Five Childhood Wounds Many People Carry: Rejection, Abandonment, Humiliation, Betrayal, and Injustice

Monday morning, in a meeting room. Min raises her hand and offers an idea she spent the whole weekend preparing. Her manager listens to half of it and says, “Let’s park that. Next item.” That is all. Nobody in the room laughs at her. Nobody criticizes her. The meeting moves on as though nothing had happened.

Inside Min, something switches off quietly. She does not speak again for the rest of the meeting, and the voice in her head begins its familiar script: “There it is. I knew I shouldn’t have said anything. Better to stay quiet. What was I thinking?” Home that evening, she is as tired as if she had run a marathon, having sat still all day — tired from holding a mask in place so nobody could see how much she was shaking underneath.

What Min carries comes from an inner child wound. Many people have encountered the four-wound framework — abandonment, trust, not being seen, and guilt. Here we look at a different one: five childhood wounds, a framework from the self-development writing of the Canadian author Lise Bourbeau, who proposes that childhood experience may leave five principal wounds — rejection, abandonment, humiliation, betrayal, and injustice — each arriving with a “mask,” a defensive posture we wear without realizing it.

Where the five wounds come from, and how much weight to give them

The framework comes from Bourbeau’s books, which belong to the self-development genre rather than the research literature. Her proposal is that a child hurt by certain kinds of experience may gradually develop a mask so as not to be hurt the same way again — and that after wearing it long enough, we forget it is a mask at all and take it for our own face. Put plainly: pretending to be something we are not, for long enough that we mistake the pretense for our personality. It is a form of emotional self-protection, an adaptive coping mechanism practiced until it became an automatic response.

The five wounds

1. The wound of rejection usually forms out of experiences that left a child feeling their very self was unwelcome: opinions brushed aside, their interests treated as odd, or a lasting sense of not being the child their parents hoped for. The mask most often worn is invisibility — becoming as small as possible, as quiet as possible, as far from the spotlight as possible. In adulthood it surfaces as someone who will not risk offering an idea, who steps back from an opportunity before anyone can decline it — or as Min in that meeting, for whom “let’s park that” landed with the weight of being told her whole self was worthless.
2. The wound of abandonment usually forms out of warmth that came inconsistently, separations, or an adult who was present in body while their attention was never there. The mask most often worn is dependence — holding tightly to a relationship, because being alone feels too dangerous. In adulthood it shows as fear of solitude, a need for repeated reassurance of still being loved, or conceding far more than is reasonable in order not to lose someone.
3. The wound of humiliation usually forms out of experiences in which being oneself was made ridiculous or shameful: being mocked in front of others, compared until one felt worthless, or criticized for one’s appearance and most basic needs. The mask most often worn is bearing everything — becoming the person who laughs first at the joke made at their own expense, who looks after everyone, who places their own needs last to prove they are good. In adulthood it surfaces as guilt when doing anything for oneself, or a quiet fear that anyone who saw the real person would be repelled.
4. The wound of betrayal usually forms out of promises broken repeatedly, trust used as a tool, or the person who should have protected us being the one who disappointed us at the moment it mattered most. The mask most often worn is control — because if you manage everything yourself, nobody can go behind your back. In adulthood it appears in people who delegate work but never quite trust it, who plan constantly for the worst case, or whose anger runs especially hot when someone fails to keep their word.
5. The wound of injustice usually forms in children treated coldly or with excessive strictness, valued for their output rather than themselves, or watching plain inequality at home with no power to affect it. The mask most often worn is perfectionism — everything must be done correctly and without fault, because being right is the one defense nobody can argue with. In adulthood it surfaces as standards for oneself set so high they leave no room to breathe, difficulty accepting help, or such disconnection from one’s own feelings that one is sometimes unsure whether one is tired.

The real value of this framework is not learning which number you are. It is the moment you can separate the mask from the face — recognizing, for instance, that one person’s perfectionism is not innate precision but the armor of an injustice wound. Making that distinction opens a considerably more life-changing question: if you did not have to wear this mask all the time, how would you want to live?

If these marks are clearly interfering with your life — relationships catching on the same point, exhaustion from holding a mask in place until nothing is left, or feelings too overwhelming to manage alone — a mental-health professional who works specifically with psychological wounds (trauma-informed care) belongs near the top of the list. You do not have to force yourself to find which event a wound began with, or to reconstruct faded childhood memories. Begin with the mask you can see today. And if at any point what is inside becomes more than you can carry alone, Thailand’s mental health hotline, 1323, is staffed by people who will listen.

How hypnotherapy works with the five wounds at NBRH

At NBRH we use hypnotherapy as our principal approach to emotion, physical sensation, the meaning a person holds about themselves, and the automatic responses still connected to early experience.

With these five wounds, what we attend to is the mask operating in the present: the silence that arrives by itself in a meeting, the unease of delegating, the guilt of resting. The work does not aim to find or confirm forgotten memories, and there is no need to know which event each wound began with. We work with these patterns gradually in a focused, relaxed state — one in which a person may remain aware of their surroundings or drift deeper at intervals, and which is never a state where the therapist takes control of anyone’s mind. Emotional safety comes first, always. And the goal is never to tear the mask away, because it genuinely protected us once and deserves some thanks. The goal is to develop additional responses that fit present life, so that wearing or setting down the mask becomes a choice we make — rather than something the mask decides on our behalf every time.

Healing, in our sense, is not ripping a mask off. It is becoming its owner again: able to wear it when necessary, able to set it down where it is safe, and always aware that the face underneath never went anywhere.

At NBRH (Neuro-Behavioral Repatterning & Hypnotherapy) we hold that our behavior and responses are not a permanent identity but patterns shaped by experience, which can gradually change given care and the right conditions. We use hypnotherapy as our principal way of working with these automatic circuits, in a space that is safe, private, and always respectful of each person’s own pace.

If this framework has made you want to look more closely, “The Four Inner Child Wounds” approaches the same ground with more attention to how each wound forms, and “What the Inner Child Is” introduces the part of you still holding them.