Are Rebellion and Conformity Both Trauma Responses?

If you know me, you’ll know I tend towards the rebel side. Questioning, resisting, taking the new path. And yet, when I was in a relationship with a narcissist, to some degree, I tried to conform. I tried to be someone who would not activate his disapproval or displeasure. It was clear that when I stood up for my way of seeing things, my needs and opinions, he would make it painful to me in some way, either by telling me how wrong I was, or withdrawing attention and affection. If I found a way to go along, it would generally be safer. But in this process, I started to lose myself, my spark, my joy.

In my family, I often felt that no one cared what I did, and so I pushed boundaries as far as possible. My parents were exploring open marriage and both dating one or more people outside their own relationship. They had little time or energy for me and my brother (we “joke” that we were feral children who had to raise ourselves — not actually so amusing to be honest). I now see that my rebellious behavior had as its motivation the question of whether or not anyone cared.

In another relationship with a toxic man, I found that I was both conforming and quietly rebelling. He wanted to control all our expenditures (with a pretty tight fist), which made me feel constrained, so I spent what I wanted and hid it from him. In this case, I was pretending to conform to his views while rebelling in order to feel I had some say in my own life.

In my view, conforming is different than aligning, and rebelling is distinct from self-determination, because both conforming and rebelling tend to be more reactive states. Aligning and self-determination, on the other hand, are proactive, the path of choice. What’s interesting in both cases is that within a toxic system, we might start by attempting to align, only to lose pieces of ourselves in the process and find ourselves conforming. Or we might start by honoring our own self-determination and find that we are rebelling by becoming rigid about our own needs because no one is listening to us.

In fact, one test to see if you are in a toxic relationship or system is to ask yourself if you feel aligned or that you need to conform, or if you feel self-determined or that you need to rebel.

It’s also important to note that of course we carry our early adaptions with us, and this is our own healing to do. My clients who are working with relational trauma often have calibration to look at in this area. They are overly concerned with whether their opinions and actions will upset people and try to anticipate and conform to the world’s expectations. Or they refuse to do anything that makes them feel at all constrained as a way of expressing themselves, only to damage potentially healthy relationships and their professional reputation.

Healing can start with questioning if you have a tendency to conform or rebel, and then activating the opposite. For those who overly conform, the work may be to look more at self-determination and be willing to explore their own needs even if others may not approve. For those who overly rebel, the work may be to look more at creating alignment with others without losing themselves in the process.

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This post was previously published on But Now I Know Your Name and is republished on Medium.

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