#othunderous

so... we all know that daryl was abused and neglected as a child ( by his mother, father, and brother ), as a teen ( by his father and brother ), and well into his adulthood ( by his brother and the type of company he kept ). there's no question about it, and the severity of the abuse he endured has definitely had a massive influence on the way he navigates his adult relationships.

you can see him struggle a ton with this while merle is still alive in the first 3 seasons of the show. merle makes daryl feel like he's all daryl has—

because family, kin, blood, comes before all else, right? it doesn't matter how much i abused you growing up and still abuse you now, because i'm your big brother and i know what's best for you, always. i spent years trying to make a man of you, so you owe me something. you're worthless without me and you have been since you were born. i'm older, i'm wiser, i always protected you even though i abandoned you at the drop of a hat every time i could to get away from the man we both suffered under our whole lives. i'm the only one who cares about you. nobody else will ever care about you. just me.

—and it's to the point where daryl literally leaves people who are better for him in every way in order to rough it on his own with merle. even when daryl decides that enough is enough, that he'd rather go be with people who appreciate him and give him a much better life, he still lets merle come back with him ( despite his awful behavior while they're on their own, such as merle's aggression with the family on the bridge ). he tells rick that if the group wants daryl to stay, then they must accept merle back into the fold even if they don't like him.

the degree to which daryl is so easily manipulated by his brother is astounding, but that's how that kind of abuse goes. they make you feel worthless, like you're nothing without them, like they made you the person you are and that you should be grateful to them— and if you ever try to leave them, to detach yourself from their hold over you, they make you feel like you're the piece of shit who doesn't care; like you are the one who's done wrong, not them.

and it leads into daryl being easily manipulated by people like rick, for example. there are countless times throughout the show where daryl does as rick asks of him even though he vehemently disagrees and / or doesn't want to, and every single time there's an overarching theme of do this because i need you to. because we're family, and that's what family does for one another. it's very much the same sentiment that merle instilled in daryl from a young age, and it's something that rick has literally seen merle to do daryl before but it's still something he chooses to knowingly repeat. it's a dynamic that becomes even more interesting the more daryl refers to rick as his brother ( and i could go on about this forever, but this post isn't just about the way that rick treats daryl. that can come sometime later ).

but then there are people like carol— daryl's best friend above all others from the very beginning. the woman he would do anything for. you don't have to look too deeply into their relationship to understand that part of the reason they get along so well is because of their similar backgrounds of abuse and neglect. even after years and years, the fact that their tight bond began and persisted because of their traumas is still referenced ( in season 10 ep 1, daryl's quote: sometimes i think we're just surviving one fight to the next. / and carol's response: it was like that for you and me before all this ).

i think it's important to acknowledge how daryl's history and experiences play so hard into the bonds he makes with other trauma survivors ( specifically trauma pre-outbreak, because yeah, everyone suffers horrific traumas once the dead begin to walk ). it carries over into his relationships with people like leah ( see this post for my thoughts on their relationship and why it's strictly platnoic ) and with lydia.

lydia is actually a really big one, too, because she's the most prevalent example of an abused child / teenager who daryl can bond with and who he sees himself in. during the time that he meets and gets to know lydia, however, he's in a position where he's more healed and has let go of much of his past life. it lets him relate to her, but it also lets him reach out to her. help her. show her that she doesn't have to stick by the side of someone who is / was atrociously abusing her. it goes back to him choosing merle over the people who actually cared for him— lydia is sort of an opportunity for daryl to come full circle and show the audience just how much he has healed in a lot of different ways ( even though he does still display some aggressive and stubborn behaviors. this is daryl we're talking about, after all ).

moving on, i can't talk about how daryl's past impacts his relationships without talking about his guilt and shame. this could be a whole separate post in itself because there's just so much to it, but i feel like it needs to be at least touched on here.

i believe it goes without saying that guilt and shame are two very large parts of what makes childhood trauma so debilitating. there's an air of responsibility that comes with it, like you need to set aside your own needs and dissociate from them in order to do and be what others need you to do and be ( people-pleasing ). and a lot of times, the guilt comes in when you push yourself so far that you break.

some examples of this are: not being able to find / save sophia, especially with her being another abused child and after he felt like the only person who cared enough besides her own mother to go looking for her; not being able to save beth at grady memorial after she became such a good friend to him in their solo travels after the tragedy of the prison falling; being taken advantage of by dwight, which eventually results in denise's death and daryl running off to go find him ( which then further results in michonne, rosita, and glenn being captured alongside him by the saviors and ending up being included in negan's lineup ).

the common thread between all of these events is that daryl feels like he's let his people down. maggie even has to pull him aside after he escapes the saviors to tell him that glenn's death was not his fault, and that he doesn't need to carry that shame with him.

and then there's the guilt he feels surrounding his reactivity throughout the show: for example, when daryl is tasked with leading their people away from the saviors after the fall of alexandria, he gets in tara's face for letting dwight go. his outburst frightens judith, which is perhaps the only thing that stops him from continuing to escalate. this leads into his shame surrounding children in general, as well— he is good with kids, as evidenced by his uncle daryl status with judith and rj, but one of the main themes of his time as their acting parent later in the show is that he has no idea what he's doing. he's never had a frame of reference for what actual good parenting looks like, and he constantly asks himself what rick would do instead of trusting in himself that he won't turn out to be what his own father was.

to make a very long story much, much shorter... the way that daryl's family treated him at large before the outbreak culminates in: intense trust issues; self-sacrificial behavior; people-pleasing; poor emotional regulation / reactivity; self-doubt / self-loathing; a deep fear of abandonment, yet the need for extreme emotional distance from others; dissociation from personal needs; feelings of unworthiness when it comes to relationships; struggles with emotional intimacy; hypervigilance; avoidant behaviors; confusion and unsettling feelings surrounding close relationships; and more.

it's also worth it to note that daryl does work through these feelings and trauma responses throughout the show ! you can see how much progress he makes as he gets closer to people in the group and how much he really begins to blossom into his own person without the influence of his old life hanging over him.

there are so many other things i could have mentioned, too. i didn't mention how daryl's trademark quiet nature is in itself fueled by his trauma ( what has talking ever gotten him? most likely, a beating ). how his willingness to sacrifice himself for the people he loves comes, in part, from his past.

and to that point, i never mentioned how daryl's physical body and the things he went through as a child and adolescent shape the way he interacts with people. how he shies away from physical touch until much, much later in the show. how his bodily autonomy is almost always in question ( and if you're curious about that, i have a post on it here ) and how every piece of his body has been used over and over again, down to the very blood in his veins being sold for money as a child.

i also didn't dive into how he's such a good judge of character that it's literally spelled out for you and mentioned countless times throughout the show, but that when he's faced with one of his abusers asking him to go away with him, he does it even though merle is a terrible, awful, horrific, piece of shit person— which just goes to show you how deeply ingrained the trauma bond between him and merle really was. and, beyond that, how trust issues because of childhood trauma made it so difficult to really put his faith in the group when merle was in his ear telling him that daryl didn't need them. that they didn't actually care about him at all.

i never even got into his older brother-little sister relationship with beth, and how she was the first person to help him let go of a huge piece of his old life by burning down the old shack. and i didn't talk about how easily he's able to talk about merle when he tells connie the story about the boat.