01/11/2026
Lately I’ve been reflecting on how much of what we struggle with as adults doesn’t actually start in adulthood.
So many of our patterns — social anxiety, people-pleasing, self-doubt, perfectionism, feeling like we have to earn love — trace back to our earliest core wounds.
Wounds formed in moments when we didn’t feel fully seen, heard, or emotionally safe.
As children, we don’t have the capacity to say, “This environment isn’t meeting my needs.”
Instead, we internalize it as: “Something must be wrong with me.”
Not because it was true — but because that’s how the nervous system survives.
The tricky part is that we can grow up, build confidence, achieve things, even tell ourselves we’re “fine”… and those early imprints can still quietly run the show.
Healing isn’t about blaming our parents or the past.
It’s about compassionately tracing the thread back to the root — and gently re-parenting the parts of us that learned love had conditions.
When we do that, we stop fighting ourselves.
We stop setting resolutions and then shaming ourselves when we can’t sustain them.
Real change begins when we heal from the inside out.
If this resonates and you feel something stirring,
comment ✨ or send me a message and I’ll share a gentle journal reflection to help you explore this more deeply.
You are not broken.
You never were.
You just learned how to survive —
And now, you get to learn how to live.
