What if You're Taught PTSD? How Fences Couldn't Protect Me as a Highly Sensitive Child
What happens when a fence can't protect you?
Most people assume physical boundaries keep us safe. A fence around a schoolyard. A locked door. Distance from danger. But for highly sensitive people who grew up with trauma, the real boundary work happens internally.
When Physical Boundaries Fail Highly Sensitive People
Picture a playground. Children run toward a chain-link fence, laughing and playing tag. The fence creates a boundary between the schoolyard and the street beyond.
One child stops short. Twenty feet from the fence. Hands wringing. Eyes scanning for white vans and dangerous strangers.
The fence exists to keep threats out and safety in. But this child feels no safety at all.
This moment captures what childhood trauma really is. While other children flow through play and wonder, trauma survivors learn to freeze. The physical boundary of the fence means nothing when your nervous system has been taught constant fear.
How Hypervigilance Gets Taught to Highly Sensitive Children
Hypervigilance doesn't develop randomly. It gets taught.
A child hears repeated warnings about kidnapping threats. School faculty get briefed. Teachers reinforce the danger. The message becomes clear: stay alert, stay afraid, stay far from the fence.
The adults mean well. They want to protect. But protection without coping strategies creates a different kind of harm.
That child learns hypervigilance is the right way to be. Smart. Wise. Protective. The fear gets accepted into a small body until it can't hold any more. Years later, that same hypervigilance becomes a mental health diagnosis. PTSD. Anxiety disorder. Depression.
The irony cuts deep. The very trait taught as survival becomes pathologized as sickness.
The Hidden Trauma That Shapes Boundary Setting
Most people believe the worst trauma comes from tangible abuse. Physical violence. Sexual violation. Direct harm.
A harder truth exists.
The moments between abuse often create deeper wounds than the abuse itself. Emotional neglect. Constant overwhelm. Living in confusion with no finish point for the fear.
Abuse moments have time limits. They start and end. Being taught to live in constant terror has no endpoint. No settling. No peace. The weight stays constant on a developing nervous system.
A child in this state can't explore with natural wonder. Once unsafety and fear integrate into mind and body, hypervigilance becomes the only option. The powerlessness to change any of it wreaks the real havoc.
Why People Pleasing Starts in Childhood
Eldest children often carry safety responsibilities that don't belong to them. A mother tells her oldest child: keep your sister safe from your father. Watch for danger. Protect her.
That child learns their purpose is caretaking others instead of themselves. We give away what we most need.
A small child who doesn't want to feel frightened shields younger siblings from fear. Holds the terror for everyone. This dynamic creates the foundation for people pleasing patterns that last decades.
The adults around this child don't realize they could hold those fears instead. They don't know how to empower without terrifying. The parentification grows deeper.
Does your own childhood show you similar patterns? What did your body get taught to feel? How much did your mind learn to think?
Boundary Work for HSPs Requires Internal Safety
Teaching boundaries means acknowledging that external barriers aren't enough. The fence on the playground couldn't help that frozen child feel safe. Physical distance from a parent doesn't automatically create emotional security.
Highly sensitive people have a right to learn how to feel safe inside themselves. This is the boundary work that matters most.
Your emotional boundaries live inside you. When you grow up without internal safety, you carry that lack into adulthood. Relationships feel threatening. Decision-making triggers paralysis. Setting boundaries with others feels impossible when you haven't built them within yourself first.
The Dissociation That Protects Highly Sensitive People
The human psyche splits under tremendous trauma and betrayal. Dissociative Identity Disorder remains controversial, but the splitting phenomenon is real.
A child who loves their father while being told to fear him can't hold both truths. The heart rips in two directions. Oil and water that won't mix. The psyche can't process this paradox.
So the mind goes into sleep mode. Like a computer conserving energy. Still on, but not fully present. Not functioning at full capacity. This happens automatically, not by conscious choice.
The psyche does this for you, not to you. Self-preservation meets psychology. Some call it spirit or ancestral protection. The lens you choose matters less than understanding the mechanism.
Healing means the split parts can integrate again. From fractured to whole. The definition of yoga is "to yoke" or bring together. Physical yoga practice teaches your brain how to inhabit a body it disconnected from during trauma.
Setting Boundaries Means Unlearning What Trauma Taught
That child on the playground was directly taught that hypervigilance was correct. Faculty participated. The court system knew. School counselors tried to help through play and connection, but no one taught actual coping strategies.
No self-defense training despite abduction threats. No whistle to blow if grabbed. Just fear with no tools to manage it.
People pleasing survivors often fear doing more damage, so highly sensitive children who need help end up emotionally neglected despite well-intentioned adults nearby. The child yearns for guidance but can't articulate the questions floating inside them.
Medication offers limited relief from mental and emotional struggles rooted in learned behavior. No pill teaches your mind to stop being hypervigilant. Teaching started the hypervigilance. Teaching your body to let go of it creates the healing.
Permission matters. Invitation matters. Practice matters.
How Low Empathy Parenting Damages Boundary Setting
A parent with low empathy can create a three-day terror spiral about kidnapping threats, then tell the child to walk to school the next day.
Low empathy allows this contradiction. The parent gives the fear, then sends the child directly into it.
Walking to school becomes an exercise in maximum hypervigilance. The child scans for white vans. Prepares to be tough if the dangerous parent appears. Takes responsibility for a younger sibling's safety too.
The tornness inside creates that splitting feeling. Loving a parent while needing protection from them. The psyche can't hold both truths without fracturing.
Young elementary school ages are precious because children are so impressionable. You could convince a child they're an alien or that everyone else eats wrong. Parents are superheroes in a child's eyes. Children can't know until much later whether their parents were heroes or villains.
Boundaries and the Grief Highly Sensitive People Carry
Separation without explanation creates wounds that last. A family exists one day. The next day, everything changes. No packing belongings. No goodbye to the home or the tree house that proved a father's love.
Goodbyes matter. They get overlooked for children.
Years later, that child drives to the old house with a new license. The tree house still stands. Other children played on it. Sitting in the car, crying for a long time becomes the only way to give that loss a proper goodbye.
The grief for highly sensitive people holds multiple layers. Primal loss of the person who held you at birth. Conscious loss of personality, strong arms, lap sitting, warmth. Aching in ways you can't understand mixed with profound confusion.
Grief ranks among the hardest and most complex experiences humans face. No simple path exists through it.
Why Inner Child Work Transforms Boundary Setting
Resistance to inner child work runs high. Vulnerability feels uncomfortable. But look at that story of the frozen child on the playground.
Can you see how important it becomes to embrace, hold, and soothe that terrified, overwhelmed inner part? The one forced to be adult when being adult was impossible?
Taking your power back means helping that inner child feel powerful instead of powerless. Making peace with childhood this way continues the healing.
Without tending to that tender part, what other work could possibly heal these wounds?
The practice takes seconds:
Place one hand on your heart and one on your belly
Take a deep breath
Speak directly to your younger self
Offer the reassurance that was missing
"I love you. I'm sorry you had to carry all of that. You are safe inside of me. You will never feel so alone and frightened again because grown-up me will be with you always. You didn't have grown-up me back then. You get to have grown-up me all the days of our whole long life forever. Thank you for letting me share that story. I love you so much. Now you can go play while I get back to work."
Tears come because that precious part felt under-seen and under-validated. Lost in confusion for so long. In that moment, relief floods through. This is what I've always needed. Thank you for seeing me. Thank you for giving me what I needed.
The healing you've been craving lives in this practice.
Building Boundaries Through Understanding Your Story
Growth, healing, and evolution happen through story. The more you embrace the truth of your story, the more clearly you see your current growth edges.
You learn how to give yourself permission to do vulnerable work. Work that heals. Work that grows up your inner children so they don't act up, act out, and self-sabotage your life.
Real internal peace becomes possible. Not fake attempts at being peaceful. Actual freedom and ease. Unification of mind and body. Integration of soul care.
Learning to become a safe place to fall for yourself matters most. Even if you grew up without experiencing that safety.
The Layers Highly Sensitive People Discover in Healing
Healing happens in layers. Like peeling an onion. Therapy reveals drives, personality, gifts, flaws, strengths, and weak points that need strengthening. For highly sensitive people, the onion layers seem endless.
Recording personal stories creates a time capsule. Looking back reveals how much growth occurred. Sometimes it also reveals what got left out.
Dissociation leaves remnants. Many survivors carry these throughout life. The mind that survived through dissociating in the first 30 years does it less after active healing work. Much less again in the next decade. But remnants might always exist.
Some part might decide that sharing certain details feels like too much. A momentary amnesia. A splitting off of the part that knows versus the part that doesn't want to know or speak. That protective part takes over.
Abuse survivors often feel frustrated and ashamed when this happens. They expect themselves to know and remember everything. But these moments don't mean you haven't healed or that something is wrong with you.
Your mind and body did what they needed to help you survive. Getting upset with yourself for this self-protection puts you closer to fight or flight. Shaming yourself because you can't escape yourself creates desperation. Your healing nervous system doesn't need that.
Why People Pleasing Patterns Require Compassion
Abuse histories contain multiple layers. Deep human beings, especially intelligent people with emotional depth and complexity, may have layers of themselves unveiled throughout their entire lives.
Can you soften the part of you that thinks you're doing something wrong when another layer appears?
Splitting off as a child when hearing a parent might want you dead serves a purpose. The harsh, bizarre messaging gets delivered casually. That split-off part helps you wake up, go to school, and learn while blocking off home life. Your psyche figured out how to give you breathing room.
This wasn't an intentional decision. Your system took over. Self-preservation meeting psychology, maybe spirit, maybe ancestral energy protection. Multiple lenses exist for understanding dissociation.
Humans have an internal four-wheel drive. On icy, slippery roads, it kicks in automatically to stabilize and prevent flying off the mountain. A healed but once-traumatized psyche might sometimes kick in automatically the same way. Emotional four-wheel drive protects from too much slippage.
How Highly Sensitive People Sustain Human Connection
The people who resonate with trauma recovery work and boundary setting share something fundamental. Big hearts. Even when they haven't always known what to do with their feelings.
Highly sensitive people are the ones who would have leaned down to that frozen child on the playground. Who would have asked why the running stopped. Who would have invited talking about what's bothering them. Who would have offered a hug.
From the depths of pain, sensitivity extends love, care, and consideration. Yes, the trait creates struggle at certain moments. But human to human, soul to soul, heart to heart, sensitivity offers something irreplaceable.
Because highly sensitive people see and feel deeply, they acknowledge others. That acknowledgement gives people an outlet. It offers reassurance. It sustains life just as much as food does.
Highly sensitive people are the sustainers of life.
Your sensitivity isn't the problem. Learning boundaries means discovering it has always been your superpower.
Episode Tags
- ADD 1
- Abuse 16
- Alcohol 3
- Anger 9
- Bullying 6
- Childhood 37
- Codependency 10
- Covid 4
- Crystal Catalina 4
- Depression 15
- Detachment 2
- Disassociation 4
- Emotions 75
- Existentialism 2
- Faith 1
- Family 28
- Fatigue 4
- Focus 3
- Gratitude 11
- Grief 13
- Guilt 2
- Healers 7
- Healing 52
- High Sensation 4
- Hope 1
- Hypervigilance 7
- Introverts 6
- Lonliness 7
- Love 3
- Manifesting 5
- Manipulation 19
- Masculinity 1
- Men 1
- Mindfulness 38
- Money 10
- Music 3
- Nutrition 2
- Overthinking 8
- PTSD 13
- Parenting 12
- People Pleasing 8
- Perfectionism 6
- Pets 4
- Relationships 19
- Resiliency 14
- Sadness 1
- Self Esteem 17
- Self Love 11
- Self Respect 1
- Self-Care 26
Episode Tags
- ADD 1
- Abuse 16
- Alcohol 3
- Anger 9
- Bullying 6
- Childhood 37
- Codependency 10
- Covid 4
- Crystal Catalina 4
- Depression 15
- Detachment 2
- Disassociation 4
- Emotions 75
- Existentialism 2
- Faith 1
- Family 28
- Fatigue 4
- Focus 3
- Gratitude 11
- Grief 13
- Guilt 2
- Healers 7
- Healing 52
- High Sensation 4
- Hope 1
- Hypervigilance 7
- Introverts 6
- Lonliness 7
- Love 3
- Manifesting 5
- Manipulation 19
- Masculinity 1
- Men 1
- Mindfulness 38
- Money 10
- Music 3
- Nutrition 2
- Overthinking 8
- PTSD 13
- Parenting 12
- People Pleasing 8
- Perfectionism 6
- Pets 4
- Relationships 19
- Resiliency 14
- Sadness 1
- Self Esteem 17
- Self Love 11
- Self Respect 1
- Self-Care 26
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