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Marie

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A gap. Ok, a rather wide one. In my memory.

A growing awareness that large parts of my childhood felt inaccessible to me. I knew my past had shaped me. I knew my nervous system carried something significant.

I knew my relationships reflected it.
My self-worth reflected it.
My hypervigilance reflected it.
My life reflected it.

Yet whenever I tried to look backward, I found fog.

There were memories, of course.
Fragments.
Scenes.
Moments in time.

But there were also entire stretches of childhood/teenage years that felt strangely out of reach. At the time, I didn’t understand why. The years directly after a significant emotional and traumatic event in my life were the memories were gone, and I knew it wasn’t a good thing.

How could I know I had been profoundly impacted by my childhood while simultaneously struggling to access so much of it?

I eventually brought those questions into therapy, where a trauma-informed therapist helped me understand and changed the way I viewed traumatic memories.

Trauma does not always disappear.
It fragments.

Let me explain,

When we experience chronic stress, emotional neglect, scapegoating, fear, criticism, unpredictability, or other overwhelming experiences, the brain is not focused on creating a perfect historical record.

It is focused on survival.
A nervous system isn’t asking: “How do I remember this thirty years from now?”
It’s asking: “How do I make it through today?”

So experiences that are overwhelming, too painful, too confusing, or too unsupported can become compartmentalized.

The memories don’t necessarily vanish.
They become disconnected.
The emotions may remain while the details fade.
The details may remain while the emotions disappear.

Sometimes, only a vague sense that something wasn’t right survives.
My memories were not lost; they were fragmented, protected, softened, and held at a distance.

Stored in a way that allowed me to continue functioning while carrying experiences that were undeniably psychologically fracturing.

Because we don’t get to pause life while trauma is happening.

We still have to go to school or work.
We still have to adapt
We still have to survive.

So the mind does what it can.

It separates what cannot yet be carried consciously from what is required to keep moving forward.

We suppress it, move on too quickly without resolving the emotional/somatic impact.

That is why traumatic memories stay hidden.

It isn’t because these experiences weren’t real.
And you aren’t making things up.

Please know, this is completely normal, and the protective brain/nervous system functions more than any conscious decision you made. This wasn’t presented as an option for you. It was decided for you.

But because the experiences were never fully processed, understood, witnessed, validated, or supported when they occurred.

The memories remained.
The story remained.
But the connections between the pieces became harder to access.

And then, over time, something began to happen.
The pieces started finding each other.

Not all at once. It’s a slow neural process of memory defragmenting.
There wasn’t a dramatic breakthrough moment where everything suddenly came rushing back. It was slow.

Painfully slow.

More like a gradual reopening of doors that had been closed for a very long time.
A memory.
A feeling.
A conversation.
A journal entry.
A pattern that suddenly made sense.

It was a slow, methodical, experiential reopening.
It was a gradual reconstruction of a story that had always been there.

A surprising part of that process was realizing that as my own memories became clearer, many of the family members around me seemed to have access to fewer and fewer of theirs.

I started understanding experiences that had shaped my life, I found myself sitting across from family members who genuinely seemed disconnected from those same events. Conversations that felt significant to me appeared insignificant to them.

Experiences that altered the course of my development were remembered as minor incidents or not remembered at all.

I’ll admit now, I believed then it was possibly intentional denial. Now I think something more complicated was happening. I’m certain of it. Trauma affects memory differently for different people. Every child occupies a different role within a family system.

The scapegoat experiences the family differently from the golden child.
The lost child experiences it differently from the hero. The child absorbing blame experiences the family differently from the child receiving protection.

Even siblings raised under the same roof can walk away carrying entirely different versions of reality. This is very normal for there to be two truths of very different lived experiences within the same household and parent relationship.

One remembers the criticism. Another remembers the vacations. One remembers fear. Another remembers belonging. One remembers surviving. Another remembers feeling safe.

Neither experience necessarily invalidates the other. Both can be true.
But they are not the same experience.

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If you’re reading this and thinking, “Well, I don’t remember much of my childhood either,” I’d encourage you to get curious.

Not alarmed.
Just curious.

One of the biggest misconceptions people have about trauma is that if something significant happened, they should remember all of it.

Unfortunately, the brain did not consult us before implementing its survival strategies.

Many people who experienced chronic emotional neglect, family dysfunction, bullying, scapegoating, emotional abuse, or relational trauma remember surprisingly little. Not simply because difficult things happened, but because nobody helped them process, understand, validate, or make sense of those experiences afterward.

In Therapy, I learned to ask myself:

“Why does my nervous system react as though something happened?”

For years, I didn’t find dramatic, pivotal memories. I was finding clues.

• Why did criticism hit me like a freight train?

• Why did I automatically assume problems were my fault?

• Why did I feel responsible for managing everyone else’s emotions?

• Why did certain family interactions leave me emotionally wrecked for days?

• Why did I struggle to trust my own perceptions?

• Why did my body seem to know things my conscious mind couldn’t fully explain?

Research on trauma consistently shows that experiences that are not processed, witnessed, validated, understood, or repaired don’t simply disappear.

They remain stored in the nervous system. They influence our relationship patterns, emotional reactions, and the beliefs we develop about ourselves.

So if parts of your childhood feel foggy, I wouldn’t immediately assume nothing happened.

I’d get curious.
What do you know?
What do you not know?
What stories were you told about your childhood?
Do those stories match how you actually felt?

Think about your younger self, what emotions show up first?

• Fear?

• Loneliness?

• Confusion?

• Responsibility?

• Shame?

• What happened when you were hurt?

• Who comforted you?

• Who helped you make sense of difficult experiences?

• Who repaired the relationship after the conflict?

• Who helped restore a sense of safety?

And if the answer is “nobody,”
Don’t rush past this.

Because, from an attachment and trauma perspective, that answer matters.
A lot.

The truth is, healing isn’t about recovering every memory. It’s about understanding why your nervous system adapted the way it did.

The memories may come, or they may not.
But the patterns are usually sitting right in front of us.

Quietly waiting for us to ask better questions.

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Marie O,
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But today, I recognize those thoughts for what they are: echoes of survival, not reflections of truth.

This essay is about that journey.

The long process of learning that every time we choose not to abandon ourselves, we take another step toward believing what trauma spent years trying to convince us wasn’t true.

That we belong here.

Just as we are.

Learning I Had the Right to Belong
The truth is, sometimes I still struggle with believing in my own worth.
Let me explain.
One of the hardest things I had to do in recovery was slowly retrain my nervous system to allow me to exist.
That may sound dramatic, but after years of complex trauma, undiagnosed AuDHD and the disconnect in so many relational connections, I had developed a deeply ingrained belief that I didn’t have the same right to exist, belong, take up space, have needs, make mistakes, or be fully myself the way other people seemed to.

Trauma didn’t create that belief overnight.
Neurodivergence didn’t create that belief overnight.
It was built through experiences that taught me that connection was fragile, belonging was conditional, vulnerability was often dangerous, and some type of relational betrayal or abandonment was always waiting nearby.
I learned to fear rejection in all its forms.
I learned to fear betrayal because I experienced so many forms relationally.

I learned that showing my full self often came with consequences.

So I adapted

I adapted as a response to what I had experienced.
I became willing to do almost anything to maintain the connection.
I tolerated things that violated my own sense of self.
I ignored my own needs.
I overextended myself.
I accepted treatment that hurt me and thought that was love, friendship, real.
I abandoned parts of myself in order to remain attached to people I was afraid to lose.

And that is where the belief was born.
Not a single one of those people explicitly told me I didn’t matter.
But because over time, I unconsciously learned that everyone else’s needs, feelings, secrets, or hidden motivations mattered more than mine.

The nervous system eventually draws its own conclusions.
If I must continually sacrifice myself to stay connected, then perhaps I am the sacrifice.
If I must earn my place over and over again, then perhaps I don’t truly belong.
If being loved requires abandoning myself, then perhaps my authentic self is unlovable.

The hardest part is that trauma doesn’t stop there.
Over time, I lowered the bar.
Then I lowered it again.
And again.
I tolerated more and more.
Accepted less and less.
Made excuses for things that violated my values, my boundaries, and my sense of self. Participated in behavior I now profoundly regret.

With each compromise, I became a little more disconnected from myself and a little more convinced that somehow I deserved it.
Trauma does that to people.

It slowly teaches you that survival is more important than self-respect.
That attachment is more important than authenticity.
That keeping the connection matters more than protecting yourself.
Until one day you find yourself accepting things you never would have imagined tolerating years before.
Not because you are weak.
Not because you wanted it.
But because your nervous system became convinced that losing yourself was safer than losing the relationship.
That is how a person develops the belief that they don’t have the same right to belong here as everyone else.
Not because it is true.
Because they spent years surviving inside relationships that taught them their existence was conditional.

One of the most difficult parts of my recovery was realizing that I couldn’t simply think my way out of those beliefs.
I couldn’t logic my way out.
I couldn’t read my way out. The sticky note affirmations were useless.
I couldn’t positive-think my way out.
I had to challenge them.
I had to test them.
I had to gather evidence.
I had to have several people, and a tremendous amount of data, repeatedly demonstrate that the stories my nervous system believed were no longer aligned with reality.
Even then, it wasn’t a matter of suddenly believing something different.

It was a matter of slowly asking my nervous system to consider a new possibility.
The possibility that I matter.
The possibility that I belong.
The possibility that my existence does not need to be earned.
The possibility that I never had to become smaller to deserve love.
The possibility that I was not the problem I spent so many years trying to fix.
That process deserves an essay all by itself.
Because teaching a traumatized nervous system that it is safe to belong is very different from simply understanding the concept intellectually.

The mind can understand it long before the body believes it.
For me, healing wasn’t just learning new information.
It was teaching my nervous system that I had the same right to be here as everyone else.
The same right to take up space.
The same right to have needs.
The same right to set boundaries.
The same right to make mistakes.
The same right to be imperfect.
The same right to belong. to feel, to love, to be loved.

Not becoming someone new.
Not fixing my past and having all the answers.
But slowly returning to the person who existed before trauma convinced me I had to earn my place in the world.

I still have moments when those old beliefs resurface.
Moments when I question my worth.
Moments when I wonder whether I belong.

But today, I recognize those thoughts for what they are: echoes of survival, not reflections of truth.

And every time I choose not to abandon myself, I take another step toward believing what trauma spent years trying to convince me wasn’t true.

That I belong here.
Just as I am.

And for you, reading this.
Say this to yourself aloud or silently.

“Today I recognize the thoughts of not belonging, not being worthy are echoes of survival, not reflections of the truth”.

Holding this with you.

Marie

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Recommended Reading:

Ellen Tift - There’s a word for that - She expands on where internalized worthlessness comes from and offers ways to retrain the brain, nervous system, and soul that helped me on my own journey.

Here’s the Book Link -Book Link HERE

BOOK: There’s A Word For That- Understanding Complex Trauma When You Feel Broken, Lost, and Confused: A Survivor’s Guide to CPTSD and Finding Your Way Back to Yourself

by Ellen Tift (Author)

Then I experienced a profound loss of connections who were important to me lost in a rapid succession of a few years. Complex grief entered my life.

Not the kind of loss you “get through.” The kind that stops your life for a while. The kind that changes the landscape of your world.

What I didn’t understand at the time was that grief wasn’t the only thing I was carrying. The loss overwhelmed my nervous system’s capacity to cope. And when that capacity dropped, old trauma began surfacing in ways I couldn’t ignore.

Many people assume trauma symptoms appear immediately after a traumatic event. Sometimes they do. But sometimes trauma stays partially hidden until a later crisis, loss, or period of chronic or prolonged stress reduces the nervous system’s ability to keep everything contained.

The signs can be subtle at first. Here are a few sneaky ones to self-reflect on: I would recommend reflecting on this once a week for a month.
You may be surprised by what clarity may come to you from just seeking inward instead of externally.

• You may notice that your emotional reactions become larger than the situation seems to warrant.

• You may feel overwhelmed by normal responsibilities that once felt manageable.

• You may find yourself increasingly anxious, irritable, exhausted, numb, disconnected, or emotionally/relationally shut down or shut off.

• You may struggle to concentrate. Your memory may seem worse. Small decisions may feel surprisingly difficult.

• You may become hypervigilant without realizing it. Always scanning. Always anticipating problems. Never fully relaxing. cPTSD experienced bodies lock in this place subconsciously.

• You may start avoiding situations, conversations, places, or feelings that create discomfort.

• Sleep may become more difficult. Rest may no longer feel restorative.

• Relationships may feel harder to navigate. You may withdraw from people you care about or become unusually sensitive to rejection, criticism, conflict, or abandonment.

• You may find yourself relying more heavily on coping strategies that help you escape discomfort, whether that’s overworking, scrolling, binge-watching, overeating, substance use, isolation, perfectionism, or constantly staying busy.

Underneath all of these experiences is often the same reality:
Your nervous system is working harder than before.
It’s carrying more load than it can comfortably manage.

For some people, trauma memories begin to surface directly through widely different ways. It can vary, but look out for: Flashbacks, nightmares, intense or intrusive thoughts, body sensations, or emotional states that seem disconnected from present circumstances.

For others, the signs are less obvious. They simply feel like they are becoming a different version of themselves. Less resilient. Less capable. More reactive. More exhausted.

At this stage, most of us think we just need a good weekend nap. or some of us may recognize things are getting out of our control and start to seek support.

What is happening?
It’s a nervous system that no longer has enough reserve capacity to keep old wounds buried.

This doesn’t automatically mean someone has PTSD or acute symptoms like c-PTSD. Only qualified professionals can make those determinations.

But something important deserves attention. 👇

If you recognize yourself in these experiences, don’t dismiss them because you’re still functioning. That is exactly what I did for far too long. The bill for that came years later with heavy interest.

Many trauma survivors continue functioning long after their nervous systems begin signaling distress.

Right now, the important step is simply recognizing that what you’re experiencing has meaning.

Your reactions are information.
Your symptoms are information.

Sometimes the nervous system isn’t malfunctioning.

It’s carrying something unresolved that needs to be acknowledged, understood, and witnessed before it can be transformed into self-advocacy and wisdom.

A Simple Capacity Check

Sometimes the most important warning signs aren’t found in a score, a diagnosis, or a questionnaire. Sometimes they’re found in what your life quietly looks like compared to six months ago.

Ask yourself:

• Is my recovery time longer than it used to be?

• Am I more emotionally reactive?

• Am I withdrawing from people more often?

• Am I forgetting simple things?

• Am I tolerating less noise, stimulation, uncertainty, or demand?

• Am I getting sick more frequently?

• Am I spending more time in survival mode than in curiosity, creativity, connection, or joy?

If you notice several of these increasing, your nervous system may be carrying more load than your current capacity can support—even if you’re still functioning, showing up, and getting things done.

This is more important for people navigating trauma recovery, autistic burnout, chronic stress, or late-diagnosed neurodivergence. Many of us become so skilled at pushing through that we mistake functioning for thriving.

In my experience, loss of capacity is often a more meaningful measure than stress itself.

A person can score “moderate stress” on a screening tool while their nervous system is already signaling fracturing overload through exhaustion, irritability, shutdowns, cognitive difficulties, or worse yet, skill regression, health issues, emotional volatility, or a shrinking ability to engage with everyday life.

Your nervous system is not asking you to be stronger. It may be asking you to pay attention.

Sometimes what we call stress is actually a signal. A signal that something unresolved needs to be acknowledged, understood, and witnessed. A signal that your body is carrying more than it was ever meant to carry alone.

And sometimes the path forward begins not with trying harder, but with listening more closely to what your nervous system has been trying to say all along.

That realization changed the course of my life.

Also, the PTSD Test link below is the USVA self-test for PTSD, recognizing this is primarily geared towards service members, and not framed clinically for cPTSD or other co-occurring conditions. It can be used as a reflection guide to help you identify if it may be time to seek support. Nobody deserves to suffer. You should NOT be suffering. If you are. There is hope, and there is help out there.

PTSD Test Link

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Disclaimer: I hold trauma-informed certifications and draw from extensive education, research, and my own lived experience navigating recovery, healing, and belonging. I am not a licensed mental health counselor, therapist, psychologist, psychiatrist, or medical provider. The information shared here is intended for educational and informational purposes only and should not be considered a substitute for professional mental health or medical care.

This reflection explores the lived experience of a family scapegoated child who became a family scapegoated adult, and what happens when exclusion becomes normalized, silence protects a system, and absence is quietly woven into the family structure.

For those who have stepped away from family gatherings to protect their well-being, you may recognize some of these dynamics.

Every holiday required me to walk into a room where my mother treated me as though my presence was an inconvenience.

The behavior was never dramatic. It lived in sighs, facial expressions, emotional withdrawal, dismissiveness, and an unmistakable lack of welcome. The message was rarely spoken aloud, yet it was consistently communicated.

I felt it every time I walked through the door when she was there.

What made it particularly painful was that this did not occur in isolation.

My Siblings saw it.
Their spouses saw it.
My nieces and nephews grew up watching it.

Year after year, holiday after holiday, they witnessed a grandmother relating to their aunt in ways that communicated distance, disapproval, and exclusion.

Nobody stopped the process. Nobody named it. Nobody asked what it was like to be on the receiving end of it.

The family simply learned to organize itself around the reality of it. Normalized it.

Over time, I found myself in an impossible position. I wanted relationships with my siblings and kids. I wanted to be part of family gatherings and family memories.

But participation came with a cost.

To attend meant exposing myself once again to a relational environment that felt emotionally unsafe. It meant sitting at tables where the tension was visible but never discussed. It meant carrying the burden of everyone else’s comfort while suppressing my own experience.

As the years passed, the cost became too great.
I stopped taking time off work to attend holidays.
I stopped putting myself in situations that left me depleted for days afterward.
I stopped asking my nervous system to tolerate what my mind could no longer ignore.

By that point, I had years of working through family systems, trauma, scapegoating, emotional neglect, projection, and intergenerational dynamics. What began as an attempt to understand my own experience became an education in the psychological processes that shape families.

The more I learned, the less I could pretend not to see.
The more I learned, the harder it became to dismiss what I was seeing.
I began recognizing patterns that once felt confusing.

I’m autistic and see things others do not. I saw this before I had language for it.
I’m seeing it so clearly now.

I saw how entire families can organize themselves around an unspoken narrative.
I saw how children learn who is safe to question and who is not.
I saw how exclusion can become normalized when it happens slowly enough.
I saw how people adapt to relational distortions until they no longer notice them.

Most of all, I saw how silence protects a system.

Once I identified and understood these dynamics, it became increasingly painful attending and participating because my awareness grew in spaces I didn’t expect to see. It was becoming painful and impacting my nervous system. I was showing signs of complex trauma while they opened presents.

The family could continue treating the tension as normal.

I could not.
So I withdrew.
Not because I stopped loving my family.

Not because I desired distance.

I withdrew because remaining connected required me to repeatedly endure something that was harming me.

The hardest realization came afterward.

When I stopped attending, very little appeared to change.
The holidays continued.
The gatherings continued.
The photographs continued.
The traditions continued.

What I eventually realized was that the family had already adapted to my exclusion long before I physically stopped showing up.

My absence was not the disruption.

My absence had become part of the structure.

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#FamilySystems #ComplexTrauma #Scapegoating #EmotionalNeglect #FamilyDynamics #HealingJourney #IntergenerationalTrauma #TraumaRecovery #EmotionalHealth #SelfAwareness

Disclaimer: My work is informed by trauma-support certifications, ongoing education, research, and lived experience. I am not a licensed therapist, psychologist, psychiatrist, or medical provider. The perspectives shared here are intended for education, reflection, and conversation and are not a substitute for professional mental health or medical care.

Understanding Is Cognitive. Reconciliation Is Relational.

Understanding is the ability to recognize what happened.
Reconciliation requires something more. It requires a willingness to engage with the emotional and relational consequences of what happened.

A sibling can intellectually understand that scapegoating occurred and still be unwilling to face their own participation in it, for reasons unrelated to malicious intent. It’s a subconscious family projection process; a phenomenon that happens in families that scapegoat.

A sibling may acknowledge that harm occurred but remain unable to tolerate the guilt, grief, or identity disruption required for repair. It is a mountainous climb to balance the relational equinimity in the family system. Most families do not have the capacity or skills to be willing or even capable of this.

Understanding opens a door. Reconciliation requires walking through it.

I think there is a thoughtful observation here that is worth exploring carefully.

One reason sibling wounds can feel more difficult to process than parental wounds is that the expectations are very different.

Most adults eventually understand, at least intellectually, that parents are imperfect people with histories, limitations, injuries, and blind spots of their own. The parental relationship is inherently hierarchical. There is an acknowledgment that parents hold power and that power can be misused.

It’s my experience that Sibling relationships occupy a different psychological space.

Siblings are often experienced as peers, companions, witnesses, and fellow survivors of the same (But different) dysfunctional environment. They are the people who were “there” when things happened (or they weren’t). Because of that, many scapegoated adults carry an implicit expectation that their siblings should have seen what was happening, should have understood, or should have provided protection, solidarity, or recognition of the impacted harm.

When that does not happen, the injury can feel uniquely devastating and force the scapegoated sibling to tolerate the abusive environment to remain connected to the entire family unit as a whole. It comes at a very high cost. It left traumatic grief for me.

For neurodivergent scapegoated adults, there may be additional layers. My own RSD (Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria) was triggered by the continuation of projective patterns late into adulthood.

Many others spend significant portions of their lives studying social systems, patterns, motivations, and inconsistencies in an effort to make sense of experiences that never quite fit the explanations they were given. Once they encounter concepts like family scapegoating, trauma, attachment, or family systems theory, the parental dynamic often becomes easier to map. There is a clear power differential. There are identifiable incentives. There are recognizable patterns of projection, emotional immaturity, control, or image management.

The sibling relationship is often far less tidy.
The sibling was not simply an authority figure.
They were also a child to the same parents.
They may have been conditioned by the same system.
They may have genuinely cared about the scapegoated sibling while simultaneously participating in their marginalization.
They may have repeated family narratives without fully understanding their consequences.
They may have benefited from the system while also being constrained by it.

These contradictions make the sibling relationship harder to categorize and harder to grieve, at least it was for me.

The grief itself is often disenfranchised.

Society has language for parental abuse, neglect, and elected estrangement. There is far less language for grieving a sibling who is still alive, who may not view the behaviors of the family as destructive, and who may continue to require participation in the system that excludes safety and inclusion in it.

The loss is ambiguous.

The person is still present.
The relationship exists in some form.

Yet the hoped-for bond, the unconditional trust, the sense of having someone who truly witnessed your experience, may feel irretrievably broken.

That creates a particular form of ongoing grief:

grieving not only what happened, but grieving what should have existed and never did.

For some scapegoated adults, the deepest wound is not that a parent scapegoated them. It is that a sibling who occupied a position of relative safety within the family system never stepped out of the family narrative long enough to recognize what was happening, or to repair the rupture.

The resulting trauma is not merely about childhood events. It is about the collapse of trust in a relationship that was expected to be reciprocal.

And when the sibling continues, consciously or unconsciously, to display relational patterns learned from the parent, such as dismissal, minimization, denial of harm, selective empathy, image management, triangulation, or resistance to accountability, the nervous system may experience this not as a historical wound but as an ongoing one. The body indeed keeps the score.

What makes healing especially difficult is that the grief often has nowhere to go. There is no funeral. No public acknowledgment of loss. No social ritual for mourning the siblings, cousins, or family members who are physically present but emotionally unavailable to the reality of what occurred, because it’s never been allowed to be spoken.

In that sense, many scapegoated adults may find that healing from parental scapegoating involves understanding the system, while healing from sibling betrayal involves mourning the relationship they believed existed, the relationship they hoped could exist, and the years of trust that were lost in between.

Family scapegoating did not only distort how one family member was seen. It altered how everyone related to one another. It fractured trust, interrupted attachment, constrained authenticity, and narrowed the possibilities for connection across generations. The losses were not distributed equally, but they were distributed widely. Repair begins when someone becomes willing to look directly at those costs. Not to assign blame, but to understand what sacrificed in service of maintaining the narrative. When truth becomes more important than protecting the image, reconciliation, however imperfect, becomes possible.

That is often not primarily a problem of understanding.
It is a problem of grief trapped in generational silence.

If a parent models estrangement, cutoff, unresolved conflict, and relational rupture, the children in the family learn something profound about the relationships, whether conscious or below consciousness. (see below diagram)

Those lessons are not merely beliefs.
They become embodied expectations.
They become nervous-system predictions about what relationships are.

In that sense, even if siblings remember events differently, both may have been shaped by the same relational environment.

One sibling may carry memories of scapegoating.
Another may carry memories of pressure to conform.
Another may carry memories of fear, avoidance, or divided loyalties.

The experiences are not identical.
But they can all be real simultaneously.

Here’s the hard truth. The injury is not limited to the scapegoat.
The entire family becomes organized around a distortion.
Everyone adapts.
Everyone loses something.
The losses are not equal.
But they are distributed throughout the system.

What most scapegoated siblings will tell you:

I lost my siblings.
I lost access to nephews/neices.
I lost access to cousins. extended family.
Entire branches of relationships were cut off.

This wasn’t only just traumatic grief, but it was relational deprivation. It was a form of social and attachment losses that altered my nervous system at a pretty young age.
Kenneth Doka describes disenfranchised grief as grief that is not socially recognized, validated, or publicly supported. The grief associated with family scapegoating often falls squarely into this category.

The Downstream Effects of
Family Scapegoating Projection

Perhaps one of the most important principles of genuine reconciliation is:

Healing does not require identical memories. It requires enough safety to allow multiple realities to coexist without one person’s experience being erased or blamed.

The tragedy of many scapegoating family systems is that they train family members to do the opposite. They train people to choose a single approved reality or invisible narrative and defend it.

Repair often begins when someone becomes willing to say:

“My experience was real. Your experience was real. We may not have understood each other at the time, but neither of us should have to disappear for the other to exist.”

One of the most meaningful developments in my own healing has been witnessing a sibling begin to confront realities that were once too threatening to examine. For much of our lives, protecting the family image appeared more important than understanding the human cost of maintaining it. The family narrative offered certainty, belonging, and protection from uncomfortable truths. Challenging it carried risks that were emotional, relational, and deeply personal.

What I see now is a sibling standing at the edge of that realization. They are facing the possibility that preserving the family’s preferred story may have come at a high cost to the people who lived within it. That is not a small undertaking. It requires questioning long-held assumptions, revisiting painful memories, and confronting the possibility that harm occurred even when no one intended to create it.

This recognition does not undo the past. It does not automatically repair the web of relational fractures that family scapegoating created.

It does not restore lost years with nephews, nieces, cousins, extended family members, or relationships that were narrowed or cut off while the family narrative remained unchallenged, and the parent who required all of it remained in the middle with no accountability. Some losses may never be fully recoverable.

What it does offer is something equally important: space for reality to exist.

It creates the possibility of acknowledging that sustained scapegoating and chronic invalidation imposed an unfair burden. It allows room to recognize that repeated dismissal of a person’s perceptions, emotions, and lived experience can produce profound self-doubt. Over time, this does not remain merely an emotional wound. It becomes embodied. The nervous system learns to question its own signals, memories, judgments, and perceptions of reality.

Recognition cannot erase those effects. But it can interrupt their continuation.

The goal of repair is not to determine whose experience was correct and whose was mistaken. The goal is to create enough safety for multiple experiences to be witnessed without requiring one person’s reality to disappear for another person’s to survive. My experience of scapegoating was real. The ways the system shaped other family members were also real. Both truths can exist simultaneously.

This may be where reconciliation actually begins. Not with perfect agreement, and not with a complete accounting of every injury, but with a willingness to value truth over image and understanding over protection of the narrative. When someone becomes willing to stop defending the story and start examining its consequences, a different future becomes possible. The past remains unchanged, but the pattern no longer has to continue unquestioned into the next generation.

There is a path forward,

Marie

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Sources & Literature

Family scapegoating is increasingly understood not as a problem located within a single individual, but as a systemic process that organizes family relationships around projection, blame, and role assignment (Mandeville, 2020; Bowen, 1978).

Foundational Sources

• Mandeville, Rebecca C. (2020). Family Scapegoating Abuse (FSA) Research and Education.
  https://www.familyscapegoathealing.com

• Bowen, Murray. (1978). Family Therapy in Clinical Practice. Jason Aronson.

• Bowen Family Systems Theory: Sibling Position Study.
  https://thebowencenter.org/theory

• Doka, Kenneth J. (1989). Disenfranchised Grief: Recognizing Hidden Sorrow. Lexington Books.

Researchers, Advocates & Educators

Rebecca C. Mandeville, MA

Clinical researcher and pioneer of Family Scapegoating Abuse (FSA). Her work has been instrumental in bringing recognition and understanding to family scapegoating dynamics.

Website:

https://www.familyscapegoathealing.com and her Substack

Bridgette Hamstead

Researcher, advocate, and educator whose work explores neurodivergence, family scapegoating, and complex trauma.

Website:

https://www.bridgettehamstead.com and her Substack

Nate Postlethwait

Author, speaker, and trauma recovery advocate known for his work on family dysfunction, emotional abuse, and healing.

Website:

https://www.natewrites.com and his Substack

Additional Resources

Jay Reid, LPCC

Jay Reid provides extensive educational content, videos, and recovery resources for survivors of narcissistic abuse and family scapegoating.

Website:

https://jreidtherapy.com

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@jreidtherapy

Jerry Wise

Family systems coach and educator specializing in self-differentiation, family dysfunction, and emotional maturity.

Website:

https://www.jerrywiserelationshipsystems.com

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@JerryWiseRelationshipSystems

Recommended Resource:
“Self-Differentiation Work to Break Free from Dysfunctional Family Patterns”
https://www.jerrywiserelationshipsystems.com

I use AI as a support tool for graphic design, research assistance, editorial organization, and investigative work. AI also serves as an accessibility aid that helps me manage and navigate my AuDHD. All published content reflects my own judgment, lived experience, and final editorial review.

If you have concerns about my use of AI, that’s your prerogative. I will continue to use available tools that improve accessibility, efficiency, and the quality of my work.

One of the most common misconceptions about therapy is that you need to tell your whole story during the first session. In reality, the first goal is not disclosure.
The first goal is safety.

A good therapist will understand that trust takes time. Early sessions are an opportunity to learn whether you feel comfortable, respected, and understood. They’re also a chance to ask questions, discuss your goals, and determine whether the relationship feels like a good fit.

I created this guide to help you navigate those first conversations with more confidence. Inside you’ll find questions to ask a potential therapist, ways to introduce difficult topics without going too deep too soon, and a few green and red flags to consider along the way.

You deserve support without having to earn it through oversharing. Take your time. Go at a pace that feels safe. The right therapeutic relationship is built on trust, not pressure.

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About Me

I’m a writer, researcher, and lifelong learner exploring the intersection of trauma, healing, identity, neurodivergence, and what it means to become ourselves after years of surviving.

Like many people who find their way here, I’ve spent time untangling the effects of trauma, questioning old narratives, and learning that many of the things I once viewed as personal flaws were actually adaptations, survival strategies, or misunderstood parts of who I am.

This space is for thoughtful conversations about trauma, PTSD, cPTSD, grief, recovery, late-discovered autism and ADHD, masking, burnout, relationships, self-acceptance, and the complicated process of healing. It’s also a place for curiosity, reflection, and the occasional realization that maybe it isn’t “just your trauma” after all.

I especially enjoy connecting with trauma survivors, late-diagnosed AuDHD adults, neurodivergent individuals, LGBTQIA+ community members, allies, mental health professionals, caregivers, and anyone interested in understanding themselves and others with greater compassion.

If something you’ve read here resonates with you, I’d love to hear your perspective. Feel free to explore, subscribe, leave a comment, or connect with me through the links below.

Healing doesn’t happen in isolation. Sometimes it starts with finding people who speak a language you didn’t know you needed

Here’s to building that together,

Marie

The more I learned about Family Systems Theory, trauma, Autism, ADHD, OCD, attachment, and nervous system regulation, the more I find myself wondering: What if some of our families weren’t simply dysfunctional? What if they were carrying generations of unrecognized neurodivergence, untreated trauma, unresolved grief, mental health struggles, addiction, emotional immaturity, chronic stress, and survival adaptations that nobody had language for? What if nobody fully understood what they were looking at?

As a late-diagnosed Autistic woman, I’ve spent a lot of time looking backward through my own family tree. Not searching for villains. Not looking for someone to blame. Looking for understanding. Looking for patterns. Looking for the things that suddenly make more sense now. The sensory sensitivities, the emotional overwhelm, the anxiety, the depression, the addiction, the perfectionism, the people-pleasing, the emotional shutdowns, the conflict avoidance, the family secrets, the scapegoating, the isolation.

And once you start looking through both a Family Systems lens and a neurodivergent lens, it becomes difficult not to notice the patterns. What if the grandfather everyone described as difficult was actually Autistic? What if the aunt everyone called dramatic was living with untreated ADHD and chronic anxiety? What if the family member who drank too much was trying to quiet a nervous system that never felt safe? What if generations of people were struggling with things they could feel but couldn’t explain? What if many of the coping mechanisms that hurt us today began as survival strategies decades ago?

These questions don’t erase harm. They don’t excuse abuse. They don’t remove accountability. But they do provide context. And context often reduces shame.

For me, one of the most healing questions has become: How did this happen? Not who caused it. Not who is to blame. How did this happen? How did these patterns develop? How did they get passed down? How did entire family systems organize themselves around coping methods that no longer serve anyone? And perhaps the bigger question: What do we do now?

Because awareness without action only gets us so far. If families are willing to try, I think healing begins with curiosity. Not blame. Not a diagnosis. Not forcing everyone to agree on the past. Curiosity. A willingness to ask questions. A willingness to learn. A willingness to consider that multiple experiences of the same family can exist at the same time. A willingness to acknowledge harm without immediately defending intent. A willingness to recognize that understanding behavior is not the same thing as excusing behavior. A willingness to allow people to change. And perhaps most importantly, a willingness to grieve.

Because once we begin seeing these patterns, there is often so much grief underneath them. The support that never existed. The diagnoses that never came. The accommodations nobody knew to provide. The relationships that might have looked different. The misunderstandings. The lost years. The generations of people trying desperately to survive while believing something was wrong with them.

I sometimes wonder what would happen if more families were encouraged to explore these conversations together, how much healing could come generationally to everyone.

What if we could examine the roles, adaptations, trauma responses, losses, neurodivergence, coping strategies, and family patterns that may have been influencing generations of people long before anyone had language for them?

Not to excuse harm or erase accountability. But to create understanding.

Maybe healing begins when one person is brave enough to say, “I think there might be more to this story than any of us understood.” Maybe healing begins when we stop asking, “Who is the problem?” and start asking, “What happened to all of us?” Maybe healing begins when we recognize that some of our families were navigating Autism, ADHD, OCD, trauma, grief, addiction, nervous system dysregulation, and mental health challenges long before those words existed in everyday conversations.

Maybe what we inherited wasn’t simply dysfunction. Maybe we inherited generations of people adapting to realities they couldn’t explain. And perhaps the greatest act of compassion is becoming curious enough to understand what those adaptations were trying to accomplish.

We cannot change what previous generations knew. We cannot change what happened. But we can become more curious than defensive. More compassionate than blaming. More interested in understanding than winning. More willing to acknowledge both harm and humanity at the same time.

For me, Family Systems Theory opened a door to asking different questions. As a late-diagnosed Autistic woman, it has also opened the door to exploring the possibility that neurodivergence has been woven throughout my family system for generations. Not as a flaw. Not as a defect. Simply as part of the story. A story that intersects with trauma, grief, resilience, survival, misunderstanding, love, loss, and adaptation.

This understanding gave me freedom to explore without shame or fear.

If you’re beginning to suspect there may be generations of unrecognized Autism, ADHD, trauma, addiction, grief, or family role patterns woven throughout your family tree, you are not alone. More people are asking these questions than ever before.
Not because they’re looking for someone to blame. Because they’re looking for understanding.

I’ve attached a simple Family Systems Theory guide as a place to begin. Maybe it helps you see a few patterns. Maybe it sparks a conversation. Maybe it simply reminds you that your story exists within a much larger story.

And sometimes understanding the system is where healing begins.

With compassion,

Marie

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FamilySystemsTheory #FamilySystems #IntergenerationalTrauma #ComplexTrauma
#CPTSD

There’s something I wish more people understood about trauma recovery, autistic burnout, and nervous system collapse:

Sometimes the first stage of healing is not “processing the trauma.”

It’s stabilizing enough to survive your own life again.

For many of us, especially late-diagnosed neurodivergent adults, chronic capacity-crashers, trauma survivors, and people who spent decades masking, the nervous system has been running in survival mode for so long that the body no longer recognizes its own limits accurately.

You stop noticing exhaustion until you crash.

You stop noticing sensory overload until you melt down or shut down.

You stop noticing emotional overwhelm until you’re in a fit of tears and shaking, panic, illness, insomnia, dissociation, rage, numbness, or collapse.

And because masking teaches you to override yourself constantly, you can become deeply disconnected from your actual capacity thresholds.

Sounding familiar?

Make notes, privately to yourself….

Notes on exactly what you’re terrible at noticing. Yep, just what I said.

And then begin paying close attention to providing nurturing, attentive care to yourself in THOSE areas. Compassionate care to protect the parts of you that are suffering the most right now. This is not only smart, but it will help you show up in the best way, even during a burnout.

This can slowly improve alexithymic conditioning and help you build a small toolbox of internal resources that later provide the infrastructure for longer, more sustained stability.

So before “deep trauma processing” can safely happen, many people first need:

• nervous system stabilization
• sleep restoration
• sensory load reduction
• burnout recovery
• regulation skills
• pacing
• body awareness
• psychoeducation
• safety
• rest
• permission to stop performing survival

This part is the part that doesn’t look like growth, but it actually was significant. This is also where medication management can be vital to stabilization.

So if you’re suffering from autistic/trauma burnout and need to know what part you actually are responsible for, strap in, this may get weird.

Honestly, a lot of the hardest and ugliest work lives here, so I can’t even color it pretty for myself.

The pre-work of healing looks like:

It can look like learning how to notice hunger again.
Learning what overwhelm feels like in your body — and where in the body activation shows up.

Learning the difference between shutdown and rest.
Learning that productivity is not the same thing as what is actually good for you.

Learning that hyper-independence was an adaptation, not proof you were okay.
Because you weren’t.

And that may be painful to accept.

Sometimes healing begins with finally realizing:
Your body has been screaming for years.

And now you’re learning how to hear it.

Marie writes about trauma recovery, autistic burnout, nervous system healing, grief, and the long, nonlinear process of coming back to your center.

Late-diagnosed AuDHD & cPTSD. Clinical Trauma & Peer Support Specialist exploring neurodivergence, trauma recovery, nervous system healing, and burnout — likely in a forest, mid-conversation with moss. The forest is where I learned interoceptive practices, and now I like helping others learn how to reconnect with themselves, too.

Thanks for reading and supporting my work. If this resonated, subscribe to follow along.

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Book Time With Me

Not because I don’t care.
Not because I didn’t mean what I said—it only took me 40+ years to put it into language.

And not because I haven’t craved reconciliation of this wound since I was just a child.

But because I finally understand the pattern well enough to recognize when engagement won’t lead to repair.

And that kind of acceptance… took a lifetime.

Because for most of my life, I stayed in conversations far too long—
trying to explain, clarify, soften, harden, reframe…
hoping that if I just found the right words, something would land.

Something would shift.

This time, I didn’t do that.

I read the response once.

And what stood out wasn’t just what was said—

It was everything that wasn’t.

There was no curiosity.
No attempt to understand.
No reflection of the lived experience I had just carefully, intentionally laid out.

Nothing that said:
Help me understand what this has been like for you.

Instead, the focus shifted.

Away from the impact.
Away from the history.
Away from the patterns I named.

And directly onto how uncomfortable it was to hear it.

If you’ve lived inside certain family systems, you know this moment.

If you’ve lived as the scapegoat within a family projection process, you know how hard this moment can hit when reality finally sinks in.

You name harm—and it’s received as an accusation.
You describe impact—and it’s reframed as an attack.
You ask for repair—and the conversation becomes about your tone, your delivery, your “demands.”

The original experience disappears.

And suddenly, you’re not the person trying to make sense of harm.

You’re the problem.

That’s the moment everything flips.

And if you’ve experienced it enough times, something in your body recognizes it almost instantly.

Not intellectually.

Somatically.

A quiet, familiar knowing:
This isn’t going where I hoped it would go.

What’s taken me years to understand is this:

Sometimes the response doesn’t contradict your experience.

It confirms it.

It shows you, in real time, that the very thing you tried to explain
is still actively happening.

The avoidance.
The deflection.
The inability—or unwillingness—to sit with impact without redirecting it.

And that’s not something you can fix on your own.

I want to be clear about something, because this part matters to me:

It is not lost on me that I have contributed to relational fractures in my life.

I have crossed boundaries.
I have communicated poorly at times—more often than I’d like to admit before I began healing.
I have reacted from places of pain, confusion, and survival.

And I’ve done the work to look at that.

Not casually. Not defensively.

Deeply.

I’ve taken responsibility for my behavior.
I’ve worked to change patterns.

It became clear to me that change only began when I took responsibility and stayed present with what others avoided.

That kind of growth brings a certain wisdom—
but it’s a lonely kind of wisdom to carry.

I’ve learned how to show up differently—
with more awareness, more regulation, more respect for both myself and others.

There’s a softness in me now that didn’t exist before.
And an immense compassion for those who are suffering.

That work has been non-linear.

But it has been real.

Which is exactly why I can say this now, without hesitation:

Repair requires two people.

It requires acknowledgment.
Curiosity.
A willingness to understand impact—not argue with it.
And consistent behavioral change over time.

Not words.
Not “I love you.”
Not distance disguised as peacekeeping.

Behavior.

And when those things aren’t present—
when the same patterns continue to show up, just in slightly different language—

there comes a point where continuing the conversation
is no longer an act of connection.

It becomes an act of self-abandonment.

That’s the line I’m no longer willing to cross.

Not after doing the work to understand how much of my life was shaped by self-abandonment in order to maintain connection.

There’s a particular kind of grief in this space.

Not just grief for what happened—
but for what never happened.

The repair that didn’t come.
The conversations that never deepened.
The understanding that was never reached.

The quiet realization that someone may continue choosing misunderstanding
over the effort it takes to truly understand.

And maybe the hardest part:

Accepting that clarity doesn’t always come through resolution.

Sometimes it comes through repetition.

Through seeing the same pattern play out one more time—
clearly enough that you can no longer override what you’re seeing.

Some responses are not invitations to keep trying.

They’re information.

And painful as it is…

That kind of clarity can also be the thing that finally sets you free.

Because the family projection process doesn’t change
just because the scapegoat begins to heal.

It requires more than one person
to break what was built collectively.

If this meets you somewhere in your own experience—
quietly, internally, in a way you don’t always have words for—

you’re not alone in it.

Not even close.

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If you’re beginning to recognize yourself in this dynamic—what you’re seeing isn’t imagined, and it isn’t isolated.

Family projection and scapegoating are not just personal experiences—they are well-documented patterns within family systems, trauma psychology, and object relations theory.

In many families, one person becomes the carrier of what the system cannot face—unprocessed trauma, shame, dysfunction, or emotional truth. That person is often labeled “the problem,” when in reality, they are the one closest to naming it.

Understanding this doesn’t erase the grief.
But it does return something that was taken:

I’ve spent years reading and studying this work, trying to make sense of my own experience. If you’re finding yourself here, I highly recommend exploring these patterns further—or bringing them into a conversation with a therapist.

• Rejected, Shamed, and Blamed by Rebecca C. Mandeville;

• The Scapegoat by René Girard;

• The Scapegoat Complex by Sylvia Brinton Perera;

• works on Family Systems Theory by Murray Bowen;

• writings on projective identification by Melanie Klein;

• Blind to Betrayal by Jennifer Freyd;

• The Myth of Normal by Gabor Maté;

• Owning Your Own Shadow by Robert A. Johnson

Hugs on your journey,

Marie

#ScapegoatJourney #FamilySystems #FamilyProjection #BetrayalTrauma #cPTSD

I did a personal deep dive in research, reading everything I could get my hands on about trauma, betrayal, and family systems.

Researchers like Jennifer Freyd, Rebecca Mandeville, and many others helped me name something that once just felt like chaos.

It’s more than just “family dysfunction.”
It was a traumatic fracture in trust.

The kind that forms in betrayal trauma—
when the people you depend on for safety
are the same ones who disrupt your ability to trust at all.

Questions I’ve had to sit with… and maybe you have too:

• Have you ever tried to explain your experience… and felt like it just didn’t land?

• Have you ever felt like your reality was minimized, reframed, or quietly dismissed?

• If you’ve stepped outside the family system… what has it cost you?

• And maybe the hardest one—have you been waiting for effort that never came?

That kind of fracture doesn’t repair itself.
It requires something very specific:

Acknowledgment.
Consistent behavior change.
A willingness to step outside the system that caused the harm
and actively participate in rebuilding trust over time.

That’s what healing actually asks for.

I actively practice this level of compassionate love within my 21-year marriage—from a place where we didn’t always know how to do it right. In fact, we participated in patterns that harmed our connection and trust.

We had to learn reparative love.

Repair work is hard.
But effort is healing.
And connection becomes the reward for those willing to stay in it.

But families like this… don’t choose that.

They acknowledge just enough to soften the surface—
“yeah, I messed up”—
but stop far short of anything that would require real change.

I hear this over and over from others who’ve lived this:

The weight gets placed back on the scapegoat—
to fix it, to carry it, to “get over it.”

And your need for trust?
It simply isn’t considered.

The past generation resisted change.

Because real change would mean dismantling the very dynamics
that keep the system intact.

And so the pattern continues.

The scapegoating narrative continues.
The projections continue.
The avoidance of truth continues.

And the person who stepped out—
who did the work, who named it, who tried to repair—
is left holding something almost unbearable:

Hope.

Hope that accountability might still come.
Hope that the projections might finally stop.
Hope that trust might be rebuilt in a real, lived way.

But hope, in a system that refuses repair…
becomes its own kind of pain.

Because you’re not waiting for perfection.
You’re waiting for effort.

And effort isn’t being chosen.

If this resonates, I’m curious:

• What has “hope” looked like for you in your own family system?

• At what point did you start redefining what healing meant—on your terms?

• What has helped you rebuild trust… even if it wasn’t with them?

I’ve done the work to understand this—deeply.
To rebuild trust internally.
To stay present with what most people avoid.

But understanding it doesn’t soften the reality:

The fracture was real.
The repair requires participation.
And without that… the relationship stays broken.

I carry a compassionate burden for anyone else who has experienced scapegoating and the family projection process.

It’s a psychological weight—
one that sends you searching for a never-provided resolution.

#TraumaRecovery
#BetrayalTrauma
#FamilyScapegoating
#ComplexPTSD
#HealingJourney

This is what recovery actually looks like for me—
complex, nonlinear, and still unfolding.

It’s Just My Trauma is where I continue to explore that honestly.
Writing has become part of how I make sense of it… and how I keep growing.

Thank you for being here.

If this spoke to you, I’d love to hear your experience—
or simply know you’re out there.

Leave a comment

Subscribing, commenting, or sharing helps more than you probably realize.

— Marie

Photo: The Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Bryson City, NC

— Nantahala National Forest

Somewhere between a real system collapse
and the kind of growth you don’t get to skip ahead to.

Not the before.
Not the after.

Just… here.

The middle —
where most days are steady enough.
Almost predictable.
Sometimes even a little boring.

And still… anxiety rises anyway.

The slidebacks still happen.
They just don’t take me down the way they used to.

They move through faster now.
Or maybe I move through them.

I’m starting to notice my nervous system before my thoughts rush in to explain it.

There’s a hum underneath things.
Old alarms.
Background noise that doesn’t belong to this moment — but still shows up like it does.

And for the first time in my life,
I’m not trying to outthink it.

I’m not fixing it.
I’m not chasing it down.

I just stay.

Sometimes I sit.
Sometimes I stand.
Sometimes I walk myself back into my body, one small second at a time.

Not perfectly.
Just… intentionally.

I give myself these tiny moments of awareness —
where I let what’s inside me be seen, without rushing it away.

And when I can, I ask:

Am I scared?
Am I angry?
At what… or who?
What didn’t happen that should have?
What was missing when I needed it most?

Not to solve it.
Just to notice.

Because this —
this is what growth actually looks like for me.

It’s not dramatic.
It’s not linear.
It’s not something you can package into a clean “before and after.”

It’s quiet.
It’s repetitive.
It’s learning how to stay.

If you’re here too — somewhere in your own middle —
this is just a small invitation:

Pause for a moment.

Check in, gently.

Let whatever is there exist…
even if only for a few seconds.

You don’t have to unpack it all right now.
You don’t have to make sense of it yet.

You can just hold it —
in whatever kind of safety you’re able to create for yourself today.

We can open those containers later.

For now, even something small —
like catching a spring sunset —
can soften the edges a little.
Can remind your system that not everything is a threat.

Sometimes that’s enough.

Photo: Western North Carolina in spring

It’s Just My Trauma is a reader-supported space shaped by lived experience, nervous system work, and the long, nonlinear path of healing.

If this resonated, you’re welcome to subscribe, share, or just sit with it for a while.

For a long time, I lived at their extremes. One part of me clung to connection wherever I could find it, driven by a nervous system that had learned attachment was synonymous with survival. Another part stayed fused to a deep, unintegrated rage—not explosive, but ever-present—because staying ready to fight once meant staying alive.

From the outside, this looked chaotic. From the inside, it was exhausting.

What changed things wasn’t insight alone. It was a compassionate reframe. I stopped asking what was wrong with me and started asking what had happened that made this necessary. That single reframe shift softened something fundamental. These patterns weren’t failures of character or emotional immaturity. They were intelligent adaptations that had simply outlived their usefulness.

Healing didn’t begin when I tried to override these responses. It began when I honored them without letting them drive. Those parts that clung needed internal safety and consistency, not shame. The part that fought needed proof that the danger had passed, not suppression.

When survival strategies are met with compassion, they loosen. They don’t disappear, but they stop running the system. Attachment becomes choice instead of desperation. Anger becomes information instead of a permanent stance.

Healing begins when we understand that we were never broken—only organized around a survival instinct that needs to be repatterned. And from that viewpoint, integration became possible for me. Shame didn’t get me there. Compassionate reframing helped lead my path.

If any of this feels familiar, you’re not alone.
You might gently ask yourself:

• Which survival response has been running my system most often—attachment, fight, or both?

• What did this part of me need when it first learned to show up this way?

• What would it feel like to thank it, instead of trying to get rid of it?

If you’ve lived inside this pattern too, I’d love to hear what resonated. Shared language has a way of dissolving isolation—and reminding us that healing rarely happens alone.

Hugs on your journey

Marie

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There’s a quiet tension that arises when contact exists, but repair does not.

Texts may resume. Politeness returns. The thread is technically open.
But something essential remains absent: accountability, curiosity, and the willingness to examine what broke safety in the first place.

This is where discernment lives—not confusion.

You can hold three truths at once:

Your perspective is honest, evidence-based, and grounded in lived experience.
The other person has not demonstrated reciprocity, accountability, or relational repair.
Sharing depth in this context would mean offering access that hasn’t been earned.

That isn’t withholding. That’s wisdom.

In trauma-informed spaces, we often talk about grey rocking as a survival strategy—becoming neutral, minimal, non-reactive to protect oneself from further harm. What we talk about less is the inverse dynamic: when someone benefits from contact, proximity, or the appearance of connection, while avoiding responsibility for the emotional labor that real relationship requires.

This creates a subtle asymmetry.

Connection without accountability.
Access without repair.
Familiarity without safety.

Relational access is not the same thing as availability. And it is not guaranteed by shared history, family ties, or time.

Access is built through curiosity instead of defensiveness, reflection instead of dismissal, responsibility instead of avoidance, and a willingness to sit with discomfort in service of repair.

Without those elements, sharing one’s inner world becomes extractive—even when everything appears calm, polite, or “fine” on the surface.

Choosing not to share in these moments is often framed as cold, closed, or avoidant. But in reality, it can be a deeply values-aligned act. It says: My inner life is not a teaching tool. My healing does not include overexposure to people who have not earned trust at the level of my nervous system. My vulnerability is not owed.

Discernment is the ability to recognize when connection would cost more than it gives—and to honor that without resentment or justification.

There is a difference between building bridges and giving away the house.

Sometimes the most self-respecting choice is to keep writing, keep connecting, and keep offering depth in spaces where it is met with care, reciprocity, and real human presence.

Not everything needs to be shared to be real.
Not every open thread deserves access.
And choosing yourself here is not disconnection—it’s integrity.

Reflective questions to sit with:

• Where in your life does contact exist without repair?

• Who currently has access to your inner world—and how was that access earned?

• What would it mean to let safety, not obligation, guide connection?

If this resonated, consider subscribing. I write for those navigating healing with discernment, not self-erasure.

About the author
I’m an AuDHD, OCD storyteller and trauma-informed journeyist, unpacking the complex intersections between neurodivergence, the nervous system, and the long arc of trauma recovery.

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I had to ask myself to deeply examine my own capacity—not in a motivational way, but in an honest, biological one.

Capacity was the doorway.

Once I started paying attention to what I could actually hold, I began to see the patterns: reactions that weren’t about now, but about emotional and psychological memory. Stored responses. Learned survival. A nervous system that had been living with accumulated—often traumatic—interpersonal harm for far too long.

What surprised me was this: as I expanded my ability to stay with discomfort, I didn’t become more distressed—I became safer.
(Okay, not at first. Not even close. But after a lot of dedicated practice.)

My body found regulation not through avoidance, but through understanding. Through permission. Through pacing. Through curiosity and experimentation.

At some point, I learned how to hold my own hand.

I stopped forcing productivity or isolation and started moving toward spaces that allowed me to recharge, reset, and restore what I now understand as neuroprotective rest. When I honored those needs, my capacity expanded—slowly, steadily, honestly. I could go further because I wasn’t abandoning myself to get there.

As you read this, you might pause and ask yourself:

• Where in my life am I still forcing productivity or isolating instead of restoring?

• What does my body do when I don’t listen to its need for rest—before my mind steps in with explanations? What are the consequences of that override habit?

• When was the last time I chose a space, rhythm, or relationship that actually allowed my nervous system to settle?

• What have I learned to override in myself to keep going?

• If I stopped abandoning myself just to get through the day, what might change about how far I can go?

You don’t need answers yet. Noticing is enough.

I’m proud of how I used that time unemployed, struggling to make ends meet.

I immersed myself in books, research, podcasts, medical journals, therapy, and education about the nervous system, trauma, neurodivergence, and everything interconnected to them. It worked. I grew out of what I now recognize as a full burnout crisis—one rooted not in weakness, but in prolonged dysregulation.

And here’s the part I can’t ignore anymore:

No one should have to do that much research, therapy, and self-education just to understand what’s happening inside their own body.

Why wasn’t the link between my AuDHD and trauma discussed—or even explored more deeply—during residential mental health treatment? Because, quite honestly, it hasn’t been thoroughly researched and explored. It needs to be!

More information is coming out now, even as I write this. And I’m excited about what the science—and so many of us—are learning. Healing is possible from this kind of burnout crisis. But what modern mental health programming currently offers barely touches it.

And it’s not just me noticing this. Other neuro-sensitive people have noticed too. Many of them are now leading research, finding each other, and building resilience through a growing, global chain of shared resources and lived experience.

There are so many people suffering right now. And we keep calling it “mental health” or “addiction,” as if those labels explain anything on their own.

What if—at least in part—we examined this through the lens of nervous systems that have been baselined at chaos for years? Decades?

What if what we’re seeing isn’t pathology—but biology under chronic threat?

How much of our current framework not only fails to help, but actively worsens symptoms of PTSD and mood disorders by ignoring the body entirely? We’ve medicated minds while trapping nervous systems in survival states. We’ve treated chemistry without addressing safety. We’ve silenced symptoms instead of listening to what they’re trying to say.

This isn’t an anti-medication argument. It’s a context argument.

A dysregulated nervous system cannot think its way into healing. It has to be met. It has to be slowed down. It has to be shown—over and over again—that it is no longer in danger.

Until we center nervous-system literacy in how we understand burnout, trauma, addiction, and collapse, we will keep mislabeling survival responses as personal failure.

And people will keep thinking something is wrong with them—when what’s actually wrong is the environment they were asked to survive.

If this resonated, it’s probably because your nervous system recognized itself in these words.

I’m writing to make this kind of knowledge more accessible—because people shouldn’t have to hit collapse, lose work, or spend years searching alone to understand what’s happening in their bodies.

If you want to support this work, I’d love for you to subscribe, share this essay, and help get nervous-system-centered conversations into more hands. That’s how we shift the narrative—away from personal failure and toward biological reality.

I’m also working on a Burnout Survival Resource Guide, coming in early 2026. It’s being built slowly, carefully, and with deep respect for the people living this—not just studying it.

As you close this, consider:

• What have I been calling “burnout” that might actually be a nervous system asking for safety?

• What would change if I stopped treating my limits as a problem to overcome?

You don’t need answers yet. Just honesty. Just presence.

Hugs on your journey!

Marie

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Grief is deeply isolating. Even when people are around you, it can feel like you’re sealed off behind glass—watching life continue while your internal world has stopped making sense. Language disappears. Time warps. Your body is here, but you are somewhere else entirely.

I know that fog. I know what grief did to my ability to think, plan, decide, remember. I lost executive functioning. I struggled to complete basic tasks. This wasn’t weakness—it was my nervous system in survival after too much, too fast.

Caregiving during ALS was traumatizing. Watching my father’s nervous system fail him, knowing there was no recovery coming, living inside anticipatory grief while still being expected to function. When he died, we weren’t given the space to mourn together. We fractured instead—each of us retreating into our own injured state.

Then came more loss. A murder. A suicide. Other deaths layered so close together that my system never had a chance to reset.

What I rarely say—but feel deeply—is how much I would have given back then to connect with just one person who understood. Someone who didn’t rush me, minimize me, or try to make meaning too quickly. Someone who knew that what was happening to me was not psychological failure—it was neurobiology.

Because grief isn’t just emotional.

After traumatic loss, the nervous system often stays in high alert. Stress hormones remain elevated. The brain shifts away from higher-level thinking and into threat response. The prefrontal cortex—where planning, focus, and organization live—goes offline. Memory fragments. Fatigue becomes overwhelming. Social capacity shrinks. This is why people in grief seem distant, scattered, or “not themselves.”

Knowing this matters. The science helps us hold compassion—both for ourselves and for others.

Now, when I show up for people in grief, I don’t try to fix it. I don’t try to cheerlead them forward. I stay. I listen. I let silence exist. I let stories repeat. I remember that their nervous system is doing exactly what a human nervous system does after catastrophic loss. I protect this sacred space to hold them as I needed to be held.

I speak in this space now because I remember how alone it felt.
Because I’m not afraid of grief’s terrain anymore.
And because presence—steady, informed, compassionate presence—can be the difference between suffering alone and being gently held while your system finds its way back.

You are not broken.
Your body - representing a normal response to a very abnormal reality.
And you do not have to carry it by yourself.

Hugs on your journey.

Marie O

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It feels like finding a present hanging quietly on a tree you didn’t expect to be walking past.
A small signal that says: Oh. Someone else has been here too. :)

That’s what happened for me when I read Kristin’s Complex PTSD Warrior’s piece, How Complex PTSD Reshapes Your Brain + Body. Because it named something familiar with precision, humility, and lived authority. I love Kristin’s own representation of “integration” and wanted to share it.

You can tell when someone hasn’t just learned about trauma—
but has untrained the lion of it inside themselves.

Lived Experience Has a Different Texture

There’s a difference between trauma-informed language that is acquired
and trauma-informed wisdom that is earned.

Earned wisdom doesn’t rush.
It doesn’t shame.
It doesn’t over-explain.

It says things like:

“Your nervous system isn’t broken. It’s still running the survival code it learned early on.”

That sentence alone tells me she understands something many of us spend years trying to articulate:
that what looks like dysfunction is often brilliant adaptation.

Her writing cues into the places that matter most—not just cognition, but identity, body memory, and self-story. Focus. Organization. Regulation. Presence. Parenting. Relationship. Collapse.

Not as moral failures.
Not a lack of effort.
But as nervous-system inheritance.

Recognition Is a Somatic Event

What I appreciate most is how clearly she tracks the body.

Hypervigilance.
People-pleasing.
Shutdown.
Trust fractures.

These aren’t listed as “symptoms” to fix, but as protective strategies that once kept a child safe.

That framing matters.

Because for those of us in long-term recovery—those who have spent years peeling back layers of shame, rage, grief, and grief-for-the-grief—recognition itself becomes regulating.

Reading her work felt like being met by someone who has already asked:

“What did my body have to live through to respond this way?”

That question is not academic.
It’s earned through sitting with yourself when there is no audience, no praise, no bypass.

I learned so much from others who stepped up to the sorely needed space of peer-support leadership within trauma-informed growth.

And for those of us walking this long road—untraining survival responses that once kept us alive—that modeling matters more than motivation ever could.

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Marie - It’s Just my Trauma -

I’m an AuDHD, OCD storyteller and trauma-informed journeyist unpacking the complex intersections between neurodivergence, the nervous system, and the long arc of trauma recovery.

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An off-duty officer found passed out in a drive-through.
A cop arrested for DUI after crashing his cruiser.
Domestic violence. Road-rage assaults.
Officers charged with trafficking the same drugs they’re sworn to take off the street.

What we rarely talk about is the slow build underneath those stories: years of accumulated trauma, nervous systems locked in survival, and a culture that tells officers to “suck it up” while quietly punishing anyone who admits they’re not okay.

When the pressure cooker has no safe release valve, substances step in as a counterfeit solution. Alcohol. Pills. Drugs. Not to party—
but to sedate a system collapsing under unprocessed trauma.

This article explores the well-documented link between unhealed trauma, SUD (substance use disorder), and PTSD-driven behavior in policing—
and why we still don’t have a solution that truly works.

Policing as a Nervous System Injury

Being a police officer is not just stressful.
It is relentless exposure to:

• violence

• death

• child abuse

• domestic trauma

• moral injury

• unpredictable danger

Most civilians will never see what a police officer sees in a month, let alone a career.

Studies show:

• First responders experience trauma at much higher rates than the general population.

• Up to one in three first responders meet criteria for PTSD, depending on assignment and exposure.

• PTSD in officers is associated with sleep disruption, hypervigilance, numbing, irritability, and aggression.

This isn’t about “mental weakness.”
This is nervous system overload—a survival brain doing its best to cope.

And yet: show up tomorrow, armed, calm, emotionally regulated, flawless.

This gap between human biology and institutional expectation is where substance use creeps in.

Even the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin acknowledges this, noting the “cycle of trauma and substance abuse” inherent in the job.

When Coping Becomes a Liability: SUD in Law Enforcement

We cannot fix what we refuse to measure.
And police culture makes honest reporting nearly impossible. Still, the data we do have paints a stark picture:

• 18.1% of male officers and 15.9% of female officers reported adverse consequences from alcohol use.

• Up to 30% of first responders report alcohol or substance use problems.

• Many officers admit they drink specifically to manage intrusive memories, anxiety, and emotional numbing.

• Police officers have higher suicide rates than the general population, with substance use playing a key role.

This is not a footnote.
This is the architecture of a profession built on uninterrupted trauma without meaningful recovery time.

Alcohol becomes the unofficial therapist.
Drugs become the dark-night-of-the-soul quiet button.
Off-duty becomes the only place to collapse.

From Trauma to Violent Behavior: How It Happens

Most officers with PTSD or SUD do not become violent.
But ignoring the trauma–SUD connection while focusing only on “bad cops” is intellectually dishonest.

There are clear pathways from accumulated trauma → SUD → escalated behavior:

1. Hyperarousal + Intoxication = Explosive Reactivity

A nervous system already in “fight mode” reacts faster, harder, and with less inhibition when substances lower the brakes.

2. Emotional Numbing → Loss of Empathy

Officers exposed to repeated trauma often develop emotional blunting. Add substances, and the disconnect grows.

3. Shame, Exhaustion, Moral Injury → Self-Destruction

Many officers carry private trauma before they ever pin on a badge.
The job compounds it.
Substances mask it.
Eventually:

• DUIs

• violence

• poor judgment

• reckless actions

• suicide attempts

Not because they’re monsters.
Because they’re drowning.

“Get Help”—But Lose Your Job: The Policy Trap

Imagine you’re an officer with PTSD.
You’re drinking to sleep.
Maybe using pills to function.
Maybe you’re terrified of your own temper.

You want help.
But if you disclose it?

• Fitness-for-duty evaluations

• Weapon removal

• Suspension

• Reputation damage

• Termination risk

• Financial consequences for your family

So you hide it.
You mask it.
You push through another shift.
And trauma compounds.

Research from the National Council for Mental Wellbeing confirms this: officers frequently avoid seeking help because of fear of professional consequences.

This is the real crisis:
There is no compassionate, safe pathway to healing that doesn’t risk a career.

So they toughen up.
Or try to.
And substances fill the gap where mental health support should have been.

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We Need a System Built for Human Beings

Trauma-informed frameworks exist.
Retreat models exist.
Peer support programs exist.
Some departments are trying.

But nothing works at scale because the underlying structure is unchanged:

• Admitting trauma = career threat

• Addiction = moral failure instead of survival adaptation

• Treatment = liability

A true solution must:

• protect confidentiality

• remove punitive consequences for seeking help

• normalize trauma as an occupational injury

• integrate long-term mental health support into the profession

• create safe pathways back to duty after treatment

• acknowledge that a regulated officer is a safer officer

This is not softness.
This is public safety.

A Call to First Responders

If you are reading this and you recognize pieces of yourself—
the exhaustion, the irritability, the drinking that went from “helping” to necessary, the numbness, the fear of snapping—
you are not broken.

You are injured.

And injuries can heal.

Ask yourself:

Am I ready to explore a different way to live?
A way that doesn’t require white-knuckling through every shift or sedating myself to sleep?

Your nervous system deserves relief.
Your story deserves compassion.
And you deserve support that does not threaten your livelihood or dignity.

If you need resources—clinical, alternative, educational—or want a private, compassionate witness to begin your own reflection and healing, reach out.
You do not have to carry this alone.

There is a path forward.
And you can turn toward it now.

Sources & References

• National Council for Mental Wellbeing. Addressing Substance Use Disorder in Law Enforcement.

• Psychological & addiction research on police SUD: prevalence, adverse alcohol outcomes, occupational stress links.

• CDC, SAMHSA & first responder trauma data: elevated PTSD, depression, suicide, and substance use risks.

• FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin: trauma → substance abuse cycle in policing.

• Vera Institute of Justice: trauma-informed policing frameworks.

• Reviews of first responder behavioral health, including SUD screening outcomes.

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Those early ruptures became the emotional blueprint of our family: when things get hard, people pull away. They shut down. They avoid. They pretend. And the pain gets buried instead of spoken.

So when I began my own healing work—trauma recovery, nervous system regulation, therapy, self-examination—I hoped my sister and I might be the ones to finally break the cycle. I wanted us to be the generation that turned toward each other instead of away. I wanted us to name what we inherited and make different choices.

But healing requires emotional capacity.
And emotional capacity requires a sense of safety inside the body.

What I’ve had to accept is that my sister simply doesn’t have access to that. Not right now. Maybe not ever. Her nervous system does what it was trained to do—shut down, avoid, protect, and stay far away from anything that feels too emotionally exposing. What feels like a connection to me feels like danger to her.

That doesn’t mean she doesn’t care. It means her survival system has stronger roots than her readiness to look inward.

And that realization has been its own grief inside me now.

Because when you’re the one breaking generational patterns, you hope the people you love will join you. You hope they’ll grow with you, repair with you, and finally have the conversations your family always avoided. But not everyone can step into that kind of emotional space. For some, honesty feels threatening. Depth feels like a risk. Repair feels impossible.

I can’t force capacity where it doesn’t exist.
I can’t make healing feel safe for someone whose body interprets it as danger.

So I am letting go of expecting her to meet me where I am.
Not out of anger, or punishment, or shutting down.
But because continuing to reach for someone who cannot reach back keeps opening the same wound.

I love my sister.
But love alone doesn’t create emotional capacity.

The most compassionate thing I can do now—for myself and for her—is to stop asking her to do work she cannot do, and to stop abandoning myself in the process.

Sometimes the people you love can’t walk into the truth with you.
And sometimes the healing is learning to move forward anyway.

Softness in your journey

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Marie

It wasn’t drugs or alcohol.
It was overworking until burnout felt like achievement.
It was scrolling when I felt alone.
Shopping to fill the void.
Smoking to quiet the ache.
Validation-seeking through constant texting or checking who cared enough to respond.

We often think of addiction only as something extreme — but many of us are quietly numbing in socially acceptable ways. These “everyday addictions” can be just as damaging because they keep us from feeling, healing, and being present.

Awareness was my first step. Compassion was the second. Recovery is still the daily practice.

In case you thought you had no addictions, here is a good reference list for self-exploration.
You are addicted when you are unable to stop a behavior pattern or use of substances, despite negative consequences and despite your best efforts to stop.

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• Alcohol
• Internet/games
• Attentional distractions
• Kleptomania
• Avoidance
• Auto racing
• Pornography
• Betting/gambling
• Reckless behaviors
• Cheating
• Self-inflicted injury/self-harm
• Coffee
• Sex
• Colas
• Shopping (clothes, shoes)
• Collecting (coins, art)
• Sleep
• Smartphone apps
• Social networking
• Smoking / tobacco
• Speed
• Spiritual practices
• Music
• Sports / physical activity (e.g. biking, rock climbing, running, bodybuilding)
• Computers
• Diet / food / carbohydrates / “junk food / chocolate / specific food”
• Videos / video games/television
• Work
• Drugs (both illicit and prescribed)
• Diuretics
• Email/texting
• Vandalism
• Other (imagining, fantasizing, etc.)

Next week, I’ll share a breakdown of Marsha Linehan’s full list of “Common Addictions” — it might surprise you how many apply to daily life.

#TraumaRecovery #AddictionAwareness #MentalHealthMatters #CPTSDHealing #TraumaInformed #ItTakesTime #ItsJustMyTrauma