Either from abusive parents, toxic relationships, short or long term bullying or any other kind of traumatic past that gave you some survival reflexes that are not longer relevant but are hard for you to get rid of.
I’m a queer person raised in the US but now living in a saner country. I’m slowly realizing how much living in the US has traumatized me.
- Whenever I go to a large gathering I instinctually look for the exits and try to stay near them.
- Still scared to go to the doctor.
- Minor one, there’s a lot of apartment buildings around me named “__ Arms”. In the US, I would expect anything with that name to be a huge gun store covered in white supremacist branding. I still side eye the sign whenever I pass by.
- Expecting government offices to be heavily armed and require going through TSA levels of security. Turns out other countries aren’t police states that treat you like a criminal by default.
- Same thing for small venues
- Driving is its own ball of anxiety and trauma
- Expecting anything with sugar to be sickly sweet. It’s no wonder why the US is so obese
I will only ever explain myself once. If the person I explained myself to seems to completely misunderstand me, I’ll just shut down and search for an escape from the conversation. I’m just so used to never getting through to people, and being misunderstood. No, I didn’t mean to upset you, and you insisting that I did is getting us nowhere. Accept that I’m sorry.
But no. Never happens. So I barely try any more.
I’m 44 years old and I still can’t stand people standing behind me if I’m sitting down. When I was a kid and I did something wrong my dad would sit me at the table while he walked around yelling at me and every so often he would walk behind me and slap the back of my head.
To this day I still get so uncomfortable that I have to get up or ask the person to move. Even if it’s my own kids, I can’t stand it.
I am just like that and was surprised how few people mention this when I searched it online. The other day, I stared down a group of people standing and chatting behind my seat while I was trying to eat my lunch. Thought it was just some common etiquette or evolutionary instinct and stared until they walked away.
Can’t recall if there was any specific thing in my childhood that causes it, but reading this made me realize that I’m not alone in this survival reflex.
Lost everything in a house fire, an electrical fire, in high school. So 30 years later I’m nervous around new appliances or lamps or, really, anything that plugs in except low-voltage. I don’t trust PoE, I don’t plug things in overnight until they’ve logged some daylight hours under monitoring, etc. My sister keeps a number of fire extinguishers around the home, so I think she’s got some PTSD over it too.
House fires change lives.
Never wanted to rock the boat and never felt the need to growing up. Or at least conditioned to feel that way. Now I often screw myself over by nodding and agreeing as my default response. I like to think that I have ideals, but I hardly defend them, can’t bring myself to be reasonably confrontational. Also really bad at coming up with and asking questions and end up nodding along even if I don’t really understand.
I mask around white people to appear non threatening and I don’t like it
in my late teens and early adulthood i’d lash out for being slightly teased about relationships or sexuality. back in my early and mid-teens i would frequently be bullied about not performing manly enough, not having a girlfriend or even having a slightly deviant (or maybe syndromic) look. even now, if i see something that passingly reminds me of these experiences, i play along, but then after i have to take sometime alone to breathe and reassure myself that these experiences are not related.
I think calling it “survival reflexes” alters the truth of the matter. After all, other people live without being paranoid/aggressive/excessively fearful just fine. Better, actually. And this is coming from someone that used to consider some of my more unsavoury behaviour as “survival reflexes”…
If something breaks I have to spend a beat to fight the urge to hide the evidence and then hide myself.
