The Wounds You Don't Talk About

I grew up in a house where the atmosphere shifted depending on the hour, the day, or the mood hanging in the air. Some families had rhythms, morning routines, dinner conversations, predictable jokes, stable ground. We had weather. Storms. Sudden pressure drops. The kind of tension you could feel in your bones before anything was said.
Before most kids learned multiplication tables, I had learned how to listen for footsteps in the hallway and evaluate whether the day was going to break open or break apart. I learned how to read the slam of a door the way other kids read storybooks.
Some households teach love. Mine taught alertness. Hypervigilance. The art of staying small. I didn’t know I was learning survival. I thought it was normal. When chaos is your first language, you don't realize it's chaos. You just live in it. You adapt to it. You shape yourself around it.
I became quiet, not because I didn’t have anything to say, but because speaking felt like risk. Words could trigger storms. Questions could ignite explosions. Emotions could turn into targets. So I swallowed everything.
People think trauma is the moment of impact. The yelling, the slammed doors, the unpredictable outbursts. But trauma is what settles afterward, the silence, the pretending, the forced smiles around the dinner table when everyone knows the house is burning under their breath.
It’s the emotional isolation that does the real damage. The sense that there is no safe witness to your pain. The belief that your feelings are too heavy, too inconvenient, too dangerous to express.
As a child, you don’t decide to emotionally shut down. You just do. Instinctively. The body builds walls long before the mind can explain them. And those walls grow with you.
I molded myself into someone who could endure. Someone who could read danger before it arrived. Someone who did not cry. Someone who did not ask for help. Someone who could sit perfectly still and become invisible when necessary.
But invisibility has a cost. When you disappear to survive, you lose pieces of yourself in the process. Softness becomes weakness. Vulnerability becomes threat. Love becomes unpredictable. Safety becomes something you don’t believe in.
The child who learns to disappear becomes the adult who doesn’t know how to stay present. The adult who rarely feels at home in their own skin. The adult who struggles to trust love because love was never safe.
I carried that version of myself for years, the silent one, the watchful one, the one who had mastered the art of not needing anything. But pain that doesn’t leave the body will always find somewhere to go. And eventually, it consumes.
I didn’t know how to talk about what was happening inside of me. I didn’t have the language yet. I only had the heaviness. The tightness in my chest. The constant hum of tension running beneath the surface.
People called me strong. Mature for my age. Independent. They didn’t realize those were just different words for lonely.
And loneliness is not quiet. It echoes. It grows. It sharpens itself.
Before addiction ever entered my life, the ground was already cracked. The wounds were already present. The silence was already killing me slowly.
This is the part people don’t see when they look at the finished story. They see the addiction. The crash. The recovery. The transformation. They do not see the child who learned to disappear because it was the only way to survive.
And that is where the tunnel begins. Not with substances. Not with bad decisions. Not with rebellion. But with pain that had nowhere to go.

Jeff