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Message: [QUOTE="Karoline, post: 9339"] [URL='https://lissarankin.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/How-to-Love-A-Trauma-Survivor.jpg'][IMG]https://lissarankin.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/How-to-Love-A-Trauma-Survivor.jpg[/IMG][/URL] Everyone deserves to be loved, especially the people who didn’t get love growing up. We all deserve companionship, affection, attention, appreciation, nurturing care, safe touch, comfort, and someone to have fun with. All human beings deserve to feel special, chosen, admired, and wanted by others. Everyone deserves to have their birthday celebrated, their positive qualities cherished, and their truth validated, even when their holding people who hurt them accountable. Especially then. All children deserve to be kids who don’t have to grow up or take on adult responsibilities prematurely. Everyone deserves to individuate, have agency over their lives, make autonomous decisions, and take charge of their own life. We all deserve the opportunity to pursue our dreams. And everyone deserves the basic human rights laid out in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Sadly, the fact that everyone deserves these things doesn’t mean everyone gets their just desserts. Those of us who grew up getting many core attachment needs met have no idea what it’s like to grow up with caregivers who are neglectful, insensitive, inattentive, insulting, devaluing, withholding of affection, comfort, and nurturing, or even downright terrifying, violent, exploitative, or otherwise abusive. We might even feel a sense of survivor’s guilt because we love someone who went through hell during their childhood, and while we had our own challenges, we can’t begin to comprehend what the person we love went through. It’s all heartbreakingly unfair, because no child ever did anything to deserve that kind of child abuse, and it’s understandable to those of us with compassionate hearts that severe childhood trauma might make someone hard to love later on. Every childhood trauma survivor tries to make sense of “Why me?” Most of the answers our culture throws their way only make them feel worse, especially the spiritual explanations. “Your soul chose your abusive parents so you could grow spiritually.” “Your abuse is karmic payback for misdeeds in a past life.” “God doesn’t give you anything you can’t handle.” “Your perpetrator is actually your teacher.” Such ways of trying to make sense of heartbreaking tragedy lack empathy and further harm abuse survivors. Through no fault of their own, not all babies get their early attachment needs met. When they don’t, they grow up with a broken heart. They can’t help dissociating. They wind up with traumatized nervous systems that don’t develop the way they’re supposed to, which can make them act out and be highly reactive. They may develop many other developmental struggles that aren’t their fault. They see other kids with loving caregivers and can’t understand why they’re not lovable enough to their parents to evoke affectionate closeness, normal bonding behaviors, encouragement when they do things most parents would be proud of, and permission to become their own well-boundaried, sovereign, uniquely precious little beings. Because kids personalize everything, they’re too little to understand it has nothing to do with them. So they make up a story that they’re bad to the bone, unlovable, damaged goods, worthless, not good enough or cute enough or lovable enough to attract the affection of their parents, the way other kids do. This core worthlessness causes a huge impact on the relationships of severe trauma survivors later on in life, which can cause survivors of severe trauma to struggle with relationships later in life. How could they not? Nobody ever taught them the “how” of healthy relationships, so instead, they have to cobble together relational skills that may come at a high cost. The price of admission may cause such trauma survivors to sell out their authenticity, give until they’re depleted, sacrifice their own needs, wants, and protection, martyring themselves in order to win love. It can also cause people to seek out other people they can dominate, control, overpower, bully, and exploit. They say that wounds that happen in relationship need to be healed- in relationship. Ideally, that relational healing happens with a trained therapist who knows how to handle the transference issues, projections, reenactments, and acting out behaviors that trauma survivors typically go through relationally before getting better. But many trauma survivors can’t afford expensive therapies that insurance usually doesn’t cover, like IFS, Somatic Experiencing, NeuroAffective Relational Model, Advanced Integrative Therapy, and other cutting edge healing therapies. That’s why I’m bringing in my daily parts processing partner Emma Harper to help me lead a weekend training on Peer To Peer IFS Parts Processing. This way of doing IFS as peer support is already happening all over China. They call it “Inner Peace Coaching,” as a way of minimizing the taboo of psychotherapy or trauma healing common in many Asian country. Since IFS is focused on creating more internal harmony and less polarization between our parts, we can help each other- peer to peer- develop more settling in our own systems, more ease of negotiation between polarized parts, more clarity about what our parts want and need from us, in Self, and more practice with a peer support partner for trying out different relational recovery tools, like asking for what you need, calling someone out if they’re doing something that’s unsupportive, setting and enforcing clear boundaries, and engaging in relational repair when we inevitable mess up and upset our peer support partners- because we’re human and we make mistakes. Learn more about the Peer To Peer IFS Parts Processing training here. It’s not easy to learn these relational skills with someone very close to you- like your spouse, your parents, your kids, or your siblings. The advantage of doing IFS parts work with a peer support person is that there’s some distance there. There’s less risk, if something goes wrong. You can try out new ways of relating- and get feedback. And you can also get someone who will at least try their best to empathize- to witness, mirror, and validate your parts- maybe not as well as a therapist will, but it can still be helpful if practiced safely enough. Emma and I have written a 13 page document about the “how” of peer to peer parts processing, which I shared with Dick Schwartz, who was impressed with it and asked for a copy. When I shared it with Harvard psychiatrist and lead IFS trainer Frank Anderson, MD, he said something like “Oh yeah, you just wrote down how to love a trauma survivor.” He said these are the very tools trauma survivors must learn in order to be healthy in relationship, and these are the ways of relating trauma survivors must practice in order to heal their relational lives and their parts. If this sounds like something you’re interested in trying, you’re invited to join us November 1-2 on Zoom. We’ll be giving you the opportunity to “speed date” potential parts processing partners so you can find someone you jive with. Or you can learn the skills and do this with someone you already know, who you think would be a willing partner. We’ll be giving you all the tools, and Emma and I will model exactly what we do with each other- and then give our students the chance to practice with each other, with feedback from us. Save $100 if you register now. The post [URL='https://lissarankin.com/how-to-love-a-trauma-survivor/']How To Love A Trauma Survivor[/URL] first appeared on [URL='https://lissarankin.com']Lissa Rankin[/URL]. [/QUOTE]

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