Re: deep trauma becoming entrenched from a young age: so it’s not a guaranteed thing, this isn’t something that everyone who loses a mother at such a young age is 100% going to experience, and to such an extent. Some adoptees never manifest this, but some do, even if they were adopted as infants and their adoptive parents were great. Everyone’s different. I’ve read several accounts where the person doesn’t really start grappling these feelings until they’re a young adult, and they find it helpful through therapy to identify these feelings as having first origins in this disruption (and then go on to learning productive ways of responding to those emotions when they arise). This seems to be a more recent shift in modern understandings of adoption and fostering but presently it’s something I’ve noticed a lot.
But also I was reflecting last night and making myself sad, because child Cassandra has a terrible time of it, because Gothel is an awful human being. She sees Gothel actively choose to abandon her at age four, an age when I think people are actually starting to form conscious long term memories (though granted yes, she then deeply repressed this memory). But it’s also not that one moment, she had four years of neglect and, in a way, small scale temporary abandonments as Gothel continuously ditched her for unknown lengths of time. Just remember her face at the words “I won’t be gone long.”