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It was difficult for me to find a good way to word my question. I know there is no objective answer, but I want to explore it and get some feedback. From as early as I can remember until age 9, I was frequently and viciously beaten by my dad, and also by my mom. I was mostly beaten by my dad at the request of my mom, who requested these beatings for my questioning her authority or disobeying her orders. My memory of my entire childhood is very fuzzy because I was forced to be on the constant lookout for anything I might say or do which would get me beaten, and also because I was severely neglected. As early as age 6 my parents would leave me home alone for a day, and when my mom (labeled schizophrenic) moved across the country to a group home at age 9, I lost the only of the two parents which paid any attention to me whatsoever. My dad stayed on his computer or in his room and ignored me and my younger siblings and I only have two clear memories of him which don't involve him beating me. One major problem I still face because of all the abuse is that my nervous system still constantly prepares me for being physically attacked. In other words, it's extremely difficult for me to relax and take a deep breath. I have been in a state of non-stop stress ever since I can remember, because almost any interaction with other people has the potential to trigger an emotional flashback to childhood. It has improved since going no contact with my father and my extended family (it has been just over 4 months at this point), but there are still days when the whole day I am stuck in a state of physical and emotional pain, combined with an inability to feel physical or emotional pleasure. When I put my preferences over the other person's - especially if it's someone I don't know well or trust my fear response is activated. I am equally as prone to be triggered by positive events as I am with negative ones. Someone being very nice to me often triggers my fear that I'm being tricked somehow into letting my guard down so I can be hurt even more. This is especially true with women, which makes sense given the fact that my mom was capable of being very nice to me when she wasn't threatening me, brainwashing me, or keeping me from developing my own identity. I struggle with flashbacks at my customer service job. I was never able to develop my own identity with my mom around because she treated me as an object which she could showcase to her friends. Because I was smart, because she was so good at teaching me language skills (homeschool), and because she was a narcissist, I was something for her to show off to her friends in the church and the only way for me to gain her affection was to play the smart, obedient little boy to gain her status with her "friends". I was never able to develop my own identity around my father because he simply didn't interact with us in the home. In high school I started to use my constant anxiety and verbal skills to make people laugh and started to become very popular for this. I had 2 of my 4 closest friends move away and for various other reasons, I was unable to continue to use this strategy, which was a type of personality structure in reaction to my trauma. My personality changed to something akin to a paranoid schizoid, which I couldn't truly shake until I moved out of my dad's house and to a different city. This drastic change in my personality happened sometime between the end of 10th grade and the beginning of 11th grade. I never consciously decided to make either of these changes to my personality - they happened unconsciously, and because of my lack of social support, not a single person reached out to see to try to understand why I went from loud, popular guy to eating lunch in the bathrooms guy who couldn't make eye contact over the course of a few months. I believe the only reason I survived this period of my life without killing myself or becoming a monstrous sadist was because I was able to suppress (in the short-term) my impulses, feelings, and do whatever the people I was hanging out with me wanted to do. I am unable and/or unwilling to go back to either of those personality types. My ability to exist and express myself unconsciously was taken away from me, because I was filled with rage and hate yet smart enough to realize the social consequences of me acting out my rage on others (other than my siblings which I unfortunately was abusive to when I was a child). For me to "be real" in front of other people would have gotten me ostracized by anyone other than someone else who had their humanity stolen from them. It feels like I can't be real now (except in therapy and with my one good friend), because the real me is full of rage, sadness, and fear. I have been in therapy for 5 years now and have made tons of progress, but it's very disheartening how much I struggle each and every day. To me this is the most sinister part of child abuse combined with severe neglect. You are filling the child with rage and hateful, murderous impulses - which gives them one of two options: Either act out the impulses and face the consequences from others and society as a whole (probably prison), or constantly suppress those impulses which is to create one's own prison and erase one's identity. It's extremely difficult to be outgoing without being either a people-pleaser or letting my rage surface. I work at a gas station and I have been leaning towards the people-pleaser side because at least I get some positive reactions from people, but I can no longer keep that up and it makes me miserable to act this way. I know how to be nice, and I can tell which people deserve to be treated nicely, but I hate doing it because when they are nice to me it triggers me that this person is trying to lull me into a false sense of security and will send someone to torture me (the way my mom did). When they are mean to me it triggers me and my brain sends the signals to my body and mind to prepare for torture. Also, when I am nice when I don't want to be, it feels like a continuation of my survival strategy in my childhood environment. It takes so much work for me to get through each and every day having to constantly suppress the emotional roller-coaster that my brain and body go through even during what other people consider mundane social interactions. My brain is constantly going a mile a minute and telling my body to go a mile a minute, but I realize that these are impulses which don't need to be acted on, and if are acted on only serve to tighten the chains of my past around my neck. I feel trapped. Maybe my weariness with people-pleasing means I am finally strong enough to live without the positive opinions of people who I don't really care about, but the fact that lots and lots of people now know who I am and the way I usually act (practically everyone in my relatively small town comes into my gas station) makes being the real me even more difficult. I've stopped hanging out with two people I was spending a lot of time with and have hung out with for several years with because I recognized I was constantly engaged in people-pleasing with them. I think I'm already taking good steps to solve my problems but I could use some advice from anyone else who has struggled with similar issues. Sometimes it feels like I'm fighting an unwinnable battle and it feels like I've been fighting for a lifetime.