Why do people with abusive childhoods or extreme childhood trauma often never recover?

[Soi Woh Jak]

I think it would be because they internalize it or it becomes a never ending cycle of "why me". That "why me" mindset is a really powerful thing, neurotoxin levels of powerful under the right circumstances. Some people obsess about it and end up never letting go.

 

[One Sixth Native American]

Psychology and psychiatry are for-profit and like any other commercial enterprise, it relies on customers coming back to stay profitable. It's not in their best interest for patients to get better. They work hard to find the right balance where you don't get worse but you also need to keep coming back for more support. It's usually a combination of encouraging you to reassess your past traumas over and over (talk therapy) while keeping you in a state of mental haze (SSRIs and other psychiatric drugs).

The mental health industry is not all bad, some people are in such a bad mental state from their past traumas that these things help them have a semblance of a normal life. However, most people don't need these interventions. From my experience, we diagnose people far more often than is necessary and encourage them to live in a perpetual state of victim-hood so the mental health industry can continue to stay profitable. Eating right and exercise seems to fix 99% of the problems. If more people took that route, there'd likely be more services available for the people who truly need help.

That's my perspective at least as to why people with past traumas never seem to recover.

 

[Dawdler]

Example: two women are raped as toddlers. One is born with Bipolar Disorder and is a sensitive autist. The other doesn’t have a mental illness exacerbating the issue.

Basically, skill issue. Everyone has some sort of horrific trauma if you get down to it; some are just more equipped to handle it than others. Survival of the fittest. Being alive is awful except when it isn’t.

It's not a skill issue if you get traumatized before developing coping skills or own personality. That's why it is so important to protect kids from harm as events in childhood shape them later in life.
And since such events shape them who they are later on they go in various ways regular people wouldn't.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2950193824000019

In fact, studies on child sexual abuse have generally found much higher prevalence rates for LGBTQI+ young people: Saweyc et al., 2021, Saweyc et al., 2021 reported 21% of trans girls, 22% of questioning young people, 27% of trans boys and 28% of non-binary young people reported childhood sexual abuse compared to 17% of cis girls and 4% of cis boys.

 

[skykiii]

Honestly for me this question is pretty simple to answer.

For myself, one of the few things that keeps me going is my tendency towards nostalgia, positive memories of the past and the hope that those days will somehow return (ideally through the discovery of time travel). Even just watching an old show or discovering new media from that same era is enough to turn depression into euphoria and make me go go go!

..... People who had shit childhoods of course don't have nostalgia and so don't have any sort of internal renewable fuel source like that. They have literally no positive anchor to life. I hate to sound psycho but they really would probably be better off just offing themselves.

Sadly I feel like this is gonna be the future for most people, as the modern world means that everyone is being abused in some way, shape, or form, and nobody who is a kid right now is gonna have something worth looking back on in twenty years.

 

[supremeautismo]

It's not a skill issue if you get traumatized before developing coping skills or own personality. That's why it is so important to protect kids from harm as events in childhood shape them later in life.

Maybe this wasn’t the thread to get pithy. I don’t mean literally ‘skill issue lol,’ just that some people are genetically more likely to react to trauma in a debilitating way. I’d like to think most people understand it’s no one’s fault for being abused, but then again, India exists.

 

[YHWH's Strongest Soldier]

People who had shit childhoods of course don't have nostalgia and so don't have any sort of internal renewable fuel source like that. They have literally no positive anchor to life. I hate to sound psycho but they really would probably be better off just offing themselves.

Nigga, what the fuck? A sad childhood doesn't mean that a person should commit suicide and there are plenty more reasons to live than nostalgia.

I guess that OP got his answer. Seriously, what is wrong with half of the people replying to this thread? Again, I must repeat my advice to everyone with early life trauma because a significant portion of the population has less ability to empathize than a dog. Don't share your past with the average person because you will be called weak and told to either kill yourself or to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. The same people will tell you to distrust therapists.

 

[Dawdler]

Maybe this wasn’t the thread to get pithy. I don’t mean literally ‘skill issue lol,’ just that some people are genetically more likely to react to trauma in a debilitating way. I’d like to think most people understand it’s no one’s fault for being abused, but then again, India exists.

Allright then. That is true, genetics plays a big role in stress response.

Seriously, what is wrong with half of the people replying to this thread?

It is meaningless posturing.

Again, I must repeat my advice to everyone with early life trauma because a significant portion of the population has less ability to empathize than a dog

That's pretty good representation of society.

 

[Squishie PP]

The Internet re-traumatizes them every time they try to break out of it. It is the conduit of madness, from which there is no escape for those who are broken.

 

[Trump's Chosen]

Psychology and psychiatry are for-profit and like any other commercial enterprise, it relies on customers coming back to stay profitable. It's not in their best interest for patients to get better. They work hard to find the right balance where you don't get worse but you also need to keep coming back for more support. It's usually a combination of encouraging you to reassess your past traumas over and over (talk therapy) while keeping you in a state of mental haze (SSRIs and other psychiatric drugs).

The mental health industry is not all bad, some people are in such a bad mental state from their past traumas that these things help them have a semblance of a normal life. However, most people don't need these interventions. From my experience, we diagnose people far more often than is necessary and encourage them to live in a perpetual state of victim-hood so the mental health industry can continue to stay profitable. Eating right and exercise seems to fix 99% of the problems. If more people took that route, there'd likely be more services available for the people who truly need help.

That's my perspective at least as to why people with past traumas never seem to recover.

It's true that eating right and exercise solves many problems. They're also possibly the hardest habits to build in people, which is why people are turning to ozempic en masse, and the gyms go empty after february.

---

It's so strange how deep childhood trauma can be completely debilitating for some, and the motivation to make life work for others. It is an issue insolved by science. We have no way of predicting who will continue the cycle of abuse, or become someone who breaks it and becomes a pillar that helps break it in others.

In some sense it is a crucible, you are tested by fire and it either forges you or burns you badly. Though it seems to me it is much less a test of character, and more a spin of roulette. Does the coping strategy that gets locked in help or not? Because you're likely going to have a hard time to let go of it, much like friends forged in fire are going to feel more like friends than anyone else. That's where the phrase blood is thicker than water comes from. It doesn't mean bloodline, at least mot originally, it means the people you bled with, typically in war.

With that said, there is an almost infinite spiral of how bad abuse can get. Sexual abuse may seem the worst, and then you get to sadistic abuse where damaging a child is the purpose itself. Than that seems the worst, and then there is abusing a baby through essential developmental stages where it doesn't learn things that aren't really possible to learn later. That seems worst, and then there is that plus physical abuse to the point of causing permanent physical damage, loss of limbs or eyesight or others. Then that seems the worst and you learn about mk ultra abuse, where you first have to kid utterly reliant on only one specific person, and then have that person completely terrorize the child, the way Podesta did in the "fatherhood" leaked tapes.

There are some levels of abuse that go so deep and depraved that they also work as isolating, where if you try to talk about them, most people would dismiss it and also distance themselves from you. Some people genuinely can't fathom the depths of evil, or imagination that some evil and/or broken people have.

It's also very hard to tell who is coping well or not with their abuse, because abuse victims know how to hide like no other, especially if they did have public experiences like going to school. We have a whole system of habits to not show our wounds. It can be very hard to break, even if that is the intent.

Of course there can be a lot of currency in airing your abuse, your victimhood status. It can garner sympathy, support. Lying or exxagerating about such can be a good method of manipulation. Of course it's rather evil to do so, you shake lose support that is meant for others. When people figure out it's manipulation, you train people not to take victims seriously.

 

[Mark Robinson BussyLiquor]

you never stop thinking about it.

Crying about it won't unrape you, tranny! HAHA!

 

[Tornado]

There's a medieval scholastic maxim that originates with Aristotle, that custom has the force and character of nature. The things that happen to you at your most receptive cause a lot of habits to be forced downstream of these "customs" embedded into us at a young age. Because habits tend to be interdependent, changing one tends to require all of them to change at once. To overcome these habits you need virtue and the power of reason, though these are weakened because the experience of evil at a young age tends to inhibit our formation of virtues and the ability to reason effectively. As a result few people ever overcome them.

 

[AMHOLIO]

To begin to understand trauma, one must understand the mind--more specifically, the limbic system. I'm just going to quote from "The Neurobiology of Trauma", since it conveys what needs to be said easily enough.

People impacted by trauma find it hard to even think things can be better or be aware of moments of well-being. All the little good things in life just slide by their awareness (Hanson, 2009).

This is also something to be aware of when talking to fellow doomer kiwis or even when thinking about your own problems. It can be easy to fall into this, especially if you are terminally online and have an echo chamber of negativity or your own brain forcing you into it.

Shit sucks. But things like petting dogs and laughing at Ralph getting beaten in Portugal are things to cherish.

 

[Sneed's Feed n Seed]

Perhaps a stage along the way of processing it? You start as a frightened child, and the way to survive is appease. Now you’re an adult (male?) and there is a way of coping that’s attack, before defence. That makes a degree of sense, by picking the fight you control when it starts. You’re fighting on your terms. If yoi think more deeply about it - the fights and conflict are they all ones deep down you know you’ll win? Or are you testing the boundary of when you get knocked back again? Are you on attack mode to protect yourself or are you actively wanting someone to beat you? I would humbly suggest that fighting could get you hurt, and that conflict mode on all the time is bad for your health. Perhaps the next stage is to move beyond to knowing that if/when conflict arises you can cope with it and win, but you don’t need to be on the offensive all the time. Apologies if too direct, just a thought.

I would respectfully suggest it might be over-compensating. Something in your life put you into the mindset of expecting conflict. This made you prone to appeasing, shying away from the expected confrontation. You may have identified your problem as weakness or fear and view it as improvement to now aggressively face the conflict and see victory in it. And sometimes it might be. But the actual resolution would more likely be to resolve whatever is making you expect conflict. Your aggression may be a better (or worse) maladaptive behaviour then your avoidance, but both are maladaptive responses in most normal societies. Both can lead you to isolation or trouble forming friendships.

However, you have demonstrated the ability to modify your learned behaviour which is impressive and a positive. So if you agree with my take on it (you may not which is fine), you have the potential to move on to a third stage again, where you are comfortable with confrontation but don't expect it in a self-fulfilling way.

I cannot help but find these sentiments to be "don't fight, don't stick out, don't rock the boat - because we don't like that or think it's best for us." While this is certainly useful advice, a better approach would be "pick your battles" and "know when it's worth engaging in conflict after decorum breaks down."

tl;dr there is a line that, if crossed, means you're a moron for playing by the rules when your adversary is not playing by the rules.

To address Otterly, I don't want to lose or be beaten; I want to not be fucked with. I do not want to be tested; I want finding out to minimize people fucking around.
To address Overly Serious: "most normal societies" is an interesting way to put it. I'd put it as "cooperative people and cooperative societies warrant your own cooperation and they would do well to deal with uncooperative people, such as people who are too bellicose, so work with people." Sadly, the society we were born in and socialized into is no longer present, so we now often need to step out of the lines drawn by yesteryear for the average person.

Being quick to escalate with people who pick fights or try to scam you makes them fuck off faster. It's not maladaptive if it's the best option I have to take!

It really feels like shit is breaking down. People test the waters and look for weaknesses to exploit instead of doing what was agreed upon, but I'm not so upset about that. I'm upset that I was taught "just cooperate and put up with bullshit, now now!" when any society is always going to have a small number of people who fuck with you, and you need to be willing to meet their uncooperative shit with your own. I'm particularly upset that even still people tell you to be a good victim.

My job is not to make things better or easier for bystanders; my job is to advocate for myself, and my friends, in that order.

 

[cybertoaster]

Real trauma never goes away, all the therapies I seen are basically a form of cope, from "don't think about it" to literally self-rewrite your memories to think everything went well in the end.

Of course I'll say most lolcows here didn't have real trauma in their lives, most had at least one good parent and some friends. I've met people who were truly born fucked, a terrible family, generational poverty, completely ostracized, and yet they still go on, limping along while running on literally nothing.

Like I understand being a bit of a mess during your 20s

Most people I seen who didn't get their shit together in their 20s never did, its the one decade of your life when you need to get a job, any job, and some experience with the opposite sex. If you reach your 30s and are still a loser, a virgin and have no work history worth a damn you're about to enter nightmare difficulty IRL.

 

[Dawdler]

This is also something to be aware of when talking to fellow doomer kiwis or even when thinking about your own problems. It can be easy to fall into this, especially if you are terminally online and have an echo chamber of negativity or your own brain forcing you into it.

Shit sucks. But things like petting dogs and laughing at Ralph getting beaten in Portugal are things to cherish.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-users-emotions-news-feeds

All by design

 

[PaleTay]

It's so strange how deep childhood trauma can be completely debilitating for some, and the motivation to make life work for others. It is an issue insolved by science. We have no way of predicting who will continue the cycle of abuse, or become someone who breaks it and becomes a pillar that helps break it in others.

The answers are largely money and independence, kids in poor neighborhoods have fewer positive role models and a smaller support network, kids who are pressured to live nearby as adults are less likely to recover.

I think it would be because they internalize it or it becomes a never ending cycle of "why me". That "why me" mindset is a really powerful thing, neurotoxin levels of powerful under the right circumstances. Some people obsess about it and end up never letting go.

I would say it's more "why isn't it me", kids with abusive childhoods especially those living in bad neighborhoods aren't judged on their merits very often. It's often stupid shit too, like I could never try streaming or making Youtube videos growing up because getting my family to close their doors or not blast the television to the point where there was noise bleed would lead to getting screamed at.

 

[Trump's Chosen]

The answers are largely money and independence, kids in poor neighborhoods have fewer positive role models and a smaller support network, kids who are pressured to live nearby as adults are less likely to recover.

Muh poor neighborhoods. People vastly overestimate the effect of these. It's not that it doesn't have an effect, but so much extra shit got shoveled into it to try and hide genetic differences between groups. Each of these things have a kind of gravity, abuse, genetics, poverty of surrounding, and for each it can be hard to work hard to develop escape velocity and not get sucked back in. But of these money is probably the smallest effect. There's no shortage of wealthy abusers, or wealthy that are abused. Being in an abusive dynamic beyond childhood is because people have a kind of prison in their mind where they don't see the bars, and even when they do, the prison itself feels familiar and at some level, feels safer despite not being so.

 

[Overly Serious]

I cannot help but find these sentiments to be "don't fight, don't stick out, don't rock the boat - because we don't like that or think it's best for us."

Your words were "I revel in fights". Normal people do not. We enjoy winning but we don't usually enjoy conflict. If you can read a post from someone saying that a mindset of expecting conflict is still an abuse response as them saying "don't stick out", if you can't as you say help but read that into it, then that's more support to my suggestion you're over-compensating. Which might be a step forward for you but isn't a good place to stop.

Expecting conflict and revelling in it, is still an abuse response that is therefore not going to work well in non-abusive situations. That's kind of where the problems of abuse arise - not that they might not be a sensible response in the situation but that the mode of behaviour is hard to shake once the abuse has passed and you're an adult living in different circumstances.

Being quick to escalate with people who pick fights or try to scam you makes them fuck off faster.

Until you run into someone like me who will take an escalation and kick the shit out of you in my own threat response. You're fooling yourself that you think this strategy is helpful. Stand your ground is the right approach. There's a reason most people don't escalate and their instincts are against it - it's because it's a short-term strategy not a long-term one. A pattern of escalation response to try and intimidate people who cross you is a game of one-up-manship which will leave you with long-term injury or in jail or social ostracism. Society has all sorts of ways of dealing with overly aggressive people which is what "being quick to escalate" is. Many of those ways don't involve direct confrontation but just not returning calls, not inviting you to things, warning others to avoid you. You can take it from me, having a reputation as someone who is quick with their fists works in simple situations and quick confrontations with another male, and fucks you over socially and in most other situations. You'll read all this as being compliant and submissive but nowhere have I said that. I say stand your ground, don't be quick to escalate. It's a game of odds which most people will choose not to play because human instincts are evolved for the long-term and repeatedly rolling the dice means at some point they're going to come up 1's. You're confusing most people's lack of desire to get physical with your own strength.

You come across as seeking conflict which isn't healthy and is an over-compensation to your earlier aversion to conflict. Most people are averse to conflict for good reason. Be ready for it, but if you can't handle a situation without escalating, you're missing important life skills.

 

[Sneed's Feed n Seed]

Your words were "I revel in fights". Normal people do not. We enjoy winning but we don't usually enjoy conflict. If you can read a post from someone saying that a mindset of expecting conflict is still an abuse response as them saying "don't stick out", if you can't as you say help but read that into it, then that's more support to my suggestion you're over-compensating. Which might be a step forward for you but isn't a good place to stop.

Expecting conflict and revelling in it, is still an abuse response that is therefore not going to work well in non-abusive situations. That's kind of where the problems of abuse arise - not that they might not be a sensible response in the situation but that the mode of behaviour is hard to shake once the abuse has passed and you're an adult living in different circumstances.

I'm supposed to suffer because someone else picked a fight?

Until you run into someone like me who will take an escalation and kick the shit out of you in my own threat response

You're fooling yourself that you think this strategy is helpful.

With a scammer? No. With someone who is trying to stall? Maybe if it's a function of effort vs time. I value my time more than anything, so I immediately go to high effort instead of getting idiot trickle tortured while waiting for endless "processes" and excuses to be ran through before people actually do what they're supposed to do or fuck off.

A pattern of escalation response to try and intimidate people who cross you is a game of one-up-manship which will leave you with long-term injury or in jail or social ostracism.

In my experience, the only people who dislike cutting to the chase are the people who themselves like to play endless brinkmanship and use social sanction as one of their weapons. I'm not able to use gossip, slander, and rallying to get what I want. I'm not a woman. I'm also likely too impatient, but maybe that's because I'm a man and I expect people to know how to behave and fuck off if they don't, and I want people who act like niggers to fuck off. I do not want them in my life. Removing people I do not want from my life from my life is a feature, not a bug.

Many of those ways don't involve direct confrontation but just not returning calls, not inviting you to things, warning others to avoid you.

I don't pick fights with people - maybe this is where the miscommunication arose from? I don't look for trouble. I, of course, work things out with people who can be worked out with. If people stall, stonewall, hide behind bureaucracy, or otherwise fuck around, it's clear I don't want or need them in my life in any way whatsoever. I consider burned bridges with people who are shitheads a plus.

The reason I'm being so tenacious about this is telling assholes to fuck off is because it has been nothing but a positive. Manipulators who can't respect boundaries need to go away, scammers need to not exist, and businesses that jerk and fuck people around don't need my patronage anyway.

You come across as seeking conflict which isn't healthy and is an over-compensation to your earlier aversion to conflict. Most people are averse to conflict for good reason. Be ready for it, but if you can't handle a situation without escalating, you're missing important life skills.

I don't seek conflict. One doesn't have to seek it in order to enjoy helping one who fucks around to find out.

I, of course, work with reasonable people. When people are unreasonable, when the juice isn't worth the squeeze if present at all, I want them gone, I do not care what they think, and I do not have friends who suffer fools themselves. If someone acts like a nigger, a scammer, or is extremely demanding and offers nothing in return, I don't want to play the boundary setting explanation game, I want to go back to how it was before I knew they existed. Hostility works wonders to make scammers fuck off, aggressive door to door people to fuck off, businesses that scam and stall to refund and go away, and new 'friends' who are trying to endlessly demand and manipulate find someone else to sucker.

Maybe I'm still dialing in normal boundary setting. Maybe I have a temper. Maybe one of my shoulder angels is Stinkmeaner. All I know is when I quit giving a fuck and skipped to the end with human pieces of shit, my life improved dramatically.

I don't know where you live or what your social circle is like. For whatever reason, shitheads present themselves every few weeks or so in my own life. At work, this is not a problem, because educated professionals don't act like niggers and don't make unreasonable demands, they're cooperative, so of course I cooperate. I'm not going to turn into a nigger and throw shit and pick a fist fight over a request from a coworker or my boss asking for me to work late once in a blue moon.

If it's every day, that's different, but I've found a decisive, pointed expectation setting question set that straight very quickly.