Self-regulation is a battle between past and present, a negotiation between the child in me and the man I need to be. If I step back and look at myself objectively, through the lens of neuroscience and psychology, PTSD is the shadow in the room. The boy who once endured has never quite stepped aside for the man. I function, I live, I work. But in many ways, I am still the child reacting to an associative memory that keeps resurfacing. My limbic system, the primal core of my emotional world, is wired for survival, but survival is not living.
The truth of today is simple: I am still trying to find stability in a world that was never stable for me. When I was a child, my father was the storm, an ever-present force that shaped the way I saw myself and the world. My mother, whether by submission or fear, allowed the storm to rage. Even after he was gone, his control over her remained, shaping my reality long past his death. The result? A limbic system trained in instability, primed for threat, scanning for danger even where none exists. That system was formed between the ages of zero and four, when a child watches, learns, and absorbs their world like a sponge. My world, at that stage, was not safe.
This is where the gap exists—the space between the child and the man. The man knows better, but the child still feels. When confronted with someone who carries the echoes of my father—not the same, not as overtly abusive, but possessing an air of superiority and righteousness—I react. The child fears, the child withdraws, the child expects harm. It doesn’t matter if the threat is real or perceived. The associative memory is in play, and that’s all it takes. The adult in me must step forward and override that response, but that’s the work. That’s the daily practice.
I have spent years understanding this. Intellectually, I know it. The limbic system operates beyond logic—it doesn’t care for rationality, only survival. When I was left alone, when stability was removed, it reawakened that deep sense of insecurity. Depression is layered, built upon a foundation of unresolved childhood pain. The only way through it is to anchor myself in the present, to acknowledge the truth of now. Not the truth of then. Then is over. Then cannot reach me anymore, except through the echoes I allow to exist.
Self-regulation is about stepping in as the adult. It’s about telling the boy within me: ‘You are safe. I will look after you now.’ It’s about recognising that I do not have to entertain the narratives of abuse that replay in my mind, that I am not trapped in the cycles of the past. This requires discipline—not in the rigid, punishing way I once believed discipline to be, but in the act of mental housekeeping. Structure. Boundaries. Order. The small daily acts of looking after myself because no one else will.
Irritability is an old scar. It is the residue of my father, the voice of the inner critic that tells me I am not good enough. I have internalised his abuse to the point that I now wield it against myself. Self-directed cruelty, disguised as self-discipline. If I am to break the cycle, I must learn to be compassionate to myself. I do not extend that kindness easily. It is foreign, unfamiliar, like speaking a language I was never taught. But if I do not transcend the patterns inherited from my father, I will remain bound to them.
Trust must begin with myself. The past conditioned me to believe that trust was dangerous, that letting my guard down would invite harm. But trust is not about others—it is about believing in my own capacity to navigate whatever comes. If I can learn this, I can break free. My soul is not shaped by the suffering I endured but by how I choose to rise from it. I have been letting the ghosts of abuse dictate my present and my future. That stops now.
The mind, when left unchecked, becomes its own captor. If I continue to exist within the narrative of the inner critic, I will never move beyond it. But I am not bound to that story. The practice is to be kind in the moment, to be conscious of my thoughts, to take responsibility for how I treat myself. My father may have shaped the way I think, but he does not own my thoughts. I do.
The boy in me cannot care for me. That is the role of the man I am becoming. The discipline is in recognising this, in stepping forward as the adult who takes ownership of his own mind. There is no grand moment of transformation, no single breakthrough that erases the past. There is only the work—the daily practice of self-regulation, of self-awareness, of choosing to be kind rather than cruel. And in that choice, I begin to rewrite the story of who I am.
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