Achievement Is The Symptom

“Good memories.”

I flipped through the photos. I don’t remember it that way.

That’s what my family texted our group chat after my sister sent a Zillow listing of our childhood home.

All I remember is pain.

I see myself bullying my sister to feel powerful. I see myself sneaking into the pantry and binge-eating peanut M&Ms to feel something. I see myself obsessing over video games to escape.

How can people remember the same house this differently?

I put the phone down. Pain. Shame. Guilt. I can’t look anymore.

I realize I’ve been living inside my head. My whole psyche has been wired for an external world.

I feel robbed of my childhood. Not by somebody else. By my body.

Frozen In Time

A part of me was protecting myself – fragments of myself frozen in time.

Memories where I felt intense shame, guilt, and helplessness. I’ve spent most of life trying to block these out.

Occasionally they’d surface. Seemingly at random times. I would just beat them down out of awareness. I numbed however I could.

I didn’t want to relive a past I knew was filled with pain. My body locked those memories away – but they were not forgotten.

The longer I went on in life the louder the internal cries for help. The small helpless boy in the past kept reaching up through the surface desperate to be heard.

No matter how much I tried to avoid the internal turmoil I couldn’t keep this up.

I eventually came across Internal Family Systems and started to listen.

What I found was a cast of younger selves, each trapped in a different moment, each carrying a burden from my past.

It was physically distressing – my back would radiate and seize as different parts of me expressed their fears.

Through listening I found a version of myself underneath the parts. Calm, curious, compassionate. The Self.

It didn’t just hear them. It felt what they were carrying. The pain didn’t move through language. It moved through being felt.

Slowly, my body started to feel safe enough to process what it had been holding.

Before There Were Words

What looked like ambition from the outside was a nervous-system that was never told the war was over.

I had organized my entire psyche around protecting childhood wounds I couldn’t see. Every goal, every action, every thought – in service to parts of me I didn’t know were there.

Traumatic experiences don’t get stored like regular memories.

The nervous system gets overwhelmed past what it can process. Parts of the brain go offline.

There are no words available – only fragments of sensation, embedded somewhere below language.

Most of what adults carry was ingrained before they had language to associate it with.

As an infant, your nervous system learns to regulate itself through the faces and voices of the people who hold you. That’s the foundation.

When those faces are unpredictable and the source of safety is also the source of fear – the body braces and never finds the signal to unbrace.

The world feels unsafe. Intimacy feels dangerous. You can’t trust how you feel.

All of that, before there’s a self around to question any of it.

Three Angles

What I’ve come to see is that the achievement pattern, the parts of me frozen in time, and the nervous-system state I’ve been describing aren’t three different things. They’re one thing seen from three angles.

The drive to keep performing is a developmental process – a stage of meaning-making that organizes the whole psyche around proving worth.

It’s also a protective part doing its job – guarding something younger and more vulnerable that can’t yet be touched directly.

And underneath both is a body that registered danger before there were words for it, and never got the signal that the danger had passed.

Same phenomenon. Three vocabularies.

Each one true. Each one partial.

Work that reaches one level only releases one level.

Talk therapy gave me language for the pattern but didn’t shift my body’s response.

Somatic work moved tension but couldn’t tell me what the tension was protecting.

Parts work named the protectors but couldn’t dissolve what the nervous system underneath was still bracing against.

None of it was wrong. Each one only reached the phenomenon at its own level.

Feeling My Way Back

What got me into this position is not what will get me out of it.

So I’ve started small. Mostly mindfulness – long exhales, attention to where tension lives in the body. Where does this feeling sit? What part of me is bracing right now?

I’m trying to feel my way back into a body that learned to leave itself.

Slowly, the nervous system is starting to release – not just tension, but what the tension has been holding.

The protectors have softened – they’ve been guarding these younger parts for decades, and they’re starting to trust the Self enough to step back.

When they do, I can sit with the exile directly. I feel what it’s been carrying. The pain doesn’t move through language. It moves through being felt.

I’ve met the boy who used to ravage through the pantry. He didn’t need me to fix him. He needed someone to know he was there.

I’ve met the teenager who sabotaged his relationships before they could turn vulnerable. He didn’t need to be fixed either. He wanted to be loved and to love.

Each time I meet an exile, I’m struck by what they’ve been carrying. And each time I listen and feel their pain, the system relaxes.

The Photos Again

I look through the photos again.

A more compassionate part of me can see the child who was doing the best he could.

The pain is still there. I don’t know how to process all of it yet. But there’s a subtle love filtering the photos now that wasn’t there last week.

I don’t think the wounds ever fully leave.

The way I see these photos today and the way I’ll see them in six months won’t be the same.