Survival

We have all been impacted by non-empathic environments in our lives and so have suffered. This may seem a mild description, given the experience it tries to describe. To say it in another, more experiential way: we have all felt ourselves humiliated, discounted, and used as objects to serve the desperate needs of others; we have all been abandoned, left to disintegrate in the face of unknown horrors; we have all felt the gut-wrenching plummet toward personal non-existence. This may now seem overstated - but not to those aspects of us who bore the brunt of this wounding.

And we have all done whatever we needed to do in order to survive such degradation and annihilation - we have developed some amount of survival personality. That is, we have all had the life we were meant to live driven underground; we have all been entranced, brainwashed into forgetting our heights and our depths; we have all been forced to live a pretense, burying our true selves.

-  The Psychotherapy of Love,  Firman/Gila