A personal share and some thoughts on why our individual healing and the collective moment may not be as separate as they seem.

⚠️ Trigger warning: This article contains personal disclosure of childhood sexual abuse, descriptions of nightmares and emotional flashbacks, and references to the Epstein files. Please take care of yourself as you read.

I knew it intellectually for years. I had done the therapy. I had read the books. I had done the grieving. I understood, on every cognitive and emotional level available to me, that my father was a wounded, limited man who was not a threat to me anymore.

And yet on the deepest level, the fear remained dormant and became reawakened. Like an amorphous cloud of menace blanketing my senses.

What finally shifted, and how the Epstein files of all things played a role in it, is what I want to try to describe here.

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The Protective Narrative

For most of my life, the story I held about my father was this: he was ignorant but kind. Bumbling yet well-meaning. Wounded himself but certainly not dangerous. Not intentionally harmful.

This story left out something essential about him. And I believe now that it was incomplete for a specific reason, because my psyche was protecting me from a reality I was not yet ready to metabolize.

I had carried a feeling for much of my life that I had experienced sexual abuse from my father but I had no clear memories. It felt like a vague knowing without a narrative. Something held in the body that the mind had learned, carefully, not to look at directly.

My father would make comments about my body. I recall one time in my early 20s he said “Oh that bathing suit is hot” right in front of my mother who said slowly and quietly, with a hurt look on her face, “You don’t say that about your daughter.”

I hadn’t been ready to see the full picture of what the vague feeling and isolated moments were all pointing to.

Then I reached a point in my life, in 2022, when I had been single for the first time in about 15 years and had an extended quiet space and solitude, when it surfaced in its entirety.

It occurred during an intense period of about 6 months. I had nightmares during the night and emotional flashbacks during the day. It felt like I had entered a dark tunnel of deep processing and the only way out it was to just go through it. It was rough. Thankfully my outer life was pretty quiet then and relatively smooth so I could put my focus on processing this.

The turning point came when I finally allowed myself to see what the nightmares and flashbacks were pointing to with visceral, horrifying clarity: the story I had been telling myself about my father (ignorant but kind, bumbling yet well-meaning) was not the real one. He crossed boundaries in ways that were predatory toward me as a child.

I remember the exact moment that truth landed. And the two days that followed felt like sitting at the bottom of a sewer — the full stench of who he really was, laid bare.

 

With support, I stayed present to it. Instead of attempting to minimize it or distract myself away from it, I let myself move through the various feelings of disbelief, the denial, the rage, the grief, and eventually into a deeper, reality-based understanding of what had actually happened and who he actually was.

That was the first layer. It took years to get here and it was necessary. I couldn’t have gotten to what came later without having gone there first. Over those six months, the nightmares played out the full arc of the abuse — from the horrific dawning awareness of a predatory gaze on me, to the image of my tiny hand frozen and unable to move to protect myself, until eventually I had the empowerment, in an adult body, to physically fight him off. That’s when the nightmares finally stopped.

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The Epstein Files

 

I thought that chapter had closed because four years had passed. Then the Epstein files dropped.

My father looks a great deal like Epstein. Very similar facial features. Suddenly his face was everywhere; on every screen, in every news cycle. It was like seeing my father’s face plastered across the media as well as on covers of newspapers when I walked down the street.

What resurfaced wasn’t a direct flashback this time. It was something those of you who are healing from C-PTSD will recognize: a free-floating dread. It was an amorphous, unattached fear with no clear object. This kind of dread is horrible precisely because of its diffuse nature. You cannot reason with it or locate its source. It feels like a persistent residue of terror blanketing all your senses.

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The Night Something Dislodged

One night, some months after the files dropped, I was feeling the free-floating fear very intensely. Instead of buffering myself from it (reaching for my phone, making tea, doing anything to create distance) I just sat with it, watching it. It was so intense that I felt as though I was physically cowering from it. It went from the background dread to a full-blown terror in the foreground.

And as I sat with it, calmly observing both the energy of the fear itself and my response to it, something began to shift that I had never felt before in quite this way.

It was as if I could reach around the fear, or behind it. Like it was gathering into a condensed version of the vague dread I had carried my entire life, and it was dislodging itself from wherever it had been held in place. I became acutely aware that this terror was not about the current moment but was both a physical and mental imprint from the past.

I stayed with it, observing it. And then the realization came —as though my mind, emotions AND body all had an epiphany in one moment.

This intense dread that had been stalking me was really about just one thing. One small, wounded man. It did not mean anything about life or reality.

I saw that as a child I had extrapolated my father’s predatory chaos outward to mean something about life itself. His volatility, his rage, and his unpredictability.  I had absorbed all of it and projected it, making it mean something scary about the very nature of existence. That life itself had an ominousness to it, a menacing quality that warranted the hypervigilance and constant scanning that I have struggled with to some degree for my entire life.

As a child, I had no choice but to separate my father as a person from the terror he created, by instead projecting the terror to be about reality. This was a way of protecting myself, so that I could continue to believe that my dad was good and safe; to make the unbearable reality somehow more bearable.

That is what children do when they cannot metabolize the reality of a dangerous parent. They make it generalized, everywhere, cosmic, to protect themselves from the truth which is too intense and way too close to bear. It’s too scary to recognize that the terror is a valid response to a dangerous person that they rely on for survival. So children make it true about everything.

The menacing flavor of the parent becomes atmosphere, a filter for reality.

But sitting there, with my empowered adult self fully in the room, I became extremely present and curious. I looked at the fear, really looked at it with clear eyes. And I saw that the fear was not a quality belonging to reality. The fear was purely and only…about him. And he is a small person. Not powerful. Not now.

In fact, he is quite inept and holds no power over me whatsoever. I haven’t seen my father in 15 years. In reality, he is small-minded, unhealed, ignorant man with very little self-awareness. I say this without cruelty, it is simply fact. I do feel compassion for him as I know he was brutally abused when he was a child.

He is no longer a threat to me. But he WAS a genuine threat when I was trapped with him, dependent, vulnerable with no recourse or protection. But now I am free. I felt the truth of how I am so much happier than he had ever been. So much more powerful, mature, reliable, and solid than he ever was. The contrast between us as adults is vast.

I almost laughed out loud.

This massive fear was originally about this tiny, small man.

And then the fear collapsed. Palpably, completely. Like a plug pulled from a socket. The room around me that before was feeling increasingly ominous and threatening, instantly felt benign and kind. The furniture in the room, even the sounds of distant cars felt gentle, even friendly.

Something essential about my filter for reality, in place since childhood, had dissolved with this felt, multi-level realization.

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What Changed — And Why I Think It Happened Now

Here is the part I keep returning to:

I knew all of this cognitively before. Intellectually I was aware of this for years. I had named it, mapped it, wept through it, worked through it in therapy. And still the fear had remained somewhat dormant on the deepest layer.

However, this time was categorically different. It was not emotional processing nor cognitive reframing that created this breakthrough. All that created the conditions for something dislodged at this deepest of layers; what I can only describe as the level of reality.

This was a direct experience of healing on the deepest level.

The structure of perception itself had shifted.

A veil came down. The barrier between me and life (a barrier I had lived behind for so long I had stopped noticing it was there, that chronic, subtle tension of hypervigilance) was simply gone. Life felt more benevolent, more benign, instantly less threatening. Even though nothing external had changed. It was because the filter through which I had been experiencing everything (built from the fear of one man, in one household, decades ago) had finally dissolved.

I’ve been sitting with the question of why now. Why this layer, at this moment.

My best understanding is that it became possible because of the foundation built through years of Mother Wound healing work. Mothers are our primary attachment — this is a developmental fact, not an opinion, nor is it blame. The earliest sense of self forms in the mother-child relationship before the father enters the picture in any differentiated way. The work of healing the Mother Wound is fundamentally the work of building a new, higher baseline of felt “inner safety.” Of becoming, for ourselves, the reliably loving and compassionate presence we needed and didn’t fully receive.

When that foundation is solid enough and when there is enough earned self-trust to know you can hold yourself through intense pain, something in the deeper psyche relaxes.

What I’ve come to understand is that healing the Mother Wound creates the internal safety required to clearly perceive (and eventually heal) the Father Wound.

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The role of the Animus in healing the Father Wound

Leading up to this experience I’d been working with my own sense of the inner masculine for quite some time. Carl Jung called it the Animus, the inner man within a woman. Prior to this realization, I was having intense dreams many times per week, not of the abuse like in the period before, but dreams of a healthy masculine energy. I had months of dreams that included things like being in a male body, facing an unseen threat in the dark and saying “Come on, let’s do this!” ready to face anything. In another dream I was startled and then gently calmed by a soothing masculine presence lovingly stroking my forehead. In yet another dream, I looked at myself in the mirror and saw a man looking back at me with a quiet, confident smile, the vibe of ready warrior with golden strands gleaming in his shoulder-length hair. A gaze of strength, joy and possibility.

I realize now that as my inner mothering presence had been long established for years prior though healing the Mother Wound, and the processing of the sexual abuse had been progressing as a result, the sense of a healthy inner man had been blossoming inwardly in response.

In other words, as I was working through the sexual abuse coming to consciousness, in parallel, a healthy inner masculine energy was gently emerging from inside me as it healed.

I feel this healthy inner man as a profound confidence in my capacity to meet whatever life brings. A tender protection of my own vulnerable places. An erect spine and an unpretentious openness. A sense of belonging to and protection of Life itself. An innate worth that doesn’t look for external validation. It just IS.

I see that through this one experience several things had converged and what was previously locked in place from childhood could finally begin to move.

The Father Wound, in my experience, only became fully accessible to me once that healed ground of a loving inner mother was stable enough to hold the pain arising from it. It was only after I had healed sufficiently that I could open to and viscerally trust a loving inner-masculine presence — one capable of genuine care rather than harm.

Together, these two inner forces made something possible that neither could have done alone: it was the inner mother who made it possible to STAY with the terror rather than flee from it, and the inner masculine who made it possible to actually LOOK at it directly without flinching.

Only then could the stark contrast of differentiation emerge between me and my father, between my life and his life, between my reality then as a child and my reality now as an adult. The stark contrast on all these levels allowed that fear to dislodge on the deepest level — the level of reality.

The global filter shaped by my abusive father’s imprint…dissolving. Like a watermark dissolving from a page.

My own healthy inner man could now finally de-throne the negative father’s terrorist-like reign in my psyche.

I didn’t plan this sequence. I discovered it by living it.

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The intersection of personal and cultural triggers

I’ve been thinking about why this particular cultural moment feels so overwhelming for so many people, and especially for those of us who grew up in chaotic, unpredictable homes.

What’s happening collectively right now has the same features as those dysfunctional households: no reliable adults at the wheel, danger that seems to increase without clear intervention, a gap between the official narrative and the lived reality. For those of us whose nervous systems were shaped in environments like that, the resonance is visceral and specific.

The triggers are real. I want to say that clearly before I offer anything else. This is not all in our heads.

And neuroscience tells us something both humbling and hopeful about this. In order to actually rewire a traumatic pattern, we need to feel a small degree of the original trigger. We need what I think of as a “live wire” in order to” re-wire” it.

The world is handing us live wires constantly right now.

This is why moments like this (however destabilizing) can also become openings. When the past and present briefly overlap, the nervous system has a rare opportunity to update what was once frozen in place.

What I have found useful, in those moments when the old fear rises and blends with present circumstances, is to practice differentiation — gently, repeatedly, without forcing it:

  • I am an adult now, not a child. I have choices and options the younger version of me simply did not have.
  • I, as my adult self, am far more dependable and resilient than my parents were when I needed them. I am my safest person.
  • Life is supporting me in this moment, even in the uncertainty. I have somewhere to sit. Breath is moving through my body. There is always something here to anchor to.
  • I don’t have to figure out the whole future. I only have to meet this moment. And then the next one.

These statements are tools to teach the nervous system the difference between now and then, which it needs repeated safe exposure to, in order for those distorting filters from childhood trauma to dissolve from our current reality in the present moment.

Our nervous system and the inner child need differentiation between what is actually happening and what it feels like is happening. Our freedom is in that differentiation.

A new reality becomes possible there in that space.

And on the other side of it, if my experience is any indication: life feels more benign than you were taught to believe it was. The barrier between you and the world thins. Things that felt permanently threatening reveal themselves as the residue of one household, one period, one set of people who were doing great harm while you were too small to defend yourself. What you find on the other side is a more restful intimacy with yourself and with Life as a whole.

A deeper, visceral sense of safety you didn’t know was even possible.

 

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A Final Note..

If something in this article resonated, I want to name that the foundation I’m describing here (the inner safety, the self-trust, the ability to stay present with what once felt unbearable) isn’t something we’re born knowing how to do but we can learn how to build it over time.  There are mindsets, skills, and practices that lead to these kinds of breakthroughs. This is the work I’ve been living and teaching for over a decade through healing the Mother Wound. And it’s what made this deeper layer of healing possible for me. I’m also beginning to develop work specifically around the Father Wound—this article is part of that emergence. But if you’re at the beginning, or somewhere in the middle, the Mother Wound is where I would start. It’s where everything else becomes possible. Here’s a link to learn more.