Dear 10-year-old me,

In this letter, I want to grieve. I want to hope. I want to be free. 

I want to try to remember a few things so that I can heal through this childhood trauma. When was the moment I learnt how to read a room? When did I learn to read the whole evening from the sound of a key in the door? Or when I learned to check a face before I knew it was safe to speak?

I cannot find that moment. I am not sure it existed.

I think that is the first thing worth grieving.

 

Was it really maturity?

Everyone called it maturity. They said I was so responsible. So grown up. Such an old soul.

I smiled when they said it because it felt like praise. Hence, it took you decades to understand that what they were actually describing was childhood trauma. That the calmness and responsibility they admired was hypervigilance. 

I remember I was only seven years old when my mother would cry to me. I was a seven-year-old who didn’t know what to say. Nobody had told me.  Nobody thought to tell me. Yet, everyone had accepted that this was my role. 

I patted her hand. When I told her it would be okay, I meant it. If it was not okay, what was I supposed to do with that?

That was emotional parentification before I had a word for it. A child absorbing the emotional weight of an adult because the adult had nowhere else to put it.

 

What Did It Cost Me?

Parentification stole a lot of my childhood the part where I got to be confused, lost, and figure myself out. 

I never got that.

Instead, I got front row seats to problems that weren’t mine to solve. I became the keeper of secrets. The one who knew which topics not to bring up at dinner. The one who sat outside the room during arguments. I would sit with my back against the wall, listening for the moment the voices dropped, or the crying started.  Waiting to fix something, anything, to make it stop.

Nobody asked me to do it, but I couldn’t let it happen. The thought of not doing anything was more unbearable. 

What it built in me was hypervigilance so deep. I thought I was highly perceptive. Intuitive. Good at reading people. Many decades and therapy sessions later, I knew I was scanning for threat. 

I had been doing it since before I even had words for what I was watching.

 

Why did I need Permission To Feel Anger?

I’ve gotten through so much of this letter. Yet, I have not mentioned the anger. It is there, even if I have buried it six feet under. Under a lifetime of people pleasing and making myself so useful that nobody could leave. 

Over the years, I was consistently asked to give something a child should never have been asked to give. My nervous system. My freedom. My right to be the most important person in my childhood.

I gave it because I loved them. I did not know I had a choice. The alternative was watching someone you love fall apart, and that would end me. I knew it would. 

That is not maturity. That is a child making an impossible calculation with the limited tools available to them. I deserve to be angry about it. 

My anger was waiting to be heard for a long time now. 

 

How Did I Carry These Feelings?

The child who learned to over-function at home becomes the adult who cannot stop. 

I see it in the way I move through relationships. I’m always the annoying one who is checking in. The one who feels the responsibility to smooth things over. The one who foresees people’s needs. 

People pleasing is a survival strategy that has stuck with me. It made complete sense when I was ten years old. It makes a lot less sense now. However, my inner child is yet to catch up. She is still standing in that corridor. Still listening at the door and still waiting to be needed so she can feel safe.

Parentification teaches you that love is something you earn by being useful. That you are only welcome if you make yourself useful. Receiving care and love that asks nothing in return feels so foreign. Unsettling. 

 

What I Want You To Know

For years, circumstances forced me to give up what no child should ever lose.

I was just a child in a situation that asked too much of me. I did what I knew best. 

My inner child is still in there. Still waiting for someone to find her. To sit down beside her in that corridor. To tell me that it is not your job. It never was.

For me, healing looks like not undoing what happened. Not going back and not forgetting. Rather, it is learning to receive love and care without expectations. To feel love, simply for existing. 

 I am sorry nobody told you that earlier. 

 

Who Helped Me?

If you find this letter years later, please don't forget to name your emotions. Name those feelings that hurt you. You finally have a name for it, do not put it back into the box. 

I worked through these feelings for years with the help of therapists from iDare. Parentification and the childhood trauma it leaves behind deserve informed support. At the end of the day, I became the person who held space for my inner child.  When I couldn’t help myself, I let the team of therapists at iDare help me. Book your session to get started with your healing journey.

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