What it's like to be a chronic fighter as a victim of emotional abuse

While I am creating the weekly SIHPs, I write about other trauma responses, especially the 'fawn' response, which many people may not know about. Usually we hear "fight, flight, freeze", right? Psychotherapist and Complex PTSD expert Pete Walker is the person who came up with this term and its definition. Fawning refers to people who try to appease or please their abuser as a response to the abuse.

I am absolutely and will never be someone who fawns. I'm not suggesting that those who do are less than I am in any way. I do have a hard time understanding that response just because of the way I was made. Perhaps God knew when my soul realized the types of parents I would have that I would need to be a fighter in order to survive it, and in order to thrive in spite of the environment in which I grew up.

I have personally watched children being raised by an emotionally abusive mother. It was heart-wrenching because they fawned. The times they did try and fight, their mother put them in their place very quickly and they were terrified of her. I had to watch it, year after year, and I hated it for them. They're adults now and it might not surprise you that they're still that way.

I am pretty sure my life would have been easier for me if I just fawned over my mother's demands, her insults, her constant criticisms, her blatant and excessive coddling of my brother, who was only 15 months younger than I was. I probably wouldn't have been institutionalized on my 13th birthday because she just couldn't handle me, probably wouldn't have been constantly grounded for nonsense. The truth is, I fought her constantly with logic, with reason, with common sense. But, get this, emotional abusers are anything but logical and reasonable, especially emotional abusers with personality disorders like borderline personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder. I was fighting a battle that I would never win as a minor, but I fought anyway.

I look forward to the day when readers will get a chance to read my story, to read about what happened on my 13th birthday, to understand how, while it was severely detrimental to my social life in middle school (oh someone told someone else... the rumors spread like wild fire and I came back to school after 3 months with a massive target painted on my back), the experience was also validating because after every single psychological test was administered, my results determined that I was perfectly normal in every way with above average intelligence. However, back then no one understood emotional abuse and even though I repeatedly accused my abuser in front of mental health professionals, with evidence to support my accusations, I was ignored. It was ignored. I fought the good fight, but I lost over and over again because the system was not there to protect me.

One of my therapists, John CeCe in Crown Point, Indiana said that I was an anomaly. He didn't see people like me end up the way I did from the type of abuse I experienced. He was in awe, and I could never explain it. Perhaps the explanation is that I went through it, and came out on the other side only to find a way to save others who were, who are, in the same battles I was in. We're all soldiers, you know, but we don't have uniforms or a special word we use in front of other soldiers, we're just trying to survive and learn to thrive and it's my wish to keep walking back to the trenches and save as many as I possibly can.