A conversation with Kirsty Denny
Victim sensitivity
What it might be, what could be underneath it, and what children's big behaviours may be asking for.
The question
Kirsty's question this week was: there is something called victim sensitivity, what are your thoughts on it? It came from a reel by Jason Field, which both of them happened to be watching at the same time. He talks about victim sensitivity being higher in people who are ADHD or autistic, and about what might sit underneath it.
Kirsty's view
Kirsty linked it to rejection sensitivity, the idea that people who are ADHD or autistic may feel judgment or rejection more strongly and spiral over it. She also pointed to a strong drive for justice.
A drive for justice has real value. If you see someone suffering and it feels unjust, you may well say something. It can also drift into tribalism, where you must agree completely or you are on the other team, and where outrage grows over more and more things because fairness has become part of who you are.
Sensitive children notice a lot. They can come to feel on the outside: that person does not understand me, I do not belong, the world is an unfair place. If I can fix it, maybe I will feel alright in myself. Without a wider social network, or a feeling of being held, a cultural identity built around victimhood can fill the gap. Real injustice exists, but it can also be a distraction from what is happening internally.
Reach for understanding of the self and of others, not for why they are different to me, why they are wrong.Kirsty, lightly tidied
The hook: a larger ego at age four
What caught Donna was a phrase in the reel about some children having a larger ego at four. Kirsty explained it as developmental: where there have been attachment ruptures, possibly across generations, or neurodevelopmental differences, a child may feel less secure and be more volatile. All young children are egocentric, but it can be more pronounced.
Donna heard her own work in it. A small child whose cues are not picked up does not think Mum has been up four times in the night and is exhausted. They do something else.
Well, I'm going to make this mean something about me.Donna
That is the meeting point with her work with parents, with Interplay, with her own interpretation of it, Relational Flow, and with the attachment mentoring she does with adults. Donna was clear that she has not done the research, so she cannot say whether it is fact. It makes sense to me.
Needs, and what happens when we fight them
Donna works with personality needs, what we missed in our own childhoods, which the subconscious then spends a lifetime trying to meet. We can meet them healthily, or we can fight them. If we do not meet a need consciously, the subconscious meets it anyway, often unhealthily, and that adds stress to the nervous system.
She has been watching people come through with a high need for social justice. Often they are fighting it, and often they have put it outside their own body, because that feels safer than creating justice for themselves.
Many of these people have been fighting this need for most of their lives, and that can take their nervous system into freeze. They feel shut down, lost, even disconnected and dissociated from life. When they start creating some justice for themselves and step into the need, it can take their nervous systems out of freeze and become a flow of life.
Personality needs are your life force.Donna
One of her own needs is sharing, which sits inside the human need for contribution. Met healthily, as in these weekly sessions, it gives her vitality. Met by overgiving and oversharing, it knocks into her wounds of I am not worthy and I am misunderstood, and it pulled her into a victim role.
Kirsty added that denying the ego and the needs simply does not work. Making friends with them may be a stepping stone, because we cannot skip from total dysfunction to being like Buddha.
The trauma triangle
A big step in Donna's own journey was learning to step out of the trauma triangle. She noticed that relationships carry an unspoken dynamic where we are placed, or place ourselves, as victim or as hero. She used to put on the hero cape. She would take a step forward, then look around to find everyone else had taken two steps back, and she gained a reputation for being argumentative.
The work was to slow down and ask: am I playing a role, or is someone trying to put me into one? And then to step off.
What this means for children
The needs never go away, Donna said, but like thirst, the more we meet them, the less thirsty we feel. For children with huge behaviours, there is a need underneath.
The behaviour is there because there is a need that is hidden in plain sight.Donna
Donna sees a culture of fixing children. Working in person with a parent who calls their child diabolical, she can see how many cues are missing, and she can walk alongside the parent as their own wounds activate. What she sees again and again is that no one has taught them rupture and repair. Some explosions happen because no one is coming back to repair.
When there is power and control, the child is trying to create safety. But the parent does not have safety either, so the two knock off each other. This is why Donna values in person work: a third person who can spot the cues no one can see in plain sight.
She calls the moments where a parent decides how to respond choice points. A parent can punish, shout, pull away, slam a door or hide in bed. Or they can look at it proactively and meet the child's needs.
The middle path
Kirsty named a split she sees. One camp says the child's behaviour is bad and must be fixed. The other says it is simply how their brain is and must be affirmed. Both can do damage if they stop us asking what is actually happening.
It is always coming back to that middle path.Kirsty, lightly tidied
She spoke about her own children, who as small children were sensitive, volatile and found everything unfair. She was good at repair and at sitting with big feelings, and her own old stuff still came to the surface, and she could not gloss over it with an attachment parenting script. Her children are older now and incredibly reasonable. People change. She said that if she had simply put it down to autistic justice seeking brains and demand avoidance, it would have done all of them a disservice. Looking at the physical factors mattered too.
She also remembered another part of the reel about call and response, the collective chanting of a ceremony for example, and saw in it a mirror of how we are in relationship.
None of us exist in isolation.Kirsty, lightly tidied
Where Donna landed
Donna finished with something personal. Five years ago someone told her she had a big ego, and it hit hard. Now she can see it differently. In the last two years she has cleared about twenty wounds. In the attachment work she does, every insecure attachment style shares one wound, safety.
Yes, I did have a big ego, because I did not feel safe in my body.Donna, lightly tidied
A few things to ponder
- When a child says "that's not fair", what might they be asking underneath?
- Which of your own needs do you meet healthily, and which do you meet in ways you wish you did not?
- Are you ever in the hero role, or the victim role? Is someone trying to place you there?
- When a rupture happens at home, what gets in the way of coming back to repair?
We would love to hear your take on this, even if it is quite different to ours. We make life better for children when we can have these conversations and are not scared to be different to someone else.
About us
Donna is based in Pukekohe, Aotearoa New Zealand, and works both locally and online. She calls herself The Relationship Facilitator because her modality, Relational Flow, moves across every kind of relationship: adult attachment work, couples, parenting, and children's big messy behaviours.
Curious where to start? Book a free Zoom coffee chat with Donna.
DonnaStichbury-TheRelationshipfacilitator.as.me/ChatwithDonna
Kirsty Denny of Kirsty Marie Energy is an energetic kinesiologist and home educating mother of neurodivergent children. She uses kinesiology to work with the layers of subconscious stress and conditioning that can impact our ability to align to our truest expression.
When it comes to working with nervous system health and healthy attachment, she believes that it all matters, the physical, the emotional and the spiritual, with healthy relationships with ourselves and others as the bedrock.
www.kirstymariedenny.com
Donna's work on personality needs and attachment wounds draws on Integrated Attachment Theory from the Personal Development School. Jason Field's reel is discussed as one starting point and is not endorsed or verified here. This page is general education, not a diagnosis or medical advice. Kirsty Denny's words are shared from a recorded conversation and are summarised with care.
