How Frozen Feelings Turn Us Into Victims

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Often my clients describe their state of fear in front of spouses, bosses, simply superiors, authorities, like this:

"He's screaming, but I'm afraid and I don't know what to do."

When they say like this: “I don’t know what to do,” it means that feelings are frozen, not expressed, not experienced.

And therefore such a person cannot budge, cannot define boundaries. He is in eternal fear of a grandiose figure, an eternal victim.

Moreover, gender is not at all important: both women and men are afraid.

I immediately assume that such a person is stuck in childhood trauma. Someone scared him, abused his power in his childhood, and he, as a child, was scared, as if nailed to the spot. And sentenced to life in the same stupor. Unless she gets to the therapist, of course.

I asked one of my clients to remember who scared her so. She remembered several people: her father, her teachers.

I asked why she was afraid of her father. The client recalled the scene: the father, in a rage, beats her brothers with a belt, they beg them not to beat them, but the father does not listen, and continues the violence.

The girl is afraid that her father will beat her too, and freezes in horror. She wants to be inconspicuous in order to protect herself.

I notice that the client freezes, turns to stone, talking about this episode. She sinks into her childhood experience of stupor.

“I don’t know what to do,” she repeats.

Her feelings and words froze from fear.

Then I say instead of her: “Stop it! You're scaring me! I am afraid of you!"

The client listens to me and starts crying. Fear unfreezes.

After that, I say “on behalf of my father”: “I'm terribly angry! I can't handle my rage! I don’t have the strength to admit that I don’t have the resource, that I am weak, that I cannot cope with it! But I can’t do it any other way.”

Now the client is furious: “I hate you! I hate you for what you did!"

For some time she lives with rage and fear, crying, and getting angry.

Then it becomes easier for her from the fact that she expressed her feelings.

…. Due to the fact that the abuser did not recognize his feelings, did not express them, the child also cannot experience his feelings. And he becomes a victim in life, because the very situation is not brought to the end, feelings are not placed, boundaries are not marked. Therefore, that very old story needs to be reanimated, restored, and what is missing.

Subsequently, this leads to the fact that in new cases of violence or attacks on borders, the victim no longer falls into a stupor, does not reflect on the question “I don’t know what to do,” but all feelings, including anger, live. And, in the end, she has resources and words about what suits her and what does not.