What happens to the child within when the home itself becomes the unsafe?

What happens to the child within when the home itself becomes the  unsafe? Children cannot flee, where would they go? They cannot fight, they’d lose. So they do what they can, they freeze, they flee on the inside through shutting down or dissociating. Because our thinking freezes up when we’re scared, we tend to make sense of terrifying circumstances after the fact if at all. As children, we need some sane and caring grown up to help us understand what frightened us so that we can put it into some sort of normalizing framework for ourselves. But in homes where the parents themselves are the ones causing the stress, this normalizing all too often doesn’t take place. And if it’s the parent causing the stress, children lose access to the very person they would normally go to for comfort. So this becomes a double whammy for the child; not only are they feeling helpless and afraid, but the person they would normally go to for comfort and understanding is the one causing the stress to begin with. They are left to try to comfort themselves and make sense of the situation on their own.

All too often, the sense they make is laced with the magical thinking and natural egocentricity of the child, e.g., “I must be bad to upset my parent like this, after all they are telling me I am the one upsetting them, it must be all my fault. I need to change something that is terribly wrong with me, but no one is telling me what that is, so I will watch very carefully and try to behave in a way that doesn’t make them so angry.” This is codependency in the making as the child becomes increasingly hypervigilant, trying to divine the parent’s mood from their gait, the look on their face, the sound of their voice or the smell of their breath. Over time, when the child cannot seem to get it right in this home where rules and routines may change according to mood and alcohol or drug use, the child’s “trauma reasoning” may go something like this, “I just can’t get it right so I might just as well give up.”


The Ten Stages is a studied recovery course. It is a source of reconnection a method of unlearning and a reintroduction to our child within which leads us back to our one true intuitive voice.We start to learn and come out of our protective dysfunctional shell and reclaim our lives.

Related articles

• Self-doubt is part of the ten stages healing process.
• The CHILD WITHIN thats is an interior voice accessing the exterior and is the only true voice of the child.The authentic intuition voice that lovingly guides your life.
• Joining The Ten Stages Study starts the emotional healing process
• Preliminary Stages Workshops introducing ourselves to the different parts of our Child Within which live at different stages of healing.
• We are unwittingly being constantly influenced or covertly controlled by our unconscious child within.
• We all suffer from social dissociation or joining the tribe.