As a trauma therapist, I often sit with clients who carry immense shame for how they respond to the world. They tell me they “overreact,” that they’re “too sensitive,” or that they “should know better by now.” These are not the words of someone broken—they are the echoes of survival.
In her profound book Mother Hunger, Kelly McDaniel writes:
“Reacting to life with the mind of someone young and afraid is the legacy of abuse; not an indication of character or value.”
This sentence, simple and powerful, often stops clients in their tracks. Many of them have spent years believing their emotional responses are evidence of personal failure. But I’m here to remind you that when someone reacts from a place of fear, especially in relationships, it is often because that fear was once necessary for survival.
Childhood neglect, emotional abandonment, or abuse creates a nervous system that is wired for threat detection, not ease. As children, when we’re scared and there’s no one safe to turn to, we adapt. We become hypervigilant. We people-please. We disappear emotionally or physically. These responses are not choices—they are reflexes, ingrained through pain and absence.
When those adaptations carry into adulthood, they can be misread as immaturity, dysfunction, or weakness. But McDaniel’s words offer a reframe: these are not signs of who someone is—they are reflections of what someone survived.
As therapists, partners, friends, and fellow humans, we must hold this truth close. Trauma responses are not moral failings. They are not personality flaws. They are stories—unspoken, unfinished, and deeply human.
If you see yourself in these words—if you recognize the “young and afraid” mind inside you—know that healing doesn’t mean erasing that part of you. It means learning to hold it with compassion, to speak to it kindly, and to stop blaming it for doing what it had to do.
You are not broken. You are healing.
