The Little Girl I’m Still Learning to Hold

The part of me I’m still learning to care for.

Why has letting go been so difficult for me in the first place?

I am beginning to understand why surrendering myself has felt so frightening—and why I learned to confuse love with self-abandonment.

There is a quote I used to love and return to when I was healing my inner child:

“It’s like a mother, when the baby is crying, she picks up the baby and she holds the baby tenderly in her arms. Your pain, your anxiety, is your baby. You have to take care of it. You have to go back to yourself, to recognize the suffering in you, embrace the suffering, and you get a relief.”
—Thich Nhat Hanh

For me, healing meant going back to the first, deepest wound of my childhood: the abuse I experienced as a child.

For years, I carried the secret of what had happened and suffered quietly. I did not always have the words for what was happening inside of me or the understanding to make sense of it, but I knew there was a heaviness I could not escape.

Somewhere along the way, I learned to believe that love meant giving whatever was asked of me and caring for someone else’s needs, even when it hurt me. I learned to make myself smaller, to stay quiet, and to carry responsibility for things that were never mine to carry.

When I finally said, “Enough. I can’t live with this anymore,” I was already swallowed by the pain. Standing up to it was terrifying, but it was also the beginning of my freedom.

I chose that I would no longer accept it, no longer let what had happened control my life, and no longer carry responsibility for someone else’s choices, behaviors, or actions.

But liberation came with a cost.

When I spoke up, I had to face denial and the way my pain was turned back onto me. That part was its own kind of wound. I was blamed for what had happened to me—the child who had been hurt—while being told that I was trying to cause harm, break apart a family, or create something that wasn't there.

There were things I was expected to carry alongside the original secret, and a version of the story emerged that protected someone else from having to face the truth.

Writing this now, I can still feel how heavy that was to carry.

But I can also feel the part of me that survived it—the part that finally chose to tell the truth, even when no one else wanted to hear it.

And there is something else I am beginning to understand about that little girl.

She wasn't only learning to abandon herself. She was learning to protect the person who was supposed to be protecting her.

I was a child. I depended on this person for love, safety, and guidance. Because of that, I believed that if this was what I was being asked to do by someone I depended on, then somehow it must be okay. I didn't have the understanding to know that the responsibility was never mine—that I should never have been placed in that position in the first place.

This person was supposed to teach me what love was.

They were supposed to teach me what protection felt like.

They were supposed to teach me that my body and my boundaries were mine, and that no one should ever use me in that way.

They were supposed to be someone I could feel safe with.

Instead, I was taught something completely different.

I learned that love could be earned by giving someone what they wanted. That if I did what was asked of me, I might receive something in return—affection, attention, gifts. Somehow, a child could come to understand that as love because the person teaching her was the person she was supposed to trust.

But that wasn't love.

And it wasn't protection.

It was a profound betrayal of both.

The person who should have been my protector became the person I needed protection from.

Looking back now, I can see that I was a child trying to make sense of something that never should have been mine to understand. I was trying to preserve a relationship with someone I depended on, while being taught that keeping that person happy was somehow connected to being loved.

There was no way for that little girl to know that the person she was trusting was the very person she should have been protected from.

And perhaps that is part of what I am still learning to untangle.

I learned very early that love meant giving someone else what they wanted, even when it came at the expense of myself.

But maybe even deeper than that, I learned that love was something I had to earn.

And perhaps one of the deepest forms of healing has been realizing that love was never supposed to require that of me.

Love was never supposed to be something I earned by giving another person what they wanted.

Love was supposed to be freely given.

Protection was supposed to feel safe.

And the people who loved me were supposed to care about what was safe for me, too.

I thought that telling the truth would be the end of that story. In many ways, it was the beginning of my freedom. But I am realizing that surviving something and fully understanding how it shaped you are not always the same thing.

I learned how to protect myself from the person who hurt me. I learned boundaries. I learned to speak up. I learned that what someone else chose to do to me was never mine to take responsibility for.

But somewhere deeper, there was still a part of me that believed keeping someone else comfortable was safer than honoring myself.

Maybe that is the part of me I am still learning to care for.

The little girl who learned to stay quiet and carry the weight of what someone else had chosen to do to her is now the woman learning to pick herself up, hold herself tenderly, and say:

You don't have to do that anymore.

Maybe healing isn't only about learning to protect myself from the people who hurt me. Maybe it is also about learning to recognize the moments when I am tempted to abandon myself to keep someone else comfortable.

Maybe it is learning that I don't have to disappear to love someone.

I don't have to silence myself to keep the peace.

I don't have to take responsibility for what someone else chose.

And I don't have to earn love by abandoning myself.

The little girl who once believed that staying quiet was safer is still a part of me. But she doesn't have to carry that weight anymore.

Now, there is a woman here who can see her.

Who can hear her.

Who can hold her.

And who can finally tell her, with tenderness:

You don't have to do that anymore.