https://aeon.co/essays/the-power-imbalance-between-parent-and-child-leaves-a-trace
Don't know why this url won't insert as a link, but:
"Because children rely entirely upon adults for survival, they usually cannot allow themselves to see that important adults are distorted or defensive. They simply assume that adults are correct. This is a primitive emotional safeguard. The emotional logic here is this: if my caregiver is wrong, I am unsafe; but if I am wrong about myself, I can be fixed, forgiven and even loved. In this context, the child pursues the only workable option: turning the adult’s projection inward."
***
The thing was, for me, I could absolutely tell that adults were often not correct. That they did not know what they were talking about, that they weren't understanding me, that they couldn't or didn't want to see something that I could. A lot of being an autistic and gifted little kid, for me, was being able to see and hear and perceive things that adults could not. It was obvious that adults could be wrong. They were wrong a lot.
And the result is that I seem to have escaped a fair amount of the emotional damage of assuming that I was just inherently bad or wrong about myself*, at the cost of understanding at a very young age that I was, in fact, unsafe because my caregivers did not understand the world. They didn't understand the world as I experienced it or how other people reacted to me in it, and there was therefore no real chance of me ever getting useful help or support. There was no getting adults to understand what I needed or why.
*although it's another variety of mindfuck altogether to understand that you aren't intrinsically bad/wrong but that no one around you has a problem with you being mistreated.
