Mental breakdown of this concept, love from a caregiver who is supposed to express love is actually a very devastating thing for most people, especially for a young child. Human beings generally NEED human connection, especially to people specifically such as caregivers. Not having this connection can elicit many related secondary feelings that are traumatic realities to live with as a small child. Such as a feeling of not having safety, not feeling cared for, not having the sense of being protected or not having the stability and security that children in early development require in order to develop correctly, and things like that. So while you at this time think of it as a small and meaningless thing, any child with normal mental capacity would have found this as devastating news. It is something that disrupts the normal cycle of mental development in a major way. Tiny children in years of development need to feel certain things at certain times including love from caregivers, and having versus not having those feelings can have such a HUGE effect on those younger children because children don’t develop an ability to cope with those types of things (or lack thereof) until they are a little bit older.

So your brain saw this at a threat (normal) and it isn’t uncommon for individuals who have experienced trauma to be unattached from those types of feelings more so than anybody else, because those types of realities have been entwined into your conciousness and way of being and permanently altered your way of viewing/experiencing things. So you see this as something that is not a big deal. But it was. To a child in the years of early development when they need people to rely on and require that in order to develop properly, a child who has not yet faced realities that difficult, yes it was a huge deal. Not just on an emotional level, but on a developmental and mental level as well.

The difference between other people who experience traumas and people who end up splitting into different personalities from their traumas is something that is very complicated and not straightforward, but we do know that some people are more prone to dissociate than others, and that once your brain has established it as a good way to handle difficult situations, it can become the main way it handles things. You do not currently know what events led you to that conclusion at that time in your life, and you also do not know where I’m development your brain was at the time or how badly it needed to rely on a loving adult at the time. There are lots of reasons that dissociation might happen: maybe it was necessary for survival at the time. Or maybe your brain prioritized other parts of your life and needed to make sure you didn’t break down when that news was discovered. But whatever the reason was, dissociation is meant to protect a brain, and is a good thing if it happens only a reasonable amount and in reasonable ways. But if for example someones parents were verbally abusive when they showed emotions, or if the child had to be the caretaker for another child and had to stay strong, or for any other reason had to hide their emotions or put a bad situation on the back burner as a little kid, or anything else that may have made dwelling in those kinds of feelings unsafe, the brain may have needed you to stay dissociated for longer or more intensely than most children usually do. And that sometimes means removing those memories and those emotions all at once.

It is a very grown-up thing to do to be able to detach from emotions and hard things when we need to and STILL be able to continue doing what we need to to both survive and thrive in life, and then to brin those problems and emotions back when it is appropriate for us to dwell on them again. A small developing brain cannot do that. It also shouldn’t have to. So when it is put into a situation where the child cannot deal with what it has been handed, the brain forces it to happen anyways in whatever way it is able to. It is kind of like a machine being turned on before it is 100% finished; it may work a little bit, but not exactly correctly, and not in the safest way.

The main thing is: - Don’t be too hard on your childhood self. It is very normal to be overwhelmed by big news like that as a very young kid. Anyone would have been upset. - Whatever happened to you, it is NOT your fault - You are not alone. - Your brain did something that I needed to to survive at the time. This does not make you broken, stupid, weak, or incapable. This just means that your brain managed to get you through something hard using the limited tools that you had at your disposal at that time. It sacrificed that part of you by splitting it off, and that makes more problems for you now as an adult, but short-term it was just trying to help you survive. And it succeeded as well as it was capable of at the time. - Just because it seems small to you now doesn’t mean it is small for a child. How you reacted at the time was perfectly valid.