You can't heal what you were never allowed to feel!!!

You can’t heal sh*t you were never allowed to feel.

That’s the truth of it. No matter how many books you read, how many self-help reels you save, how many times you’ve told yourself “it wasn’t that bad”, if you weren’t allowed to feel your pain when it was happening, then your nervous system didn’t get the memo that it was safe to move on.

What is unwitnessed pain and why does it matter when it's at home.........It's important to clarify, I’m not talking about obvious, in-your-face trauma. I mean the quiet stuff. The overlooked moments. The thousand tiny ways you were told directly or indirectly that your feelings were too much, your needs were inconvenient, or your pain didn’t matter.

That kind of pain for a child buries itself deep. And over time, you start questioning if it was even real. Maybe you’ve thought, "Did I just make it all up?"Or "Other people had it worse I should be grateful. "Or "It wasn’t trauma"

Trauma isn’t about how big or dramatic something looks from the outside. It’s about what your younger self was left to carry on their own. If your little brain and body were overwhelmed and no one stepped in to help? That’s trauma. End of.

What's shit is that we grow up thinking the past is in the past. But it’s not. What we don’t process doesn’t just disappear. It waits. Sits in the background, whispering through your anxiety, fuelling that low-level guilt, sabotaging your relationships, and quietly convincing you that something must be wrong with you.

The reality is, a lot of what breaks us in the present is layered on top of pain that was never acknowledged in the first place. It’s not always about what’s happening now, it’s about what it’s waking up inside of you.

You can talk about your trauma until your jaw aches. You can explain it, analyse it, put a nice little bow on it. But if you’re not actually feeling it , if you’re not meeting the part of you that lived it, then it just sits there. Unmoved. Unhealed. Unwitnessed. And like me, it cam out in impatience, temper, and irritability.

Healing isn’t just about knowing what happened to you. It’s about letting yourself feel what you never got to feel at the time. The rage. The heartbreak. The shame. The confusion. All of it. Because only then can your body stop holding it like it’s still happening.

And then there’s the grief. Jesus christ....the grief. For a long time i never knew i was grieving my childhood.

The grief of realising what you didn’t get. The ache of watching yourself show up for your own child in a way no one ever showed up for you. That moment when you realise love, kindness, presence... it’s actually not that hard. And yet, it was never given to you.

That kind of grief doesn’t always come with a name. Sometimes it’s just a dull ache. A longing. A sadness that doesn’t seem to link to anything specific just the weight of what could have been.

Grieving your past means facing that gap. The one between what you needed and what you got.

It’s about allowing the truth to land that maybe, just maybe, you were never going to feel fully seen, loved, or safe in the environment you grew up in no matter how hard you tried, no matter how good you were.

This kind of grief isn’t dramatic. It’s quiet. It’s buried under a thousand coping mechanisms perfectionism, people-pleasing, distraction, numbing, overachieving. It’s a pain we weren’t allowed to have, so we turned it into everything else.

No one’s lining up to feel it. Most of us will do everything in our power to avoid pain only to realise, eventually, that in trying to avoid it, we’ve also avoided living.

We grieve the lost opportunities the childhood we didn’t get to have, the dreams we weren’t allowed to explore, the years we spent living out someone else’s version of who we were supposed to be. We even grieve the illusions the stories we clung to because the truth felt too heavy. The “it wasn’t that bad” and “they did their best” versions that kept us disconnected from the actual impact.

This kind of grief isn’t about blame. It’s about truth.

And truth, as painful as it is, is the beginning of healing.

If someone had told me just how deep the grief would go before I started doing this work, I would’ve laughed in their face. I didn’t want to dwell. I wanted to get on with life. But what I didn’t realise was that the life I was living wasn’t actually mine it was a performance, designed to keep me as far away from this pain as possible.

And when that became too much too exhausting, too soul-crushing —I had to stop running.

And that changed everything.

I didn’t get a medal. No one congratulated me. But I found space, space to feel, to breathe, to exist. I found joy I didn’t have to fake. I stopped numbing, stopped hiding, and started living.