childhood trauma Archives - Wholesome Badass: A Work in Progress

Four-panel cartoon showing the difference between how someone behaves behind closed doors and how they present themselves publicly. A child learns that anger and harsh language are acceptable, but later faces judgment for expressing what she learned.

I Didn’t Know to Hide It

November 3, 2026

I make no claims to benevolence. For my first 40 years, my default behavior was often diminishing and hurtful. Openly aggressive, harsh, and raging. I hated how reactive and hurtful I could be. But decades of mistreatment taught me only to mistreat, not how to respond appropriately to mistreatment or treat others with consistently high regard. What I couldn’t have known was that the behavior being modeled at home was also being carefully contained. Without any meaningful contrast of kindness, mercy, or respect, I didn’t recognize the behavior as irregular. I’ll always be sensitive, with my tightly wound nervous system basically on the outside of my body—easily overstimulated and dysregulated. But NOW I understand how to soothe and regulate myself. Struggling to regulate one’s emotions, however visibly expressed, should not be confused with exhibiting contempt or disrespect for another person. I get to distance myself from people who consider diminishing words or behaviors acceptable. And it’s been decades since I said or did a mean thing. It seems a ridiculous brag, but it’s quite the overcoming and miracle. One of many things that differentiated me from my family—and the similar relational patterns I later sought out—was that I didn’t know to conceal cruelty. My sister would scold, “You just don’t get it.” Straight facts. I super didn’t get it. What I did get: Apparently, it was okay to say and do cruel and damaging things to me. Because if you did, that was my fault, as my shittiness made you behave that way. This became my relational template, shaping my life’s trajectory. I can’t help but wonder why nobody was concerned enough to get me help. Only judge, punish, judge, repeat. Actually… 🤔 I think I understand why professional guidance was not provided. Getting me help might have meant examining what was happening at home, rather than continuing to treat me as THE problem. And why was I deemed the sinful one? But seriously—for those who know to hide it, what excuse even is there?

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs with a little girl at the bottom and a thermometer showing only physiological needs fulfilled. Safety, belonging, esteem, and self-actualization remain unrealized.

From Surviving to Thriving

October 16, 2026

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Magda’s Progression: Bottom Level—Cleared. ✅* Food, shelter, clothing. Check, check, check. But I was starved for affection, acceptance, and the security of belonging. After years of therapy, recovery work, and training in child development, I sense that my pervasive distress came from a genuine need for affection, acceptance, and the security of belonging. I’m no psychic, but I’d bet if you asked anyone I’m genetically linked to, they’d tell you the problem was that I was a selfish, ungrateful PITA. How the fuck was I supposed to grow into anything promising when the requirement was to become less—or else? I was fortunate in what I had, and deeply affected by what I didn’t. In my 40s, when I found recovery, I learned to practice gratitude. Not portray it. And all the gratitude in the world couldn’t substitute for the nurturing and secure bonding I needed to develop emotional stability and maturity. * Maslow’s hierarchy of needs identifies how human needs progress from basic survival and safety to love, belonging, esteem, and ultimately self-actualization (reaching one’s potential). Unmet needs can inhibit that progression. Remaining in survival mode can keep us caught in cycles of stress, anxiety, and reactivity.

Wholesome Badass girl draws a new relational blueprint based on nurturing, honest communication, accountability, and trust, while discarding an old blueprint of scapegoating, manipulation, and emotional neglect.

The Caller Was Inside the House

October 8, 2026

The people I relied on for protection were the same people I needed protection from. They were also the ones teaching lil baby Magda about herself, relationships, and the world. And so she gravitated toward relational patterns imprinted on her lil nervous system long before she could recognize or question them. Always reaching for the emotionally inaccessible archetype… She loved these people and wanted their approval, affection, and inclusion. They were her models for love, conflict, emotional regulation, and accountability. She mimicked some of their harmful behaviors, too. For how could she reject a model she hadn’t yet learned to recognize? I can share how Lil Baby Magda was harmed without asserting I, Big Magda, never caused harm. I own my unwholesome and misguided contributions without accepting responsibility for how others behaved. My first blueprint of the world was emotional instability, chaotic relationships, and illegible, amorphous rules and codes. My internal blueprint developed in response: my lens for perception, beliefs, vigilance, expectations, sense of worth, and capacity to care for myself, regulate my emotions and live with intention and dignity. Life might have been confusing even in a nurturing, steady family system. I might always have required more clarity, consistency, patience, and support. I lost decades tangled up in what the fuck had just happened and why, while forecasting what else would go wrong. What did I do? What did they mean? What did I miss? How do I keep it from happening again? Even when nothing was happening, I was still agonizing over things said and done years earlier. All that attention and energy spent trying to understand and prevent harm left no bandwidth to experience my own life. How much of what I’ve believed about my personality, character, worthiness, and lovability came from the people who taught me how to be a person? What might I have achieved if I hadn’t spent my life trying to figure out what was wrong with me? The messaging was consistent, collective, and insidious: Get different or be erased. If I was the designated problem and couldn’t correct myself, what was left? I couldn’t get different. I couldn’t get gone. I failed at both. And now I’m beginning to see a third way. Finally, I am getting different—not by correcting myself to fit the original blueprint, but by rejecting it.

The Shit Before the Shift

September 29, 2026

No Dimmer Switch I feel everything the most amount—the good and the unpleasant—constantly. Everything in high definition. I am a deep feeler, or as the archetype likes to say: thin-skinned, overly sensitive. Not a crime. Not a defect. But not an easy way to be in the world. From my tiniest days, I recall feeling inconsolably rattled, navigating my tightly wound nervous system and sensitive disposition with no guidance, knowledge, language, or skill set for any of it. I cannot recall another version of myself underneath it all – who ever felt secure, grounded, safe, and not overwhelmed. That has been my baseline. It is not a great point of departure. Billed to Me I was raised to believe that other people’s harsh behavior spoke directly to the quality of my person, my character, and my worth. Which was terribly confusing, because I was also often scolded for asking if a person was upset with me, “Not everything is about you.” And yet other people’s unfavorable moods and behaviors were consistently billed to me or altogether denied. So… difficult moods and feelings—mine and theirs—were my responsibility. And no clue how to manage that. Painfully aware: I was constantly and undeniably failing. While nobody taught or encouraged me to know, soothe, value, or care for myself, I was expected to read, anticipate, prevent, and manage other people’s difficult feelings. So many times, blood relatives would demand in a menacing tone, “What are you so angry about?” But it was not a genuine inquiry. It was a callout: look at you, with that massive chink in your armor. Feel ashamed and pipe down or else. There is real sadness in looking back and realizing how much unmanaged, daily compounded stress was attributed exclusively to my “poor character.” I spent more than forty years trying to do the impossible thing of getting different and becoming someone else. My only ambition. What a tragic fucken waste. Stripped of any potential to self-actualize. The Familiar And having been been handled like a piece of literal shit—a poopy diaper—I did not instinctively seek nourishing and affirming relationships. I had learned that love looked like people who genuinely were not FOR me—unless and only when I was useful to them. This explains so much. At many levels, I believe the only thing I shared in common with my family of origin was that we all held me in the lowest regard. That is hard to reconcile. And tragically, my only direction was toward the familiar. Ooof. Decades of trying to feel better, by any means possible, without really knowing what I was trying to feel better from. From being a shiftless piece of shit?? There is literally no relief from that. I mistook random positive intermittent reinforcement for kindness and brought that out into the world with me as the love I sought. And sometimes the love I gave. I hate that. Better Information I am proud to have interrupted that cycle, that I did not hand that poison directly to my sons. No matter what is said about me, it cannot be denied that I rode faithfully for my children. Without exception. Maybe not perfectly or without pain to them, but with fierce loyalty and constant sacrifice. In learning about trauma and nervous systems. Neglect. Generational abuse. Coercive abuse. Scapegoating. Triangulation. Attachment, fear, compulsion. I recognize how I confused what was recognizable with what was safe and acceptable. For and from myself. Agency With better information now, I get to experience something that for so long eluded me: agency—where I carefully consider who, what, how, and when to engage, and whether engagement is even required or prudent. Writing helps me recognize and organize all of the me’s inside of me—with no intent to prosecute my past or acquit any of my me’s. I work tirelessly to untangle my myths and misconceptions about myself, love, connection, and kindness. It is a true miracle to have grown into the loving, honest, dependable, funny, compassionate, and loyal woman I am. And this is also true: I have not always known how to move in these ways—or how to move with people who equally value them. First the unlearning. The shit before the shift, I guess. What were you led to believe about yourself because of the way someone else treated you? And do you still belive it?

A warmly lit room with an open closet, hanging clothes, photographs, books, keepsakes, boxes, and a ceramic mug surrounding a scattered pile of personal belongings. The image includes the quote, "Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know," by Pema Chödrön.

Making Sense of Life Through Patterns

August 5, 2026

With all of the therapy, writing, reading, reflection, and somatic work, a lot is coming up for me. Memories. Patterns. Correlations that I had not previously made. I am finding that this process is much less like the discovery of something new and much more like noticing something that has been there all along. I would describe it as so much stuff from the past lying in a tangled heap on a closet floor, too overwhelming to tackle or ignore. Slowly, I am making order of it, identifying items and events, and putting them in their places. The tangled mess shrinks, and the grip of it all is loosening. I am also discovering that memory is a strange thing. I don’t trust every detail, every conversation, or every interpretation. But I do trust patterns, especially those that repeat themselves in what seems like perpetuity. I am trying very hard to engage this with humility, admitting my blind spots. I recognize that other people have had different experiences and interpretations. I can’t know intent or motivation, but only I can name the impact they have had on me.

The Protected Position

August 4, 2026

Something began when I was four years old, and it was reinforced, repeated, normalized, and sustained over the course of decades. The injury wasn’t only the abuse itself. It was also the fact that the person who harmed me was favored, protected, believed, accommodated, and repeatedly restored to a position of legitimacy while I was not. Something bad happened, and the person who did it continued to occupy a protected position while my reality (moments of distress) was judged, minimized, and dismissed. When that happens over and over again, year after year, it makes sense that I began to feel as though my validity, agency, credibility, and even my right to define my own experience had been stripped away. For a very long time, I located the center of gravity in my mother. Now I am considering the possibility that my sister occupied a much more influential position than I had been able to discern. Six and a half years older than me, she was the first grandchild, the first niece, and the favored child. Then came Magda, the last grandchild: highly sensitive, tightly wound, easily activated, and in need of inconvenient soothing. My sensitivity was dismissed as performance. “Quit performing. Stop being dramatic, hysterical, manipulative. Stop trying to get attention.” Nobody taught me how to cope with difficulty, tolerate discomfort, or regulate my nervous system. I think my sister learned that there was power in being able to suck it up and may even have come to feel martyred by it. By keeping me dysregulated through taunting, provocation, and unwanted touching, she gained traction through the contrast in presentation. She appeared composed while I appeared reactive, and ours was a family with very little capacity for visible, observable, unhidable struggle. As I continue to heal, I find myself repeatedly encountering variations of this same pattern. There is a certain kind of personality that seems to require constant elevation, admiration, accommodation, and preferential treatment, and there is a predictable response to anyone whose presence threatens to divert attention from that arrangement. The archetype itself is hardly new. If only authority were evidence of integrity and virtue. If only age, status, confidence, accomplishment, popularity, or proximity to power guaranteed goodness. I was placed on this trajectory at the age of four, and now I am doing the work required to change direction. I am learning to recognize the pattern that I know so well and, without vigilance, continue to mistake for love, safety, familiarity, and home. The familiarity calls to me. Like an old glove, it simply fits. I recognize now that familiarity and safety are not the same thing. Whatever else may be true, this also happened.