When Our Minds Become Our Captors: Recognizing and Overcoming Stockholm Syndrome with My Core Beliefs
When my stepfather raised his hand at my mom for the first time I was seven. He grabbed her leg and started twisting it. I burst into tears, standing naked in the bathroom, as she undressed me for the bath, petrified in fear, completely helpless, and the only thing was certain from that on: my world was no longer safe.
No matter, what I experienced after, how many hardships and personal battles I overcame after that, the belief that the world is not safe, has never changed. It penetrated and coiled like a treacherous snake in my gut, controlling me with fear.
Metaphors aside, I’m talking here about core beliefs we all absorbed early in our lives. Those beliefs are not easily spotted, they are remnants of long forgotten fear.
Whatever happened in our lives, that we interpreted as threatening to our existence and wellbeing, was immediately suppressed by our all-mighty mind, trying to protect us.
In my case, I was looking for safety. Where does one find it, when they believe the world is no longer safe? In their head. I’d detach myself from physical reality, living in my mind instead as my escape, my safe place. I couldn’t control the outside world, but I could control my world within. I could make my internal world perfect.
The other thing I learnt that night was that I was weak. I felt weak and incapable to protect my mom from abusive stepfather. I couldn’t stop him. My helplessness was threatening to my well-being. Some fight, some flee. I froze. I didn’t like experiencing my incompetence as it could be detrimental to both of our existence. My mind confirmed my slowly conjuring belief: “Look at you, can’t do anything, so weak, so fragile”. I felt shame in my own incapability. My mind used it to tell me to control my feelings instead. “You are weak, but we can be strong together. I’ll show you how to never be bothered by it again”, it said.
From that on another core belief of mine was established. I was weak as in “not good enough to protect my mom”, which years after just got blurrier, lost some meaning, gained more traumatic depth, turned into “not good enough”, “weak is bad”, “feelings are bad”, whatever version would fit the narrative to confirm the idea that there was something wrong with me, so my mind would become my crutch to feel better about myself.
It’d protect me from my true self. So I’d supress feelings, perfect the environment, hide or run. Later on, I’d become desperate for approval; then an obsessive perfectionist to make sure everythig around me and myself are always “good enough”; then an alcoholic to stop myself from feeling. Everything was done to resolve one and only problem of ‘’not being enough’.
Where in reality, I was only seven for God’s sake. I was not in the position of taking that much responsibility.
Core beliefs usually become so strong because the emotions attached to them were strong enough to establish them on the deepest levels of our identity. As children, we only begin to get to know ourselves, and whatever we don’t like about ourselves potentially becomes a ground to self-defeating convictions.
So why am I sharing my story? You probably could see by now where I was going with it.
We all have those core beliefs, nesting deep within as the “rightful inhabitants” without questioning them as they’ve been “with us” since we remember ourselves. They became, in a sense, that part of the family we never wanted but couldn’t choose.
In reality, they’ve never been “with us”, they’ve been using our incompetence and “weakness” to manipulate us, so we’d learn to follow our mind, instead of our heart, proving to the world for the next thrirty-fifty years we are good enough. Despite that belief to never be true to begin with. We can’t see it now. We can’t even see we are being manipulated by false beliefs, that we developed a Stockholm syndrome with the monster we created.
Its whole mission was to protect us from fear, a fear that has always been inevitable. We never learnt to mitigate it. We believed we got really good in avoiding it. In fact, avoiding it has always been a self-fulfilled prophecy. Fear never left us. Like it never left me. It kept me petrified in the bathroom in my naked helplessness, as if there was something wrong with me, for many years.
Without further dramatizing self-deception, I’m sure a lot of you discovered before when you’ve been lying to yourself. Maybe you also know by now, it was your coping mechanism to protect yourself at that crucial moment where the world failed to protect you. Maybe you’ve seen you’ve been stuck in thinking how unfair this was because you still struggle to forgive. And maybe you haven’t realized just yet that this resentment has been your true weakness all along, because you weren’t aware that your mind has been using it to make your ego stronger, and not your heart.
I’ve been there myself, I’m still visiting from time to time, sieving through the remnants of illusionary fear, breaking the walls of my hurt ego, to let my heart expand and actually see what true freedom is. Freedom to be myself as I am, integral, with no separation on good or bad, all-or-nothing, black and white, no judgement, no perfection.
