Hostile Parenting Leads to Disassociation

Self-Repression is not Self-Regulation

In an environment of repression, children learn fear, denial and hiding, not self-regulation.

When there is a conflict between the child’s self expression and parental acceptance, survival instincts require annihilation of the self in order to preserve connection and safety with their parents. The recovery process is the restoration of that annihilated self, bit by bit.

Children that take on a quiet, submissive demeanor are often touted as evidence of the “obedience” that comes from authoritarian parenting methods. In nearly all cases, this quiet demeanor is more likely a dissociative response to cope with the intense trauma of inescapable parental rejection.

When a child is repeatedly punished for simply being a child, sometimes the only way they know how to be safe from punishment is to shut down and retreat inside themselves. The brain’s ability to protect us through disassociation is often what allows us to survive childhood traumas but it also keeps us from our authentic selves.

In a survival state, our bodies divert resources away from non-essential functions like integrating sensory information from our environment and turning it into memories. This is why traumatic memories are often remembered in fragments instead of linear narrative. The brain is literally storing traumatic memories differently and in some cases, not at all. When someone says they can’t remember their childhood, this protective disassociation is often a cause. On the flip side, if you refuse to believe someone’s story because they don’t have a full linear memory, you are punishing them for experiencing the normal effects of trauma – which is a secondary and compounding trauma.

If you can’t remember the abuse, why does it still hurt so much? Why can’t you just get over it?

Your body and brain never forget. ALL of the neural pathways you possess are based on experience. Every single one. So, for example, I don’t need to remember the first moment I learned the letter ‘A’ in order to know I learned it at some point. The proof is that I know how to read.

Because this early, pre-verbal trauma buries itself deep in the psyche beyond awareness it often manifests through symptoms in the body and unconscious behavioral patterns and expectations. Depression, restlessness, anxiety, anger, aggression, and all other manner of what are commonly called “disorders” are just the body’s completely normal reaction to an abnormal environment.

Sometimes the repression and disassociation work for a few decades. The individual copes by distracting themselves from their trauma by becoming a successful high achiever – until one day they hit a wall and have a nervous breakdown.

The body always keeps the score.

This complex developmental trauma is often beyond the scope of conventional therapy methods. CBT and other methods often assume all clients possess the basic felt sense of safety and security that is the foundation of wellbeing. It also assumes they even know why they feel so broken.

Children raised under the Christian Brainwashing Industrial Complex do not possess this basic sense of safety and security even though they are desperate for it. American society and the psychological community at large needs to understand the depth of this problem and provide more programming tailored to this population if we ever hope to dig ourselves out from under this nightmare of fascist oppression.

When these children become adults, they do not wake up one day with a newfound ability to regulate themselves out of the blue. Whatever brain architecture and pathways have been practiced are now entrenched and cannot be changed without expending great effort and intention.

There are methods that work for this population and there are ways of inducing neuroplasticity to help change the brain. But these methods do not rely on a therapists brilliance or result in recurring appointments so few therapists seem keen to use them.

These fundamentalist and evangelical parenting practices present a severe, widespread societal harm and are a direct cause of our current political situation. Authoritarian parenting produces authoritarian societies. Christian fascists will not die out. They will continue to reproduce. Any vision for a American future that contains human rights and democracy cannot ignore this strain of American society.