Surviving Psychopathic Parenting (part 16) Putting my feelings in shutdown mode

Im not going to feel that now

No, its not going to hurt me, I’m going to go rigid

Switching off

Numb

I decided not to feel anything from a long time ago. It was the easiest thing at the time. It was more than that, it was a self protective thing, because of the arrows, lies, the verbal abuse and emotional reactions of the psychopath in my life.

Did I train myself not to feel?

Possibly

I cant remember how or when I started to dissociate from my body. From my feelings. From listening to my heart.

Probably from a time when it was unsafe to. Probably from a time when the needs it expressed as a toddler or child did not get responded to, or was scalded for.

I didn’t know that it was known as ‘dissociation’ I just thought I was being clever, I was just doing what I needed to do to survive, I was just doing what I needed to to not be as hurt by the emotional abuse.

What I do remember is the strength of my mind one time. On an early morning paper round late one winter/march time, I forgot my gloves, and I usually wore 2-3 pairs, it was the cold and wind chill on a bike… So, I remember thinking to myself that temperature was ‘all in the mind’ – and so, for the next 2 hours, cycling, folding and delivering newspapers I tried to focus my mind on things like warm fires, heat and sunshine, almost trying to block out to my mind the cold pain signals. To my surprise it virtually worked, until maybe the last 20 mins.

Another time this occurred is that one piece of advice for cycling further is to listen to music, as it stops pain signals getting to the brain.

The problem with both. Is that in the immediacy afterwards, I realised that my fingers were cold, in the hot shower afterwards… and also that my body after a 100 mile cycle could only endure so much blocking of the pain…

Interesting.

My body could only withstand so much of the blocking of the pain, when it was about the cold, or exercise..

At the same time as blocking the cold on a paper round, I had been blocking the emotional reactions of the parent. I have done ever since. Just because im 43 and not 13 doesn’t mean to say that dissociation doesn’t occur even now, but it did last time 2 years ago.

My mind took over, and knew it had a heart to protect, and my body went into a kind of dissociated paralysis in her presence. No you don’t get me to hug you back. You don’t get the me you damaged.

What I also know I did was shut down my inner world, a world I am now discovering, but that’s for another piece.

Dissociation is when you psychologically separate yourself from yourself. It can make you freeze up or shrivel inside, or even make you feel like you’re detached from your body

Lindsay C Gibson, 2019 Recovering from Emotionally immature Parents

Gibson goes on to say that dissociation is a ‘natural defence’ and can be any form of distancing from your conscious experience of yourself , being a primitive type of emotional escape and common defence against threat or danger, especially for children in an unsafe environment.

There are costs to this reaction. But at the time its like coping with no gloves on a freezing cold day, its numbing the possibility of pain, and the pain itself.

Its the proverbial deer in the headlights. The freeze.

But in the moment it causes passivity. (The deer isn’t thinking much either)

Recovering from this is to reclaim the action and power in the space- not to freeze, to ‘hang in there’ – and this is something I am working through. But for now, this is about recognising that surviving psychopathic parenting was a feat of natural strength, a natural shut off.

Because

When children discover how self-disconnect takes away pain, they use it for increasingly minor threats. After a while they can become strangers to their own inner experience, instead of just cutting themselves off from fear or hurt, all emotion gets so dulled that life itself feels a little unreal.

Gibson, 2019, pp79.

Yes.

This.

Living in my head, pretending, keeping the emotions at bay.

In survival mode because of dissociation.

Most, if not all of my childhood, and a lot of my adulthood to date so far.

Discovering only recently through therapy what I feel – because I just dont or didnt know.

Shut that bit off like headphones on a bike ride.

Did everything to suppress the emotion.

The body keeps the score though.

Feeling shame, go numb

Protect myself , freeze.

Survival meant putting up the shield. One that doesn’t stop arrows, but tried to stop them going deep.

Thank you for reading, links are above or to the right of the resources, the previous parts to my story, and also how you can support me, via the KO-FI site. Thank you