Do You Try to Avoid Your Feelings?
March 12th, 2010 |
By Joyce A. Thompson, MS, LMFT, Abuse / Survivors of Abuse Topic Expert Contributor
Click here to contact Joyce and/or see her GoodTherapy.org Profile
Many survivors of childhood abuse are very skilled at avoiding their feelings. You might ask why they would do this, but it actually makes a lot of sense. As a helpless child, when you are ‘trapped’ in an abusive household and were either subjected to daily or sporadic abuse, the feelings were overwhelmingly painful. You either knew that you would be constantly bombarded day-after-day with abuse and the resultant flooding of emotions, or that you would be ‘hit’ with the abuse eventually – when you least expected it, also resulting in a flooding of emotions. Eventually, children in these situations just wanted to escape the emotional pain. So they slowly began to avoid the painful emotions – both consciously and unconsciously. Read the rest of this entry








