It usually begins with something small-a simple question that shouldn't feel this hard.

OPENING

Your partner asks what you want for dinner, and your mind goes blank. Not because you don't have preferences-but because stating one feels dangerous somehow. Like you're being demanding. Taking up too much space.

Your son needs help with something, and that familiar panic rises in your chest. Not because the task is difficult-picking out clothes, finding a toy-but because each small request feels like proof you're failing. The voice in your head whispers: Other parents handle this fine. Why can't you cope?

You've been living like this for so long that you've started to believe the story your brain tells you: that you're fundamentally not good at handling life. That normal demands overwhelm you in ways they don't overwhelm other people. That maybe if you could just make yourself smaller, need less, disappear a little-maybe then you'd stop feeling like you're drowning.

But what if the problem isn't that you can't cope?

What if you're looking in completely the wrong place?

Why 'Trying Harder to Cope' Keeps Failing

When you feel that awful sense of not coping-when your body vibrates with the need to escape, when you want to disappear-your brain offers you an explanation that seems obvious:

I'm not handling this well enough.

I should be able to manage normal parenting demands.

Other people cope fine with this stuff.

There's something wrong with me.

So you've tried the things that seem logical. You've tried to be better. To need less. To make fewer demands. To shrink yourself down so you're not adding to anyone's burden. You learned this young-if you were just quieter, smaller, less of a problem, maybe things would be easier for everyone.

And when that doesn't work-when you still feel overwhelmed by requests that seem mundane to other people-you conclude that you're failing at something fundamental. That your inability to cope is a character flaw. A personal weakness.

This explanation makes sense. It matches your experience. You feel like you can't cope.

But here's what happens when you blame yourself for not coping well enough: nothing changes. You keep trying to be smaller. The panic keeps coming. The cycle keeps repeating. And you end up just surviving rather than living, disengaged from the daily activities that other people seem to navigate effortlessly.

If the problem were really that you're not trying hard enough to cope, you'd expect your efforts to make a difference. But they don't.

So maybe you're looking in the wrong place.

The 10-Year-Old Survival Strategy Still Running Your Life

Here's what's actually happening.

You're 32 years old. But when your son has increasing needs, when your partner asks what you want, when demands start stacking up-your nervous system isn't responding as a 32-year-old adult with resources and capability.

It's responding as a 10-year-old child who learned that overwhelming situations equal danger.

Let me take you back to what was happening when you were 10. Your parents were going through a messy, high-conflict divorce. They argued constantly. Your mum was overwhelmed-crying, unable to cope. And you, at 10 years old, found yourself monitoring her emotional state. Trying to fix things. Feeling responsible for making her feel better.

You developed a survival strategy: If I'm good, if I don't add to the problems, if I disappear when things get hard-then I'm not making it worse.

That strategy worked. It genuinely helped you navigate an impossible situation.

But here's what research has now discovered: what you experienced wasn't just a "difficult childhood." According to a 2022 study published in the Journal of Child & Adolescent Trauma, almost half-46%-of children in high-conflict divorce families are at increased risk for developing actual PTSD. Not just stress. Not just difficulty adjusting. Post-traumatic stress disorder.

And here's the part that might surprise you: the verbal conflicts alone were sufficient to cause this. You didn't need to witness physical violence. The high-conflict environment, the emotional chaos, your mother's distress that you felt responsible for managing-that was enough.

What happened to you has a name now. It's called parentification, or role reversal. Instead of being the child who gets protected, you became the one doing the protecting. You focused on regulating your parent's emotions instead of having your emotions regulated.

As of 2025, parentification is formally recognized in the Developmental Trauma Disorder framework as a legitimate form of trauma. This isn't you overreacting. This isn't you being weak. Your nervous system was genuinely responding to a threatening environment.

And that 10-year-old's response system? It's still running.

When demands increase now-when your son needs things, when situations feel overwhelming-your brain is still using that childhood threat assessment. It learned: Demands = danger. Making yourself smaller = safety. Disappearing = survival.

The problem isn't that you can't cope.

The problem is that your nervous system is stuck in a trauma response from age 10, and it's treating normal adult life like the crisis environment it was designed to navigate back then.

You're Not Broken-You're Using the Wrong Coping System

This changes everything about how you see yourself.

You're not fundamentally bad at coping with life. You're using a highly effective coping system-just the wrong one for your current situation.

Think about what that survival strategy did for you at 10. When your mum was crying and overwhelmed, making yourself small and quiet genuinely reduced conflict. Not making demands genuinely kept things calmer. The feeling that you should disappear to make things better? That wasn't irrational-it was adaptive.

Your brain learned a crucial lesson: When things are overwhelming, make yourself smaller and the danger decreases.

That's not a character flaw. That's brilliant survival intelligence from a child in an impossible situation.

But here's the shift: you're not 10 anymore. Your partner asking what you want for dinner isn't your overwhelmed mother needing you to have no needs. Your son's developmental demands aren't a test of whether you're adding to someone's unbearable burden.

The same physiological response that kept you safe then is now creating the exact opposite effect. It's keeping you trapped in a cycle where you feel perpetually overwhelmed, unable to engage with your life, constantly worried.

Research on emotional parentification-published in a 2023 systematic review-shows that it's consistently linked with depressive symptoms and a broader spectrum of internalizing problems that persist into adulthood. The pattern you developed of taking excessive responsibility while feeling unable to cope? That tracks perfectly with what happens to children who had to become their parent's emotional regulator.

You weren't broken then, and you're not broken now.

You were a kid doing exactly what you needed to do to survive.

And now you're an adult whose nervous system needs help learning that the rules have changed.

Why Your Best Survival Strategy Is Now Keeping You Stuck

But here's the part that almost no one talks about-the piece that explains why you're still stuck despite understanding all of this.

The very coping mechanism that protected you is now the mechanism preventing your healing.

When you feel overwhelmed and that urge to disappear kicks in-when you want to run away, make yourself smaller, avoid the demanding situation-that's avoidance coping. And according to research on trauma and PTSD, avoidance is the pivotal factor that maintains trauma symptoms over time.

Here's why: avoidance prevents your brain from processing the original trauma. It stops you from learning that you're safe now. Every time you respond to overwhelm by disappearing (physically or emotionally), you're reinforcing the old neural pathway instead of building a new one.

Your brain never gets the chance to update its threat assessment. It never learns: I'm 32, not 10. I have resources now that I didn't have then. Being present and visible is safe now.

This is why trying to cope better hasn't worked. You've been trying to fix the wrong thing. You've been treating this like a personal failing-something to overcome through willpower or effort-when it's actually a physiological response system that needs retraining.

And here's what makes this particularly crucial: you mentioned your fear that your son might experience similar rejection patterns with his grandmother. That he might learn to make himself smaller, to take responsibility for managing her emotions the way you did.

Research on intergenerational trauma transmission shows that role confusion and parentification patterns do carry from one generation to the next-unless the cycle is interrupted. But here's the hopeful part: addressing your own trauma is the most effective prevention strategy. Your healing doesn't just help you. It protects your son.

When you do the work to help your nervous system learn that you're safe to be present, to take up space, to have needs-you're modeling a completely different way of being in the world. Your son won't learn to disappear because he won't see disappearing. He'll see a parent who stays present even when things get hard.

The forgotten factor that changes everything: your survival strategy worked brilliantly for a 10-year-old in crisis, but continuing to use it now is what keeps you stuck. And interrupting it isn't just about you-it's about breaking a cycle that research shows would otherwise continue.

What You Thought Was True

Remember when your partner asked what you wanted for dinner, and your mind went blank?

Remember when your son needed help with something simple, and that panic rose in your chest?

Remember when you felt like you were drowning in demands that other people handle easily, and you concluded there was something fundamentally wrong with you?

You're looking at those same moments now, but you're seeing something different.

What's Actually Happening

That blank mind when asked what you want? That's not you having no preferences. That's a 10-year-old's survival response: Don't have needs. Don't make demands. Stay small.

That panic when your son needs something? That's not you failing as a parent. That's your nervous system misreading a normal developmental demand as the overwhelming responsibility you carried at age 10.

That feeling of drowning? That's not evidence you can't cope. That's your body still running a trauma response from a high-conflict divorce 22 years ago, when you learned that being needed meant danger.

What was invisible before is now visible.

The problem was never that you couldn't cope.

The problem was that you were trying to cope with the wrong problem-blaming yourself for a personal failing when you were actually dealing with a nervous system stuck in childhood trauma activation.

And the solution isn't to try harder to be smaller.

It's to help your nervous system learn what your 32-year-old brain already knows: you're not responsible for regulating other people's emotions. Being present doesn't create danger. Taking up the space you're entitled to as a full human being won't make you disappear.

The same situation. Completely new meaning.

What Happens Next

You now know why you've felt like you can't cope-and you know it has nothing to do with your capability and everything to do with a 10-year-old's brilliantly adaptive response system that hasn't been updated.

You understand that the disappearing strategy worked then but maintains your trauma now.

You see that healing yourself is how you protect your son from inheriting the same pattern.

But there's something you don't know yet.

Your nervous system learned this threat response over time, through repeated experiences in that high-conflict environment. It built neural pathways that fire automatically now whenever demands increase.

If it learned this pattern... what does it take to teach it a new one?

If your brain is still using a 10-year-old's threat assessment system... how do you help it update to your 32-year-old reality?

If avoidance maintains the trauma... what happens when you learn to stay present instead?

This was just the first chapter-understanding where the real problem lives.

What happens next is where everything starts to change.

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What's Next

Stay tuned for more insights on your journey to wellbeing.