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I didn't know I was a childhood abuse survivor.
- chanel Duffy
- May 21
- 2 min read
Bloody hell it's been a while since i last posted a blog! Between perimenopause, kids, life, and work, I don't know if my name is Sandra, Claire or Chanel these day's. I'm holding on to my sanity for dear life. It's all good though. Feeling grateful for the remaining personality that the perimenopause hasn't robbed from me.
ANYWAY......
Recently, I sat down with the amazing Josh Connolly on his podcast and spoke publicly about my childhood for the first time. I tried to speak as honestly about the abuse as my nervous system would allow. What a bitch it didn't allow for me to tell as much as i wanted. My defences kicked in and my throat tightened. (Like i used to feel when i was a child about to be told off with a slipper) . However i did speak about the survival, the confusion of it all, and the reality of what happens when a child grows up having to psychologically adapt in order to survive their environment.
What's crazy is that even though i never forgot how bad my childhood was.......
I didnt walk around thinking I was a survivor of childhood abuse. I wasn’t consciously aware that so many of my behaviours, reactions, emotional patterns, fears, and coping mechanisms had actually been shaped by what I had experienced growing up. I just thought this was my personality. I thought I was naturally hypervigilant, emotionally reactive, defensive, anxious, fiercely independent, constantly anticipating danger, and EXTREMELY FIERY!!
I thought that was just me.
What I understand now, both through lived experience and through the neuroscience of trauma, is that the brain is incredibly intelligent at helping us survive things that would otherwise feel unbearable, especially during childhood when we are completely dependent on the people around us.
Children cannot simply decide that their caregivers are unsafe and emotionally detach from them. It does not work like that. A child’s nervous system is biologically wired for attachment because attachment is survival. So when the very people who are supposed to provide safety also become the source of fear, unpredictability, emotional harm, psychological manipulation, or abuse, the brain has to find a way to make that survivable.
And one of the ways it often does that is through denial. I was the queen of it.
Not conscious denial though. Like somebody deliberately lying to themselves. I mean a deeply unconscious protective process where the mind slowly learns to minimise, rationalise, normalise, disconnect, intellectualise, laugh things off, or completely shut down emotional awareness in order to preserve attachment and maintain psychological survival.
That is why so many people live for decades without fully recognising the impact their childhood had on them.
The reality i have come to learn is, the body often tells the truth long before the conscious mind does. The nervous system remembers what the mind had to bury in order to survive. That is why trauma so often shows up through anxiety, emotional dysregulation, perfectionism, panic, chronic stress, dissociation, hyper independence, emotional numbness, fear of abandonment, or a constant underlying sense that something is wrong even when life looks “fine” from the outside.
Watch the podcast here.
