It's not that you attract abuse

Many childhood trauma survivors wonder if they somehow attract abusive people into their lives.

From the outside, it can look that way. But I don't believe we look at someone and say, "Yes… let's welcome this abusive person into our lives so they can ruin it."

It doesn't work like that.

I think children who grow up in neglect and abuse are taught—by example—that their safety doesn't matter. So many of us were left with perpetrators or exposed to them, without protection.

Just like in childhood, we dissociate when someone tells us that abuse is normal or okay. Unfortunately, this pattern often repeats in adulthood with difficult or abusive people. We aren't focused on our safety because, most likely, we never learned how to do that.

When parents do not:

• model healthy boundaries
• use good intuition about their child's safety
• choose a child's safety over a perpetrator's feelings

the child grows up without a vital mechanism of self-preservation.

How can we know who is safe when the adults in our lives welcomed in danger?

Many of us need help building a radar system that should have been there all along.

It's less that we attract abusive people, and more that abuse happens to us because we don't believe we have rights around our happiness and safety.

This issue is also often mixed with dissociation, codependency (especially not wanting to rock the boat), and magical thinking.

— Patrick