It was a coping mechanism, clearly: You know that saying “no” would be regarded as bad, but you want to be good, because you want to be loved, so you abandon the part of you that would authentically say “no”. It’s a form of self-protection to survive. And it’s a trade-off. This trade-off is how trauma shapes you in the long-term, because coping mechanisms become so automatic and ingrained in your behavior, that you can’t even tell where you begin and where the self-abandonment begins. Others begin to consider these as your identity, and you might do so yourself. When in truth, you are so much more than the behaviors you created around your self-protection.
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