Trouble With Traumalittles
Being activated into a particular learned state or being emotionally reactive in a way that pushes a particular alter to the forefront is essentially a kind of skill, a repeatedly executable strategy that you develop because it consistently produces some valued output in the world. It’s something you learned long ago as part of a strategy to cope with the traumatic situations you were pushed into as a child.
Having a particular emotional response to some stimuli is not a random action, it’s not a loss of control, it is a learned optimizing style. It has an optimizer, represented in your mind by the alter, who learned it at a particular age, the “alter age”.
A skill that can be learned from trauma is the ability to dissociatively segment your memory to protect some aspects of it from the experiences of other aspects of it. This is especially helpful when your abuser requires you to perform Being A Happy Child in order to avoid them preemptively taking antirevenge on you out of the fear that you’ll take revenge on them for their abuse of you. When people talk about denial, repression, and internal gaslighting, they’re talking about the choice to employ this skill.
It would almost be better if these Parts of you were actually just frozen in time and just needed to be unfrozen, but they aren’t. They’ve spent the entire time they were isolated from the rest of your mind trapped in their own traumatic understanding of the world, summoned into the forefront of your mind by triggering situations which then reinforce that understanding, digging the mental grooves deeper and deeper, every incident serving to further justify their paranoid and depressed cynicism.
A 10 year old traumalittle you discover in your 30 year old body has spent the last 20 years perfecting the art of being a traumalittle, executing on the trauma responses that worked at that age. They believe their interpretation of the world as deeply as you do your own, and have as much justification for it as you do.
This can produce all sorts of bad effects if you try to treat alters like they just are their regressed ages, because they’re just not, for one because they’re more skilled and knowledgeable than that description would imply. An “eight-year-old little” could easily be the part of you that knows how to drive a car, for example. Separately but also importantly, trauma shards tend to be somewhat more one-dimensional then an actual child of the age their stated age. The character they present as is really just a sheet hung over the trauma and repressed memories, a cached response to call up repeatedly.
Trauma alters have usually also been through a lot more life than their regressed ages would imply, and a lot of that life has been extremely unpleasant fragmented traumatic experiences which pushed them deeper into and reinforced the trauma responses they initially learned to cope with their lives. You can’t trick them or lie to them and expect them to naively buy it, if anything that’s what they expect you to do. When they share their trauma, there’s a good chance the obvious way you want to comfort them is something they’ve seen and that has been shown to be a lie a hundred times before. You can’t just snap them out of that with logic and facts. Be patient with them, be kind.
This has been long and rambly, but in conclusion, don’t treat littles like literal children, treat them like extremely traumatized adults with childlike mannerisms from practicing their current way of being for their entire existence and getting very good at using that one move.
Ra, 2023, Trouble With Traumalittles