What does it mean to be afraid of your own feelings? How does childhood abuse play into that?

[Answered on Quora.com by Melinda Gwin]

Abuse subjects children to incredibly intense negative emotions at a tender age. No one has appreciable coping skills at that age. We haven’t had time to learn them. We cry and expect relief.

Unfortunately, child abuse usually comes at the hands of caretakers; the very people children expect and need to save them, to teach them to calm down and soldier forth with courage, are the ones inflicting the pain.

Lessons are immediately learned: No one can help. No one will help. Even the spaces that seem safest are minefields waiting to explode. Tread carefully or run and hide, as any fallout must be managed by you alone. Nothing is safe and no salvation exists.

The resulting emotions aren’t exactly positive, and the early betrayal from caretakers makes even positive emotions suspect. If one protector could turn on you, causing that much harm, how much more dangerous is everyone else?

Love and trust become suspect, vulnerability becomes folly, because those emotions and conditions were exploited to deliver incredible pain early in life. A world without safety is a world without pleasure; all emotions, without exception, are or presage pain in this state.

Detachment, even dissociation and derealization, is a common way to manage this catch-22. It makes life less frightening by dropping the intensity to zero, though it accomplishes that by precluding joy and despair alike.

When no one protects us, we try to protect ourselves. Fear of all emotions, good and bad, is an attempt to shield oneself from betrayal and the vulnerability that allows betrayal.