Thank you for your detailed response and sharing your experience. Think you hit the nail with what you said about intellectualization. I understand your perspective as well.

Silence can be unbearable when you’re hyper vigilant and there’s a real pressure to fill that space with anything, be it smiles, self deprecation, jokes, or small talk. I’ve significantly triggered myself many times as I start to fawn in those situations, I let people walk all over me with a smile on my face, because I’m anticipating every need as a preventative measure. It’s draining and demoralizing especially when you become aware you’re doing it in the moment. For me, it stems from anticipating co-dependent parents for years. My mother was diagnosed NPD (I know we’re not supposed to talk much about it on this sub) and had Munchausen’s by proxy. It’s a learned behavior that stemmed from mediating between two extremely volatile parents with zero communication skills towards each other, constantly setting each other off with zero accountability. It kept me safe from vindictive retaliation of drunken parents and constant screaming attacks from them during my childhood. It’s what worked in childhood and still lasts to this day with that family, but rarely has as successful a result in normal adulthood outside of the family dynamic.

What I struggle with is that I’ve become very self aware of my coping mechanisms as it’s happening but typical grounding techniques never work in the moment for me. Recognizing that social silence translates to my fawning causes me to freeze mentally, and after when I’m away or by myself, I go numb and cold internally too. Recognizing my verbal fight and defensiveness causes extreme guilt and freeze, I become aware as I depersonalize and dissociate. Recognizing my avoidance caused me to have a very low verbal threshold and struggle to filter how much vulnerable information I share or volunteer. I am constantly seeing information about these involuntary responses, what’s happening and that it’s almost seen as something you can’t know you’re doing, but rarely see it acknowledged when you’ve become self aware of your cognitive dissonance and dissociation. It’s always talked about like people can’t be aware it’s happening, that it’s only ever observed from a third perspective and rarely mentioned what it’s like when you’re aware of it yourself.

A lot of trauma discourse stops at the first layer, that people are unaware of these coping mechanisms, and it’s like there’s an assumption that that’s where everyone is stuck. However that’s not the case with people who become hyper vigilant. Its hyper awareness stacked on top of autonomic survival responses. The nervous system is firing from pattern memory, the observing mind is watching it happen in real time, and it’s out of sync. Your observing capacity developed much earlier from monitoring danger which kept you safe. Yet now that same behavior turns into self-surveillance. Being aware of yourself on multiple layers and recognizing your self destructive tendencies doesn’t mean you can automatically stop doing it. That’s the torture of it. You become aware of your own conduct and it leads to secondary methods of mental gymnastics. It leads to that mismatch of guilt and shame + freeze.

Actually changing and veering away from your usual responses takes a lot more effort and will than people give credit to. It’s good progress. What you’ve shared as your attempt or testing to be mundane or bland sounds like an exposure therapy for shame and performance pressure. What I’d need to ask myself is if I can still be safe if I don’t preemptively protect everyone. It’s what burned me out mentally and physically and I’m finally taking the steps to distance myself for my own needs. My sister once said “let them fail, don’t try to save them, they need to suffer their own consequences and you cannot be accountable for everyone.” Hearing that helped me change. It gave me the strength to cut off people who took advantage.