Actually, we don't even have to be told to keep things secret, we tend to somehow develop a certain understanding that we are not allowed to question certain things. When we are children we tend to look at our parents as knowing and an authority. When we are older and have experienced life for ourselves and have more life experience it can be very hard to look back on our childhoods and see how powerless we really were and how so many messages we experienced were wrong. Also, when we are children we do not have enough life experience to know what questions to ask adults either.

Many children function on flight because they genuinely don't know what else to do. Or, they tune out as a form of protection before they even know what that is. Many individuals stay in bad relationships because it's WHAT THEY KNOW and it feels "normal" to them. We are all designed to navigate, it's how our brains are set up. That means that often a person can gravitate to a partner not because that partner is going to fill their needs, but because that partner exhibits characteristics that are "familiar" to them. Truth is "familiar" is more predictable and without realizing it, most prefer predictable as it's something one is used to navigating. Actually, this is something that the movie Shawshank Redemtion shows. That a man who learns to live by being institutionalized once set free genuinely doesn't know what to do. And sometimes, they just want to go back and live what they know.

If you were imprinted with being ashamed to have emotions guy, then you will genuinely feel it's wrong to experience and feel challenged by emotions. Recently I heard a statement where "If you lock dogs in the basement eventually they will GET OUT" and I thought, "how very true that is". Actually, that especially rings true when it comes to experiencing ptsd that is not just one trauma but can stretch back to much earlier traumas. Truth is, what is the most undesirable when it comes to healing these early traumas is the powerlessness that they reflect. Trauma occurs when a person is powerless to stop something from happening.

The thing about ptsd is that not only did something traumatize a person and they were rendered powerless to stop it, but, if something triggers one to re-experience that trauma, a person can feel powerless to stop from being triggered where they relive whatever it was despite not choosing to do so. It's the hardest thing to explain to others that never experienced the challenge so often it can leave a person feeling very frustrated. No one cares to struggle to control things that might bother them or how they experience their everyday life.

One therapist explained to me that one thing I needed from him was a "witness". Many traumas happen without a witness which can leave a person feeling very alone with whatever the trauma was. There was no rescuer, no one to stop whatever it was. It's very important to be careful when facing early traumas too because it can be harder to look at with a more adult mind who now KNOWS what happened was very wrong when that child part did not have the knowledge. Being told to "just" can provoke anger and frustration because the person struggling does want to keep those old nasty dogs locked in the basement.

I believe you try to be a good person, that you want to be appreciated for that too. That you want to be able to "love" someone and feel it's safe to do so. However, not everyone actually knows how to appreciate that because they have their own deep insecurities that they don't want to be honest about, not even to themselves.