When we grow up in emotionally chaotic households, we face challenges in establishing healthy adult relationships. We learn to silence our experience because it feels too dangerous to speak up for ourselves or call anyone out on their behavior.
As children, we need to belong; to belong is to survive. To express our experience of the family craziness would be to risk the love of our caretakers, our belonging, and thus our survival. When a home is emotionally chaotic, it’s not generally filled with adults who are open and interested in the child’s experience; there’s often no safe person for a child to talk to and even less chance for there to be someone who will take responsibility for or change what’s happening.
Similarly, as adults in relationships, we think incessantly about what the other person is doing to us; we make the case for our grievances silently inside our heads, rehash what we’re going to say and how we’re going to say it. But once again, we stay silent.
We think obsessively about the other and our bad situation, but we don’t know how to take steps to make it change; we’re too afraid of the consequences, or of our own rage. As a result, we stay stuck in bad situations, feeling powerless to make our relationships change, chronically fearful and overflowing with resentment.
As adults, when we’re confronted with behavior that feels bad, crazy, aggressive, or just not OK, our nervous system goes into a kind of fight, flight, freeze response. Our front brain shuts down, in a sense, and we enter survival mode. Deep in the recesses of our brain there is an assumption being made, namely, that if we speak up, we’ll pay dire consequences and ultimately be worse off. Our deep-seated fear takes over and before we know it, we’re figuring out a way to make the other’s bad behavior work inside the relationship.
Secondly, we stop to ask our fear what it needs to know or hear from a trusted other that would allow it to speak up for itself, to confront the crazy. Sometimes the frightened part of ourselves wants to know or be reminded that it doesn’t actually need this other person.
If we can realize that we won’t die without this other person, that we’ve projected our childhood dependence onto this current relationship, the risk drops and we can find the courage to speak our truth. If we don’t yet genuinely believe that we don’t need the other, we can start taking steps toward the autonomy that can set us free.
On the other hand, the little one inside may need to know that it doesn’t have to explain why it is not OK with what is happening, or get the other person to understand or agree. Sometimes the fear is about having to defend our case against the other’s anger, blame, or defensiveness and this fear is what feels most daunting. In truth, we don’t have to get validation from the other that their behavior is not OK for us. We can offer ourselves permission to simply say, “No, this is not OK,” period—end of the sentence.
There is an infinite number of possible answers to the question, “What would I need to believe to speak up in the face of crazy?” What’s most important is simply that you ask the frightened part of yourself—with kindness—what it needs to stand up for you, confront the crazy, and speak your truth. Once you know what your system needs to move forward, you can offer yourself that truth, or start on the way to making that answer true.
When we grew up accepting the unacceptable because we had to, and we become grownups who are afraid to stand up for ourselves, we learn to stuff our anger and keep the peace at all cost, including the cost to ourselves.
But just because we grew up around crazy doesn’t mean we’re condemned to live with crazy forever. We can change; we can change our reaction to unacceptable behavior and, in the process, we can even change the situation itself. Or we can leave a situation that doesn’t work for us. Once we become conscious of our own behavior, we have choices. We can learn to be the light in the darkness and create our own reality.
Unlike what we believed as children, we get a say in our own reality and we can move from the problem to the solution.