The Wound Was Never Where I Thought It Was

You didn't pack those bricks yourself. But you're the one carrying them.

Photo by Daiga Ellaby on Unsplash

I spent years certain I knew where the wound lived.

My mother. Our relationship was confrontational, bitter, disconnected. I could do nothing right.

And I carried the story for a long time that she was the reason.

The reason I didn’t feel good enough. The reason I procrastinated. The reason I started strong and fizzled out, over and over, for most of my life.

But here’s the thing about my mother’s words.

When she said things that weren’t true, some part of me, even as a little kid, knew they weren’t true.

It was like someone telling me the sky was purple. It hurt. I carried the story of not being enough to be loved by her. But somewhere underneath, I knew it wasn’t mine.

I didn’t have that buffer with my dad.

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I adored my father. I felt loved by him in a way I didn’t always feel loved. Unconditional, or close enough to it that it felt that way to me.

So for years, when I thought about the deep work, the real healing work, I looked toward my mother. That’s where the pain was obvious. That’s where I assumed the work was.

I was so wrong.

For the past six months, doing deeper work than I had done before, a memory kept surfacing. Not my mother. My dad.

I was eleven years old. Past my bedtime. My parents weren’t speaking to each other, and my father would call me into the kitchen.

Not once. Many times.

And in those late-night lectures, exhausted and small and just wanting it to stop, I listened to him tell me:

You’ll never amount to anything.

Your sister has already surpassed you in every way.

Life is passing you by.

He meant it. And because I believed in him, I believed it too.

That’s the part that matters. That’s the mechanism.

My mother’s criticisms were loud, but they tripped a wire in me that said: this isn’t right.

My father’s words penetrated without objection. No alarm. No resistance. Just truth.

Because when someone you trust and love completely tells you the truth about yourself, your nervous system doesn’t question it. It just takes it in.

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The M.U.D. that formed on those nights was so quiet I missed it for years.

What’s the point?

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Four words. Decades of fizzling out, half-finished, treading water. Start strong. Pull back just before it really matters.

Because, what’s the point?

It doesn’t look like a wound. That’s what makes it so pervasive. It looks like realism. It feels like being honest with yourself about how things go.

But it was an eleven-year-old’s conclusion, formed in that maize yellow kitchen lit only by the light above the stove. She was exhausted. She just wanted the lecture to stop.

Here’s what I know now, doing the breath work, releasing the years of accumulated M.U.D.:

My father wasn’t even talking to me.

He was a man who drank too much, who had the weight of the world on his shoulders, who was in pain.

He called me in because my mother wasn’t speaking to him, and he poured everything he feared about himself into those lectures.

He wasn’t really even seeing me. He was talking to himself.

I had no concept of that at eleven. All I wanted was to get out of the kitchen and go to bed.

But now? When it finally clicked, what I felt wasn’t anger.

It was compassion. And ownership.

I don’t have to carry this anymore. I can free us both from it. Him from my blame. Me from perpetuating it.

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This is what we hand down when we don’t do the work. Not malice. Fear. Our own unexamined M.U.D., spoken out loud to the people who believe us most.

We all carry a backpack of bricks. The bricks are the accumulated wounds of a lifetime, and we each find a way to manage the weight.

Some people hurl them at others, creating hurt to distract from their own pain. Some people turn them inward, wearing their wounds as an identity. And some people, the ones willing to do the work, take those bricks and build something. They integrate the pain, extract the wisdom, and end the cycle.

That’s the choice. Always the choice.

And the greatest healing opportunity is almost never where the pain is loudest.

The loudest wounds we already know aren’t entirely ours. Some part of us picked up on that early.

The sneaky ones, the ones wrapped in love and trust and unconditional positive regard, those are the ones that went in without resistance.

Those are the ones worth finding.

I’m still sitting with what this means for my work with clients. The awareness is still percolating.

But I’ve already felt it change something. I’m putting in the reps now in a way I haven’t before.

Making intentional choices with my time. Building momentum instead of pulling the plug right before it counts.

What’s the point? doesn’t run the show anymore.

That’s not nothing. That’s everything.

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The bricks don’t have to stay in the backpack. The Permission Experiment is where you figure out what to build with them. Join the waitlist.