When Family Wants You Small

The betrayal that burns in your own bloodline

This life is hard… I can’t pretend otherwise. And sometimes the hardest part isn’t the world out there, it’s the family you were born into.

I still can’t quite understand it, even after years of living it. The intense dread comes in like a heavy fog and covers me. It drags me down into grief, into tears, into old trauma and pain that is still alive in my body. And at the center of that fog is the ache of knowing that the people who were supposed to love me, protect me, and lift me up were the same ones who wanted me small, silent, and gone.

I know what it is to grow up as a girl, then a woman, in the madness of patriarchal America. I know the way it worms its way into your nervous system telling you from birth that your body is not yours, that your voice is too much, that your rage is unacceptable, that your brilliance must be dimmed. I know the way you learned to survive in homes where safety never came, in families where truth was punished, in a culture that reinforced silence and sacrifice as if those were noble virtues.

Complex PTSD is not just a diagnosis. It’s the lived reality of being forced into a world that trains women to betray themselves in order to stay alive - over and over again. That betrayal anchors itself into the body.

The hypervigilance born of years of being terrorized, harrassed, exploited, and carefully watching every eye watching you, and every hand reaching for you. It all births the fight flight freeze fawn cycles, adrenal exhaustion, digestive shutdown, and autoimmune flare-ups. It’s not weakness. It’s not overreacting. It is your body screaming the truth of every violation it had to endure.

And the hardest part. When women finally stop betraying themselves, when they reclaim their rage, their voice, their wildness, the world calls them broken or mad or wrong. But I see it differently. I don’t see broken - I see wholeness rising without apology. This is a time of burning off the fucking lies.

The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.

_Gloria Steinem, The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off!: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Rebellion

That’s exactly it! The anger, the fury, the sacred raw rage that comes when you stop betraying yourself. It is not a flaw - it is freedom beginning to move through you and release you from chains.

The system we live in is built to suffocate and imprison those who want to live free. Patriarchy and capitalism thrive on keeping women overworked, underpaid, depleted, and too tired to resist. They pit communities against each other so no one remembers their collective strength. They strip nature for profit and strip women of safety, autonomy, and dignity. That dread I am feeling today, and what you may feel at times is not just personal - it is collective. You and I are carrying the grief of a whole culture. That’s why it feels like an abyss.

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