The Unfair Burden: Why Healing is Your Responsibility

Question: “If my childhood trauma wasn't my fault, why is it my responsibility to heal?"

Answer: If you grew up in an environment plagued by dysfunction, abuse, neglect, or abandonment, let’s start with the most important truth you will ever hear: None of it was your fault.

As children, we are egocentric by design. When our caregivers fail us, we do not have the cognitive capacity to say, "My parent is struggling with their own regulation." Instead, we internalize the failure.

We decide that we are the problem. We twist ourselves into knots to be quieter, smaller, "better," or invisible, all in a desperate attempt to stay safe.

You did not choose your childhood. You did not choose the dysfunction. You were an innocent passenger in a vehicle driven by people who, for whatever reason, could not keep the car on the road.

The Hard Pivot to Adulthood

However, there comes a moment in every survivor's life where we must face a brutal, unfair paradox:

While the wounding was not your fault, the healing is 100% your responsibility.

This realization often brings anger, and rightfully so. It feels unjust that after surviving the trauma, we are now burdened with the cleanup. It is like moving into a house that the previous tenants destroyed—holes in the walls, shattered windows, structural damage. It is fundamentally unfair that you have to fix a home you didn't break.

But here is the reality: You are the one who has to live in it.

The Cost of Staying Stuck

There is a temptation to cling to our wounds. Sometimes, our trauma responses—dissociation, hyper-vigilance, people-pleasing, or explosive reactivity—feel like our identity. They were, after all, the armor that kept us alive when we were small.

But wearing a suit of armor to the grocery store, to your job, or into your marriage is no longer protection; it’s a prison.

Choosing to stay stuck in patterns and behaviors that no longer serve us is not just tragic; it is essentially irresponsible. When we refuse to heal, we do not just hurt ourselves. We inadvertently wound the people we love.

• We project our past fears onto our current partners.

• We pass down generational trauma to our children.

• We push away friends because we don't trust intimacy.

If we do not transform our pain, we will almost certainly transmit it.

The Courageous Choice

Let’s be honest about what healing looks like. It is not a montage of yoga classes and bubble baths. The journey to healing is long, arduous, and complicated. It involves grief. It involves feeling feelings you have repressed for decades. It involves setting boundaries that might shake your family system to its core.

Choosing to heal is an act of warrior-like bravery. It requires you to look at the "survival map" you created as a child, realize it leads nowhere you want to go, and tear it up to draw a new one.

Reclaiming Your Narrative

Why go through this painful process? Why do the work?

Because the alternative is worse.

If you do not take responsibility for your healing, you remain a captive of your past. You continue to react rather than respond. You continue to seek validation from sources that cannot give it. You continue to re-enact the chaos you were born into.

As difficult as deconstructing your trauma is, there is nothing more painful than staying stuck in a life that someone else chose for you.

You owe it to that wounded inner child to be the adult they never had. You have the power to break the cycle. The burden of healing is heavy, but the freedom on the other side is yours to keep.

References & Further Reading

• Frankl, V. E. (1946). Man’s Search for Meaning. Beacon Press. (Focuses on the concept that while we cannot control what happens to us, we have the ultimate freedom to choose our response).

• Walker, P. (2013). Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Azure Coyote Publishing. (Essential reading for understanding how childhood abandonment and neglect create adult defense mechanisms).

• Van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking. (Explains how trauma is stored physically and how "stuck" patterns manifest).

• Maté, G. (2022). The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. Avery. (Discusses the link between unresolved emotional trauma and long-term health/behavioral patterns).

• Gibson, L. C. (2015). Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents. New Harbinger Publications. (Addresses the responsibility of the adult child to detach from the parents' dysfunction).

©Lisa King, LPC