There are days when I wake with a pressure on my chest that feels older than I am, as though something heavy and unseen has sat there through the night, watching, waiting to be acknowledged. It’s not panic, not quite. Panic is sudden. This is slower, stickier. Dread. The word barely captures it. It’s the sense that whatever the day holds, I am not built to bear it. And it’s not because something catastrophic is coming—far from it. It’s because of how ordinary the day will be. I will wake up. I will move through the motions. I will perform life. And inside, I will be watching it all from the ledge of my own mind, knowing full well I’ve stopped participating in reality but unable to climb back in.
And what’s worse, is that even when good things hover on the horizon—say, a weekend of quiet, or a rare moment of peace—I still feel it. The dread doesn’t lift. It follows me, like a fog with claws. If I had won the lottery, I know, with complete certainty, that I would dread the journey to collect the cheque. That’s how pervasive this has become. I am not afraid of misfortune anymore. I am afraid of existence itself. Of the effort it demands. Of the cracks it exposes. Of the vulnerability it requires me to engage with just to get through the day.
And I know where this comes from. This is not new. This is not random. This is the looping film reel of trauma playing out in a body that learned too early to survive by numbing, by fleeing, by shrinking down to the smallest possible self so as not to invite attention or consequence.
Pete Walker, in his book Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, names this place well. He calls it the survival end of the continuum. And it makes sense. Because that’s what this is—survival. Not living. Certainly not thriving. Just existing in a tightly wound coil, hypervigilant, exhausted, driven by an inner critic so powerful and persistent it has replaced my inner voice entirely.
The critic isn’t abstract. It’s inherited. It’s the amalgamated voice of my father’s contempt and my mother’s coldness, the echo of cruel teachers, the judgements of strangers, the disgust of others projected onto my childhood body—each comment, each look, each punishment stored somewhere deep inside me and assigned to memory not as abuse, but as truth.
So when I say that the inner critic is in control of my thoughts, I mean that the narration running through my head is not mine. It is the propaganda of my past. And in this state, I don't just feel fear—I create it. I manufacture it out of shadows. I invent reasons to feel dread because that’s the script I was handed as a child. And when those thoughts grip hold, they take me back to the trauma body, to the freeze, to the fight, to the flight. There is no truth in these feelings. They are echoes of a reality that ended decades ago, but the nervous system doesn’t recognise clocks or calendars. It only recognises danger.
The truth is, I have built an entire internal ecosystem around fear. It was my only currency growing up. It governed how I ate, how I slept, how I coped. There were entire months, maybe years, where food became my only reprieve. If I was overeating, if I was bingeing, if I was sinking into myself with the weight of shame and carbohydrate-induced sedation, there was always something happening underneath it—a flashback, a feeling, an old tape resurfacing. And instead of confronting it, I swallowed it. Quite literally. I used my body as a burial ground for emotion.
In therapy, we spoke of a patient—someone else’s story, but one that landed like a punch in my own ribs. A man whose mother was so co-dependent, so narcissistically entangled in her child’s identity, that he grew up in a psychological prison. At forty years old, he realised he’d never been free. That even as a grown man, he was still shackled to the emotional rules of a household he hadn’t lived in for decades. I felt the echo of that story like it was my own. Because it is. My own parents restricted joy in such a way that even now, joy feels like an indulgence I have to justify. It’s not a spontaneous reaction. It’s a threat. A rebellion against the emotional terms I was raised under.
So what happens? I disappear. I don’t participate in life. I disconnect. And then the critic takes over, linked into a negative self-evaluation so fierce it doesn’t just steal joy—it punishes it. It convinces me I don’t deserve it, that I am a fraud, that even when things are good, I should feel guilt. And the cycle deepens. I become small. I retreat. I sit at the edge of my own life, looking in like a ghost.
And beneath that is the oldest wound: the belief that I will always be deserted. That I am destined to be left. That my existence is disposable. That if someone were to truly know me—know the mess of me—they’d run. That core belief is not mine. It was given to me. It was carved into me by the way I was parented, the way I was shamed for my body, the way I was punished for being a child with continence issues. I was segregated. Ostracised. Made into a spectacle of disgust. And no child forgets that. The body never forgets humiliation.
“We have to take action. Otherwise, we give away our lives.”
So now, as an adult, when I find myself spiralling—when I feel the old thinking creeping in, when procrastination and self-doubt and inertia dig their nails into me—I understand that this isn’t laziness. It’s grief. It’s a nervous system replaying an old programme. It’s self-harm dressed as ordinary life. The thought process becomes the weapon. And I use it against myself.
Which is why, if I do not remain awake to it—if I do not consciously update myself every single day—I will slip. I will fall into the old way of thinking. And it will take over.
Because the truth is, if I had a physical injury—say a broken foot—I would know it needed treatment. I would rest. I would tend to it. But when the injury is psychological, when the pain is emotional, I tell myself to get on with it. I pretend nothing is wrong. I carry the wound as if it is not bleeding. And this is madness. This is the mindset of the victim—one who has been conditioned to normalise the hideous.
What I went through as a child was not normal. It was not okay. It was not something to shrug off or minimise. It was damaging. And it continues to shape my sense of self, unless I intervene.
I have to take action. I have to be present to my own identity—every day. I have to ask: Who am I bringing forward today? What version of myself am I letting speak?
Because when I allow the dread to run riot, when I allow the critic to write the story, I do not just lose joy. I lose my dynamism. My spark. My life. These thoughts belong in the past. They do not deserve space in the present. They are squatters in the mind I am trying to reclaim.
I am choosing how I think today. Because if I do not, I give away my life. And that is not a metaphor. That is the reality. Every unchallenged flashback, every relapse into survival mode, every unconscious surrender to the narrative I was handed at seven years old—that is a theft. That is me letting trauma win. And I refuse.
So I act. I speak. I write. I remember who I am.
Because thriving is not a destination. Thriving is a decision. One that has to be made over and over, sometimes a hundred times a day. Especially when the survival instinct is loud. Especially when Thanatos is knocking. Especially when everything in you says you don’t deserve to feel better.
Today, I know better.
Today, I choose differently.
Today, I refuse to give my life away.
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