“I’m Scared”

A reflection on Somatic Experience (SE) therapy, the body’s memory, and the three-year-old who never got to be a child

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I heard her say it, “I am scared,” and it sounded funny because I was not scared in that moment, but she was. The 3-year-old version of me was scared.

I was sitting in a Somatic Experiencing therapy session — a modality that works at the intersection of body awareness and relational healing — talking through something that happened on a walk with my husband and kids.

It was an ordinary Sunday. He started to get stressed about something. Something small, probably. And I felt myself shift into a familiar mode: watching him, reading him, moving carefully, trying to soften the air around him before things escalated.

My therapist asked, “What will happen when you don’t manage your husband’s mood?”

And that’s when I heard a far away voice say it. The voice was mine. The words came from somewhere deep and old and true.

“I’m scared.”

—

The Girl With the Gold Hair and Green Eyes

She was three years old.

Long gold and blonde hair. Green, hazel eyes. The kind of beautiful, open face that should have been met with gentleness, with protection, with the unhurried safety of being small and loved.

When her parents divorced, she was uprooted from everything she knew — her home, her neighborhood, her dad — and moved an hour away, into her grandmother’s house. For two years, from age three to five, that house was her world.

Her grandmother was not warm. That word — *warm* — doesn’t even apply, because warmth implies something capable of heat. Her grandmother was hollowed out. A ghost wearing a human shape. There was no tenderness there, no softness, no sense that a small child’s inner life mattered or even existed. She spanked. She ignored. She controlled through force and neglect and the particular cruelty of someone who has long since stopped caring what their coldness does to others.

The little girl’s version of playing at Grandma’s house was sitting at the kitchen table rolling cigarettes. Her grandmother blew smoke in her face as she gave her  watered down Brandy in small Dixie cups.

She and her sister got ignored or got consequences. She watched her sister get her mouth washed out with soap, screaming and crying, for nothing — because Grandma was extra drunk that night and needed somewhere to put it.

There was no dad in that house. Grandpa was at work. Mom was at work or at the bar or somewhere with some man.

There was no one.

She was three years old, and there was no one.

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The Body Keeps the Score

Somatic Experiencing, and therapies rooted in it, are built on a foundational truth: the body does not forget.

When we experience something threatening, especially as children who are entirely dependent on the adults around them, the nervous system encodes that experience. It doesn’t just file it away as a memory. It *becomes* part of the body’s operating system. A pattern. A reflex. A way of reading rooms and faces and tones of voice that runs faster than thought.

For years, I lived inside that encoding without knowing it.

When my husband’s voice would tighten on a walk — when his mood would shift — something in me would activate before my conscious mind had time to catch up. I would start managing. Softening. Smoothing. Fixing.

I thought I was being a good wife. A thoughtful partner.

I was being a three-year-old trying to survive.

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“How Old Is Ghost Mode?”

My therapist asked me: *How old is ghost mode?

She was referring to the state I sometimes slip into when I absorb a cruel comment, critique or hurt, and instead of speaking up, I go flat. I disappear. I can suddenly go under the surface and become very still and very far away.  I can make myself very small and very quiet.

I started to answer. And then my whole body began to shake. Tears, violent and beyond my control, because the body knows things the mind is still working out.

Ghost mode is 33 years old and is present and ready to disappear in a moment’s notice.

She is:
Scared of unregulated moods. Scared of unpredictable adults. Scared of what happens when someone bigger than you loses control of themselves and you are the nearest, softest thing.

In Somatic Experiencing therapy, we don’t just *talk* about these moments. We locate them. We feel where they live in the body — the tightening in the chest, the held breath, the reflexive shrinking. And we bring the adult self into relationship with that child: gently, without forcing, letting her know that the emergency is over. That she is not three anymore. That she does not have to be the one who fixes it.

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What My Mother Gave Me

My mother was not in that grandmother’s house. She was elsewhere — always elsewhere.

She prioritized her addiction. Her comfort. Her men, her relationships, her own survival. I was second to all of it, and I learned that early and thoroughly.

I can’t remember her taking me to the park. She didn’t come to my softball games, my gymnastics meets. But I saw her at the bar. I watched her screaming fights with men.  I watched her drunk. I watched her make out with a stranger. I watched her move through life in chaos, like a chaotic weather system, and I learned to read the sky.

She spoke poorly about my dad in front of me. She minimized my pain when I brought it to her. She taught me, without ever saying the words, that my inner life was an inconvenience.

What she gave me, without meaning to, was hypervigilance. A nervous system trained to detect emotional weather from a hundred yards away and begin managing it immediately. She gave me the belief, bone deep, that love is conditional on how well I manage other people’s moods.

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Coming Back for Her

There is a girl with long gold-blonde hair and green eyes, and she is three years old, and she has been waiting a very long time for someone to come back for her.

That is the work.

Not fixing or performing or managing my way into safety. But returning to that little girl with the truth she never got to hear: *You were not too much. You were not the problem. You deserved protection. You deserved a safe, healthy adult to talk to, and you didn’t get it, and that was never your fault.*

My hope is, the next time I notice myself shifting on a family walk — reading my husband, bracing, managing — I am able, for the first time, to pause. To feel the fear underneath the behavior. To say, internally, *I see you. I know why you’re scared. But this is not Grandma’s house. This is not 1992. You are safe.*

The body doesn’t believe that right away. It takes time. It takes repetition. It takes a lot of shaking and a lot of tears and a lot of gentle, patient return.

But she’s worth it.

That little girl — gold hair, green eyes, rolling cigarettes because that was all she had — she is worth every bit of it.
And so are you
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*If this resonated with you, you may be navigating your own early relational trauma. Somatic Experiencing therapy, and Internal Family Systems are all modalities that work with the body’s stored experiences and the younger parts of us that are still waiting to feel safe. You don’t have to keep managing alone.*