The Wound I Didn’t Cause But Still Carry

Some grief doesn’t come with a funeral. It shows up years later when you realize you’ve been mourning a parent who is still alive, and that the “mom you needed” might never have existed the way you hoped. We go gently but honestly into that complicated reality, with a content warning for self-harm, mental health, and childhood trauma.

We talk about what it’s like to grow up around mood shifts, hospital stays, and quiet emergencies that teach a kid to become hyperaware of tone and danger. We unpack the survival skills that can look like strength from the outside while costing you peace on the inside: staying careful, smoothing things over, hiding the truth, and telling “survival lies” to protect the family’s image. We also share the kind of memories that end childhood early, when you stop feeling like the kid and start feeling responsible for everyone else, especially younger siblings.

As adults, relationships with emotionally unsafe parents can be a tug-of-war between love, exhaustion, loyalty, fear, and guilt. We name the stomach-drop feeling when their name pops up, and we say it clearly: that reaction doesn’t make you cruel or ungrateful. It makes you someone who lived through something painful. We end with a path forward that’s messy but real: learning to self-soothe, setting boundaries, putting down the weight of other people’s emotions, and becoming the steady, nurturing, safe person you needed.

If any of this hits close to home, listen, share with someone who might need it, and leave a review so more people can find this kind of honest support.

Transcript

Welcome And Content Warning

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Welcome back to Just Breathe Confessionals. Before we get into this episode, I want to give you a quick content warning. Today we're going to be talking about self-harm, mental health, and childhood trauma. So if that feels heavy for you right now, please take care of yourself first. You can pause this, skip it, or come back later. This episode is heavier. Not loud, heavy, not dramatic heavy, just honest.

The Grief Of A Living Parent

SPEAKER_00 0:46

Today I want to talk about a kind of grief I didn't even realize existed until I got older. Grieving a parent who's still alive. And I know that sounds strange, but some of you probably heard that and immediately understood what I meant. Because sometimes the grief isn't about losing a parent. It's about realizing you never really got to have one in the way you needed. I think some of the hardest things to carry are the things you didn't fully understand while they were happening, especially as a kid. You don't have the words yet, you don't know how to explain what feels wrong. You just know something feels off. So you adapt. You learn how to exist inside of it, you normalize things that probably were never normal to begin with. And then you get older. And suddenly you start looking back differently. You start realizing, oh, that actually affected me. And I think that's what's hard about childhood trauma. Sometimes you don't remember it clearly. Sometimes you just remember the feeling of it. Because when I reach back into my childhood, there's a lot of empty space. For example, I don't really remember my mom in the way people usually talk about their mothers. I don't have stories that start with, my mom used to, or I remember when she my mind kind of just goes quiet, like trying to watch a movie where entire scenes are missing. And truthfully, I still don't know if that's because my brain was protecting me, or because emotionally she just wasn't there in a way a mother is supposed to be. And I don't know which one hurts more. I think because of that, I became really aware, really young. Aware of tone, energy, mood shifts, the feeling in a room changing before anyone even said anything. I learned how to be careful. Careful with what I said, careful with how I reacted, careful not to make anything worse. Even though I didn't fully understand what worse even meant yet. I just knew I never wanted to be the reason for it. And when you grow up like that, you grow up fast emotionally. You become the calm one, the understanding one, the one trying to hold everything together while still trying to figure yourself out too. And that awareness didn't come from nowhere. It came from growing up around things no kid should really have to understand.

Survival Skills That Follow You

SPEAKER_00 3:36

There were hospital stays, mental health emergencies, moments where I knew something was wrong because my mom was hurting herself or threatening to. But honestly, sometimes the quieter parts were the ones that stuck with me the most. The way you learn to protect your parents' secrets. I got really good at lying young, not malicious lying, survival lying, telling friends, oh my mom's not feeling good today when she's really at home, depressed, spiraling, unable to get out of bed, making excuses, trying to make things sound normal, because when you're a kid, you don't want people looking at your family differently. And the scary part is those survival habits don't just disappear. I got so used to hiding things and smoothing things over that it followed me into my teenage years and honestly even adulthood, something I've had to work through in therapy.

The Moments Childhood Ended

SPEAKER_00 4:37

And there's one memory that I don't ever think will fully leave me. I remember having to put towels on her wrist and just standing there, not really moving, because I didn't know what you were supposed to do after that. I think that was one of the moments where childhood quietly ended for me. Because after a while, you stop feeling like the kid in the situation. You start feeling responsible for everyone else instead, especially my younger sibling. Remember coming home one day and seeing an ambulance outside the apartment. The door was open, everything immediately felt wrong. My mom had hurt herself in front of my younger sibling, and they were only five years old. And somehow their brain already knew this is dangerous, I need help. So they ran to the apartment office and got the manager, and that memory destroys me. Because no five-year-old should have ever known how to do that. And I think that was the moment I realized I couldn't protect them from our reality anymore. I wasn't just the older sibling. I'd become the protector

Love, Fear, And Adult Guilt

SPEAKER_00 5:50

too. And I think that's a part of why relationships with parents like this become so complicated as adults. Because nobody prepares you for how conflicting the feelings are. You can love someone deeply and still feel exhausted by them. You can care about them and still not feel safe around them. And then comes the guilt. The voice that says, That's your mom. And trust me, I've battled with that guilt for years. Because yes, she's my mom. There is love there. But trauma and love can exist in the same place at the same time. There are days I miss her. And there are other days where seeing her name pop up on my phone makes my stomach drop. And that doesn't make me cruel. It doesn't make me ungrateful. It makes me someone who went through something painful and is still learning how to carry it. Because this kind of grief is weird. It's grieving someone who is still physically here, grieving the version of a parent who you kept hoping would eventually show up, the nurturer, the safe place, the consistency, the mom you needed, and healing from that kind of grief, there's no roadmap for it.

Healing By Becoming Your Safe Place

SPEAKER_00 7:10

Messy. It's teaching yourself things you should have been taught by someone else. How to feel safe, how to self-soothe, how to stop caring responsibility for everybody else's emotions. It's learning that you are allowed to put some of the weight down. And I think I'm still grieving her in some ways. Not because she's gone, but because the version of her I kept hoping for never really existed. But I'm also still learning something else. I can give some of those things to myself now. I can become the steady one, the nurturing one, the safe one for me. So if you're listening to this and you're grieving a parent who's still alive, you're not dramatic. You're not selfish. You're not wrong. You're grieving something real. And healing doesn't mean pretending it didn't hurt. It means learning how to love yourself in all the ways they couldn't. Thank you for being here with me. Thank you for breathing through this with me. And as always, just breathe.