How to learn to protect yourself if you are used to suffering silently?

If we grow in a psychologically unhealthy environment where it is dangerous to express our opinion, we have to develop protective strategies, adapt and suppress anger. In adulthood, this prevents you from getting closer to people and building a trusting relationship. How to reconfigure your automatic reactions and learn to open to others?

It is important for children to feel their belonging to the environment in which they grow. The feeling of belonging is equal to survival. When instability is the norm of life, we get used to living in a frightening atmosphere. Learning to hide our feelings because confrontation is dangerous.

It is risky to talk about your experiences and family problems. You can lose the love of those who care about us, lose a sense of belonging and question the survival itself.

Many children do not have a safe adult with whom you can talk. If we grow in an emotionally unstable environment where people cannot be trusted, we develop protective strategies to stay safe. Learning to put up with the fact that it is abnormal, ignore and hide anxiety, anger and despair.

These survival strategies help while we are small. But when we use them in our adult relationships, they do not work. Those feelings that we hid in childhood are always with us – just now they surfaced to the surface.

People who grew up in an environment, where such behavior was the norm, often think about what they wanted to say aloud to the parent, but did not say, because it would only give rise to even more anger and did not help.

Having become adults, we are constantly thinking about how another person behaves with us, we swallow resentment and formulate what and how we are going to express. But in the end we don’t say anything. We scroll in our heads an unpleasant situation and thoughts about who caused us pain. But we don’t know how to change something. We are too afraid of consequences or our own rage.

When we are faced with adults with the unacceptable behavior of other people, our nervous system switches to the “Bey, Run or Delay” mode. The front of the brain is turned off, and it goes into survival mode. Once in the past we concluded-if we defend ourselves, it will only be worse. And our nervous system remembered this.

But silence does not work in adult relationships. It does not allow us to grow. Moreover, this strategy no longer helps to stay safe, as once in childhood. Quite the opposite: when we do not say what we think and feel, and fight with our own instinct of self -defense, this harms us.

How to change if the nervous system makes us get stuck in old protective strategies? How to make an instinctive process conscious so that we have a choice?

First step – start paying attention to what is happening inside when conflict occurs. Thus, we recognize this pattern and notice that we are going into the response mode when we are faced with what is felt unsafe in relationships.

Recognizing what is happening, we can treat ourselves with compassion and thank you for doing such situations earlier the best ways we know. We can also remind ourselves that this strategy no longer works.

The second step – stop and ask your frightened part that she needs to hear in order to decide to protect herself. It is sometimes important that she is reminded: she does not need another person as much as before. When we understand that we will not die without him, that we projected our childhood dependence in adult relations, the risk no longer seems so huge, and we can decide on an open statement.

Perhaps it is important for a little frightened child inside us to hear that he is not obliged to explain why he is uncomfortable, or to ensure that the other person understands him or agrees with him? Sometimes we are afraid that we will have to defend ourselves from anger, accusations or protective reactions of another person, and this scares the most.