An ongoing exploration into humanness

These days, most of us are familiar with terms from psychology such as attachment style, core wounds, the shadow side and abusive behaviour. Many of us have scrolled through short videos online that tell us all about narcissism, empathy, and how to be our best, most successful selves.

But somehow, we as a species seem to be less aware of ourselves rather than more. Fear grips us, and we search for reasons and solutions, connection that doesn't hurt us more, disconnection that feels safe for once. So, how do we get here or there or wherever it is that you find yourself?

I have been given consent to share the story of one very brave person, as I seek to learn more about the subtlety of us. I warmly invite you to join me as I look at her story through a lens of curiosity, humility, and a beginner's mind.

Annie: the woman who remembered that she is a warrior

"My dad was my hero. Same as most little girls, I suppose. Nothing unusual about that. Nothing unusual about my hero story either. I want to write it anyway. I want to get it out from inside of me. It has been crippling me my entire life, and today I can see it with so much clarity that I cannot minimise it anymore.

It has to be externalised, where it belongs. It is a part of me that has been mistaken for a measure of my own worth rather than the adaptation of a very young girl who had so much love for her father that she refused to let him abandon her."

I know what you might be thinking – it would be easy to judge Annie’s dad, assign blame and make assumptions about where this story is going. I would have done once upon a time! However, I’ll ask that you remember the beginner’s mind and stay curious.

Let's see if we can learn something much more empowering that makes sense and is really quite a simple concept in the end.

Ever heard about magical thinking?

My supervisor taught me that concept. "Children have magical thinking, Hanni", Mike would say, with a smile on his face and sadness in his eyes. An expression which illustrated both sides of that coin simultaneously.

Magical thinking is the belief of children that they have the ability to make absolutely anything happen just by willing it so, and that they are responsible for all the bad stuff going on around them or happening to them because they have not wished hard enough to make it stop.

Magical thinking is how children give themselves a sense of autonomy and agency. Clever, isn't it! Our psychological development requires us to understand that we are autonomous individuals, physically different from and separate from our caregivers. Pretty scary unless we have a way to get our needs met by those around us.

Children are quite limited in this way at first. They cry, they stop crying. That's about it until they develop a theory of mind, social emotions, and some experience of relationships with others as a transactional concept that relies on the other doing their bit too. All of this is far beyond a small child's intellectual capacity, and at the same time, a human child is developing a very curious, creative, problem-solving human brain. So the child believes it must be the power of their mind that makes their mother feed them, for example.

This hypothesis becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy: it can't be disproved unless we never get fed and then we'd die before we have a chance to know we are not responsible for other people's choices.

Annie's world

Now, let us go back in time. All the way back to the mid 1980s. Annie is a young child between the ages of three and seven. Her once-stable, loving home is changing. Her parents are divorcing and will soon start new relationships. Her parents lock into a custody war due to her mother relocating to another country. One of them will become the absent parent, and the other the present parent.

Annie is a child navigating some tough stuff. She is such a little warrior, and that part of her that was once adored and admired by her parents – that part felt powerful, and perhaps that was the part of little Annie that took charge in a bid to maintain a close bond with her very fractured and displaced loved ones.

It is important that you ask yourself this: How might Annie's narrative have helped her in her situation? What might she have experienced if she hadn't created that narrative? Let's unpack that now.

First, I want to introduce you to little Annie's voice. I imagine it sounds something like this:

"My brother and I are abandoned because I am failing to will our dad to us.

I know this to be true because he says he desperately wants to be here, and he says he is lonely when he is not here with us. He says how much he loves us, misses us, and cares about us. He even cries, and I see tears in his eyes, and I hear a quiver in his voice, and he looks sad and distant, and his face is smiling, and we play together when he is with us.

That is what love looks like because that is how my dad looks, and he says he loves us. My baby brother is relying on me to get it right because he also says that he misses our dad, and he cries a lot and looks scared when our dad is not here. I am such a failure; Dad is still not here. I know it's my fault because he wrote a letter reminding me that he wishes he could be here! I must do better. Be clearer. I must be the problem.

Other people look angry and either shout or go quiet when I am around or when I appear. I hear them laughing, talking, and playing before I appear. I will promise not to take up any space at all if my dad can be with my brother and me again, please, I swear!

The more I give up my needs, the more people are around my baby brother, and my hero remains intact. I am getting really good at this; I am no longer a failure; I am powerful indeed!"

How Annie’s narrative helped her

I want you to sit with that voice for a moment before we move on. It is heartbreaking, yes. But it is also breathtakingly brilliant.

Annie's narrative – her belief that she could will her father back, that she was responsible for his absence, and that shrinking herself would somehow keep love in her life – was not a sign that something was wrong with her. It was a sign that something was working exactly as it should. Her young brain was doing precisely what it was designed to do: solving an impossible problem with the only tools available to a small child.

Let's go back to those two questions I asked you to hold. How might Annie's narrative have helped her? It gave her something to do. When the adults around her were consumed with their own pain, conflict, and legal battles, Annie's magical thinking handed her a sense of agency in a situation where she had none. If she believed she could fix it, she didn't have to sit with the unbearable helplessness of being a small child whose world is falling apart and who has no power to stop it.

The narrative also preserved her father as a hero. If it was her fault he wasn't there, then it wasn't his fault, and he could remain the adoring, loving dad she needed him to be. The cost of that narrative was her relationship with herself. The benefit was the survival of her relationship with love itself. And what might she have experienced without it? Without this narrative, Annie would have been left with the full, unfiltered reality: that her parents' choices were their own, that she had no control over whether her father stayed or left, and that love – the thing she depended on for survival – could disappear without warning or reason.

For a child, that is not just painful. It is existentially terrifying. The brain will do almost anything to avoid that conclusion. So it constructs a story. The story says, I have a role to play. If I play it well enough, things will be OK. The story gives the child a job, and the job gives the child a reason to keep going. This is what I mean when I say the adaptation was brilliant. It was a survival strategy, and it worked. Annie survived. She got through. The problem is that the strategy didn't come with an expiry date.

When a survival strategy outlives the threat, we don't outgrow it the way we outgrow our shoes. There's no moment where the brain says, "Right, we're safe now, let's file that under the things we no longer need." Instead, the pattern gets woven into the developing self – into the way we perceive, for example, our value, our role in relationships, and what we must do or sacrifice in order to be loved.

So what does that look like in adulthood? Let me offer you some possibilities, not as a checklist or a diagnosis, but as gentle signposts. See if any of them land.

For some people who, like Annie, learned that their needs are the price of admission to love, this might look like an adult who cannot quite say what they want. They might be the person who is always fine, always flexible, always accommodating. They might choose partners who need them intensely but cannot be fully present, because that dynamic feels familiar – it mirrors the original bargain.

They might feel a flash of anxiety when someone is angry, even if the anger has nothing to do with them, because somewhere deep inside, anger still seems to mean "you are the problem." They might struggle to take up space – in conversations, in rooms, in their own lives – because a long time ago, they promised they wouldn't.

Or perhaps the pendulum swings the other way entirely. Sometimes someone who spent their childhood disappearing might spend their adulthood refusing to be small again – pushing, demanding, controlling – because the alternative feels like annihilation. Both responses, in my experience, seem to come from the same place: a nervous system that learned, very early, that safety is not guaranteed and must be engineered.

The cruellest part, perhaps, is that these patterns are invisible to the person living them. They don't feel like strategies. They feel like personality. "I'm just easy-going." "I'm just someone who puts others first." "I'm just independent." The original wound may have been transmuted into a character trait, and the person might have no reason to question it until something breaks – a relationship, a breakdown, a moment where the exhaustion of performing becomes too heavy to carry.

What do you recognise here?

I’m certain some of this sounds familiar because it is something we all do. However, if you are reading this and something in your chest has tightened, or you've felt a flicker of recognition you can't quite name, I want you to hear this clearly: there is nothing wrong with you. You are not broken.

What you may be experiencing is the echo of a strategy that once helped you get through, and it is doing exactly what it was designed to do. The only trouble is that it may still be running in a world where you no longer need it. So it’s getting in the way.

You were not responsible for the choices the adults around you made; you were a living, developing human being, just like them, one moving part in a social group of many other moving parts.

You were a child, and you did what children do: you loved fiercely, you tried to fix things with the power of your mind and your heart, and you got through. That is not a failure. That is a triumph. But getting through is not the same as living freely, and you don't have to make the journey from one to the other alone. 

The therapeutic relationship

This is where therapy comes in. Therapy is not about blaming your parents. It is not about excavating every memory and cataloguing every wound. It is not about arriving at a tidy explanation and then feeling magically healed.

Therapy is, at its heart, about relationship. It is about sitting with someone who is trained to be present with you, not to fix you, not to tell you who to be, but to offer a space where the parts of you that have been carrying impossible burdens can finally be seen, heard, and understood.

It is about developing the language to tell your own story – not the one you inherited, not the unconscious one you constructed to survive, but the one that is actually yours.

A therapist can help you notice the patterns. They may gently point out the places where you are still shrinking yourself, still taking responsibility for other people's feelings, still running a strategy designed for a child in crisis, not the adult you have become. They can help you tolerate the discomfort of recognising these things, and they can walk alongside you as you begin to lay them down, one at a time, at your own pace.

Annie put it beautifully when she said that her story needed to be "externalised, where it belongs." That is, I think, one of the most precise descriptions of what counselling does. It takes the story that has been living inside you – the one that has been mistaken for a measure of your worth – and helps you set it down outside of yourself, where you can look at it clearly, with curiosity and compassion rather than shame. 

I want to leave you with something simple. If you take only one thing from Annie's story, let it be this: the strategies you developed as a child were not weaknesses. They were acts of love – for your parents, for your siblings, and, however indirectly, for yourself. They helped you survive. They kept love alive in you, even when love looked like absence. That is how tenacious humans are!

But you are no longer that child, and you no longer need to pay for love with pieces of yourself. You are allowed to take up space. You are allowed to have needs. You are allowed to be the full, messy, complicated, magnificent human that you are, without apology, without contract, without the need to earn it.

If something in this article has resonated with you, I welcome you to be brave and curious and to notice your own magical thinking narrative. You might even want to start work with a qualified counsellor or therapist to explore and uncover your very own unique story, just like Annie did.