Feeling Defeated as a Child

 When I look back at my childhood, I see the many ways my family robbed me of the opportunity to feel good about myself.

My mom didn’t believe in giving compliments. I don’t remember being encouraged to feel good about who I was or being helped to recognize my worth. Instead, I became familiar with shame at a very young age.

My dad was the punisher. His rage didn’t show up often, but when it did, it was frightening. I learned to be afraid, and I learned to associate fear with the possibility of physical pain.

My sister was the middle child, and she went to great extremes to get attention, even if it meant getting negative attention. She tried her best to make me look bad, even if she had to lie to do it.

And my brother? He was busy doing boys’ stuff. I don’t know that we really learned how to connect until we were adults.

Looking back, I can see that I was a sensitive child trying to find my way in a family where I didn’t know how to protect myself emotionally.

I didn’t know how to navigate a family that used shame, blame, and guilt, or where jokes at someone else’s expense were part of the way people interacted.

I didn’t have the tools to understand what was happening or to recognize that I didn’t have to accept every message I received about myself.

When you are a child, your family is your world. You depend on those people to help you understand who you are. You look to them for reassurance, acceptance, and a sense of belonging.

But what happens when the people you look to for those things leave you feeling ashamed, frightened, or inadequate?

How do you learn to believe in yourself when the people around you aren’t helping you do that?

I wonder how much of the little girl’s defeat came from simply not knowing how to navigate the world she was living in. She wasn’t equipped to understand the family dynamics around her. She didn’t know that other families might communicate differently or that she could grow up and create a different experience for herself.

She only knew what she knew.

And perhaps she began to believe that something was wrong with her.

There are days when I can still feel that sensitive child inside me. Even after all the years of recovery and the work I have done, I sometimes recognize how deeply those early experiences affected the way I learned to see myself.

But today, I can look back with a different understanding.

That little girl wasn’t weak because she was sensitive. She wasn’t wrong for wanting kindness, encouragement, and acceptance. She wasn’t responsible for knowing how to handle situations that were beyond her understanding.

She was a child.

She needed to feel safe. She needed to know that she mattered. She needed to be able to make mistakes without being made to feel ashamed of who she was.

And she needed someone to help her believe in herself.

Today, there’s no shortage of love. I continue to give her all the things she didn’t get as a child. And I remind her that she’s my very favorite person and that I believe in her.

Using the Tools

 No matter how long we have been in recovery or how much work we have done on ourselves, life will continue to challenge us.

We may think we have worked through something, only to find ourselves facing a situation that brings those old feelings right back to the surface. Or life may present us with something entirely new that we have never had to deal with before.

That is why the tools we learn in recovery are so important.

We don’t learn them just for the challenges we are facing today. We learn them so that when the unexpected happens, we have something to draw on. We have choices. We have ways to support ourselves instead of falling back into old patterns.

But knowing the tools and remembering to use them when life gets difficult are two different things.

This past year, I have been learning new tools to help me navigate physical pain and explore the possibility of neuroplastic pain. It has been a different kind of recovery, one that has challenged me in ways I could not have anticipated.

And this week, I have found myself being challenged again.

I am being asked to keep learning how to use the tools I have been practicing throughout the past year. It is one thing to understand these concepts when things are manageable. It is another to put them into practice when I am hurting, frightened, or uncertain about what comes next.

I’ve practiced compassion. Also being with pain rather than trying to escape it and co-regulating with someone safe.

Some of the tools are very similar to the tools I learned through recovery from codependency.

In codependency, we learn to stop trying to control everything outside ourselves. We learn to recognize our feelings, take responsibility for our own responses, establish healthier boundaries, and offer ourselves the compassion we may have spent years giving to everyone else.

I cannot always control what happens in my body. I cannot force pain to disappear, and I cannot know exactly how my healing journey will unfold. But I can learn to change how I meet the experience.

I can notice when fear begins to take over.

I can remind myself that I don’t have to solve everything in this moment.

I can reach for compassion instead of criticism, connection instead of isolation, and curiosity instead of immediately letting fear take over.

I am human. I will have moments when I struggle.

Perhaps recovery is a lifelong practice of remembering what we have learned and discovering how those lessons apply to the new circumstances life brings us.

I have spent many years learning about myself, and I am still learning.

This chapter of my life may be asking me to practice some familiar lessons in a new way.

I may not have chosen this particular challenge, but I can choose how I meet it.

And today, that is enough.

I don’t need to know every tool I will ever need. I just need to keep practicing the ones I have, remain open to learning new ones, and remember that I don’t have to walk through this alone.

Standing Up to Fear

 From the time I was young, my parents used fear as a way to raise us. We weren’t raised with praise or encouraged to believe in ourselves. Instead, we learned to be afraid.

Fear became a familiar presence in my life.

For many years, it had the power to bully me emotionally. It could make me doubt myself, question my decisions, and feel small. But that kind of bullying hasn’t had the same power over me for a long time.

I have grown. I have learned. I have done a lot of work on myself.

But fear is clever. When it can no longer get to me in the same old ways, it seems to find another way in.

Today, it uses my body and my physical issues to frighten me.

When pain shows up, fear can step in and start telling its story. It can make me wonder what is wrong, what might happen next, and whether I will ever feel better. It can try to convince me that I am not safe.

And sometimes, I have to remind myself that fear is talking.

Fear may be loud, but that doesn’t mean I have to believe everything it says.

There is something fear didn’t count on, though.

There is a wise woman living inside me now.

She has been through a lot. She has faced losses, walked through difficult seasons, and learned things about herself that she could never have understood when she was young. She has spent years learning about healing, recovery, and the power of love.

She knows the little girl who grew up afraid. She understands why that little girl learned to be cautious and why she sometimes expects the worst.

But the wise woman knows something the little girl may not have known back then.

Fear does not get to be in charge anymore.

That wise woman believes in love.

She believes that love wins.

Not because love guarantees that life will be easy or that every physical problem will disappear, but because fear does not get to define who I am or decide what is possible for me.

I am still learning how to live this way. Some days, fear may get my attention. Some days, I may need to remind myself more than once that I have a choice in how I respond.

But I am no longer willing to let fear bully me into believing that I am powerless.

I have come too far for that.

The little girl and the wise woman are both part of me. One remembers what it was like to be afraid. The other knows that we have grown beyond those old circumstances.

And together, we can keep learning to live from love rather than fear.

The bully may still show up.

But it no longer gets the final word.

Honoring the Process of Surrendering

 When it comes to surrender, I have learned that we can’t force it.

We can talk about it, read about it, and try to practice it. We can tell ourselves to let go and stop trying to control everything.

But sometimes, knowing we need to surrender and actually being able to do it are two very different things.

Through trial and error, I have discovered something about myself. I usually have to reach a breaking point before I am truly ready to let go.

The pain has to become great enough.

I wish there were a softer way. I wish I could recognize when I am holding on too tightly and simply loosen my grip before things become so difficult.

But that hasn’t always been my experience.

Surrender happens I am finally willing to stop fighting what I cannot control.

I think about how often we resist letting go. We want to be certain. We want relief. We want to know that everything will be okay before we loosen our grip.

But surrender asks us to release some of that need for certainty.

It asks us to acknowledge that we don’t have all the answers and that we cannot control every outcome.

For me, reaching that place has often come through pain.

I wish it didn’t have to be that way. But I am learning not to judge myself for the way my process unfolds.

Perhaps the important thing is not how I arrive at surrender, but what becomes possible when I get there.

Whatever brings me to that place of letting go, I am willing to meet it with compassion.

I don’t have to do this perfectly.

I just have to keep learning.

And if pain has been the doorway to surrender for me, then I can honor what I have learned without believing that I must always suffer to find my way there.

Trusting the Process

 Learning to trust the process can be challenging, especially when things look messy and uncertain.

We like answers. We want clarity. We want to understand what is happening and where we are going.

But sometimes, when we are in the middle of deep change, we simply have to go along for the ride.

We may not understand what is unfolding. We may question our decisions or wonder whether we are moving forward at all.

And sometimes, we find ourselves in the hallway.

We have walked out of the old door, but the new door hasn’t opened yet.

We are no longer where we were, but we haven’t arrived where we are going.

That is where I feel I am right now.

Things feel messy. I don’t have clarity, and I can’t see exactly what comes next. There are moments when I wonder what all of this means and whether I am doing the right things.

And yet, underneath the uncertainty, there is a deep “knowing” in me.

Somehow, I sense that this is part of moving forward.

I may not be able to explain it. I may not have the answers I would like. But something inside me tells me that I don’t have to understand the entire journey to keep taking the next step.

Perhaps this is where trust comes in.

Not the kind of trust that requires us to know how everything will turn out, but the kind that allows us to live with unanswered questions without assuming we are lost.

I have spent much of my life looking for answers, trying to understand, and wanting to know what comes next. Now I am learning that some seasons of life ask something different of us.

They ask us to be patient.

To loosen our grip.

To allow things to unfold without demanding immediate clarity.

I don’t know how long I will be in this hallway. I don’t know what the next door will look like when it opens.

But perhaps I don’t need to know just yet.

Maybe this in-between space has something to teach me, too. Maybe I am learning to trust myself without having all the answers and to trust the process even when I cannot see the outcome.

For today, I can let myself be where I am.

I can acknowledge that things feel messy without deciding that something is wrong.

And I can listen to that quiet knowing inside me that says there is still more to unfold.

Perhaps trusting the process means accepting that I am not finished becoming who I am meant to be.

I am still learning. Still discovering. Still finding my way.

And even here, in the hallway, I can keep moving forward.

One day at a time.

One step at a time.

Trusting that I don’t have to see the open door to believe that my journey is still unfolding.