🌿 You Are Not Serving a Life Sentence You Can Choose — Right Now — to Step Into Healing

This information is not new to many of us who have long suffered from the emotional patterns formed in childhood — patterns that became woven into our personality and, over time, shaped our reality. I, too, speak from my own experience.

Childhood experiences are powerful — their effects can last a lifetime.

Decades of research confirm what many survivors already know in their bones. The landmark Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study by Felitti and colleagues (1998) found a direct link between negative experiences in childhood and long-term mental, emotional, and physical health challenges.

Neuroscientists such as Dr. Jack Shonkoff and Dr. Bruce Perry have shown that chronic stress in early life can alter brain architecture, especially in the regions that regulate emotions, memory, and the stress response.

When it comes to negative early experiences, remember this: you had nothing to do with initiating them. You were just a child.

Even if you were somewhat “aware” of what was happening around you or to you, you didn’t yet have the maturity, awareness, or skills to make informed choices or process them.

In other words, it was never your fault.

For me, hearing the words “It was never your fault” was nothing short of life-altering. I had finally chosen to face — directly and without numbing — the pain I had carried for my entire life. I was a fully grown, mature woman, sitting in a trauma therapy session I had long delayed, when those words pierced through decades of silence. In that instant, something unshackled inside me. It was as if I had been propelled a thousand steps forward in a single breath.

Even more powerful was this: the need to blame dissolved, because the pain that once demanded someone to hold accountable no longer owned me. In releasing that pain, I released the very reason to keep it alive. That was the exact moment my conscious healing truly began.

If we look closely, it makes no sense for your entire life to be defined — or even subtly steered — by experiences you had no control over, whether they happened in childhood or at any other point in your life.

As trauma researcher Dr. Bessel van der Kolk notes in The Body Keeps the Score, the mind and body can carry the imprint of childhood trauma until we actively work to release it.

That’s why the first step in your healing is this: release yourself from the false responsibility for pain that was never yours to carry.

You are not serving a life sentence. You can choose — right now — to step into healing.