As a toddler, the codependent learns quickly that protesting abuse leads to even more frightening parental retaliation. Thus she responds by relinquishing her fight response, deleting “no” from her vocabulary and never developing the language skills of healthy assertiveness. Moreover, many abusive parents reserve their most harsh punishments for “talking back”, and hence ruthlessly extinguish the fight response in their children. Unfortunately, this typically happens at such an early age that they later have little or no memory of it.
