So much of my combative style activism was driven by my refusal to feel my long held pain. Victim consciousness is alive and rampant on both sides of hot polarized issues, and I have come to see why it is the ultimate pathology.
"When strong beliefs or complexes take hold in childhood, they gatekeep the emotions of that child-self so that the adult self doesn’t have to caretake that inner child and can instead focus outwardly on other indirect ways of meeting that child’s unmet needs. These emotions—to that little child—are HUGE. They literally represent existential danger because when we were little, rejection, betrayal, and abandonment meant death. They got flagged as that dangerous, and we’ve been in survival mode ever since…
Life gives us opportunities to complete the integration of these emotions called upset; aka, when someone has done us wrong and we feel they are wrong about it.
This upset is the place to enter...." https://www.kellybroganmd.com/blog/healing-betrayal
