I Was Not the Problem

In my lived experience, childhood trauma is not something that happened and then ended. It is a thread that runs through everything. It shapes how I read the world, how my body responds to it, and how I move through relationships, work, conflict, and silence. The past does not stay politely behind me. It ripples forward, showing up in reactions that seem disproportionate until you understand their origin.

For years, I carried what I now recognise as an invisible burden. Triggers would surface without warning, dragging old fear, shame, and vigilance into moments that were objectively safe but did not feel that way. My nervous system lived on high alert. To survive, I learned to adapt. I masked. I managed. I developed strategies that allowed me to appear functional, capable, and “fine.” I became very good at it.

Those strategies worked in one sense. They kept me going. But they came at a cost I did not understand at the time.

The cost was my body. My health. My capacity for rest. My ability to trust my own perceptions. The constant self monitoring, the emotional suppression, the performance of normality slowly eroded me from the inside. What once protected me eventually became another source of harm.

For a long time, I believed that if I was struggling, it must mean I was failing. That I was defective. Too sensitive. Too complicated. Too much. The systems around me reinforced this belief, subtly and repeatedly. If I couldn’t cope, the problem must be me.

It has only been in recent years that something fundamental shifted.

I began to understand that what I was experiencing was not personal weakness, but the long tail of trauma. That the patterns in my adult life were not evidence of dysfunction, but evidence of adaptation. My behaviours made sense when viewed through the lens of what I endured. They were intelligent responses to unsafe conditions, not character flaws.

That realisation came with grief. There is grief in seeing how much energy I spent trying to fix myself for injuries I did not cause. There is grief in recognising how many years I blamed myself for outcomes shaped by abuse, silence, and systemic failure.

But it also came with release.

Letting go of the belief that I was the problem changed everything. It loosened the grip of shame. It softened the internal violence of self criticism. It allowed me to meet myself with compassion rather than suspicion.

Understanding this did not erase the impact of trauma. It did not magically regulate my nervous system or undo the past. But it gave me a new perception. One that places responsibility where it belongs.

What happened to me was not my fault.

The ways I adapted were not failures. They were survival.

And the work I am doing now is not about becoming someone else. It is about unlearning what I was forced to believe about myself and slowly reclaiming a sense of agency, safety, and self trust.

In naming this openly, I am not seeking absolution or sympathy. I am naming truth. For myself, and for others who have been quietly carrying the same weight, wondering why they feel broken when they were, in fact, responding exactly as a human would.

I was not the problem.

I never was.