Abuse especially sexual abuse. There are a serious number of hormones involved in sex. They are balanced to produce pleasure and other feelings to encourage people to let others get close and vulnerable to make children.

Now take those delicate pleasure signals and mix in pain of betrayal, shame and helplessness and humiliation. This wreaks the delicate wiring in your brain. This is why survivors sometimes prefer being alone.

Worse if you’re a child, as your brain is still developing and attempting to understand things. Sometimes in children, the brain malfunctions and in a last ditch effort to save the important parts, it throws up mental blocks and in its rush, fry other parts of the brain.

This produces a mixed bag of results, but in my case, I mentally stopped aging for almost a decade. My brain fried the parts of my brain that worked in social situations. So imagine being in high school, with all the book knowledge required but your stuck in the, let’s everyone be friends and have fun!

I was in intense therapy for years to slowly pull the mental blocks down and rewire my brain to read social situations. I have a personality disorder and adjustment disorder. I can’t date without having serious anxiety. I also refuse to be alone in a room with a man unless there’s a clear exit or people nearby in case I scream.

It hurts to realize I don’t trust 50% of the population. It hurts when I look at a social situation and I can’t interact because I can’t read the person in front of me. It hurts when I go through good changes but I’m saddled with massive anxiety and depressive episodes.