The importance of unlearning our childhood stories
I have a professional background as a technology trainer, which has sparked my interest in learning.
Learning is also something that I have come to realize is vital to healing from childhood abuse as well.
As children, we were taught specific lessons:
- I’m not safe
- Trust no one
- Be silent
- I’m somehow to blame for this
I’ve shared my belief that healing involves unlearning these stories.
I recently heard a podcast that provided this lesson in a different context. On People I Mostly Admire, Stefanie Stantcheva provided an example of how having incorrect information can lead to reactions that seem logical within that context, but ultimately cause problems because they’re not accurate.
Without getting into the politics of this issue, while acknowledging that it is a hot political issue, I want to share what she found when she asked people about immigration:
So the shares differ, obviously, across countries but if we take the U.S. as an example, at the time of the study, the actual share of documented immigrants, so that’s what we asked people about, was around 10 percent. And the average perception of people was 36 percent.
They go on to talk about unemployment statistics versus perceptions, too, and Americans generally think a very high percentage of immigrants are unemployed and on welfare.
My point is this. If you believe 36% of the US population is foreign-born and they are much more likely to be getting government assistance, policies that severely limit immigration make sense. If you believe that it’s only 10% and that the 10% has roughly the same unemployment rate and economic distribution as people born in the US, you might feel differently.
If you grew up thinking your abuse was your fault, the things you believe about yourself as an adult make sense. If you grew up believing that the people who were supposed to love and protect you would always hurt you, it makes sense that you would not get close to anyone. These are normal reactions to what happened to us.
Unlearning is the process of pausing our natural reactions to people and events and considering that our beliefs may not be correct. I could not heal until I unlearned that my abuse was something I somehow caused. Unlearning that opened up the possibility of learning something different, namely, that I was abused because someone decided to abuse me. Did that happen overnight? Of course not! Unlearning is a process, and the more closely we identify with a belief, the more difficult it becomes to unlearn it. So many survivors learn at a very early age to keep secrets, that bad things will happen if they tell anyone.
People who’ve never had that belief drilled into their young minds wonder why victims wait decades to come forward and tell their stories. That’s why! That belief is hard to unlearn. Many of us grew up with silence being the thing that prevents the abuse from being worse. Why should we start discussing it? If you tried to tell someone as a child and got shut down, this only gets worse.
If you know someone who survived abuse, instead of asking why they don’t tell, and why they don’t trust, or why they struggle with this or that behavior, ask what they have not unlearned from their childhood experiences, and how you can help them do that.
We can’t move forward to new knowledge while clinging to our old understanding when the two are incompatible.
