When Love Hurts
Unboxing The Hidden Wounds We Carry
I talk often about adoption — how it shaped my life, my identity, and the complexity of carrying a story that I didn’t fully get to write.
But here’s something I don’t always share: I’m also the daughter of a father who struggled with alcohol addiction. That left a deep, silent wound, one that lived in the shadows of my adoption story.
For so long, I thought adoption was the defining piece of my past. But the more I unbox, the more I realize that it wasn’t only adoption that brought feelings of abandonment, fear, and uncertainty.
It was growing up in a house where chaos was constant, where unpredictability filled the rooms. It was the tightness in my chest that never seemed to go away, the quiet, and the unspoken pain.
The truth is, living with addiction taught me how to shrink myself to survive. I learned to fit into the chaos, to make myself small so I wouldn’t disrupt anything or anyone. And I’m beginning to understand the cost of all that shrinking.
It’s exhausting, isn’t it? To carry the weight of keeping everything “okay,” even when nothing really is.
For a long time, I thought the most significant part of my story was being adopted. But as I’ve grown older, and as I’ve done the work of healing, I’ve come to realize that although being adopted has been a significant chapter in my life, being raised by an alcoholic left its own set of scars — ones that weren’t necessarily visible to the outside world, but which were always with me, just beneath the surface.
Living in a home where addiction loomed meant that I had to become an expert at hiding what hurt. I learned early on how to tiptoe around emotions, how to keep my needs small so that I wouldn’t be a burden, and how to shrink myself to fit into the chaos.
But shrinking comes at a cost doesn't it?
The wounds don’t always show up on the outside, but they shape everything on the inside — our sense of safety, trust, and self-worth. For me, that sense of never being able to really rely on the people I loved most lingered well into adulthood. I carried the weight of hyper-vigilance and fear, always waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Even when I knew, logically, that I was safe, those old patterns would reappear — the anxiety, the need to control my surroundings, the fear of being abandoned again.
Adoption brings its own set of grief and loss, but so does growing up in a home touched by addiction. In many ways, it felt like I had to grapple with multiple layers of abandonment. On one level, I was dealing with the loss of my birth family. On another, I was losing the parent I had — my adoptive parent — to the grip of alcohol.
It took me years to realize that my struggles weren’t only about adoption. It wasn’t solely about the questions of “where do I belong?” or “who am I really?” It was also about the wounds that come from living in a house where emotional availability wasn’t guaranteed, where love was complicated by addiction, and where my needs often came last.
For a long time, I didn’t know how to talk about this. In fact, I didn’t even realize how much it had affected me. I focused on the adoption part of my story because that was the visible wound. That was the thing people could point to and maybe even say, “Yes, I see how that’s hard.”
But addiction? That was a quieter kind of hurt — one that stayed in the shadows, not talked about, not acknowledged.
It wasn’t until I began my own healing journey that I started to uncover the deeper wounds, the ones that had shaped me in ways I hadn’t even realized. I began to see that healing wasn’t just about understanding my adoption story; it was also about understanding the impact of growing up in an environment shaped by addiction, where I often felt unseen and unprotected.
Telling this part of my story is hard. But it’s necessary. Because for too long, I’ve let it stay hidden, convinced that adoption was the primary source of my pain. But it’s time to reclaim my fullest voice, to acknowledge the layers of loss, abandonment, and fear that I’ve carried for so long.
I share this with you because I know I’m not alone. So many of us have parts of our stories that we’ve kept tucked away, convinced they’re not worth sharing or that no one will understand. But these stories matter. They shape who we are, and when we bring them into the light, they give us the power to heal.
This is just one part of my journey — one piece of the larger puzzle of my life. But in sharing it, I hope it encourages you to take a closer look at your own story and all the layers of your story.
What have you kept hidden? What parts of your journey deserve to be acknowledged, even if they’ve been buried for a long time?
The road to healing isn’t easy, but it starts with bringing all the pieces of yourself into the light.
