When we’re young, we are often in situations or in dynamics that are more complex than our limited experience and awareness allows us to perceive accurately, but we’re also simultaneously moving through the world, making sense of things through that limited scope, through those naïve eyes.
And in a lot of cases, kids put themselves at the center of the problem or the center of the blame in situations that have little to nothing to do with them. They just happen to be part of a much larger whole.
For example, a child who grows up with a depressed parent and never feels safe or at ease in a sadness they can’t really name or put their finger on… so they take it on as their role, their job, to make their parent happy. They become a comedian, or a magician, or their best friend, or whoever the parent needs them to be in order to lift the mood and stabilize the environment.
Now this child believes that their role in life is to modify their behavior or their expression to meet the emotional needs of other people around them.
That’s a pretty big role to take on and decide is yours from a very early experience with limited knowledge of what’s actually going on.
Because the truth is, it’s not the child’s job to do that.
The truth is that some people struggle with depression. The truth is that each of us has to learn how to support our own emotional needs.
But the child doesn’t know that. They’re just going through life with this new rule in their little manual for how to be a person:
I am responsible for how other people feel.
Train that early enough and you get self-abandonment as a baseline.
Same thing with a child who grows up with an explosive or violent parent. One day they catch the brunt of it—maybe they were just playing in their room with their siblings, doing nothing that a normal child wouldn’t do, but they were making noise at a time it wasn’t allowed. And they catch hell for it.
So now the rule becomes:
I am only safe when I am silent. When I am compliant. When I disappear.
And with a rule like that learned so young, their entire life becomes a contortionist act. Shrinking. Twisting. Folding themselves into something small enough to avoid being seen.
That’s going to have an impact.
On connection. On relationships. On career. On leadership. On ambition. On what they believe they’re allowed to have.
One rule after another gets written this way.
That’s how we learn how to be people. How to survive.
I’m going to talk about some things very honestly and very clearly.
Some of it is uncomfortable. But what I’m sharing happened to me. It didn’t happen to you. You don’t need to worry about becoming traumatized by reading it. That’s not how it works.
And being able to talk about it matters. Because it means we get to learn from each other. It means things like this may happen less often. Maybe one day not at all.
I experienced a decade of childhood sexual abuse.
It started when I was two.
It ended when I was twelve.
That’s when I got my period. Pregnancy became a risk and I was of no further use.
Living through that, I wrote an entire tome full of rules for life. Ways of explaining what was happening and why. Ways of surviving it.
I lived according to those rules well into my adult life and doing so created a whole lot of problems for me.
I didn’t fully understand why I did what I did. Or why I felt the way I felt. Or why the same patterns kept playing out even when I didn’t like the results.
And it wasn’t until I started really looking at what I believed to be true about myself and the world—and why—that things started to change.
Not just noticing the beliefs, but questioning them.
Are they true?
Are they helping?
Do I want to keep them?
Or is it time for an update?
That’s the work I do with my clients now.
A lot of us are walking around holding onto beliefs and behaviors that were generated in situations we were never equipped to handle in the first place.
They get written down early.
They get stored.
And then they run everything.
Unlearning them is not effortless. But its damn important.
Not defaulting back to the same way of thinking, the same emotional patterns, the same conclusions you’ve drawn for decades—it’s hard.
Sometimes really fucking hard.
Because part of you thinks those beliefs are what kept you safe.
Even if they’re hurting you now.
Even if they’ve been hurting you for a long time.
There’s a part of your brain that goes: Don’t let go of that. That’s how we survive.
So you hold onto the pain.
Not because you want to suffer, but because it feels unsafe to put it down.
Like if you let it go, something worse might happen.
Like forgetting would make you vulnerable.
So instead, you carry it.
All the time.
I am in the middle of this process right now.
I’m working on a belief I’ve carried for almost 40 years.
A belief that made everything make sense to me for a very long time.
A belief that I can no longer reconcile but feel naked without.
I’m neck deep in this right now, y’all.
And not picking the pain back up is harder than I want it to be, because I’m so used to feeling it.
I was raised by monsters.
That was the story I told myself.
It explained everything.
Why no one stopped it.
Why no one protected me.
Why it was allowed to happen.
Why I was made out to be the problem.
Why I was cast as the bad one in the story that was told about our family.
Because what kind of people would allow something like that?
Monsters
That’s the only thing that made sense to me.
And I had no shortage of evidence.
I could find it everywhere. You see what you look for, remember?
And the alternative—that these were just people—little me couldn’t accept or make sense of that at all.
Monsters, that’s the only answer. Had to be.
And then adolescence hit. All of the cracks in my foundation began to show.
I did a lot of drugs. A lot of drinking.
Anything I could do to not feel like me, I was in.
And I was good at getting it.
Because I believed nobody loved me.
I believed I wasn’t worth protecting.
I believed I was a piece of shit.
And if I wasn’t worthy of love from my own family, how could I be worthy of it from anyone else?
That belief system will drive some wild behavior.
And it did.
The story being told about me during that time was that I was the problem.
That I was the monster.
I was running away.
Acting out.
Unstable.
And a mental health professional looked me in the face and told me I was a monster.
Everybody said I was.
But they were wrong.
I wasn’t a monster.
I was a hurt person doing hurt person things.
It wasn’t until I got completely away from the people who reinforced that identity that I started to see that clearly.
I started to question everything.
What happened to me.
What I believed about it.
What I believed about myself.
What was driving my behavior.
And I started to change.
Not overnight.
But steadily.
And over time, I proved to myself that I didn’t have to be who they said I was.
I am who I choose to be.
Now I’m in this position where I’ve come back into proximity with Charlie.
Handling her care.
Sorting through her life.
Talking to people who know her.
Learning things I never knew.
And I’m seeing her differently.
Not all at once.
But enough.
And I had this moment where I recognized—she’s a person I did a really good job of turning into a monster in my story.
The exact same thing she had done to me.
Just in reverse.
And even though I could line up plenty of evidence for why I felt the way I felt… I couldn’t unsee the parallel.
I knew how wrong she had been about me.
And I had to face the reality that I could be just as wrong about her.
Enough to realize that the story I’ve been holding onto—I was raised by monsters—isn’t true.
And letting that go is harder than I expected.
Because that story has been with me for a long time.
It justified my pain.
It made sense of everything.
It gave me something to push against.
But I don’t feel the need to push against anything anymore.
I don’t want to keep doing that.
I don’t want to keep seeing myself as someone who had it rough and dragging that identity into everything I do.
I don’t want to keep rehearsing that line.
I don’t want to keep practicing that pain.
I’m looking to make peace with every part of my history.
Because I can’t say I love myself and still hate my life.
What I’m starting to understand is this:
People do things that cause harm.
Real harm.
Deep harm.
But that doesn’t make them monsters.
It makes them human.
Human with their own history.
Their own pain.
Their own limitations.
Their own dysfunction.
And I know that’s true.
Because it was true of me.
There were times in my life where my behavior was chaotic.
Destructive.
Unrecognizable.
And even then, I thought I was doing the best I could.
Even when my best was a pile of hot garbage. I was still doing my best.
So if that’s true of me— then it may just be true of them too.
Charlie is not a monster.
The people who abused me are not monsters. None of them.
They are people who were capable of doing monstrous things.
That distinction matters to me. Because if I keep calling them monsters, I’m still relating to it like a wounded child. Still name-calling. Still trying to make it make sense in a way that keeps me diminished because of it.
And I’m no longer interested in any of that.
I don’t need to continue walking around wearing that wound.
They’re not monsters. They’re people.
People who did real damage. People who made choices I wouldn’t make. People who caused pain that took me years to work through.
But still people.
And seeing it that way doesn’t excuse anything. It just means I don’t have to keep dragging that version of the story with me.
I don’t need villains in my story.
And I don’t need to be a victim in order for my story to make sense.
I was not raised by monsters.
I was raised by people who were deeply unhealthy and deeply human at the same time.
And I am not a monster either.
I never was.
I was a hurt person trying to survive something I didn’t understand.
Doing the best I could with what I had.
And now I get to do something different.
I get to let it go.
Not because it didn’t matter.
Not because it didn’t hurt.
But because I don’t need it anymore.
-Sunny
