I will say that the vast majority of people I know who experienced childhood abuse or neglect growing up tend to not conceptualize it as such, often for long periods of time. and I think that's partially because of how the specific ways that families abuse and neglect their kids are normalized within that family, like, just like... I often will be talking to someone about their childhood and they'll be like "but my parents think it's normal" and its like well no shit your parents thought that was a normal way to raise a child, the fact that they thought that was a normal way to raise a child is the problem.
and I think it's also partially because... there is this pattern I see in families that produce traumatized kids, wherein the narrative of who the child is is ultimately owned by the family. like, your parents own Knowledge Of Your Self. any attempts to assert expertise in the field of who you are or what you experience is met with derision mockery punishment etc.
this can present in a variety of ways, and some of them look fairly benign, including things like "my parents think I'm this kind of person, but they don't really understand that I am a different kind of person, and every time I try to assert the person I actually am, they argue with me and try to overlay their version of me on to reality instead of listening to me about who I am and what my experiences are"
and I think that depending on how you experience that, it can range from being Just Annoying in some cases to, in many cases, being quite traumatic in and of itself. because it means that you have been trained not to believe that your understanding of yourself and your experiences is ultimately something that is owned by you. which I think is incredibly incredibly damaging both on a personal and relational level. ownership of our own self narrative is a REALLY important thing for human beings to have.
functionally I think that this often presents as an inability to understand what your own needs even are, and a willingness to simply assume that whatever you are feeling at any given time must be the incorrect reaction, especially in the face of an assertion by someone else that the correct reaction would be different than the reaction you are having.
those are both very long-lasting relational harms that go on to cause more harm in the future, because it is impossible to have a truly mutually trusting and healthy interpersonal relationship with someone when you are not aware of what your own needs are, and are certainly not capable of communicating them.*
*I did not say this to undervalue important intimate relations that we do develop with others when we are in this stage, because obviously everyone is capable of forming very strong and often very positive bonds with the people around them, but I think that there is a level of trust and safety that you cannot reach with someone to whom you cannot express your needs. and that includes yourself.
some things about the narrative of my Self that I was borrowing from my family that impeded my ability to understand my own abuse:
both my parents experienced Actual Abuse, I'm lucky, nothing they're doing to me could be as bad as That, and I should be grateful I don't have worse problems
I'm actually spoiled and the real problem is that they weren't hard enough on me
they had to do all of that, because I was a Difficult Child
I wouldn't have been treated that way if I had just tried harder to be normal
this list is not exhaustive, but those are ones that I see very commonly among other bonsai kitten people. they were instilled in my by my parents and the psychologists and social workers my parents hired to make me normal. it took me over a decade to get over even the smallest of these and be able to fully replace it with my own self narrative of the reality I lived through.
