trauma processing.

"A fourth type of triggered response can be seen in many codependents.(Codependency is defined here as the inability to express rights, needs and boundaries in relationship; it is a disorder of assertiveness that causes the individual to attract and accept exploitation, abuse and/or neglect.) I have named it the fawn response...the fourth ‘f’ in the fight/flight/ freeze/fawn repertoire of instinctive responses to trauma. Fawn, according to Webster’s, means: “to act servilely; cringe and flatter”, and I believe it is this response that is at the core of many codependents’ behavior. The trauma-based codependent learns to fawn very early in life in a process that might look something like this: as a toddler, she learns quickly that protesting abuse leads to even more frightening parental retaliation, and so she relinquishes the fight response, deleting “no” from her vocabulary and never developing the language skills of healthy assertiveness.(Sadly, many abusive parents reserve their most harsh punishments for “talking back”, and hence ruthlessly extinguish the fight response in the child.)"

I was actually physically beaten when I protested abuse - spanking was a regular part of my childhood, from my parents and my step-parent (and probably my brother but I don't remember - he was ten years older than I and we wrestled hard, often).

Fawn Response

Emotional Neglect and Complex PTSD

"The fact that verbal and emotional abuse can be traumatic is lost on many childhood trauma victims. Many never learn to validate its crippling effects. They never accurately assign current time suffering to it. Attempts to acknowledge it are typically blindsided with thoughts that it was nothing compared to kids who were repeatedly beaten – who had it worse. Yet for me, and many of my clients, verbal and emotional abuse was much more injurious than our physical abuse. Being ongoingly assaulted with critical words systematically destroys innate self-esteem and replaces it with a prevailing consciousness of toxic self-criticism. Even worse, words that are emotionally poisoned with contempt [a deadly cocktail of intimidation and disgust] infuse the child with fear and toxic shame respectively. Fear and shame condition him to refrain from asking for attention, from expressing himself in ways that draw attention, and before long from seeking any kind of help or connection at all.Unrelenting criticism, especially when it is ground in with parental rage and scorn, is so injurious that it changes the structure of the child’s brain." -Peter Walker