People love to talk about survival mode in soft quotes.
"Be kind to yourself, you did what you had to do to survive."
It sounds nice. Then you look at how the world actually treats survival mode and you see the double standard.
We applaud survivors in theory. In real life we punish them for the ways they learned to live.
You dissociated because your home was a war zone. Later they call you cold and accuse you of not caring.
You became hyper aware of every tone shift and micro change. Later you are labeled paranoid and dramatic.
You exploded after years of swallowing it. Later they only remember the explosion and not the thousand times you stayed quiet.
Survival mode is not pretty. It was never meant to be. It is the emergency setting your body used because it did not have time to build a healthier option.
It does not always look like a fragile victim.
Sometimes it looks like the loud, angry one.
Sometimes it looks like the person who refuses to trust anyone.
Sometimes it looks like someone who keeps choosing chaos because they do not recognize calm as safe.
And here is the thing that makes it worse.
Systems care more about order than they do about healing. If your survival mode disrupts their order, they call it a moral failure.
You are selfish. You are irresponsible. You are the villain.
No one is saying that survival mode gives you a free pass to keep hurting people. You are still responsible for what you do. You still have to learn new ways to show up.
But that is different from shame.
You do not heal by calling yourself trash. You heal by admitting the truth.
"I did things I am not proud of, but I can also see the war I was living in at the time. I needed help. I needed tools. I needed a way out that did not exist yet."
Survival mode was not you at your fullest self. It was you at your most cornered.
You can hold both.
You can say "I hurt people and I regret it" and "I was drowning and nobody noticed."
You are not a flaw. You are a person whose body and brain did everything they could to keep you alive. Now your job is to learn how to live in something better than an emergency.
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