One of the hardest parts of growing up in an abusive home or being in an abusive relationship, especially early in life, is that you learn to take on the role of keeping the peace. Ask most people who were the oldest child or the only child in a home marked by violence, and you will usually find that they learned how to stay low, clean up, fix things, and make everything seem okay for everyone except themselves. These skills can make you incredibly capable and productive, but they can also turn you into what I call a Groveling Purple People Pleaser.
If that sounds unclear, let me explain. Not so hypothetically, imagine someone gets drunk when you are about six years old and becomes furious because your mom bought a gallon of paint and wants to paint a room. Your stepdad throws that gallon of paint down the stairwell to the downstairs family room while you are supposed to be sleeping, as if a child could sleep through that kind of screaming. The next morning, you wake up and start trying to clean up a gallon of yellow paint splattered down the entire stairwell. And yes, the lid was not on tight.
Trying to fix things, keeping people from getting upset, agreeing with everyone, and maintaining the peace at any cost is something children of alcoholics and victims of abuse know very well. But there is another layer to it that is just as damaging. We learn to carry every burden quietly and privately. We learn not to tell anyone when something hurts or scares us because drawing attention to the chaos only makes everything worse. So we swallow it. We smile. We clean the mess on the stairs and the mess in ourselves, and we do it silently. That becomes its own kind of survival.
Even people who grew up in healthy households can develop these purple monster habits if they end up in unhealthy relationships as adults, but it does not sink in as deeply as it does when you grow up with it. For example, I have been in a healthy relationship for the past thirty years, and I am still haunted by the Groveling Purple People Pleaser that joined me so many years ago. Nearly every day I apologize for something that could not possibly be my fault or within my control. I keep worries to myself. I carry stress quietly. I still have that instinct to protect everyone else from discomfort, even at my own expense.
I know better, but I still do it. This is one part of my childhood and early adulthood that frustrates me the most because it still follows me. I have healed from almost all of it, and I have found peace in so many ways, but I clearly still carry the weight I learned to hold in silence. The purple monster may not run my life anymore, but it still whispers, and I still have to choose not to listen.