Welcome back to Part 2 of the How to Recover from Childhood Trauma Series. This is for you if you’re one of many adult children of alcoholics, adult children of narcissistic parents, or adult survivors of otherwise abusive or neglectful homes.
If you haven’t already, please check out Part 1 of the Series where I share with you exactly who is an adult child, how you become one, how to know if you’re an adult living with childhood trauma, and what are the underlying root causes of childhood trauma impacting you right now. You may want to read up on Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy, the evidence-based psychotherapy approach that has changed my life and the life of my clients.
So one evening after a day of back-to-back sessions I was cooking a Greek beef stew that calls for an enormous but delicious amount of onions. Through all the peeling and crying, it finally hit me.
I’m an onion. You’re an onion. We’re all onions.
Especially if you’re a high achieving or passionate perfectionist who is ALSO a survivor of childhood complex trauma. You’re what I call a member of the WWC, aka the Walking Wounded Club.
I know it’s not the most beautiful or poetic image—an onion. My mission is to show you that seeing your psyche or internal world as an onion will help you heal, fulfill your potential, and become the best version of yourself without stress or overwhelm. You’ll get the life you deserve, dare I say it, effortlessly. So strap yourself in because you’re in for a ride. But first….
You identify as one of many adult children of alcoholic and dysfunctional families out there. Now what?
I’m going to be doing a deep dive exploring exactly what the impact of childhood trauma is on you today. I hope you’ll be able to get a better understanding of yourself as an adult survivor. I’d like to give you a map of your internal world as it is right now so you can better deal with what’s going on inside. My intention is to get you to a place of clarity, calm, and curiosity about who you are and who you could be without your past holding you back.
I believe in every cell of my body that you CAN feel safe enough within yourself and your relationships to be authentic, vulnerable, and in real genuine connection.
You CAN be in control, claim your power, and become the loving hero of your own story. And you don’t have to do it alone, without guidance, or without a community. It all goes back to the onion.
The problem of adult children of alcoholics and dysfunctional families
I’ve worked with countless high achieving women who are also adult survivors of childhood trauma over the last 10 years. These women have ticked off many of the boxes that they or society feel are a must for fulfillment. On the outside they appeared put together like everything in their lives was falling into place. But the inside was a different story. They were on the brink of falling apart.
My clients have been my greatest teachers and mentors. I’m so grateful to have been invited into their internal worlds and traveled alongside them through metaphorical mountains, swamps, rivers, deserts, and jungles. I’ve learned and grown more than I could have ever imagined by being their therapist and fellow traveler. The greatest lesson I’ve learned is that your internal world can be visualized as an onion with 3 major layers:
SURVIVAL STRATEGIES, the surface layer
CORE FEARS, the middle layer
PRIMAL WOUNDS, the deep, deep layer
Your survival strategies and your protective parts that use them
I discovered the top 10 common survival strategies of high achievers who were brought up in abusive, neglectful, or otherwise dysfunctional homes. These survival strategies are used by protective parts of your internal system and function as high-tech AI armor. They are the bridge that connects your inner world to the outer world. Your first line of defense. Sometimes they help you get noticed like a busy public relations manager. Sometimes they help make you small, invisible, or undercover like a secret service agent. The bottom line is this: these survival strategies are supposed to prevent your worst fears from becoming a reality or rescue you when your worst fears do become a reality. Either way they’re driven by core fears (more on that in a bit!).
Before I share with you the top 10 survival strategies your protective parts use, please note that my intention is to shed light in a loving, welcoming, brave space. If I could step through the screen and sit with you as you read this, I would.
Imagine for now that we’re sitting together in a safe space, real or imaginary. Imagine all the high achieving, passionate warrior women reading this blog post sitting alongside you. Choose your safe space now. I choose a warm (but shady) spot under an old Eucalyptus tree by the sea.
You and I are here to honor your protective parts and all that they do for you. We’re here to acknowledge that once you’ve healed you don’t have to be driven by fear or survival mode. We’re here to offer the possibility that there’s another way. You can be driven by hope, love, and connection. Your protective parts can contribute (and are actually meant to contribute!) to your thriving.
Fear can be just one of the many colors on your emotional palette. Survival can be just one of the many modes of your being like one of the many filters on Instagram.
Start by noticing what’s here now from the perspective of a fiercely compassionate adventurer braving her own inner wilderness. Let’s peel back the first layer of the onion—survival strategies.
The top 10 strategies our protective parts may have acquired in the process of trying to survive are:
We wear a brave face to present to the world the best version of ourselves while secretly living a life of fear, shame, and doubt. We have mask wearing and busy public relations manager parts that help us bridge the gap between our internal worlds burdened by trauma and the outside world that can’t see our invisible wounds.
We isolate ourselves by shutting down or withdrawing behind internal walls or fortresses of our own making. We have self-sufficient parts that help us rely solely on ourselves for fear of our human vulnerability being exposed, ridiculed, or taken advantage of by others. We may become small or invisible for our own safety.
We achieve and meet our goals but still don’t feel fulfilled or at peace. We have striving parts that are moving on to the next achievement without missing a beat and perfectionist parts that attempt to make us feel good enough if we just “get it right.”
We analyze and take on multiple perspectives without feeling our feelings or bodies. We have rational, figuring-out, questioning, and intellectualizing parts that use our intelligence to help us make sense of ourselves and the world, neglecting our intuitive or vulnerable parts which could threaten our stability.
We rescue others and prioritize their needs over our own. We have care-taking, people-pleasing, and approval-seeking parts that are intent on helping us create meaningful relationships, become someone that matters to others, and receive the validation and unconditional love that was never given to us as children.
We disconnect from others, ourselves, our bodies, our truth, our memories, and the present moment. We have denying, minimizing, dissociating, numbing, blocking, or distracting parts that sweep in like undercover secret service agents to help us escape from the pain of our past traumas and their impact on our present and future.
We adapt to people and situations with Olympic gold medal gymnast-level flexibility at the expense of having a coherent sense of self. We have fitting in or chameleon parts that orchestrate our responses and interactions by presenting to the world the parts of us that would be most acceptable in a given situation.
We use external sources in an attempt to make up for our lack of connection to ourselves. We have parts that use substances, compulsions, or people to soothe, avoid, or distract us from our physical and emotional pain.
We intimidate and hurt others in the process of trying to survive our past traumas. We have controlling, blaming, rageful, vengeful, or abandoning parts that help us by attempting to regain a sense of control, agency, and power over stressful situations and others.
We criticize or shame ourselves for being less than perfect. We have critical, judging, evaluating, comparing, doubting, or shaming parts that beat ourselves up before anyone else has the chance to in a preemptive attempt to protect us from being shamed, humiliated, or rejected by others.
This list is not meant to be exhaustive or an accurate representation of your particular internal landscape. It’s a map so when you do take a peek under the hood of your protective armor you’ll have some idea of your inner landscape and its potential terrain.
Check in with yourself and see how it feels right now to have read that list. All responses and reactions are welcome. You may need to pause to process or take a break. And that’s okay. Slower is faster.
Your core fears that fuel your survival
Now let’s move farther down to the middle layer of the onion—core fears.
Core fears are fuel for your survival strategies. When fear is used as fuel it can be paralyzing, ironically. Core fears run the show even when you’re not consciously feeling them. Your entire system (and life) is organized around not feeling them. They’re like an invisible gravitational force dictating your every step. They keep you going not out of choice but out of necessity.
These fears are burdens weighing you down, using up or cutting you off from valuable resources that are your birthright. I’m talking about your resilience, energy, vitality, peace, love, joy, freedom. Living a secret life of fear drains you from the resources that would otherwise be available to you so you can thrive effortlessly.
I’m going to be sharing with you fears you may have about your worst case scenarios-slash-nightmares in life and about who you are deep down beyond the brave face. Core fears show up as beliefs or messages that vulnerable parts, or the exiles of your internal system, picked up early on. The good news is that if they’ve been picked up, they can be let go of.
The top 10 core fears you may have picked up and can let go of are:
I’m bad. I feel guilty.
I’m unloved or unloveable.
I’m worthless. I’m not enough.
I don’t know who I am. I’m without an identity.
I’m useless, helpless, or incompetent.
I’m all alone. I’m without support
I don’t have enough. I’m deprived. I’m in pain.
I’m taken advantage of by others. Others control or harm me.
I’m confused, untethered, and lost. I’m without direction, wandering aimlessly.
I don’t belong. I’m either abandoned or rejected.
(A special thanks to Chris Burris, a certified IFS therapist, who initially came up with this list based on his work with clients.)
Raise your hand if you’ve experienced at least one of these core fears. Now raise your hand if you’ve experienced most of these core fears. You can’t see me but I’m sitting in the privacy of my office raising both of my hands.
I’d like for us as high-achieving, passionate women to feel safe and secure enough to have open and honest conversations about what lies behind the brave face. I believe it’s time to normalize these fears that have been cutting us from our energy, nature, and gifts. You can tick off all the boxes you wish in life and identify and overcome your fears without becoming overwhelmed or collapsing into a slimy puddle. You can be empowered by your vulnerabilities, especially within a community that witnesses wounds with compassion as opposed to shame. Let’s not add insult to injury or throw “shame salt” on each other’s wounds, an innate part of being human.
Your primal wound causing all complex trauma
Primal wounds make up your inner most layer of your onion self. In Part 1 of the How to Recover from Childhood Trauma Series, I explained how these primal wounds show up as early experiences of abandonment, worthlessness, or powerlessness. If we dig a little deeper, we’ll find that these experiences stem from an invisible injury to your humanness or your beingness. I’m talking about your right to exist as you. This is the primal wound of nonbeing (as first described by authors John Firman and Ann Gila). You learned early on that to experience your beingness (along with all your human vulnerability) is to experience danger or threat to your selfhood.
These 2 types of abuse lead to the primal wound of nonbeing:
Neglect. You went unseen, unheard, and unacknowledged for your humanness when mattering to others mattered most. Your survival as a child depended on your needs being acknowledged, nurtured, and cherished. Not mattering was a threat to your being. You were to one extent or another cut off from your true nature, gifts, talents, and other resources that make you you.
Abuse. You were actively violated, betrayed, or attempts were made to destroy your humanness. You were humiliated or subjected to emotional or physical violence in the process. You were treated like a puppet, an object, who did not have the right to be a unique person navigating the world as a free agent. You became disconnected from your sense of belonging, worthiness, and powerfulness.
You’re a warrior navigating hell on earth
If you relate to any of this, then it’s a miracle you’re even here reading this. I want to extend my appreciation and gratitude to your protective parts who use sophisticated survival strategies to keep you going. I want to say I’m so sorry you had to carry a world of visible and invisible wounds on your shoulders while having to go about this adulting/life business as a “normal” person. I get how alone and isolating it can feel.
Chances are you’ve been stuck in endless loops or vicious cycles of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that felt like hell on earth. You probably:
Keep picking the wrong person or people (despite having a growing awareness of red flags)
Feel like a reactor (at the mercy of outside forces) instead of an actor in your own life
Are guided by the following mantra: “Don’t talk, don’t trust, don’t feel.”
Have gone down the shame spiral or had shame attacks (way more times than you’d like…I know I have!)
Ride the highs and lows of a dysregulated nervous system (which can feel like getting drunk on a cocktail of stress hormones while stuck on a rollercoaster ride)
Suffer from chronic health issues such as autoimmune disorders, digestive and gut issues, migraines, brain fog, fatigue, skin issues, etc.
There’s another way to live
You may be leaving this blog post with more questions than answers. I shared with you The Problem—the underlying onion that plagues us as members of the WWC (aka Walking Wounded Club).
In Part 3 of this Self-Hero series, I’m going to share with you The Solution—what it means to break free from your past and let go of the baggage that has been holding you back.
You’ll learn how:
Your SURVIVAL strategies can become THRIVING strategies,
Your CORE FEARS can reveal your core RIGHTS as a unique human worthy of fulfilling your potential on all levels, and
Your PRIMAL WOUNDS can transform into PRIMAL GIFTS
Confession.
I have a Type A organizational manager part that needs to break this all down into steps. In Part 3, I’ll be sharing with you the 12 Self-Hero Steps to help you go from surviving to thriving effortlessly without stress. These 12 steps are guideposts for the Self-Hero Community, a tribe of high-achieving, passionate perfectionists, and big-hearted women who are ready to connect, heal, and become the best version of themselves. Just like you.
Take a deep breath to check in. If it feels right for you, invite your attention inside. Does this resonate with you? What’s going on inside your body? Is there a sense of lightness, softness, tingling, expansiveness, upward movement? If it does, your next step is to book a free consultation with me.
I believe in my bones that you already are the hero of your own story and all you need to do is uncover the innate healing potential within you. You CAN heal from your past and achieve the life deep down you know you’re worthy of. And I’m here to tell you it doesn’t have to be painful or uncomfortable. You CAN feel joy, peace, freedom, and love along the way.
Now, it’s your turn. I’d love to know your thoughts, reactions, feelings! Here’s some food for thought:
What do you think of this internal onion business? Are you an onion with survival strategies, core fears, and the invisible primal wound of nonbeing?
Which survival strategies from the list above are your greatest hits in your day-to-day life? Why do you think this is the case?
Can you guess which core fears fuel your protective parts and keep you going? Which of those statements do you never ever want to feel or experience in your life?
Who do you believe you could be if you weren’t driven by fear? Who would you be If you were driven by a sense of worthiness, powerfulness, and self-acceptance?
I can’t wait to hear from you. I’m so glad you’re here and we can have a conversation that releases us from the shame of our pasts and frees us up to fulfill our potential as professionals, partners, mothers, daughters, sisters, and humans. I look forward to seeing you around sofiavasi.com
With love xx,
