quiet Rise!
Surviving Life
I grew up with chronic emotional and physical neglect. Emotional safety, validation, and secure connection were largely absent from my early life. To survive overwhelming stress, trauma, emotional pain, and physical violence, I learned to isolate.
Isolation became my protection.
I built walls around myself to keep out pain, disappointment, and heartbreak. For a time, that coping mechanism gave me relief. But what protected me in childhood also wounded me in adulthood. The loneliness became chronic. Emotional healing was delayed. Relationships were damaged. Self-doubt deepened. My body carried the cost of years spent living in survival mode.
When the people around me ignored, dismissed, criticized, or punished me, I learned that my voice did not matter and my needs were too much. Over time, I began to live almost like a ghost—physically present, but emotionally disconnected from other people, even when I was surrounded by them.
Living in a dysfunctional and neglectful environment kept my nervous system on constant alert. I learned to expect danger, rejection, and abandonment. That prolonged toxic stress shaped the way I thought, felt, reacted, related to others, and eventually the way my body functioned.
Even now, waves of shame, dread, emptiness, and helplessness can return without warning. In those moments, I can feel as small and powerless as I did when I was a child.
The harsh voices of the past became internal voices of my own:
You’re too sensitive. You’re too much. You don’t matter. You’re not worth it.
At the same time, I crave closeness while instinctively pulling away from it. I want connection, yet part of me still expects abandonment. I learned to shape-shift for other people—to become what was needed, wanted, tolerated, or safest—until I became disconnected from the question of who I actually was outside of survival.
That is the part people do not always understand.
Survival can become its own prison.
The very behaviors that once kept you alive can later keep you from fully living.
Rebuilding my identity has become lifelong work. I am learning to recognize which parts of me were created by fear, which parts were shaped by other people’s expectations, and which parts are genuinely mine.
I am no longer trying only to survive what happens to me.
I am learning how to exist.
How to choose.
How to connect.
How to become a person instead of a reaction.
And perhaps that is what healing really is: not erasing what happened, but slowly discovering who you were meant to be before survival taught you to disappear.
Embracing Uncertainty
About the Author — Michelle Coleman
Michelle Coleman serves as Treasurer of END SILENCE, Inc. and contributes to the organization’s mission through leadership, advocacy, survivor-centered awareness, and creative outreach. Her writing is shaped by lived experience, deep reflection, and a desire to help others understand the long-term effects of neglect, trauma, isolation, and survival mode.
Through honest storytelling, Michelle gives language to experiences many people carry quietly. Her work encourages survivors to recognize that healing is not always immediate or linear, but that rebuilding identity, connection, faith, and hope is possible.
At END SILENCE, Michelle helps support the organization’s commitment to awareness, accountability, survivor support, and responsible stewardship.
Healing begins where silence ends.
This one deserves a real conversation. quiet Rise! raises the kind of issue people often carry quietly, and silence can make hard things feel even heavier. What part of this message stayed with you after you finished reading? One line of thought from the post that especially deserves reflection is this: Surviving Life I grew up with chronic emotional and physical neglect. Emotional safety, validation, and secure connection were largely absent from my early life. To survive overwhelming stress, trauma, emotional pain, an…
Discussion prompt: What part of “quiet Rise!” stayed with you after reading—and why do you think that part mattered?
I appreciate that this does not ask anyone to fix everything at once. The whole series keeps bringing it back to one stitch, one truth, and one next step.
A useful question after reading “quiet Rise”: what is one thing I can notice, say, or do differently because of this message?
The sentence that stayed with me here is: Childhood emotional neglect can shape the way we connect, protect ourselves, and understand our own worth.