I stumbled into Reddit's r/nevergrewup a few days ago. I fit right in with the crowd there (in one of my dissociative alters, at least) for decades. As appears to be the case with most of the participants on that sub, it's a fascinating combination of what the DSMs have called Avoidant Personality Disorder, Depressive PD and Dependent PD since the 1980s.
And thus a collection of cognitive and behavioral compensations for having been so overwhelmed by some collection of having been neglected, ignored, emotionally and/or functionally abandoned, discounted, disclaimed, and rejected, as well as invalidated, confused, betrayed, insulted, criticized, judged, blamed, shamed, ridiculed, embarrassed, humiliated, denigrated, derogated, scorned, set up to screw up, victimized, demonized, persecuted, picked on, vilified, dumped on, bullied, gaslit..., scapegoated..., emotionally blackmailed, defiled and/or otherwise abused by others upon whom they depended for survival in middle or later childhood that the ego has elected to more or less permanently regress to an earlier period of time that is seen as more pleasant and acceptable.
At a price: Elements of Piaget's cognitive, Erikson's psychosocial and Kohlberg's moral development may be so semi-consciously suppressed, unconsciously regressed, wholly dissociated or just never achieved in the first place that the person simply cannot function in a few or even many areas of adult or even adolescent life... because he or she simply doesn't have the skills to do so.
While I never met the criteria for either Avoidant or Depressive PDs, I did spend much of the 1990s stuck in various Dependent PD traits, for sure. The following includes most of how I was able to dig my way out of having been conditioned, in-doctrine-ated, instructed, imprinted, socialized, habituated, and normalized to a lingering state of childlike Learned Helplessness & the Victim Identity by my dysfunctional, adoptive parents and their later surrogates:
Dis-I-dentifying with Learned Helplessness & the Victim I-dentity (and not-moses's answers to a replier's questions there),
Choiceless Awareness for Emotion Processing and pretty much everything else,
Dissociation, Memory Retrieval, "Resociation" & Reprocessing,
Appropriate & Effective "Narrative Therapy" vs. Potentially Counterproductive, Unguided Journaling,
Re-Development, and the rest of...
A 21st Century Recovery Program for Someone with Untreated Childhood Trauma... because IME there's a LOT one can do without spending a fortune on psychotherapy, as well as to speed up the process if one is in therapy or at least at the fourth of the five stages of therapeutic recovery.
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