"Eres una Traumada" – The Wounds We Were Never Meant to Carry

—"Eres una traumada." "You're so traumatized."

My mother used to say this to me all the time, as if my pain was a character flaw, an exaggeration, an inconvenience. But she wasn’t wrong—I was traumatized. By her.

Can you imagine a little toddler, small and helpless, being thrown inside a non-working refrigerator because she was crying, and her mother couldn't deal with it? I can. Because that toddler was me.

For the past 56 years of my life, I have carried the weight of my childhood traumas, shouldering not just the wounds but the dismissiveness of the very people who inflicted them. That is its own kind of pain—the gaslighting, the erasure, the unspoken expectation to pretend it wasn’t that bad, to minimize, to excuse, to move on.

But I couldn't move on without first facing the truth.

I had to sit with the memory that had always been there, the one I had tried to rationalize away as a bad dream, a figment of my imagination. I had to accept that it was real, that it in deed did happened to me, and that my own mother—the person who was supposed to be my safe place—was the one who put me in there. That acknowledgment 3 yrs ago cracked something open inside me, something I had been holding together with the fragile glue of denial.

And then came the rage.

Rage that I had been carrying unknowingly, quietly, for decades. Rage that had buried itself so deep within me that I had mistaken it for other things—perfectionism, over-functioning, people-pleasing, the need to be good so that no one would ever be mad at me again, and the heavy weight of resentment. I had been trying to outrun it, out-reason it, but rage is not something that can be intellectualized away.

It demands to be felt.

And when I allowed myself to feel it—really feel it—I was finally able to grieve.

Grieve for the little girl who never got the mother she needed. Grieve for the safety, the tenderness, the unconditional love that should have been mine but never was. Grieve for the fact that no matter how much I had wished it, no matter how many times I had tried to earn it, she was never capable of giving it.

But here's the thing: I don’t blame her.

Not in the way I used to.

Understanding my own toxic behaviors—how I have repeated patterns I never wanted to inherit—has forced me to see her through a different lens. My mother was also a wounded child, raised in a mostly maternal lineage of pain, never given the tools to break the cycle. She never learned how to hold space for her own emotions, let alone mine.

But that doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt me. That doesn’t mean I deserved it.

I was an ultra-sensitive child born to a woman who had no capacity for emotional depth, no ability to validate, nurture, or comfort. And so, for years, I contorted myself into whatever shape I thought would make me more acceptable to her, less burdensome, less traumatized.

But I am done shrinking myself to make other people comfortable with my truth.

And that’s why I write this.

I put these words into the ether not just to lighten the burden in my own heart, but because I know I’m not alone. I know we are all traumatized in one way or another, yet we are afraid to own it. Afraid because we have been conditioned to believe that being a traumatized individual makes us less.

Less capable. Less worthy. Less whole.

We have been taught to push it down, to “get over it”, "its water under the bridge," to pretend that our scars do not shape us. We have been led to believe that our suffering is something to be ashamed of, that acknowledging it makes us weak, or worse, that speaking about it is a form of self-pity.

But that is the biggest lie of all.

Our wounds do not make us less. If anything owning our wounds and shadows, they make us more. More aware. More compassionate. More deeply connected to the truth of what it means to be human.

The moment we stop running from our pain, the moment we own our stories without flinching, we take back our power. Because healing is not in erasing the past—it is in reclaiming ourselves from it.

So, I write. I put it all out there. Not because I need anyone to validate my pain anymore, but because I refuse to carry it in silence anymore.

I was traumatized. I was hurt. And I am allowed to acknowledge that without guilt.

The healing I seek is not in rewriting the past to make it more palatable, nor is it in excusing what was inexcusable. My healing is in seeing it clearly, in feeling it fully, in letting it move through me so that I no longer have to carry its weight as mine to hold.

I am not my mother. I am not my trauma.

I am the one who finally stopped running from it.