Healing from Childhood Trauma: Learning What Was Never Yours to Carry

Some words have a way of cutting straight through the noise, landing in the body before the mind even works them out. It was never yours to carry is one of those phrases for me.

So many of us move through life weighed down by things that don’t truly belong to us. A parent’s unspoken expectations. The responsibility of keeping the peace in a chaotic home. The shame or guilt that was passed down through generations. The pressure to be perfect, to succeed, to take care of everyone else’s feelings. These burdens settle quietly into our bodies until they feel like they’re part of who we are.

But not everything you’re holding is yours.

Gabor Maté often writes about how children, in order to preserve attachment and a sense of safety, will absorb the emotional weight of those around them. A child who senses tension or distress in a parent may unconsciously take responsibility, believing, “If I can be good, quiet, pleasing enough, then everything will be okay.” This is a survival technique to maintain connection, not a conscious choice.

Bessel van der Kolk, in The Body Keeps the Score, shows us how those survival patterns live on in the body. The bracing, the hypervigilance, the tightening in the chest: our nervous systems adapt to carry what was too heavy to make sense of at the time. And often, decades later, we’re still holding those weights as though they’re ours to carry forever.

But they were never meant to be yours.

Healing doesn’t mean erasing the past or pretending those experiences didn’t shape you. They did. But part of healing from childhood trauma is learning to sort through the load you’re carrying and gently setting down what was handed to you unfairly. That might mean recognising that your worth was never supposed to be measured by grades, achievements, or keeping others calm. Or realising that the shame you’ve carried was actually someone else’s unprocessed pain, passed along to you.

This process of release is rarely one big moment of clarity. More often, it’s slow and tender. It looks like reminding yourself again and again: “This weight does not belong to me.” It looks like noticing the tension in your body when old patterns get triggered, and offering yourself compassion instead of judgement. It looks like grieving what you didn’t get, and acknowledging the child in you who thought they had to hold it all together.

Each time you do, something loosens. Each time you name what was never yours, you create more space to breathe, to soften, and to step into your life with a little more freedom.