next to each impulsive tool.

You can also write down who you learned the tool from, if this applies. Was it in response to something going on in your life or to what someone said or did to you? Did you see someone else doing it, or was it something that was put on you? A common thought during this exercise is, I don’t know why. I have just always done it this way. That is fine. Write this down, too. We are so familiar with ourselves that even our dysfunctional actions and reactions feel normal.

Once you have your answers, carefully look them over as a whole. Do you see any repeating patterns? Write them down. For example, you may discover the pattern of choosing partners who you give power to or who behave as though they have power over you. Once you have identified a pattern, think about how it applies to your past and current relationships. Do you think you choose friends or partners based on this pattern? How is this related to your impulsive reaction tools?

This exercise is to help you begin to understand that you learned your emotionally wounded responses for a reason. You weren’t born with these wounded tools; you created and developed them to help you cope. As you move through the HEAL process, you will discern whether or not these tools still serve you and whether or not you want to keep using them.

Set your results from this exercise aside for now. We will come back to them in chapter 5.

Broken Boundaries

Most people don’t know whether or not they have good boundaries. They don’t know how or even if they set boundaries and what it looks like. Boundaries create a sense of emotional safety in our relationships. They are our gut reaction to a situation, how we immediately feel when we like or dislike something or someone, or whether we want to do an activity or not. Our wounding will show up where and when we do not have healthy internal and external boundaries in place. When we have broken or fuzzy boundaries, our impulsive reactions play out in various ways throughout our adult lives.

When the lost inner child who doesn’t have good boundaries reacts impulsively to a situation or event, the responsible adult self has to negotiate and manage the drama the wounded part creates. This lack of boundary setting creates a lot of confusion, and we can get lost in these dramas and in the loudness of our wounded parts. It is hard for the adult self to ignore this internal chaos and upheaval. Until healing happens and the adult self learns how to establish healthy, functional boundaries, the wounded self will continue to go back to the playbook and safety of the frozen emotions and impulsive reactions.

No Boundaries

A no-boundary situation is when we have not established a clear boundary statement of how we feel about something or someone, and we don’t know how to assert ourselves with others using a boundary voice. People become enmeshed when they have a fuzzy idea of boundaries. They are often involved in everyone else’s business, feel compelled to volunteer for everything, and let their friends and family dump their problems on them. In codependent terms they are the fixer, the rescuer, the controller. They often feel overwhelmed and don’t know what to do with all of their own problems, so they start to meddle in other people’s problems. Enmeshment is having fuzzy boundaries sometimes and no boundaries at other times.

People with no boundaries feel needless and wantless. They have learned to shut down and not claim any of their power, often acting as a victim instead. They don’t know what they like or don’t like, so they will ask others what they like and then copy that. They are fixated with others’ behaviors and feelings. “What do you want?” “I don’t know, what do you want?”

No-boundary people are often worn out from the lack of boundaries and the resulting enmeshment, and want to just run away from all of the drama that they attract and participate in. They have deep insecurities and a lifetime of letting others dictate who they should be and how they should think about themselves. They project their sense of right or wrong onto everyone else, which creates two major wounding patterns for the no-boundary person.

The first pattern is that of mind reading, or an attempt to imagine what someone else thinks and feels about them. This type of wounding is confusing for both people in a relationship. The person who is mind reading often makes up a story based on a few facts and then creates a scenario for what is probably happening. They project their insecurities and judgments onto the other person and make up stories that fit their idea of who or what the other person is thinking or feeling. Mind reading can quickly derail someone into thinking their life is a mess and everyone hates them.

The other pattern is the no-boundaries person passive-aggressively attempting to control others because they feel that others are trying to control them. The no-boundaries person tries to establish safety and control in relationships but does so indirectly, avoiding conflict and being sneaky. The no-boundaries person doesn’t know how to talk about their feelings, so they hope the other person just gets the message from their avoidance, snide remarks, or doing things without asking. At first, the other person is oblivious to this and does not pick up on these subtle or indirect clues. This is especially true if the other person is narcissistically inclined. But most people know in time when they are being manipulated, and resentment sets in, further complicating the relationship.

Don’t underestimate me and assume how I’m going to react.

The no-boundaries person usually feels lost, resentful, stressed, tired, worried, and confused and doesn’t know how they got this way. This behavior grows out of a sense of fear—fear of conflict, fear of being left out, fear of being unable to control a situation, fear that they are not involved or that they won’t be needed. They are fearful of not being of value to the other person at all times and in all situations. They are fearful of not having value to themselves, that they are literally worth less. People with no boundaries have lost themselves and usually experience a lot of sadness, drama, and hurt feelings.

Exercise: No Boundaries and/or Enmeshment

Do you think you have little or no boundaries with others? Do you think you might be enmeshed with family members or friends as a result? Having no boundaries means that you aren’t paying any attention to what is OK and not OK for you to do, think, or have others do to you. Enmeshment is having flexible and fuzzy boundaries with ourselves and others, when you are in everyone else’s business. It can be difficult to look inward at this part of yourself, but looking at your ability to set or not set boundaries is an important step toward creating a sense of safety for the wounded part inside.

Carefully consider the following questions, and write out the ones that have meaning for you. As you do so, just observe, don’t condemn yourself. There is no right or wrong; you are just exploring where you are right now with your boundaries. You will use these answers when you learn to set healthy boundaries in chapter 6, so please keep them for later.

Look over the list of questions you answered yes to. Do you see any trends? These thoughts and behaviors are how your lack of boundaries and enmeshment show up in your relationships. They are a reflection of the healing work that is needed; they are not good or bad, they just are.

Let’s go a little deeper with some questions about why you have a difficult time setting boundaries. Feel free to expand on these answers in your notebook. Be as honest as you can with yourself. Remember, this work is just for you unless you wish to share it.

Your answers to these questions will help you begin to look at the patterns and themes that repeatedly show up in your life. If you need help creating a list of your needs, please see the Needs Inventory in appendix B.

Woundings keep recycling because of a poor or weak boundary system. Once you know how to set strong, functional boundaries, you will be able to reclaim your personal power and connect to your authentic self. You will be able to stop the cycle because you will know how to protect yourself in a functional way. The patterns and themes you are discovering through these exercises have contributed a lot of information to your narrative, and they shape your interior world (your self-talk and perception) more than you know.

Be gentle with yourself as you learn the art of boundary setting. You can find your boundary voice and create loving, mutually respectful relationships.

Setting healthy boundaries forms the exit strategies for our dysfunctional and toxic relationships. It also helps to redefine relationships that may have lost their way.

Bubble Boundaries

Many people walk around with an emotional suit of armor on, prepared at all times for an imaginary battle. The wounded part of them doesn’t know that the battle is over, so they suit up every day with their wounded burden. They have what I call a bubble boundary around them to protect themselves from the world.

A bubble boundary is strong but fragile, malleable but rigid. It is the boundary you have when you hold people at arm’s length, when you feel simultaneously guarded and open. It is neither extreme nor enmeshed. You participate in life and enjoy being with other people, yet you clench your teeth hoping they don’t get too close. When you are in your bubble you feel protected; you can still see others and even let them get close, but you know in a millisecond when they get too close and touch your bubble boundary. Your bubble boundary is your sanctuary.

People with bubble boundaries learned to protect themselves from a childhood family where attacks came in the form of sly, passive-aggressive comments or deafening silence. There may have been very little expression or modeling of emotion in the household, so they never learned how to show their feelings.

Because of this lack of healthy emotional availability, these children grow up emotionally neglected and make up stories to make sense of their world. Basic needs such as food, clothing, and shelter were met, but emotional nourishment and nurturing went unfulfilled.

Sometimes this deficit of emotional expression and nurturing creates a void inside that the child tries to fill in other ways to make themselves feel whole. This behavior can come in the form of escapism, isolating, withdrawing, having a fantasy life, taking drugs or alcohol, self-harming, yelling, and other acting-out behaviors. These behaviors are emotional response tools that the wounded, lost inner child uses to self-soothe, cope, and make sense of their world. The child and parent fail to create a secure attachment bonding, which sets the child up for unhealthy attachment styles later in life.

Often in emotionally unavailable households the only communication the child receives is criticism or shaming, so they learn to keep their head down and stay low. At some point, they stop looking for parental emotional nourishment, and the wounded inner child retreats to an interior world and uses their wounded emotional response tools for protection, comfort, and reassurance. Over time, this boundary becomes a bubble surrounding and protecting them, but it was created out of confusion, frustration, necessity, and a place of lack. It doesn’t align with their authentic self and their hopes and dreams for their life.

The ultimate forms of bubble boundaries are addiction, excessive drinking, inappropriate sex, drugs, keeping people at arm’s length, and distractions from doing inner work. The short-term effect is numbing, but these behaviors eventually become crutches and then ineffective boundaries, all created to support the wounded narrative of the lost inner child.

The adult with a bubble boundary seeks out emotionally unavailable partners to replay this drama, repeating what they know in an attempt to feel loved. They want closeness, but they push people away. They secretly hope that someone will be able to see past their façade, through their bubble, to their real, wounded self, which is crying out for validation and love.

Sometimes, out of frustration, people with bubble boundaries will want to drop their stiff-arming, break the bubble, and open themselves up to a relationship. They want to feel connected and think that they can simply break their bubble boundary and become highly vulnerable, but this is too much, too soon. They don’t always have a good “picker” when finding an intimate or romantic partner, and in their hasty attempt to achieve an intimate connection with someone, they sacrifice their own sense of self, which can have devastating consequences. They often have low self-esteem and don’t feel that they are good enough, so they don’t have strong functional boundary tools to back up and support themselves in such interactions.

The person who wants to suddenly break their bubble boundary can feel excited and nervous when meeting someone new. They might decide to tell all of their secrets and provide way too much information, putting all of their dirty laundry on the table. They subconsciously think that if they do so, the other person will know who they are right up front. They want to see if they draw the other person closer or push them away if they show who they really. They go from the known safety of a bubble boundary to having no boundary.

Since they don’t know themselves emotionally and don’t have a healthy boundary system, this oversharing is their attempt at creating intimacy, but it is also a test. Emotional dumping often overwhelms the other person and chases them away, which leaves the oversharer feeling the exposed shame of having revealed too much too soon. They feel foolish and retreat back into the sealed-off world inside their bubble.

Extreme Boundaries

Extreme boundaries are the opposite of no boundaries and much harsher than bubble boundaries. An extreme boundary involves making a dramatic life change that the person believes is the only way they can keep themselves emotionally, physically, mentally, or sexually safe from another person. An example of an extreme boundary is when someone moves to a different state or country to get away from another person or a family. Constructing such a boundary is like building a reinforced concrete fortress: it will keep others out for good.

People who establish extreme boundaries are usually angry and hurt from something someone else did to them, or they feel a great deal of fear about something. They are willing to walk away from a friendship, relationship, or work environment as a response to the fear they feel. They perceive that there are no other alternatives and that the only way to protect themselves is to shut out the other person or situation. Most people, however, establish extreme boundaries too quickly and out of a sense of frustration rather than a fear of being harmed. This happens when they don’t know how to establish healthy boundaries.

Some examples of extreme boundaries are:

Some of these extreme nonfunctional boundaries might sound like they would be set by someone who needs to move a thousand miles away for their own protection, and some people do need to move away or block someone from their life for their own safety. (If this is the case for you, please see Resources in appendix C.) However, extreme boundaries need to be carefully considered and are a last resort because of the potential long-term damage they can create in a relationship connection.

If you are tempted to create an extreme boundary with someone in your life, ask yourself the following questions to determine whether this is the best option for you. Write down the answers in your notebook, and keep them handy for the boundary work in chapter 6.

Before you set an extreme boundary, ask yourself:

If you have answered these questions from a place of grounded clarity and still feel that you need an extreme boundary for personal and family protection, then proceed with caution and care. If you start to feel anger, spite, revenge, jealousy, and rage, then take a moment to re-center yourself. After you feel calmer, ask yourself if you need an extreme boundary or just need to work through your feelings. You want to feel grounded and centered when making such decisions.

If you can honestly answer from the bottom of your heart that you need to set an extreme boundary for self-protection and as a way to honor your sense of self-love, trust, and respect, then good for you for protecting yourself. But if you didn’t give thought to the previous questions and want to shut down the relationship because it is too hard or messy to figure out, then you need to reexamine that and see if there is a more functional boundary for you to put into place.

Setting an extreme boundary without discerning the best approach will only perpetuate your wounding drama. People who set one extreme boundary will probably establish more of them with others because doing so is easier than working through the issues. This type of person often goes through life shutting lots of doors and leaving messy rooms filled with unfinished emotional business.

If you connect with any of the descriptions of missing, broken, bubble, or extreme boundaries we have been discussing, please remember that you also have healthy functional boundaries. Take a moment to consider the functional boundaries you have, the areas where you are doing a good job of maintaining your sense of self. These are relationships that feel balanced and reciprocal, where you feel honored, trusted, respected, and loved. These types of relationships are the gold standard to strive for when you are interacting with others and growing your connections. Many people have really good boundaries at work but poor boundaries at home. This is often the case because at work there are clearly defined rules of work and behavior, so people stay within the lines. At home, there are no work rules per se, so people tend to bring into their personal lives the boundaries or the lack thereof that they saw within their childhood family.

Remember, you are doing more things right than wrong. We are all doing our best with the tools we have, and as you work through the HEAL process, you are learning what is already working and what still needs some work.

Angry Boundaries

Many people will set a boundary with someone else only after they have had enough and become angry. They have been pushing down their feelings, and then they use the resulting pent-up anger and resentment to give themselves permission to stand up for themselves. They use the energy of stuffed emotion and their anger to justify the boundary. Later they can blame their anger as the reason why they set the boundary: “You made me so mad!” They hide behind this excuse and don’t have to own their feelings. Recall that that is what I did at ten years old. I had stuffed my anger so much that I wasn’t going to take it anymore. I was protecting my sister, and I was also at my breaking point.

Anger is fear under great pressure.

People who set boundaries out of anger are often not used to setting boundaries at all. They have a hard time expressing their feelings, so others don’t know how they feel about something until they erupt in pent-up anger. They are told the problem is their anger, but that is not the problem. The problem is that they never learned what to do their natural anger, so now they stuff it and then explode.

Ironically, these are often the same people who received the message that the emotion of anger was bad or wrong to have at all, and thus the cycle of stuffing anger is seen more in men than women. Boys receive confusing mixed messages about emotions growing up: Don’t be angry, Don’t cry, Tell me how you feel, I can’t read your mind, Don’t get into fights at school, You need to stand up for yourself, You’re the man of the house now, man up! Women and girls hear, Don’t be so emotional or dramatic, Why are you so quiet?, Tell me how you feel, You need to be strong to be taken seriously, and they are under pressure to conform to society and make themselves smaller for the convenience of others while being told, Just be yourself and love you for you.

You never need to apologize, justify, or explain your feelings or your boundaries. Your feelings are your feelings. You have a choice in how you express anger. If your boundary has been violated, you don’t need to have an excuse to tell someone what you are feeling; all you need to do is center yourself, find the emotion you are feeling, and give that wounded part a voice.

Using Feeling Words

Sometimes the hardest part of boundary setting is finding the right feeling word to describe the feeling. Once you have found the right word, then you can clearly express yourself. Suppose you feel hurt that someone didn’t invite you to a party. Once you have identified the feeling of “hurt,” you could say to that person, “I feel hurt that you did not invite me to go to that party.” The other person may not know you feel this way—or they could have known what they were doing. Either way, the point is that you have spoken your heart’s pain and are letting them know. You stood up for yourself, and you gave voice to the emotion you felt using the best feeling word.

When we don’t say something, we are going to feel resentment about it later. We might even replay the situation over and over in our mind and continue to feel hurt—to recycle the pain. This is the body, mind, and spirit’s way of telling us to deal with it. The longer we don’t deal with a feeling, the louder it becomes within us.

When I was much younger and was first learning to express my feelings, I wasn’t used to putting them into words, and I didn’t have a big vocabulary to identify them. When I was really upset, I didn’t know what to say or how to state a boundary, so, flustered, I would say, “I don’t know how I feel. This just all feels weird and upsetting.” These were not the most descriptive feeling words, but I was attempting to get my feelings heard. This is the important part, to get your feelings out in the most functional way you can, set a boundary, and go from there.

This practice is not about perfection, it is about honoring your feelings and giving them a voice. In time, your feelings vocabulary and usage will increase. If you have trouble finding a word that matches your mood, see the Feelings Chart in appendix A for an extensive list of feeling words.

Severe Trauma and Dissociation

As you have learned, a poor or nonexistent boundary system is often a result of a dysfunctional childhood family environment that was absent of healthy emotional response tools. Sadly, in many families the parents or guardians are so wounded themselves that they are not able to model any functional behaviors or boundaries, and they don’t see or understand the emotional wounding that is happening to the child. The parents or guardians may even be the direct cause of traumatic wounding to the child. Because of this neglect, children in these circumstances have emotional woundings that go very deep and lead to devastating consequences in adulthood.

We have discussed how traumas are relative to each of us and how they coordinate with our own resilience and sense of self. Severe trauma, especially when repeated, can psychically, emotionally, and mentally damage a person to their core. While such trauma is happening, the person being traumatized often dissociates as a form of self-preservation. You can do whatever you want to my body, but you are not going to get to my core.

Dissociation is a trauma response that helps the traumatized person mentally and emotionally “check out” from the reality of the situation. To protect themselves, they unconsciously bury their essence and their feelings and prepare their minds to disconnect or go into a fantasy world as a preservation. This response is, in a sense, one of setting an internal extreme boundary, a retreat to safety that they can control. It is akin to their mental and emotional functioning going offline. They disconnect and go to another place in their mind while they wait out what is being done to them.

People who have PTSD will often dissociate when they are triggered. This can happen simply by having a conversation or seeing something on television that reminds them of the original trauma. They will mentally go somewhere else because this was how they coped when the initial trauma happened.

The unhealed traumatized brain doesn’t always know if the trauma is over or not when a trigger occurs. When a person is triggered, they begin to watch their “trauma movie” in their mind’s eye, usually from start to finish. Most people remember everything in a trauma memory in extreme detail: the surrounding sounds, touch, and emotion, whether it was a sunny or rainy day, what someone else was wearing, and what they smelled like.

I can recall every detail of taking my sister from the living room back to her room for safety, because it took all of my energy to make that happen and it was traumatic for me. Even though I don’t have PTSD, I can recall everything from that event when I was ten years old. Not everyone who has a traumatic experience will be able to recall in detail what happened. Some people know something bad happened, but that is it.

If you feel something happened to you and you aren’t sure, don’t force yourself to recall this experience. When or if your subconscious is ready to release this information into your consciousness, that will be the time to process and heal the trauma. Forcing yourself to recall a memory can be just as traumatizing as the original event. Trust and know that if you are supposed to remember this, you will.

The following story is of a woman who experienced severe trauma in her early life and how her lack of boundary-setting skills as a child followed her into adulthood. She has been on a courageous journey, and you will see that it is possible to heal from a deeply traumatic childhood. You will learn how traumas that happened in childhood followed her into adulthood. It took courage, strength, and a willingness to slowly and lovingly acknowledge the pain and events that happened to her for her to heal. The story is difficult to read, but I include it to show you that people can heal their woundings, establish good boundaries, and become much healthier after a severely traumatic childhood.

Story: Marianne’s Severe Childhood Trauma

As a child, Marianne was a good girl, but her mother saw her as always getting into trouble. She felt that no matter what she did she wasn’t good enough. Her mother would send her to her room and tell her, “Wait until your father gets home.” She learned to feel bad about herself, and would feel bad even when nothing bad was happening.

When Marianne was thirteen, a neighbor whom she trusted sexually molested her. When she told her mother, her mother didn’t believe her. In fact, her mother never believed Marianne’s stories of the abuse—or anything else, for that matter. She always doubted Marianne and was just generally not very nice to her. Being a smart girl, Marianne thought she just needed to try harder.

When she was sixteen, a teacher at her high school sexually assaulted her and told her not to tell anyone, but she bravely told the principal and her mother. Neither the principal nor her mother believed her; true to form, her mother again doubted her. Marianne learned to believe that others knew her better than she knew herself, even though none of it made any sense to her. She also learned to feel bad about and blame herself.

Marianne started acting out in school and talking back to her parents, primarily her mom. When she was seventeen, her parents, not knowing what else to do, admitted her to a mental hospital for three months because they saw her as the problem. While she was in the hospital, she met Mike, a male orderly who was older than she by six years. Mike charmed not only Marianne but also her mother. He told Marianne they were going to get married.

Mike and Marianne were married early in her senior year of high school. She thought she was marrying a charming man who was going to care for her, listen to her, and validate her, unlike her parents and the other men she encountered in her life. In time, however, she learned that her new husband was extremely narcissistic.

As with most narcissists, Mike’s charm and kindness quickly went away. About nine months into their marriage, he became controlling and angry. He beat her up, and she would go to her mother, bloody and bruised, for help. Her mom would say that Marianne must have done something to make Mike angry, and that she should go back to him. Again her mother didn’t believe her, and again she blamed herself. It was all her fault.

Over the course of their ten-year marriage, Mike continued to beat Marianne. He made her go to sex parties, where he forced her to have sex with other men and women and then tell him about it for his own sexual gratification. He would often threaten to kill her, and when he was driving the car, he would threaten to crash into a concrete barrier.

Anything could set him off. Marianne would make dinner for him, but he would find one thing wrong and break the serving dishes and plates on the floor and then make her clean it up. He told her she deserved it, and she believed him. He threatened her, beat her, and gaslighted her, manipulating her into thinking she was the crazy one. She suffered many more horrific events too numerous to detail.

She was in a violent domestic abuse situation and felt trapped. She told many people about the abuse, including doctors and clergy, but in the 1970s these professionals all turned a blind eye to abuse. They told her to stay with her husband and to try to make her marriage better, implying that her abuse was somehow her fault.

When Marianne was twenty-seven, she was finally able to leave Mike with the help of a man who truly loved her. She describes this man as her “lighthouse in a storm.” Unfortunately, she had no capacity to receive or hold this man’s love. She eventually left her rescuer, and in retrospect she is grateful that he helped her get out of the extremely abusive relationship with Mike.

Marianne’s sense of self-worth, love, trust, and respect were beaten down, and she was exhausted from years of emotional, mental, physical, and sexual damage. She was among the walking wounded. Her story shows how her early childhood woundings and poor boundaries with both herself and her mother set the stage for her to be sexually assaulted and victimized. Her early experiences groomed her to be a target for an abusive narcissist in her adult life. But as with any child, she only knew what she knew, and she literally didn’t know any better. She didn’t know she had poor boundaries, she just thought her mother didn’t listen to her. She tried to tell her emotionally unavailable mom all of this, but her mom also had poor boundaries and just blamed Marianne.

In his book The Human Magnet Syndrome: The Codependent Narcissist Trap, psychotherapist Ross Rosenberg writes about narcissistic abusers like Mike, who “possess an uncanny ability to discern whether potential victims are pathologically lonely or encumbered by core, real, or perceived beliefs of powerlessness and weakness. They seize upon anyone in a given crowd who appears isolated from others or whose loved ones, despite their protective and loving pronouncements, are uninterested in them and/or absent. The perfect [narcissistic abuse syndrome] victim has been taught the futility of fighting back, as doing so often makes matters worse.”1

People will often read stories like Marianne’s and wonder why people in such situations don’t just leave, but people with low self-esteem and no boundaries don’t see a clear path out. Marianne knew that how she was being treated was wrong. She tried getting help from adults to help her set boundaries, but her efforts to get assistance were continually thwarted. Her natural ability to protect herself became extinguished after repeated attempts. She began to believe she was the problem. In time, she felt she deserved this treatment, and she became lost in her own wounding.

When Marianne first came to me she was fifty-one years old, buttoned up, angrily defensive, controlling, a perfectionist, had major obsessive-compulsive behaviors, and felt only two emotions: anger and fear. She had daily symptoms of anxiety and depression, and kept acquaintances at work at arm’s length. She could only set angry boundaries with others. Her physician recommended that she see me for therapy.

She was wary of talking to me, as she had told no one of what she had experienced as a child and young adult. After all, she had learned that telling her story didn’t do any good. She had a profoundly disabled boundary system and had effectively established an extreme fortress-type boundary around herself. She had isolated herself from everyone else behind her armor and cut everyone out of her life.

Our work began very slowly, as I had to establish safety and earn her trust. I reassured her that we were going to go at her pace, in her own time, and that she was in control, because for much of her life she was not in control. She learned about the trauma response process and how her trauma response was natural for someone who had such an extensive PTSD wounding history.

Over our first few months of working together I saw how bright Marianne was and how she used her adaptive skills to not only survive the experiences but also channel her energy into her incredible mind’s ability to organize data, manage complex transactions, and develop systems to manage compliance at work. I saw that behind Marianne’s defensive anger she was a kind, thoughtful, and considerate person.

As our sessions progressed, I found myself repeating examples of how the body, mind, and spirit respond to trauma, but Marianne would react as if she had not heard them before. She was a bright woman, but she wasn’t remembering what I had taught her about PTSD, trauma response, and coping skills. I finally realized that she was dissociating whenever she was triggered by a story she was telling me or when I referenced a story that reminded her of a trauma. She would look, act, and verbally respond normally as she carried on an intelligent conversation, but she wouldn’t remember any of it later. She was dissociating and mentally replaying the trauma that corresponded to the trigger word, sound, story, or image that we were talking about. She had learned this wounded emotional response tool at a young age and was still using it decades later because it had served her so well.

Over time Marianne was able to recognize when she would begin to dissociate. I helped her to develop some grounding skills to keep her available and present. (With her feet on the floor, she would say, “I’m safe right now, I am in control. It’s not happening to me now, and I trust myself to protect myself.”) She began to recognize when she would dissociate at home, at the store, and out to lunch with friends. It was happening more than she realized, and she understood that she had to develop new functional response tools to help her become emotionally healthier.

Marianne learned to trust herself and listen to herself and her needs. She got a dog and felt unconditional love for the first time. She learned that she had been victimized by her perpetrators and that she wasn’t the problem. She learned how to connect with others and develop friendships. She took self-help classes and began to love, trust, and respect herself. This self-love is still hard for her to accept, but she makes progress every day. If someone had believed her and believed in her when her traumas were happening, the course of the rest of her life would have had a very different outcome, and she would have a very different story.

Today Marianne still dissociates, but the triggers are usually connected to something she reads or sees in a movie or a show on TV. She is able to come out of the dissociated state, recognize what is happening, and move on. She still has obsessive-compulsive behaviors, but she sees them for what they are, and we monitor these occurrences and their frequency.

Marianne now uses her words to protect, express, and defend herself. She knows that if a situation feels bad or uncomfortable, she has the tools to protect herself, and she knows she has the power to leave. She chooses to have people in her life who honor her, and her relationships are reciprocal. Every day Marianne demonstrates the power of practicing good boundaries. She continues to use the HEAL process to embrace and transform her woundings.

(If you are a victim of abuse of any kind, please see Resources in appendix C.)

In this chapter you learned from others how their wounded child became a wounded adult. Discovering some of the reasons you carry emotional pain can be scary and overwhelming, but understanding your past is important so that you can know where you want to go in your future.

No one wants to remember painful memories if we think there is nothing we can do about it. Recognizing the strength, resilience, and perseverance you have demonstrated to get this far in life is your reminder that you are bigger and stronger than anything that has ever happened to you.

Marianne survived many deeply traumatic situations and then learned how to thrive and love herself. So can you.

1 Ross Rosenberg, The Human Magnet Syndrome: The Codependent Narcissist Trap, New York, Morgan James Publishing, 2019.