Do You Have Problems Making Decisions? - Childhood Trauma

Who else felt personally targeted by the title 😂

I'm 42 and still don't know what I want to be when I grow up. Thanks mom and dad.

Took 8 months but I finally decided to watch this video.

This guy slowly making me realize that every single aspect of my personality is a childhood trauma response 💀 one video at a time

Not having our feelings validated as a child leads us to learn that nothing we feel or want is correct, so why would we feel confident making decisions? I'm just starting to dig into this with my own therapist

All of the factors describe my parents so well but what affected me the most was being made to feel like I couldn’t make mistakes. My parents always chastised me. Instead of telling me to learn from them, they’d tell me how I should’ve foreseen the problem or how I should’ve been smarter enough to avoid it. It literally set me up to be scared of making decisions.

Tell yourself, "I made the best decision that I could make at that time," for every decision you have made in life. ( Let that stress go.) ❤️❤️❤️

This really hit home because I hadn't realised quite how neurotic I was to research things for days/weeks before decisions. At some point enough is enough.

His mentioning “seeing life as one false move that’s finite, that’s forever” really hits home among other things.

I made an uniformed medical decision for my great grandmother when I was 19. I was the only one who showed up to the hospital for her even tho I was out of the country. My family laid into me for that decision but according to the doctors the alternative was death. This was the starting point of my decision to go no contact with my family and while I don’t regret going nc, I spent 4 hours trying to buy a flashlight last week😅. I’m a work in progress. Thank you for this easy to understand explanation.

"The most depressing thing that can affect a person's life is the unfulfilled life of their parents". This struck so strongly. I would love to figure out how to stop being so affected. The security bit is also very difficult for the larger choices.

Wow, never realized parents not helping the kids could be classified as neglect. From an immigrant family, it was normal that my parents didn't understand how things worked here and couldn't help, and they were also working all the time. But they didn't even try to be honest - never took me to any after school programs or signed me up for any sports or anything enriching. The one time I convinced them to let me sing on the schools xmas album cuz I was one of several who got chosen by our choir teacher - they came to pick me back up very early, broke up the taping of it, and took me out of there as if something was wrong. Nothing was wrong, we were all just singing. They were total a-holes to be honest, they always ruined anything good I tried to do for myself. I remember sitting in my room in the evening trying to do my HW, and many times just straight bawling because I was so frustrated and didn't understand and had nobody to help me. I learned from an early age I couldn't ask them for anything, in fact the thought never even occurred to me. So sad.

My mother used to yell at me & get impatient with me because I could never decide anything. Looking back I realize that so many decisions were always made for me, what to eat, what to wear, what to do, that it really is no surprise that I had trouble with it. I still do. I went from an abusive home to an abusive marriage, where again, I had no voice. My needs & wants don't matter & when I do decide something, its my fault when it doesn't turn out right.

All decisions were treated as "life or death" with intense time pressure to decide--"make up your mind right now or you get nothing." If I made the "wrong" decision, I was verbally degraded. Many decisions were set up to trick me. So, yeah, I have anxiety with decisions.

I make decisions and I always regret them... My fear is that I always regret my decisions no matter how much I tried to make the right decision... I always think the "other" decision was the correct one

My difficulty in making decisions is not childhood related, it's adulthood related. Many wrong decisions have led to regret, so it's impossible to make major decisions.

It wasn't just childhood trauma for me. Yes, that caused me to be incredibly insecure, indecisive and fearful of regret, but what really hammered it down was that in adulthood, the doom scenarios for decisions always actually played out. And sometimes there weren't even doom scenarios in my head, but things still turned out badly in ways I hadn't even imagined. Most of the decisions I have made in life have had such horrible outcomes and terrible consequences that I just no longer trust my own judgment and am more frozen than ever. My childhood laid the foundation, but adulthood seems to have cemented it. I'm not sure how one crawl out of that hole.

I used to have tremendous trouble with this. Two highly critical parents who solely focused on criticising the 'bad' and never praised 'the good' - thus all my decisions must be bad...

I was in a really toxic workplace and I left after getting screamed at with nothing lined up, two years later I'm beating myself up to this day because the job hopping has made me accrue tons of debt with interest and paying rent. I'm still trying to come to terms with it and staying in the present.

I never realized how much my childhood trauma affected me as an adult. I thought I was crazy.