When Home Wasn’t Safe

Maybe nothing dramatic happened, and there was no single event you could point to, no story that sounds bad enough when you say it out loud. But there was an atmosphere you grew up with, one that set expectations of you—reading the room before you entered it, tracking moods, never quite being able to exhale all the way. Maybe home was a place that required management rather than a place where you could rest.

Your mind might have moved on from all of that. Decided it wasn’t that bad, or that it’s in the past, or that you’re fine. However, the body doesn’t move on just because the mind does. The body keeps the record, and it shows up in ways that are often confusing until you understand what you’re looking at.

When a child grows up somewhere that doesn’t feel safe—whether that’s because of abuse, neglect, a parent’s drinking, constant conflict, emotional neglect, or something else—the nervous system adapts. It learns to stay on alert, becoming very, very good at detecting threat, because in that environment, that skill kept you safe.

The problem is that the nervous system doesn’t automatically know when the situation has changed. Even after you grew up and built something different, your alarm system is still running. It’s still scanning, bracing, and expecting what it was trained to expect.

I hear about this from clients all the time, often before they have language for it. They tell me their jaw is always tight. Their shoulders are tense, their stomach is perpetually unsettled, they startle easily, and they can’t sleep, or they sleep constantly and still feel exhausted. Often, they feel weirdly disconnected from their own body, and they have this low hum of dread that doesn’t go away even when their life, on paper, is fine.

That isn’t something to be ashamed of, and in theory it’s a good thing. It means your body is doing its job. It’s just a job that was designed for an environment that no longer exists, and until someone helps it understand that the threat has passed, it keeps doing that job. Your nervous system learned exactly what it needed to learn to get you through; the work now is teaching it that the job has changed.

This is why I find that insight alone only goes so far. I’ve worked with women who could articulate their childhood clearly, who understood the patterns, who had years of therapy under their belt, but whose bodies were still flinching. Because understanding something intellectually and your nervous system actually registering safety are two completely different things.

Real healing has to get into the body. Not just the story, but the physical experience of the story—the held breath, the braced muscles, the responses that got frozen in place and never finished. This is why I use EMDR with so many of my clients. It works at the level where this stuff actually lives in the body’s nervous system — not just in the narrative.

It’s slow, and it’s not always linear, but what I get to witness when it works is genuinely remarkable. Women who have been braced their whole lives start to soften. The jaw loosens, the shoulders drop, and they describe feeling like they’re actually allowed to be somewhere, sometimes for the first time they can remember. Like they can finally put the bags down.

If that sounds like something your body has been waiting a long time for, I’d love to talk. You don’t have to have a dramatic story to deserve this kind of support—the quiet stuff counts too.

Therapist Recommended Reading

• What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma — Stephanie Foo

  A journalist's searingly honest memoir about being diagnosed with complex PTSD. Beautifully written, unflinching, and deeply validating for anyone who has spent years functioning on the outside while quietly falling apart within.

• The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture — Gabor Maté

  A wide-ranging and honest examination of how what happens to us in childhood shapes our physical and emotional health as adults, and what it actually looks like to heal the whole person.

• It Didn’t Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle — Mark Wolynn

  Offers a compelling understanding of inherited trauma and fresh, and powerful tools for relieving its suffering.

• Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents — Lindsay C. Gibson

  One of the most validating books available on childhood emotional neglect and its lasting effects.

Some of the links above are affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission if you choose to purchase — at no additional cost to you. I only recommend books I genuinely find valuable.

If This Resonates

If your body has been carrying something your mind has tried to move past, you deserve support that reaches both. Trauma-informed therapy — including EMDR — works at the level where childhood wounds actually live, and it can help your nervous system learn, maybe for the first time, that it’s safe to rest. When you’re ready, you’re welcome to schedule a confidential consultation.

For continued reflections on healing childhood trauma and nervous system recovery, consider subscribing here on Substack and following along on Instagram and Facebook. If you’re looking for more therapist-recommended books and resources on somatic healing and childhood trauma, you can also follow my Pinterest for curated recommendations.

With you,
Charlene, LMHC & Trauma-Informed Coach