What happens when the circumstances of life force you to grow up too quickly & shoulder a weight of responsibility or caretaking far beyond your developmental age? When our bodies carry the story of an interrupted adolescence into adulthood, how can this kind of trauma impact us? And how do we begin to heal?

In this conversation, my friend Jonathan shares a recent experience of dysregulation: a chest-tightening, drowning sensation when too many people around him needed too many things. Together, Jonathan and I process how this everyday moment with his family strikingly paralleled some of his childhood experiences, and he names the longing inside so many of us with similar stories: “Can someone just take care of me?”

We talk about what he wishes he could tell his younger self, and how the way we are in our bodies tells the story of who we’ve been up to this point in our lives.