Why we Fail to Grow Up: The Legacy of Child Abuse & It’s Upshots

I was introduced to r/nevergrewup today. Needless to say, I immediately found that sub fascinating. A Redditor there wrote, "When I see my adult body even though I know I am a mentally a child, I still will say, 'I wish I was a child.' I am not sure why really."

So I launched into the following...

IME, Learned Helplessness & the Victim Identity is the state the untreated, traumatized, "inner" child (or children) live in here... and "split off" Compensatory Narcissism is the state the untreated, traumatized, "inner" child (or children) live in there.

See the second of the Three Definitions of “Splitting” in not-moses’s reply to the OP on that Reddit thread. Because I think that's the version of "splitting" to which most of us became conditioned, in-doctrine-ated, instructed, imprinted, socialized, habituated, and normalized in our misspent youth. And the version that produces the "not-okay inner children" first discussed by Eric Berne as he developed his "Transactional Theory" back in the 1950s... later much -- and very usefully -- "amplified" by Richard Schwartz in his Internal Family Systems Model.

Once I understood all that stuff I picked up along the path in almost ten years of postgraduate school in psychopathology and the remediation thereof, I was able to apply Choiceless Awareness for Emotion Processing (and for pretty much everything else) to keep an eye on my own IFSM, it's increasingly occasional regressions into LH & tVI and, its employment of CN to jump out of it.

Over time, I learned to spot the regressions and "head them off at the pass" before the other kids on my big yellow (mental) school bus started to jump back on the Karpman Drama Triangle with them and either try to "rescue" or "persecute" them.

Mindfulness really is the bomb, but we don't need all that woo-woo window dressing that usually distorts the useful product. For me, at least, this guy was a huge help on that.

If interested, see also:

Dis-I-dentifying with Learned Helplessness & the Victim I-dentity (and not-moses's answers to a replier's questions there),

Appropriate & Effective "Narrative Therapy" vs. Potentially Counterproductive, Unguided Journaling,

Re-Development, and the rest of...

A 21st Century Program of Recovery for Someone with Untreated Childhood Trauma.

Because 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.

And thanks for triggering me to connect all those dots this way... as benefits may accrue for others as a direct result.