For some children, childhood is a place of happiness. Playing in every corner of the house, parents joking with each other, picnics on Sundays, spending time together without fear. It is a time they remember with a smile. I cannot express it in words, because for many of us, it was never like that.
For others, for people like me, childhood was a place where you had to grow up too fast. Stay quiet for too long. Cry as much as you can in silence. And learn to survive through the time that breaks you into a million pieces, and still act like nothing happened in the morning.
No one hit you. No one shouted at you directly. But every night you went to sleep listening to shouting from the other room. You kept your blanket over your head and counted the stars from your window, hoping the fight would stop before you fell asleep.
For a child, there are only two homes — Mother and Father. When those two fight each other, that child becomes homeless inside. He has a roof over his head, but he has no safe place to go. He becomes a parent before his age. He becomes the peacekeeper. He starts scanning faces the moment he enters a room — is mother angry? Is father sad? Is tonight going to be safe?
This trauma makes us extremely sensitive to certain things. A loud voice, a door closing hard, a silent treatment for days, a small change in tone — our heart starts beating fast, even when we are grown up now. Our body still remembers what our mind tried to forget.
You can fight the whole world. You can destroy the whole world. But when it comes to your own family, you end up hurting yourself. You cry at night when no one is watching. You become quiet in front of others. You pretend everything is okay, because you learned very early that your pain makes people uncomfortable.
And the feeling when you visit someone and see how normally their house lives — you feel so longing for that. For them it is just a normal evening, just a normal dinner. For you, it is your whole childhood that you never got.
Some people ask me, are you a papa's boy or a mom's boy? As far as I can remember, I have been my own boy. I was busy surviving while everyone else was living. Those things stole my peak time, my best age, my innocence. While others were learning to play, I was learning to survive.
I came out of an abusive childhood and went into my life already messed up. Every choice I made was from a trauma mind. I chose people who hurt me because hurt felt familiar. I stayed quiet when I should have spoken, because speaking felt dangerous.
He believes love equals fighting.
If this is what he saw every day, his subconscious learns: This is what love is. Shouting, silent treatment, throwing things, not talking for days. This is how people who love each other behave.
Later, he will either repeat the same pattern, or he will be terrified of any kind of conflict and run away from relationships. Because for him, love was never safe. Love was always loud, always scary, always painful.
He doesn't want to fight. He just wants a home where no one has to shout to be heard.
But this story does not end here. Because I am healing.
People think healing means forgetting. It is not. Healing means remembering without breaking again.
Healing started when I stopped blaming myself. For years I thought — maybe I was not good enough. Maybe if I was a better child, my parents would not fight. Today I know the truth. A child can never be the reason for his parents' fight. I was 7, 8, 10 years old. I was supposed to be protected, not be the protector.
The second step was — I stopped calling pain normal. We learn to say "sabke ghar me hota hai". But shouting every night, not talking for days, making a child scared in his own house — that is not normal. That is not love. Love is not supposed to make you feel small.
I started speaking, not hiding. I used to stay quiet for too long. Now I write. I speak. Even if my voice shakes, I speak. Because the silence that saved me as a child was killing me as an adult.
I stopped running from conflict, and I stopped creating it. Now I am learning that a normal argument is not a war. Two people can disagree and still love each other. No shouting, no throwing things, no 3 days of silence.
I chose peace over familiar pain. Trauma mind always chooses what feels familiar, even if it hurts. Healing mind chooses what feels peaceful, even if it feels new and scary.
I gave myself the childhood I never got. No one will give me back my childhood, but I can give myself a safe present.
Healing is not a straight line. Some days I am fine. Some days a loud voice, a door sound, or a fight in someone else's house takes me back to that small room again. That is okay. Healing is not about never feeling pain. It is about not living in that pain anymore.
I am still healing. I still get sensitive. I still overthink. But now I know — I am not my trauma. My trauma is a chapter, not my whole story.
To every child who is still sleeping with a blanket over his head, listening to fights from the other room — I want to say one thing:
You are not alone. You are not weak. You are not too sensitive. You did not cause it.
And one day, you will build a home for yourself where you will not have to scan faces to feel safe. A home where love will be soft, calm and kind. That home will start inside you first.

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