The warm place

Vaguely. I think a lot of the Freudian interpretations of trauma put too much emphasis on sexuality and not enough on trust and safety. The truth is that we generally develop most of our adult personality and values before we reach 10 years old, and as such the events within these early years are highly influential/formative. We also have dumb monkey brains so we often forget why we came to the conclusions that we did, we only remember the conclusion and it’s emotional expression. Being an adult in a position with someone who you feel completely and utterly safe with can often do a lot to open up old wounds and vulnerabilities. It was only after I started feeling safe in the arms of my first real female friend that a lot of my shitty childhood trauma came back to the surface, the extreme isolation, the feeling of being undeserving of happiness, the fear of crossing some ambiguous line which would ruin everything at any second… all came rushing back to me within a month. That level of raw emotional expression and damage is ultimately what ended the friendship a few months later, but it was incredibly eye opening to see what i had been hiding under the surface for so long. A half decade later I’ve done a lot of work to overcome it, and I’m finally at the point where I can say with confidence that I’m happy about who I am, as cheesy as it sounds. I’m genuinely a stronger and more capable person now than I was back then.