Ending violence / Dealing with violence in your childhood home:

If you experienced stress or violence in your family as a child, you had to develop coping strategies. In adulthood, these strategies are often still there. But they no longer help you. Rather, they might disrupt your life.

Children have to adapt

If you experienced overt violence or difficult situations and stress with your parents as a child, you had to adapt somehow. Imagine a 4-year-old boy lying awake at night, hearing his parents yelling at each other over and over again. This child is completely terrified. He doesn't know what to do with his fear. No one comforts him. If he were 10 years older, he might say to himself: “I've had enough, I'm getting out of here”.

But 4-year-old children can't just run away. They are completely dependent on their parents. They have to somehow develop strategies so that they can withstand these experiences and survive in this environment. These strategies will possibly accompany them into adulthood – even if they no longer need them then.

We talk about some of these strategies here. Please put yourself in the situations we describe and see if anything might apply to you.

Becoming tense and vigilant

Children pick up on a lot: Even as a baby, you were affected by the feelings of others. Starting at the age of about 18 months, you were able to empathize with them emotionally. You understood that Mom is now angry and Dad is now sad. You were able to develop compassion for them.

From the age of about 4, you gradually developed the ability to imagine what other people were thinking. You learned to read between the lines. If you grew up in an insecure environment, you learned this all the better: You learned to read that the twitch in the corner of Dad's mouth and Mom's strained voice meant there was about to be trouble. You were constantly on guard. You were never really relaxed.

Today, you may be rather tense and vigilant. You may find it difficult to relax and let go around other people.

Shutting things out

Let's say you repeatedly witnessed things as a child that were very unpleasant. This feels terrible. So it's logical if you learned to shut your eyes and ears to what was going on – in the spirit of “if I don't see it, it isn't happening.” Maybe you learned to really stop seeing or hearing these things. You disappeared into your own internal world.

Today, you might think that everything was wonderful in your childhood. But the unpleasant things somehow ended up in your memory. And it's possible that they come back up. This is called flashbacks. You can learn more about them in this text.

Numbing and distorting

Imagine that there was constant fighting in your home. At some point, you learned that this was “normal”. “Dad just yells” and “Mom just threatens to kill herself every now and then” – things like that became “normal” in your eyes. This way, you managed to create the image that things were okay in your home. You became numb to the bad behavior. What would horrify or outrage other people made no impression on you. You put on a pair of distortion goggles, so to speak, that glossed over the bad things.

Now you are older and enter into relationships with other people. You might still have those goggles on. So, you might allow people to treat you unkindly or violently. Because for you, this is normal.

Glorifying your parents and denigrating yourself

As a child, you depend on your parents for survival. From a child's point of view, it is incredibly important that their parents are trustworthy, reliable, and lovable. However, if you feel that this is not actually the case, you have to tweak your perception somehow: If Mom scolds you, she's probably right. If Dad ignores you, he's probably doing it for a good reason. You probably deserve to be scolded and ignored. The parents are right. You are wrong. There is something wrong with you, not your parents.

This childhood logic follows many into adulthood. If this is true for you, then you now understand why your sense of self-worth is so low. And you also understand why you still put your parents on a pedestal and think: “I have great parents”.

Invalidating your own feelings

If, as a child, you often feel fearful, distraught or helpless, and no one comforts you, then at some point you develop an inner voice that shouts down your own emotional experience. You then think phrases like, “Get a grip!” “Pull yourself together!” “You're just fooling yourself!” “They're right, you deserve this!” “It's your own fault!” “You asked for it!”

Today, you might still have an inner voice that rebukes you or puts you down. Back then, that voice was important: it helped you to not take your childhood suffering seriously. If you had taken it seriously, you would have fallen into despair. The voice helped you to fit into your environment. It helped you to survive.

Today, the voice is interfering with your life. You suffer from constantly beating yourself up. The voice has simply not understood yet that the past is over. In this text, you will learn more about dealing with unpleasant feelings.

Denigrating and rejecting parts of yourself

Every child needs love from their parents. Now imagine that some of your needs or characteristics had no place in your home. For example, you were very strong-willed or lively. Or you needed a lot of physical affection. That just didn't seem to fit in with your home. You learned that those aspects of you were unlovable. As a child, parental love was more important than self-actualization.

Therefore, you dismissed and rejected those ill-fitting parts of yourself. You “put them away”. You only allowed those parts that received affection from your parents: for example, the well-behaved child. Or the strong child. Or the independent child.

Today, the rejected aspects and needs of you may show themselves. But you still judge and reject them. So they become even louder and more disruptive. They want to be taken seriously.

Identifying with your parents

Imagine you had parents who gave you very little affection. There was no loving closeness. The parent-child bond was fragile. As a child, however, this bond was incredibly important to you – it was the most important thing of all. You therefore tried to create closeness with your parents. For example, you behaved in a way that increased the amount of attention and affection you received.

Maybe you also started to think like your parents. Identification is a way of building closeness: “If I think like them, I am like them, and then I'm very close to them.” That's the child's logic. You also adopted what they thought about you: “You're so clumsy!” “You must be able to do that!” “A man doesn't do that” and so on. Their voices took up residence in your head, so to speak, and became your own. Today, these voices still live within you.

Behavioral problems and disorders

Everything we described so far can lead to behavioral problems and disorders of self-image and self-experience. You may have developed an eating disorder, a compulsion, or some other difficult behavior. We recommend that you read this text.

And now what?

Maybe you recognize yourself in some of these descriptions. Now you may ask yourself what you can do about all this. You've already taken an important first step. You have developed interest in yourself and your story. You will make progress when you see what happened more clearly, and when you develop appreciation and compassion for the child you used to be. We also recommend this text.