Learning to Come Home to Myself

This usually makes people uncomfortable, but I’d call my childhood “The Hard Years.”

Growing up in an abusive, narcissistic family meant living without autonomy. I was constantly walking on eggshells, questioning myself, and trying to survive in an environment that didn’t feel safe. For a long time, I believed I had to earn love by shrinking myself. I was constantly blamed for things that weren’t my fault, triangulated and talked badly about, lied on, and mistreated by the people who claimed to love me. My first bullies in life were my family.

My entire childhood was a confused fog, trying to make sense of my environment. I knew something was off, but I didn’t know what. It’s crazy what mental abuse does to the brain. To this day, I’m still healing from the damage that was wreaked on my nervous system. Some days, I grieve the loss of the childhood I could have had, the person I could have become if my sense of identity hadn’t been robbed from me.

What got me through it was something I didn’t realize I was building at the time: resilience.

I learned to trust my inner voice, even when everyone around me tried to drown it out. I became interested in psychology when I was in 7th grade and later got into manifestation after COVID happened, because I wanted to understand why people behave the way they do and how we can heal and create better lives for ourselves. Also, I was desperate to better my circumstances. It was that or nothing else. I couldn’t bear the abuse any longer.

I found healing in the relationships I built outside my family, people who showed me that love doesn’t have to hurt and that healthy connection exists. Cutting contact with my family was an immensely painful thing I had to do to open myself up to better things. Their negative energy dragged on my soul, and I didn’t realize how much of a pull it had on me until after I escaped that environment.

I don’t even call them my family anymore. They are my relatives, the people I came from, but they won’t be my future. Now, my family is the beautiful, healthy one I am creating with the love of my life, free from any abuse or mistreatment.

I’m 29 now, and in many ways, I’m still smack dab right in the middle of the healing process. Healing from childhood abuse isn’t a straight line. It’s messy, painful, beautiful, and deeply transformative.

But for the first time in my life, I trust myself and my journey. And I know that those hard years didn’t break me. They taught me how to come home to myself.

Now, I’m learning how to be okay. I’m experiencing peace and unconditional love for the first time in my life, and it’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever experienced. This is the thing that’s been missing all my life.

And through all the pain and sadness, I pushed through. Life is only getting better and better from here on out.