“The fuel of life is feeling. If we’re not filled up in childhood, we must fill ourselves as adults.” ~Jonice Webb, author of Running on Empty
I was nine years old the first time I taught myself how to disconnect completely from my emotions.
It started with a secret I wasn’t supposed to tell, a classroom that turned on me by lunchtime, and a mother who had nothing left to give me the exact moment I needed her most. By the end of that day, I understood the one rule my whole family lived by, even though nobody had ever said it out loud: a feeling was only acceptable if it didn’t inconvenience anyone else.
Here’s how the day went. My best friend confided in me her juicy secret: over the past weekend, a boy from our class had walked her into the coat closet at the YMCA, kissed her, and told her he loved her. She made me swear never to tell a soul. I made it less than a day before I blabbed it to the biggest mouth in our class, the way nine-year-olds do, thinking a secret is just a story you haven’t shared yet.
By lunchtime, everyone knew. By last period, my best friend and the most popular girl in our class, a girl who’d spent months making me believe we were close until she quietly set the trap that ended it, had turned almost the entire class against me.
I spent the rest of the day crying in my teacher’s office because as far as I understood the world at age nine, my life had officially ended.
What actually broke something in me wasn’t my best friend turning on me and joining forces with the mean girls, and it wasn’t ninety percent of my class deciding I didn’t belong, either.
It was what happened later that same day.
I was a latchkey kid, so I came home from school and sat with that feeling completely alone for hours. When my mother finally walked in the door, I did the one thing a nine-year-old is supposed to be able to do: I reached for her. I needed her to hold space for me on what felt like the worst day of my life.
She told me, sharply, that she didn’t have time for this shit, and I needed to get over myself. That’s the sentence that actually caused my collapse.
Not the mean girls. Her.
I remember walking into the bathroom afterward, closing the door, and sinking onto a little step stool in there. I cradled my head in my hands and rocked myself back and forth. I don’t know how long I sat there.
I recall reaching for something deep inside myself, a quiet, empty space, and pulling it forward until the crying stopped and something else took over. I believe that was the first day I learned how to leave my own body when a feeling got too big for the room. It wouldn’t be the last.
For someone who held feelings as deeply as I did, that was almost more than I could bear.
I didn’t have language for the depth and breadth of my emotional pain until much later, when I learned I’m a highly sensitive person: someone whose nervous system takes in and processes information more deeply than most people’s does. It’s not a mood, and it’s not my preference, either. It’s simply how I’m built. And it meant I felt things at a volume other people in my house weren’t equipped to handle.
Which might explain why an environment where feelings were treated as a weakness and a problem to be solved didn’t just bruise me a little. It shaped who I let get close to me, the breadcrumbs I was willing to accept, and how small I was willing to make myself to keep the peace.
It took decades to trace that thread all the way back to that bathroom floor. Underneath the people-pleasing and that low hum of never-quite-enough that followed me into every relationship I chose, there was shame and a constant, quiet sense that I was unworthy at my core.
I never married. For most of my adult life, I mistook familiar for love, because familiar was the only definition of love I’d ever been handed.
What shaped me the most wasn’t the fourth-grade class rejection, or the mean girls, or even that one afternoon in the bathroom. It was about what happened every single time after that, when a nervous system that never got to fully calm down stayed locked in survival mode long after the danger had passed—for years.
I used to think this was just how my immediate family was: people who never learned how to hold space for someone else’s feelings. I didn’t think much more about it than that.
Then one afternoon, one of my uncles told me something that rearranged everything I thought I understood about my extended family. He said, plainly, that he and his wife had decided early on to adopt all of their children rather than have biological ones because his side of the family, which is also my family, carried what he called a long-running streak of mental illness that he refused to risk passing down.
Gently but seriously, he told me I might want to consider the same thing for myself, for the same reason. That’s when I stepped back and saw the bigger picture.
It wasn’t just about my mom, dad, and sister. It was a whole family’s operating system, one generation quietly handing the wiring down to the next, unnamed and untreated, until somebody finally decided the safest thing to do was stop the line altogether.
That wiring has a name. Researchers link exactly that kind of environment, one where feelings are consistently dismissed or punished, to how conditions like borderline and narcissistic personality disorder take root: some children grow up unable to regulate emotion at all, while others learn to bury the real self so deep they build a false one instead, one that never has to feel anything as inconvenient as a genuine need.
It turns out, I ended up making the same calculation my uncle had. I never had kids. It’s one of the sadder, more regretful costs of growing up in a house that couldn’t hold space for you when you needed it most.
I’m fifty-nine now, and it’s taken most of my life to understand that none of what happened to me as a nine-year-old crying in a teacher’s office was ever really about that one bad day. It was about a family that never learned the true value of emotionally supporting someone when they are expressing their feelings.
I still have to remind myself some days that a big feeling isn’t a burden. It’s just information; actually, it’s extremely valuable data, and it’s allowed to take up space.
What I know now that I didn’t know sitting on that footstool on that bathroom floor is this: I get to be the person who holds space for me. Nobody handed me that skill. I built it myself, slowly, mostly by learning to notice the moment I want to disappear into that old, quiet emptiness and choosing to remain present in my body instead.
Some days I still don’t manage it as well as I should, but most days, now, I do. That’s not a small thing. That’s the whole rebuild, and I’m so proud of what I’ve become.
Somewhere in the middle of that rebuild, something in me finally snapped—not broke; it snapped awake. I let myself get angry, really angry, once I could see clearly that what I’d absorbed as “normal” in that house had been toxic the whole time. That anger is what put me on the path to figuring the rest of it out, piece by piece, the same way I’m telling you about it right now.
These days, holding space for myself looks like this: it looks like spending my days writing about the very thing that once made me disappear into a dense fog; that quiet, empty, fuzzy and unfeeling part of myself. It’s become my raison d’être, my heart song, the thing that gets me out of bed every morning when nothing else could.
Nobody held space for me back then. So now, I lovingly hold it for other people who are standing exactly where I once stood.
If any of this resonates with your story, you’re not alone, and you didn’t deserve to be treated this way. Don’t ever give up on yourself. You’re a beautifully crafted, deeply emotional masterpiece who deserves to have that space lovingly held around you; and once you start holding it for yourself, you’ll show the world exactly how you should be treated.
About Stephanie Roese
Stephanie Roese is a trauma‑informed author and digital creator whose work helps survivors understand emotional neglect, gaslighting, and narcissistic abuse. She recently published the eBook, Decoding Covert Abuse: The 50 Tactics You Were Never Meant to See. Stephanie also creates free healing tools and resources that offer clarity, validation, and support for anyone rebuilding self‑trust. Explore more of her work at https://unseenscars.vip and https://blog.unseenscars.vip.
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