We are designed in a very simple way, when it comes to learning, we have to simple mechanism that work together to avoid danger and self correct course when you deviate from it.
The first mechanism is autonomy, like when you are first born you want to explore the world around you, making a child learn is really, really easy because is what they naturally want to do.
But of course there are also some dangers in too the world so you need a mechanism that when the information about those dangers is discovered in any way, you will avoid that danger in the future, like for example if you touch a hot object and burn yourself, next time you have to interact with that object you are either going to be cautious or avoid it. That mechanism is called free will, which is the capacity to take better decision based on the information that is available to you.
When you are exposed to abuse, you lose your autonomy, as the general purpose of abuse is to force someone to do something against his/her will for the benefit of the abuser. This results in a loss of autonomy impairs your capacity for learning, because when you lose your autonomy you can't respond to external feedback very well.
If you are talking with a slave and you try to give him education on how to make money, his action are limited by his chains and the will of his master. He can't do all the things that you are telling him that they work because his master won't allow him. But of course most of us are controlled by anxiety not chain, being a "slave" is not necessary living your life in chains as much as being controlled by someone else through some means in order to take the fruits of your labour. Most of us are controlled by anxiety, we don't live our life in chains we live our lives in fear which is the tool of control of our master.
So because you are afraid, in order to control your anxiety you attempt to control yourself in order to control the world around you. Not only you lose your autonomy but also you try to take the autonomy of everybody around you.
When people loose their autonomy they have a really hard time correcting the course, they don't learn out of their own experience or from other people wisdom and advice. This generally leads to arrested development, I don't know if you ever meet someone that acts very immature for his age, like a child trapped in an adult body, that could easily be a side effect of abuse.
The unfortunate thing is that recovering your autonomy can happen only from the inside out, there is very little you can do to people that lost their autonomy, other then educate them, but you have to take in consideration that they suffer from arrested development and they don't respond very well to external feedback. The only way to recover your autonomy is to voluntary decide by yourself to stop controlling yourself to control the world around you.
