The Quiet Fight.
When you grow up surrounded by chaos, pain becomes the language you know best. And when hate is all you’ve ever heard, loving yourself doesn’t just feel hard but it feels impossible. I used to look in the mirror and hear the echoes of every cruel word that was ever thrown at me. For a long time, I believed them.
Nobody ever taught me how to regulate emotions. As a child, there were no calm explanations, no gentle lessons. Anger was met with anger. Sadness was ignored. Joy was rare. So when I became an adult, I didn’t know what to do with my feelings except bury them, run from them, or let them explode. Learning how to pause, breathe, and feel without falling apart is something I’m still working on.
Trauma has a way of showing up in the body. For me, it showed up in my weight. I have battled with it for as long as I can remember. It’s not just the number on the scale, but the shame that came with it. Eating became comfort, and then eating became guilt. And that cycle is one I know many women silently carry too.
Marriage was another battlefield. When you don’t know how to communicate, every disagreement feels like a war. My husband and I have had seasons of constant fighting, where love felt buried under walls of defense and misunderstanding. It’s not easy to break patterns you never had modeled for you.
To cope, I turned to whatever would numb the pain—even if just for a moment. Sometimes that meant good things, like writing or music. Other times it meant self-sabotage.
I still remember one night, sitting on the bathroom floor with the door locked, chasing relief from a bottle I swore I didn’t need. I wasn’t drinking to have fun. I wasn’t drinking because I liked the taste. I was drinking because for those few minutes, I didn’t have to feel. I could disappear from the storm in my head. And while I don’t want this to be the whole story here, because addiction deserves its own chapter of truth, I share this to say: if you’ve ever used something, anything, to silence your pain, you are not weak. You are human. And healing doesn’t come from shame. It comes from honesty.
Even underneath it all, the mental health battles persisted. The feeling of never being good enough clung to onto me.
Loneliness has been one of the hardest parts of my story. Even surrounded by people—married, with kids—I often felt completely alone. Trauma isolates you. It whispers that no one understands, that no one really sees you. And that feeling of never being enough, never being noticed, seeps into everything. Friendships, family, and love, it always felt like I was on the outside looking in.
Learning to love and be loved is still a journey for me. When your parents reject you, it plants this seed of doubt: If they didn’t like me, how could anyone else? And yet, slowly, I’m realizing love doesn’t have to look like pain. Love can be gentle. Love can be safe.
One of the hardest lessons I’ve learned is about boundaries. Setting them isn’t the hardest part though it’s grieving the people who refuse to respect them. My relationship with my mom was defined by her alcoholism, and in the end, I had to say goodbye long before she was truly gone. That kind of loss sits heavy. And it broke my heart knowing my kids would never get the version of family I wished I could give them.
Even now, it’s not easy for me to accept love. Trauma doesn’t vanish just because you start a family. It follows you into motherhood. It whispers in the back of your mind when you’re rocking your baby at 3 a.m., when you’re smiling at the park, when you’re helping with homework, when you’re trying so hard to be the mom you never had.
For a long time, I didn’t take care of myself. There were stretches where I didn’t shower for days, even weeks, because I didn’t feel worthy of the simple act of caring for myself. I wished, over and over, that I could just be “normal.” That I could be one of those women who had it all together, who didn’t carry this heaviness around like a shadow.
But then something shifted. I realized that if I wanted to break the cycles, it had to start with me. My kids didn’t deserve the pain I carried, and I didn’t want them to inherit it. Healing didn’t mean I wouldn’t fail, it meant I had a chance at success. And that hope, that sliver of light, was enough to push me to fight every single day.
Rewiring my brain has been one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. My instincts are fight, flight, and freeze. Learning to choose love, light, and life instead is like teaching yourself to walk again. Some days, I stumble. Some days, I fall. But some days, I take steps forward.
And maybe that’s the point. Healing isn’t about “arriving.” It’s not about being fully healed or perfectly put together. It’s about showing up. It’s about trying again after you fall. It’s about choosing yourself even when you don’t feel worthy.
To the women reading this…especially the moms carrying childhood trauma on their backs, please know this: you are not alone. Your pain is valid, your story matters, and healing is possible. It’s messy, it’s ugly, it’s slow. But it’s also powerful, and it’s worth it.
I’m still in it, too. I’m still learning. But every day, I fight to be the mother, the woman, and the person I want to be. And if you’re fighting too, then sister, you’re already braver than you know.