Bradshaw on... Trading off Awareness for (the Hope of) Security

WARNING: May be triggering

..

..

..

..

..

"Trading off awareness for security is the mechanism of defense that our mind uses to survive. Denial and repression [aka "dissociation"] are the most extreme examples. If I don't see the horror scene, I don't get scared. If I deny that my father is mean and cruel, I don't have to feel the wrenching pain of his rejection. If I make up the fantasy of a loving and nurturing mother, I can believe that she will protect me. If I completely dissociate from the sexual violation that is happening to me, I will not experience the pain associated with it or [perhaps] remember it at all. All the human psychological defenses are self-hypnotic survival mechanisms. We trade off perceptions (actually feeling the pain of what is happening) for the security of being numbed out or being somewhere [and sometimes, even someone] else in fantasy. Our defense mechanisms allow us to survive, but we pay the price in diminished awareness.

-- John Bradshaw, in Family Secrets: The Path to Self-Acceptance and Reunion, New York: Bantam, 1995.

Additional Resources:

Briere, J.: Therapy for Adults Molested as Children: Beyond Survival (Revised and Expanded Edition), New York: Springer, 1996.

Fisher, J.: Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma: Overcoming Internal Self-Alienation, London: Routledge, 2017.

Heller, L.; LaPierre, A.: Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Effects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship (The NeuroAffective Relational Model for restoring connection), Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2012.

Putnam, F.: Dissociation in Children and Adolescents: A Developmental Perspective, New York: The Guilford Press, 1997.

Van der Hart, O.; Nijenhuis, E.; Steele, K.: The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization, New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.