I Wasn't Born Knowing How to Protect Myself

For a long time, I thought I should have known better. I thought I should have been stronger. That I should have done something.

I’ve imagined how everything could have been different.

I thought there must have been something about me that made me vulnerable to the people who hurt me. Maybe I was too trusting. Maybe I didn't have good boundaries. Maybe I didn't recognize red flags. Maybe I was simply bad at protecting myself. That I was weak.

But there is something I understand now that I didn't understand for most of my life: I wasn't born knowing how to protect myself. I had to learn how to survive first.

And the people teaching me what the world was like weren't teaching me that I was safe.

My Story Didn't Begin When I Became an Adult

When people talk about abusive relationships, they often talk about the adult relationship as though that is where the story begins. For me, it didn't.

My understanding of relationships, trust, love, fear, and safety had already been shaped long before I was old enough to understand any of those things.

My stepfather was my abuser, beginning when I was six years old.

At six, I didn't have the ability to understand what was happening to me in the way an adult would. I couldn't step outside of my childhood and analyze the situation. I couldn't make an informed decision about what was healthy or unhealthy. I didn’t have the vocabulary to explain why it felt so off. I couldn't simply walk away.

I was a child. And children adapt. They find ways to survive the environments they're given.

My abuser swung between love bombing, bitter coldness, and corporal punishment.

I Learned to Read People Instead of Trusting Myself

I became very aware of other people's moods. I learned to notice changes in someone's voice. I learned to anticipate reactions. I learned when it was better to stay quiet. I learned to think about what someone else wanted before thinking about what I wanted.

Those skills helped me survive. But survival skills don't always disappear when the danger does. Sometimes they follow you into adulthood.

You become the person who tries to keep everyone happy. You apologize even when you haven't done anything wrong. You worry about upsetting people. You question your own memories. You second-guess your feelings. You become incredibly good at adapting. And you may not even realize that you're doing it.

It doesn’t go away when the danger is gone—it lingers. When survival depends on keeping everyone else happy, it leaves a person empty. Simple questions like “Who are you?” or “What are you good at?” are difficult to answer.

I Thought It Was a Character Flaw

For years, I interpreted those things as weaknesses. I thought I was too sensitive. Too forgiving. Too trusting. Too willing to give people another chance. I thought I needed to become tougher.

But now I look at those parts of myself differently.

The little girl who learned to anticipate danger wasn't weak. She was observant. The girl who learned to keep the peace wasn't pathetic. She was trying to stay safe. The woman who struggled to trust her own instincts wasn't stupid. She had spent years learning that other people's reality mattered more than her own.

There is a difference between being broken and being conditioned. That distinction has changed the way I see myself.

You Can't Blame a Child for the Lessons an Adult Taught Her

This is one of the hardest things I've had to understand.

When something happens to you repeatedly as a child, you don't just experience the event. You learn from it. You learn what you think love means. You learn what you think you deserve. You learn how much of yourself you're allowed to take up. You learn whether saying no feels safe. You learn whether adults can be trusted. You learn whether your needs matter.

And sometimes you carry those lessons into relationships long after you have left the environment where you learned them.

That doesn't mean you wanted what happened. It doesn't mean you chose it. It means you were a child trying to make sense of a world that wasn't safe.

This is what makes recovering from childhood trauma so difficult. Recovering from a single traumatic event means trying to go back to who you were before. With childhood trauma, there is no "before." There is no baseline or reference point for what normal, safe, or happy means.

How do you reach a place of peace and happiness if you never felt it in the first place?

I Don't Want to Blame the Woman I Became

I spent too many years asking why I didn't protect myself better. Now I want to ask a different question: Why was I expected to know how?

I was a child. I didn't choose the environment I grew up in. I didn't choose the person who abused me. I didn't choose the lessons I was taught.

And when those lessons followed me into adulthood, I didn't suddenly become responsible for the fact that I had been conditioned to survive.

I can acknowledge the things I wish I had done differently without turning that into blame. I can learn from my past without condemning the person I was. Those are two very different things.

I Am Learning Something New

I'm learning that protecting myself doesn't mean becoming hard. It doesn't mean never trusting anyone. It doesn't mean assuming everyone will hurt me.

It means listening to myself. It means believing my own discomfort. It means recognizing that I am allowed to have boundaries—even when someone doesn't like them. It means understanding that love isn't supposed to require me to abandon myself.

And perhaps most importantly, it means understanding that the little girl who didn't know how to protect herself deserved someone who would.

She deserved safety. She deserved protection. She deserved to be believed. She deserved to grow up without carrying someone else's shame.

I can't go back and give her those things. But I can stop blaming her for not having them.

And I can spend the rest of my life learning how to give myself what she should have had all along. I am learning to relearn what life is—and what it can be.