Silence Masquerading as Virtue
From pure potential, a child arrives. An energy with endless opportunities. Not a being to blame for one’s misfortunes. It is easy to blame a child and that is why you cannot. They are defenceless. Some receive the love and nourishment required to develop into healthy, well-rounded individuals, and many, not so much. Sometimes parents are doing their best, what they believe to be right, but they too were subject to a less-than-ideal childhood. So their actions are a repeat of what they learned as children to be the right thing to do. This is what I call, ‘trained by trauma’.
Trained by trauma, the child becomes fluent in the unspoken language of tension. Before learning to speak, children find social cues through observation, and our bodies are terrible at hiding our true feelings. Children can recognise the micro-aggressions, subtle facial expressions or intonations in voice. Trained by trauma, the child recognises storms in silence. There is a difference in energy between two people who love each other, and two people who tolerate each other. Children understand resentment, hiding in plain sight.
Grown up amidst emotional instability, the child is trained by trauma to develop a false self. One void of personal boundaries, a good child, a nice child. Boundaries dissolved and intuition muffled. Their fire dampened, they become exactly who they ‘should’ be. This false self is a handful of identities catered to the needs of others, to please others, to sacrifice the true self in an attempt to be loved by someone incapable of loving them for who that true self might be. Day by day, the false self is taught to be the ‘right’ self. The child might even believe it is their true self, but, true love cannot be earned through sacrifice. There will always be something missing. A feeling that something is not, quite, right. Making the true self small for others to feel big is the soul losing itself. Manipulation dressed as dependence is not intimacy. Genuine intimacy is not emotional extraction, it is not compliance; it is silence masquerading as virtue.
image by Carl Jung