The Secret Shame of Wanting to be Rescued

Welcome to the Overcoming Sexual Abuse podcast where you get the tools and inspiration to help you overcome childhood sexual abuse. I’m your host Christina Enevoldsen, certified coach, author, and incest survivor, and I’m here to help you heal and live your very best life.

When your needs aren’t met in childhood, you may still crave to be rescued now. Whether you’re hyper-independent or still feel powerless, there’s a secret shame in wanting to be taken care of. I’ll show you where that comes from and how you can heal the original wound and use that desire in a way that actually empowers you.

Somewhere around 14 years ago, my birthday was coming up and I wanted my husband, Don, to buy me a new bed. It was this vintage, beautiful bed, and he was going to have to drive a distance to pick it up. 

As I was imagining how good that bed would look, I noticed, though, that I wasn’t feeling good. I wasn’t excited to get the gift. I wasn’t appreciating it. I wasn’t even feeling loved by Don. Actually, the opposite. I was feeling anger come up. And as I explored that, I just paused a minute and I noticed that there was this kind of “prove it” energy to it, like “Prove to me you love me by doing this hard thing and driving far and spending money on me.” And it felt demanding as though I were owed this debt and it was long overdue and it was finally getting paid. And I wasn’t appreciative; I was just like, “Give it to me.” 

And I got even more honest with myself after that. I knew internally, I just knew that I wasn’t even going to feel loved even after he did all of that for me. And that told me something. It told me that I was transferring feelings onto Don that were really about someone else. And I knew that those someone else’s were my parents. 

Don didn’t owe me anything. And it was never his responsibility to meet those needs. But it had been my parents’ responsibility, not in my adult life, but when I was a child and my needs for protection, and things like feeling safe and secure, and to feel loved just for existing, to know that my place in the family wasn’t just something to earn or something that I could lose, and to be accepted and comforted no matter what emotions I experienced. My need to be corrected in patience instead of being shamed and to be loved in my imperfection. Those needs they weren’t met by my parents. 

But those needs never went away. Even though I passed out of childhood and into adulthood, I ignored them and I tried to cover them with other things like this vintage bed. And wanting someone else to take care of me was a very childlike desire, and there was really no shame in having that desire. It just simply speaks to the very normal need that children have to be taken care of, because they’re powerless to take care of themselves. 

And when we experience trauma, that part of us freezes in time. So part of you gets frozen in the patterns of the past, like you get stuck with this fixed set of emotions and beliefs and memories and reactions and unmet needs. And so if you’ve felt like a child in an adult body, it’s due to the childhood trauma. That part of you that didn’t get your needs met still thinks and feels like a child because she is a child. 

And those unmet needs, that caused a fear in me, a fear of abandonment. And when a child is abandoned, that’s a really big deal, you know, that’s life or death because a child is helpless and completely vulnerable alone. But even into adulthood, that fear stays with you. You’re empowered as an adult, but you feel like a child, so it still feels life and death until you resolve it.

And so I used to be very clingy in some relationships because I was really afraid of someone leaving me. I felt like I can’t get close enough or feel secure enough in any relationship; I just couldn’t just relax and enjoy it. I was anxious about being rejected or left. And sometimes though, I would, knowing that I’d been accused of being needy, too needy before, I would just try to play it cool. Like, I’m not gonna let on how fearful or anxious I feel. I just act like I don’t care. I’ll reject them first or I’ll ignore them.

And some people are hyper-independent and they act like they don’t need anyone. And you might not think that they fear abandonment, but they fear abandonment just as much as I did. And they don’t allow themselves to get close to people or depend on people because they’re protecting themselves from feeling that abandonment. So fear of abandonment is actually at the heart of both of those attachment styles, and those are distinct attachment styles. And I talk more about that in episode 22, how childhood neglect impacts your relationships.

I noticed that when the fear of abandonment was triggered, I went right to anger. I wasn’t even in touch with the vulnerable emotions of pain and fear. And it didn’t take much to trigger the anger either. If Don was coming home late, then I wasn’t aware of fear. You know, if he came home late but didn’t let me know where he was, before he got home, I would just be thinking how inconsiderate he is to let me think he’s dead in a ditch somewhere, or if it didn’t go to that catastrophizing, I got angry that he expected me to just drop everything when he got home that I had to make my plans around him and wait for him. Or if he forgot to pick up something for dinner, then I would think he doesn’t care about me, he doesn’t care that I’m hungry, and I would tell myself I can’t count on him and he’s such a disappointment. And I went to anger instead of being with the pain and the fear that I felt, and I definitely did not associate that with childhood. 

And that fear of abandonment came out in other relationships too, but it was just that a lot of expectations went to Don. And so, I experienced a lot of disappointment in my early relationship with Don, where we’ve been married 20 years now, but those first years, especially pre-healing and then into my healing a little bit, they were rough. 

And that’s not because Don actually did let me down, but because a lot of what I expected was unreasonable because subconsciously I was expecting him to make up for the hurt that my parents caused. And it wasn’t fair to me that my parents didn’t meet my needs, but it really was not fair that I treated Don as though he had to make it up to me. 

And that leads to what else I discovered. I had these conflicting feeling of anger, “I deserve this.” And feelings of shame, like, “I don’t deserve this.”

And that’s one of the reasons why nobody else can give us what we miss from childhood, because those unmet needs were so much more than just the unmet needs. That neglect speaks and it has a message. It communicates things like you’re not important, you’re not lovable, you’re too needy, your needs are selfish. 

And I came to believe that I was a burden by the subtle messages of my mother. Most of them weren’t even spoken, some of them were spoken, but I knew by her actions and attitude that I wasn’t a pleasure to care for. I caused her a lot of work and I was too much trouble. And that’s the way I learned to believe about myself and treat myself. 

And we enter into the world as little babies and small children just looking to others to tell us about the world and how it works and what our part is in it. Who are we in this world? How do we fit in? And a child’s job is to learn all of that. And so, they’re very open and their brains are not developed in a way that they can filter out the untruths and they aren’t experienced enough to discern and they take everything personally. They can’t say, “Oh, mom’s just having a bad day. This isn’t about me. I’m not going to take that too seriously.” Those false messages become your beliefs and you live by them and they impact how you treat yourself, who you’re attracted to, what you expect and tolerate in relationships, and your whole life. 

And it’s a common belief with most survivors that I work with that it’s selfish to want attention. But what do we give to someone we love? We give them our attention. It’s a part of love and it’s a basic human need. And we know that because we’ve experienced that being ignored is so much more painful than being mistreated. 

So when you have the belief that wanting your needs met is selfish, you feel shame for both having the need and then asking for the need. So you can’t ask for the need directly. But the hope is that if someone else does meet your needs or gives you some time, some effort, some gifts, then their actions will tell you that you are worthy, you are deserving. And you didn’t have to claim it yourself by asking directly, they said it. And so the desire for wants and needs to come from someone else might just be this cry of, “Please someone make me feel lovable and worthy and valuable. I want to believe those things.” 

But nobody is able to make up for what your parents didn’t give you. And especially not by filling in the needs themselves, you need to address the underlying messages under that. And if you don’t, you’re still going to feel undeserving and you won’t be able to truly receive the love that’s being shown to you. You might feel guilty or sabotage the good that comes in and you’ll never be content with what anyone else does for you because those external things just don’t get to the root of your pain and your loss.

And the other thing about this is that dependency leads to controlling others and being controlled by others and it keeps us in the child role. Even if the other person isn’t trying to control you, you are controlled by their response to you.

And you try to control them by manipulating their response to you. And that leads to things like people pleasing, which is trying to control people’s thoughts and feelings and actions towards you. And you’re orienting around them, adjusting to them and their moods and constantly gauging the effect of your actions on them. Did they see that? Did they like what you just did? 

And I cared for others in the hope that they would care for me. I didn’t say no, I didn’t express boundaries or express what I truly wanted and I wasn’t honest. And those kinds of games never lead to feeling loved and valued. I always felt like I tricked someone into doing something for me. 

And those original devaluing messages come from someone else so it’s absolutely reasonable to think that the valuing messages that you do want of being loved and worthy would need to come from someone else too. Unfortunately, that’s just not the way it works. You have to be the one to address the original lies and all those external fixes, those external things and other people can never get to those wounds. 

Now, if you’re thinking, “It feels hopeless because I don’t feel capable of doing that for myself,” I really get that. Abuse and neglect lead to a feeling of powerlessness to act on your own behalf. And that’s understandable because like I already shared, you get frozen in the perspective of the child that you were. I felt like that for most of my adult life. I just felt like a six year old in an adult body. And any hope of my life improving was attached to someone else. I wanted someone else to change my experience. I hoped my parents would stop trying to control me. I hoped my now ex-husband would treat me like an adult. I hoped my boss would treat me more fairly. 

And my life didn’t improve until I stopped waiting and hoping for others to change. It was this kind of crazy revolutionary thought to hope that I could be the one to make the most difference in my life. And I took my power back one step and one thought at a time. And that was key. I needed to recognize my thoughts. As a kid, our parents are Godlike. They hold our lives in their hands. And our parents, they pronounce and define our reality. “You’re not really hurt.” “You always exaggerate.” “What I did to you, that was love.” And as children, we have absolutely no defense against this. Our parents’ opinions were life and death.

And we know now we can look at that more objectively and see that they were actually just very fallible humans. They have their own limitations and weaknesses. And yet, we came to believe so much from them. My mom told me that I was living in a fantasy world if I believed that my dad abused me. She sais that to me as an adult, but I felt like I was a child, like she could erase me with her dismissal. And I panicked like she could, you know, just snuff out my life by not believing me. And as I sat with that, I realized that as a child, it really was life-threatening to me that she ignored the signs of abuse. And I needed to acknowledge that my fear was real, but it was also from the past. I didn’t need her to believe me. I also needed to acknowledge that my life isn’t in her hands anymore.

So, until we look at the source of these false messages and question the source, we continue to live by them, to be dictated to by them, and we cling to them as truths that can’t be violated. And when we do identify the source, then we can begin to see, we were not born believing these things. I was not born believing that I was unlovable, that I was a burden, that I was unworthy, that I wanted too much attention. These things are not inherently true. They came from an experience and they came from another fallible human. And when we recognize that we’re empowered to question their accuracy. Is it possible this isn’t true about me? And that’s the beginning of owning your power and taking back your life and true healing. 

So I have a special treat for you. If you’re listening when this episode is first published in the spring of 2025, I get into this in much more detail and show you exactly what to do with it in my free annual healing event of the year, “The Five Pillars to Healing.” and people tell me it’s better than paid programs that they’ve done and it’s all free so you really don’t want to miss it. So go to overcomingsexualabuse.com/masterclass and register there. 

Before we conclude I want to share that a member of my Flourish group who brought up this topic and requested an episode on this. I get so much inspiration for the episode topics from questions in my groups and from emails. So if you have a topic that you’d like me to discuss, then please email me. I’m bringing you so much more on healing and boundaries and self-care and family dysfunction and all that fun stuff, so much more. So be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any of it.