The Child I Had to Become

Survival Roles, Attachment Wounds & Emotional Hypervigilance

Growing up in my house required me to become someone I wasn’t.

Not out of choice.
Not out of personality.
But out of emotional necessity.

Children in chaotic systems don’t ask,
“Who am I?”
They ask:

“Who do I need to be to stay safe?”

Only now, with distance and real clarity, am I starting to understand the roles I stepped into — not because they were healthy, but because they were required.

1. The Good Child

I learned very early that the easiest way to avoid chaos was to be:

  • compliant
  • quiet
  • undemanding
  • emotionally self-contained
  • responsible beyond my years

In a house with a dysregulated father and a controlling mother, the safest place was to not be a problem.

This became:

  • people-pleasing
  • self-suppression
  • perfectionism
  • avoiding conflict
  • feeling guilty for saying no

I didn’t “choose” that.
It was survival.

2. The Emotional Translator

I lived in a house where emotions were:

  • denied
  • projected
  • misdirected
  • manipulated
  • reframed

So I became the interpreter.

I learned to read:

  • tone
  • facial expressions
  • the way someone entered a room
  • the energy between my parents
  • the slightest shift in mood
  • the emotional climate around me

Hypervigilance isn’t a personality trait.
It’s the nervous system adapting to unpredictability.

It kept me safe then.
It exhausts me now.

3. The Parentified Child

Because my dad was drowning
and my mum was controlling and emotionally unavailable,
I stepped into roles no child should fill:

  • the mediator
  • the caretaker
  • the stable one
  • the emotionally mature one
  • the one who soothed adults
  • the one who managed tension

I didn’t get to be held.
I held everything.

Parentified children grow up quickly —
but carry a lifetime of tenderness that never felt met.

4. The Child Who Took Responsibility for Adult Emotions

When your parents are not emotionally regulated,
you learn to believe that:

  • your behaviour causes their moods
  • your needs create conflict
  • your emotions make things worse
  • your wants are burdens
  • your boundaries are dangerous

This shaped my adult attachment style:

  • fear of being too much
  • difficulty receiving
  • guilt around needs
  • fear of abandonment
  • attraction to emotionally unavailable people
  • difficulty trusting stability

I wasn’t broken.
I was shaped.

5. The Child Who Learned That Love = Endurance

My dad endured so much.
My mum expected so much.
Love looked like:

  • holding everything in
  • suppressing emotions
  • staying no matter what
  • accepting chaos
  • absorbing guilt
  • losing yourself to keep the peace

It wired me to associate love with suffering.

Undoing that has taken years.

But I’m finally seeing it clearly.

6. The Moment I Realised I Was Not the Problem

Growing up, I internalised the chaos as:

  • my responsibility
  • my burden
  • my fault

But the truth is something I can finally hold without collapsing:

I was never the problem.
I was the child responding to a problem.

The roles I developed were adaptive, not pathological.

They kept me safe in a house where emotional logic didn’t exist.

And now, as an adult, I get to unlearn them.

Not because I’m doing something wrong —
but because I no longer need them to survive.

What I’m Choosing Now

I’m choosing:

  • regulation over hypervigilance
  • needs over guilt
  • boundaries over self-abandonment
  • secure connection over chaos
  • honesty over emotional performance
  • softness over survival roles

I’m no longer the child who had to survive that house.

I’m the adult who finally gets to live outside of it.