Conditioned Silence

Part of growing up is learning who you really are. For me, that process has been painful.

I come from a dysfunctional family where I had to manage my emotions alone from a young age. Over time, I learned to repress them. I believed I wasn’t allowed to feel what I felt. I never tried to explain or justify what I was going through because I always felt powerless. I was conditioned to believe I was beneath everyone else. My self-worth was constantly under attack and I struggled to form meaningful connections, whether with friends or romantic partners. It started at home, where I was criticized simply for existing. I could name countless ways I was mistreated by my family, but revisiting those memories only brings pain. What I’m trying to do through journaling, is process that trauma and heal from the things I didn’t deserve to go through as a child.

Home has never felt like a place where I could share my burdens. It was where the burdens were created. When I looked for relief at school, I couldn’t open up there either. I’d show up to class with invisible wounds and sometimes visible ones. Leaving home always felt safer than staying, but the fear never left me. I found it hard to confide in anyone because I was afraid they would despise me like my own family did.

It felt like I was being trained through punishment, conditioned the same way Pavlov trained his dogs. In his experiment, Pavlov rang a bell before feeding them. Eventually, the sound alone made them salivate, even when no food came. They had learned to associate a stimulus with an automatic response. That was me. Every time I cried or showed emotion, my father punished me. The more pain I expressed, the harsher the reaction. I was conditioned to believe that emotions led to violence. So I stopped crying. I stopped showing how I felt. My nervous system learned that feeling was dangerous and vulnerability meant pain.

I don’t remember exactly when, but I learned early on to cope by hiding my emotions. Even with “close friends”, I kept everything bottled up. I let people mistreat me because I thought having a few “friends” was better than being alone. I also became hyper-aware of other people’s emotions, constantly observing and adjusting to avoid conflict. I’m always walking on eggshells. I was terrified of being rejected again, the way my family had rejected me. So I stayed quiet, even when I was being used. As an adult, I now recognize that I developed people-pleasing habits as a coping mechanism and they still show up in me today.

I never really shared what was going on at home or showed anyone who I truly was. I was scared that if they saw the real me, they’d walk away. So I built an armor around my heart. If someone rejected me, at least I could say they didn’t reject the real me, but the version I created for them to see. That armor made it nearly impossible to let anyone in and when people got too close, I felt suffocated. I would find ways to push them away because I believed that if someone truly knew me, they would abandon me. Attempting to leave first always gave me a sense of control. Rejecting people was better than being rejected myself.

Sometimes, there’s nothing I want or need more than connection. But I’ve lived my whole life this way, always hiding behind a facade. It’s hard to imagine a day where I am truly nonchalant about the way people view me and allow myself to be just, me. Or perhaps it’s better to keep my distance from emotions, people, after all. Maybe that’s the only way to protect my sanity and what’s left of my shattered soul from another heartache.

I wish someone could live in my head for a day and understand how painfully ironic it is to feel everything and nothing all at once. But i wouldn’t wish this pain on my enemies either haha.