The Girl Under The Chair

I was eight years old when I was asked to help save my family. The room was full of adults. Some were familiar. Most weren't. I was the only child. The counselors explained that it was my turn. They wanted me to sit in the circle with my parents and tell them what it had been like to live in our home while they were using drugs and alcohol. They wanted me to share my feelings so that my parents could understand how their addiction had affected our family. This was family week.

I wanted to hide under my chair. 

Three weeks earlier my aunt and uncle showed up at our house unannounced to stage an intervention to urge my parents to go to inpatient treatment for drug and alcohol addiction. They thought my parent’s behavior put our family at risk. Next thing I knew, they were being whisked away. I didn’t know what was going on. I was scared that they wouldn’t come back.

Soon, my aunt and uncle told me that I would be going to visit my parents, so I joyfully went along. I wanted to see them. I missed them. When I got inside the building, however, the counselors explained what was going to happen next. I did not want to do it. I felt tense and scared and I did not want to talk in front of a large group of adults.  Didn’t they know that I was shy? This was the last thing I could have ever imagined wanting to do. 

From behind the leg of my uncle, I peeked into the big room filled with adults talking over cups of coffee, not a kid in sight. This was overwhelming. I did not want to participate in family week, talk in front of the counselors, my parents and the other people. I didn’t really understand what was happening inside my body, but I knew I didn’t like the feelings I was experiencing. None of the adults seemed to notice that I was scared and shutting down. I was told that my parents needed to hear from me directly to understand what it was like for me and my brother. They really needed me to be a big girl and do what the adults were asking of me. Looking back, I wonder if part of me believed that if I didn't do what the adults asked, my parents might not come home.

In that moment, despite my fear and overwhelm, I ended up performing instead of firmly digging in my heels, and I got rewarded for that. I was told over and over by my aunt and uncle, parents, and I'm sure every adult in the room: 

"What a grown-up little girl.”  

I remember that I got a lot of positive attention. I was being praised. Perhaps I even believed that I was holding our family together and helping my parents heal. I discovered what it felt like to think that I was a good girl, mature for my age, and a good daughter. Looking back, this formula feels painfully clear.

I don’t remember deciding any of this. I only remember living as though it were true. I never consciously decided "Now I'll become the responsible one." Children don't think that way, but something inside me somewhere seemed to create an unspoken contract. It seemed to take the form that if I could be grown up enough, work hard enough, be helpful enough, carry enough, and be good enough, then maybe the people I loved would stay, and maybe everything would be okay. We often imagine identity as something we consciously choose. I wonder if perhaps it begins as something we inherit in moments when we're too young to know another way. I wasn't trying to become exceptional. I was trying to become safe.

I couldn't have possibly known this then, but that day would quietly thread itself through the decades that would follow. It showed up in classrooms, in uniforms, in helicopters, in disaster zones and in intensive care units. Different rooms, different stakes, but the same familiar instinct: carry more and feel less. This is where the armor took shape. This was when I learned how to achieve what I thought I wanted in my life and how to be of service to others at the expense of myself.

Achievement became my safest place. The more difficult it was, the more overstimulating it was, the more alive I felt. The more responsibility I carried, the less I had to feel what lived beneath it. I slowly disappeared beneath the armor, holding and believing. If I just kept performing, I would be safe and everything would be okay.

Then my younger brother got cancer. It became clear that I couldn't save him no matter how much I performed. I realized that for the first time, I came face to face with something I couldn’t outwork, outlove, or outperform. 

During a ceremony with Ayahuasca a few months after my brother died, something inside me cracked open. I was able to experience that eight-year-old version of myself at family week sitting under the chair, shaking, her nervous system dysregulated, overstimulated and overwhelmed. I wept for her. I wept with her. I crawled under the chair and sat with her and honored her. I told her that I loved her. I let her know that she was worthy and loved, and acknowledged that the adults hadn’t seen how scared she was.

“Sweetheart…. It isn’t your job to hold this family together. You don’t have to earn your place here. You just get to be you.”

It was the first time that I understood that the rescuer that I had become wasn’t a personality trait or even an identity. She was a little girl trying to keep her family together. She had been carrying something that never belonged to her.

I’m beginning to suspect that the work of a lifetime isn’t becoming someone else.

Maybe it’s remembering who we were before we believed we had to.