I was born into a family system where control was intimacy and image was everything. I learned to regulate other people’s emotions before I even understood my own. Love means silence. Support never included my best interests. But, I was rewarded for being hyper independent, good, agreeable, easy to shape, and easy to deny. The trauma and distress experienced isn't loud—it's layered, subtle, and undetectable from the outside.

Covert, manipulative, and buried under spiritual language and parentified praise, it took decades before I could even see what had been done to me. And by then, I had already internalized it. My nervous system was trained to accept dysregulation as normal and collapse as rest. I didn’t rebel—I vanished. I built a life from fragments. I adapted invisibly, and destructively.

I believed them first. I tried to reshape myself.

I chose dysfunctional attachment each time.

Over three decades later, I am unlearning what they told me I had to be and remembering the the young woman that existed before the role, before the mask, before the false peace of submission. I am doing what they never did: sitting with discomfort, staying with truth, staying with myself. I am not on a journey to be "better".

But, to be whole.