Emotional and psychological harm

Growing up in a home where love was conditional on performance or compliance

Love and approval that came and went based on how well you behaved, how good your grades were, how much you complied, or how well you hid the parts of yourself that were not wanted. Learning that you had to earn the right to be loved.

Love that had to be earned teaches a child to perform instead of exist. As an adult you may not know who you are when you stop achieving, complying, or pleasing. The exhausting suspicion that you are only as lovable as your latest performance was installed early, and it is false. Here, nobody has to audition.

What can follow an experience like this

No two people carry the same experience the same way. These are some of the effects that people with this experience often describe. Having some of them, all of them, or none of them says nothing about how real what happened to you was.

C-PTSD When trauma happened repeatedly, over a long time, or at the hands of people who were supposed to care for you, the effects go deeper than a single event. Depression Not just sadness. People-pleasing Anticipating what others need before they ask. Shame Not guilt about something you did. Identity disturbance Not being able to answer simple questions about yourself. Anxiety The background hum of dread that is always there. Fawn response When the nervous system learned that the way to survive threat was to appease it, some people learned to become whatever the threatening person needed them to be. Narcissistic traits When someone grows up without adequate mirroring, with conditional love, or having to meet a caregiver's needs rather than their own, certain adaptations form.

Nothing on this page is a diagnosis, and nothing here decides what is wrong with you, because nothing is wrong with you. Something happened to you. This page exists so that when you are ready, you can find people who understand it from the inside.

You do not have to carry this alone.

Bridge of Hope Recovery is a free, anonymous, peer-led fellowship for trauma survivors. Meetings run throughout the week by phone, by video, and in person. No cost, no waitlist, no one asking for your real name.

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