She Carried It Before Me
And I Almost Did Too

I always knew something wasn’t right.

Not in a way I could explain. Not in a way anyone else seemed to see.

It was subtle. Quiet. Easy to miss if you weren’t inside it.

I kept my distance in the ways I could. And still — I loved her in the way you love someone you don’t fully understand but can’t fully walk away from either.

I didn’t have the language for it then. I just knew something in her felt heavy. Like she was carrying more than one life could hold.

My mother died at 63.

We had found our way back to each other about six months before. And by then… I knew.

Not from a disease they could name on a form. Not from something the doctors caught too late or missed entirely. She died, in the way I understand it now, from the weight of everything she never put down. The anxiety that had no name. The patterns she learned as a girl that she carried, unexamined, for her entire life. The survival responses that became her personality, her identity, her way of moving through the world — until her body simply couldn't carry them anymore.

She was 63.

I am 52.

And for most of my life, I was becoming her.

I didn't know that was what was happening.

That's the thing nobody tells you about intergenerational trauma — it doesn't arrive with a label. It doesn't knock on your door and announce itself. It just quietly becomes the water you swim in. The way you learn to read a room before you enter it. The way your shoulders tighten when someone's tone shifts. The way you apologise before you've even said the thing you're apologising for.

I thought that was just me. I thought that was just how I was built.

I watched my mother disappear into herself for years. I watched her carry everyone else's weight while quietly drowning under her own. I watched her cope in the only ways she knew how — and I watched those ways cost her everything, slowly, over decades.

And then I looked at my own life and realised I was doing the same thing. In different ways. With different methods. But the same root.

I got sober at 49. Almost 50.

And I want to be honest with you — because honesty is the only thing that has ever actually helped me — getting sober was not the hard part. Getting sober removed the thing I had been using to not feel. And then everything I hadn't been feeling was just... there. Waiting. Patient in the way that only old pain can be patient.

I thought I was fixing something when I got sober. I was actually just beginning to see it.

What I found underneath the coping wasn't weakness. It wasn't brokenness. It was a little girl who had learned, very early, that the way to stay safe was to make herself useful. To stay small. To feel everything but show nothing. To take care of everyone else's emotional world so carefully that she never once stopped to ask what she needed.

She learned it from watching. From absorbing. From a woman who loved her but had never been taught how to put her own oxygen mask on first.

It lives in the body.

That's the part that took me the longest to understand. I could read about it. I could talk about it in meetings, in therapy rooms, in quiet conversations with women who understood. I could trace the lineage of it back through generations, point at the moments where it took root, name the patterns with the right words.

And still my body kept responding the way it always had.

Because intergenerational trauma doesn't live in your mind. It lives in the way your nervous system learned to interpret the world. It lives in the survival responses that got handed down — not through genes, not through stories, but through the thousand small moments of watching someone you loved not know how to feel safe.

Your body learned what hers knew. And it has been running that programme ever since.

Because for years I saw myself in her — her patterns, her coping, her quiet unravelling — and I thought: this is where I am headed. This is what I inherited. This is who I am.

But here is what I know now, from the work I have done and am still doing:

My mother didn't have the language for what she was carrying. She didn't have the tools. She didn't know there was a name for what was happening in her nervous system, or that it had started long before her, or that it could have been different.

I do. And that changes everything.

If you recognise yourself in any of this —

If you have looked at your mother, or your grandmother, or the women in your lineage and seen pieces of yourself you didn't choose —

If you have wondered whether you are simply becoming the pattern, or whether there is a way to be the one who finally breaks it —

You are not too far in. You are not too old. You are not carrying something that cannot be set down.

The younger version of you who learned these patterns before she had any words for them — she is still here. She is still waiting. And she deserves to finally be met.

That is where this work begins.