Love Left Fingerprints Too

For years, when Lizzi looked back at her childhood, the pain was easy to find. The kindness was harder to see.

In this deeply personal episode of Untamed Voices, she remembers the people scattered across countries, classrooms, kitchens, and gymnasiums who offered her something they may never have realized she needed: joy, dignity, belonging, protection, encouragement, attunement, and the simple experience of being genuinely enjoyed.

From a woman in Brazil who wrapped a towel around her wet hair and called her a queen, to a classmate who made room beside her, coaches who learned how to believe in her, teachers who saw beneath her struggles, and a woman who was simply happy she existed, these small moments became far more significant than they appeared at the time.

Lizzi explores why complex trauma can make love difficult to recognize, how the belief “my existence isn’t valid” shaped the way she remembered her life, and what happened when healing allowed those old memories to take on new meaning.

This episode is a reflection on the quiet ways people change us without ever knowing it—and the tenderness of realizing that while pain left fingerprints, love did too.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:42

Hi everyone, welcome back to Untamed Voices. So I have this memory from when I was a little girl in Brazil, maybe around six years old. And honestly, it's kind of a ridiculous memory to have held on to for more than 40 years. If you look out it, if you look at it outside of context, right? I don't really remember much about it. I don't remember what room we were in or what happened earlier that day. I couldn't tell you what this woman was wearing, what we talked about, or much of anything else about her. I don't even know that I spent much time with her. She was the mom of one of the other children in the commune that we were in, that we were living in at the time. And that's about all I remember. For those of you who haven't heard my podcast before, you know, I my first seven years of my life, I was raised in a cult and hence the commune. So the the only thing that I remember about that is that I had gotten out of the bath or a shower. I don't know. I don't remember that part either. And this woman, she showed me how to wrap my wet hair in a towel. You know, like when you flip your head over and then twist the towel and then tuck it back so that it sits on the top of your head. For for women, you probably know what this is. Men, I don't know if you do, maybe you do, maybe you don't. I didn't know how to do that. So she did it for me. And when she was finished, she looked at me and said, There, look at you. You look like a queen. A queen. That's the memory. That's it. Of all the things my brain could have kept from Brazil, it kept that. And recently I found myself wondering why. Because honestly, Brazil was not an easy place for me. Actually, it was one of the most traumatic places of my childhood. And there are memories from that time that are painful and confusing and fragmented. There are things I spent years trying to understand and things I spent even longer trying to heal. And somewhere among all of that, there's this woman putting a towel on my head and calling me a queen. For most of my life, when I thought about my childhood, she wasn't really part of the story. Neither were a lot of people I'm going to tell you about today. That's what I find so interesting because I didn't forget these people exactly. The memories were there. If you'd asked me the right question, maybe I could have found some of them. But I couldn't yet understand their significance. I couldn't see what they had given me. And I think I know why now. For much, much, much of my life, there was a belief underneath almost everything that I had experienced. A belief that I have, I have had to do like an enormous amount of work to finally uncover and begin releasing. And it wasn't simply I'm not good enough. It was much, much deeper than that. It was my existence isn't valid. That was my core belief. Even saying that now feels enormous. And I've mentioned this in previous episodes as well. Because think about what a what that belief actually means, right? Not that I occasionally feel unwanted, not that I'm afraid someone might reject me, but that somewhere deep, deep inside, there was this old understanding that my very presence in the world required justification, that I needed a reason to take up space, that other people's needs naturally carried more weight than mine. That being useful made my presence more acceptable. That being easy made my presence more acceptable. That being wanted by someone else made my presence more acceptable. But simply existing, simply being Lizzie, that didn't feel like enough. And when you're looking at your life through that lens, you don't just experience the present through it. You eventually remember the past through it too. That's something I don't think I understood until fairly recently. We like to imagine memory as this faithful historian sitting somewhere inside of our minds, recording everything exactly as it happened. But that's not really how memory works. Our brains are constantly sorting, connecting, interpreting, deciding what matters. And especially when we live through complex trauma, the mind becomes remarkably good at organizing experience around the beliefs that helped us make sense of what was happening. If the belief is I don't matter, then every moment of being overlooked makes perfect sense. Of course. See, there it is again. If the belief is my existence isn't valid, then rejection has somewhere to land. Neglect has somewhere to land. Being used has somewhere to land. Being forgotten has somewhere to land. They all fit. They all belong to the story. But then someone looks at you after wrapping a towel around your wet hair and says, You look like a queen. And that doesn't fit at all. What do you do with that? What do you even do with that? Where does this little girl put that when she doesn't yet have a place inside herself capable of sorry, let me say that again. Where does this little girl put that when she doesn't yet have a place inside herself capable of believing it? I think in my case, I just kept it. I just didn't know what I was keeping or why I was keeping it. So I stored it. It was a good feeling. I didn't get many of those. And that's what's been so fascinating about this stage of healing for me. As that old belief my existence isn't valid, has lost more and more of its authority over my life. I haven't only begun seeing myself differently. I've started seeing my past differently. Not prettier. I want to be really, really clear about that, right? It's it's not prettier than it used to be. It's still not ideal. I'm not interested in turning trauma into something, some beautiful story because enough time has passed. It's not gonna happen. Some things were absolutely terrible. Some things should never have happened. Healing hasn't made me need those truths any less. But it has made room for more truth. And apparently there was more. There were more people. People I had almost edited out of my own understanding of my life. People who stepped into a moment and gave me something without ever knowing how badly I needed it. People who had no idea what was happening behind closed doors. People who never knew the secrets I was carrying. Some were in my life for years. Some may have been there for only a season. One of them, I don't even know his name. But somehow, all these years, I can still hear his guitar. And when I started following these memories backward from one person to another: Spain, Brazil, Paraguay, classrooms, basketball courts, volleyball games, other people's kitchens, college, I realized something that has honestly changed the way I understand my own story. For a very, very long time, I thought the people who hurt me had left the deepest fingerprints. And maybe that's because pain demands our attention, right? It's loud. Pain is loud. But they weren't the only ones touching my life. There were other hands there too, gentle ones, hands that made room, hands that opened doors, hands that pulled me out of a game when I needed a minute to find myself again, hands that pointed towards something in me I couldn't see yet. And once I could finally see them, I started realizing just how much of who I am had been shaped not only by what I survived, but by these small, incredibly human moments of being known. And the very first one I can find takes me back even farther than that towel in Brazil, back to Spain. I was very little. The details are pretty hazy, but somewhere inside that haze, there's a man with a guitar. And somehow I still remember the song. I mean, the only part that I remember is something like doo doo doo doo doo doo. It was like something about your light, you know, shining your light or something, and then do do do do, and he would like twirl his finger or finger around. So, yeah, that's it, right? That's all I remember. Forty something years later, that's what survived. A few notes, a fragment of a lyric. And this feeling I still can't completely explain. He was playful, jolly almost. He would play his guitar and sing, and we would sing with him. And somewhere in that very early version of my life, I remember feeling drawn to him. I felt seen by him. I wish I could tell you exactly what he did that made me feel that way, but I can't. And maybe that's part of what makes this memory so interesting to me. Because when I look at it now through adult eyes, of course I have questions. I grew up in an environment where adults weren't always what they appeared to be. I know now that friendliness didn't always mean safety. So the adult part of me has occasionally gone back to that memory and wondered about him. Who was he? Was he actually safe? Was there anything happening that I didn't understand? I don't know. I may never know. But I've also learned not to take the adult questions I have now and use them to erase what that child experienced then. And what that little girl experienced was joy. She experienced a grown man being silly. She experienced music. She experienced being invited into something instead of being expected to give something. She got to sing, she got to laugh, she got to be a child. And maybe that's why my mind kept the song. Because complex trauma can make childhood strangely serious, right? For those of you who have that, you know what I mean. Even when there are games and toys and other children around, some part of you can become very busy. Busy watching, busy sensing, busy adapting, busy figuring out who everyone needs you to be. You can become incredibly sophisticated at reading a room long before you know how to read yourself. So imagine what happens, even briefly, when someone doesn't require anything from you. They're not asking you to manage their emotions. They're not asking you to anticipate what comes next. They're not asking you to become smaller or quieter or easier. They're playing a guitar and they want you to sing. And their nervous system notices that too. Right? Your nervous, sorry, your nervous system, I'm sure theirs also does, but your nervous system notices that too. We talk so much about the way trauma teaches the body danger, but I think sometimes we forget that the body is also capable of collecting moments of safety, really valuable moments of safety. They may not be powerful enough at the time to rewrite the larger story. They may become buried beneath much louder experiences. But they can remain almost like the body tucked them somewhere for safekeeping. Here, we'll keep this. Maybe she'll need it someday. And apparently I did, because all these years later, I can't tell you his name, but I can still hear the rhythm of his song. And I love that. I really, really do. I love knowing that somewhere in those earliest years of my life there was a little girl singing, not surviving, not analyzing, not caring anything, just singing. And then life moved. And it as it really often did in my childhood, right? Life just kept moving. Spain became Brazil, Brazil eventually became Paraguay. Homes changed, people changed, languages shifted around me. And somewhere along the way, I became very, very good at entering new places and figuring out how to exist inside them. By the time I was in school in Paraguay, belonging had become complicated. There was a school I attended where I never really found my footing. I was there because someone had generously made it financially possible for me to attend. But I was surrounded by kids who seemed to come from a completely different world than mine. A world with money, a world with things, a world where everyone seemed to understand rules I had not been given. And kids noticed differences. They just do. I was bullied, I didn't fit. Eventually I started shutting down. My grades were suffering. I was failing in ways that looking back had very little to do with my actual ability. I just wasn't there anymore, not fully. It's hard to learn when so much of your energy is being spent trying to survive the room you're learning in. And I wasn't just surviving what was happening to me at the time. I was surviving all of the things that came before as well, trying to understand, trying to cope, trying to, trying to deal with all of these things. Then a place opened up at the school that my siblings attended. It was American Christian School. And another generous couple had made it possible for us to attend because my parents could not afford it. I was in seventh grade and I was given the choice. I could stay where I was or I could leave. I chose to leave. And I still remember walking into that new classroom. It was partway through the school year, and somehow I guess that made it a little bit worse. Because everybody had already started, you know, everybody had a place, everybody already knew where to sit. Friend groups had already been formed. Inside jokes already existed. Lives had been happening without me. And I was the new girl standing at the edge of it all. I remember being so nervous, really, really nervous and scared. Because when you've already experienced rejection, a new beginning doesn't necessarily feel hopeful. Sometimes it just feels like another opportunity for the same exact thing to happen again. I didn't walk into that classroom thinking maybe this is where everything changes. I walked in wondering, what if it's exactly the same? And then Mia looked up. She saw me standing there. And without making it complicated, without waiting to see whether I was cool enough or interesting enough or whether someone else wanted me first, she made room. Here, sit next to me, right here next to me. I can still feel something soften when I think about that, because there are moments in life when someone offers you exactly what you need before you have learned how to ask for it. I needed a place. Mio gave me that place. And literally, there was a chair beside her, and she wanted me in it. That mattered. It matters so much more than she could have possibly known. Because underneath that old belief that my existence wasn't valid was another question I carried almost everywhere. Is there actually room for me? Room for my needs, room for my personality, room for my mistakes, room for my presence? And Mio didn't answer that question with some profound conversation. She answered it by scooting over. That's the thing about feeling seen. It's often incredibly ordinary from the outside. The person doing the scene may not experience the moment as significant at all. But inside the person being seen, something can shift, especially with complex trauma. Because our nervous systems don't update themselves through intellectual arguments alone. I can tell myself that a thousand times that I belong. But belonging doesn't become believable when someone behaves as though I do. The brain is always comparing what is happening now with what happened before. It's predicting, preparing, trying to keep us one step ahead of pain. And then someone does something the old prediction didn't account for. You expect exclusion, someone moves over. You expect judgment, someone becomes curious. You expect your mistake to make you disposable. Someone keeps believing in you. Those moments don't magically erase trauma, but they introduce another possibility. And possibility matters. Neil became one of my closest friends. I spent a lot of time at her house. She made sure I fit in. And little by little that school became somewhere I could breathe differently. And that moment became a turning point in my life. But there was another home in Parway that gave me something I wouldn't fully understand until much later. It belonged to my best friend's family in my neighborhood. Her family had migrated from Argentina, and her mother was one of those women who she just seemed to have unofficially adopted half of the neighborhood. There were always kids around. People came in, people went out, and somehow nobody seemed like an intrusion to her. I think that's what I remember the most. Nobody seemed like an intrusion. There was room. Her door was open in a way that went far, far, far beyond whether it was physically locked. You could feel it. There are these homes where the moment you walk inside, you're aware that you're a guest. You become careful. You don't touch anything. You don't open the refrigerator. You watch the clock because eventually you're supposed to leave. And then there are these homes where someone has somehow communicated. You don't have to keep proving that you're allowed to be here. Her home felt like that to me. And I loved being there. Her mother didn't know my whole story. She couldn't have. I had been sworn to secrecy about so much of what happened at my family. Keeping things hidden wasn't simply something I did. It had been woven into the structure of my childhood. You protected the family. You didn't tell. You exposed, you didn't expose. You learned very early that there were things that other people simply weren't supposed to know. But this woman, she knew something. Maybe not the facts, maybe not the name of things, but she knew something wasn't right. She paid attention. And there were times when she tried to protect us. There were even moments when she would lash out at my parents on our behalf. I think about that now as an adult and realize what that must have communicated to me. Someone else sees this too. Someone else thinks something isn't right. Someone else believes I'm worth defending. When you're a child, you don't necessarily sit down and translate an experience into those words. I definitely didn't. But the body receives messages long before we know how to articulate them. And one of the most disorienting things about complex trauma is that when harmful things are normalized around you, you often don't know that they're actually abnormal. This is simply life. This is simply family. This is simply how things are. So when another adult responds differently, even if they never explain why, they quietly introduce another standard. Oh, maybe adults can protect children. Maybe someone can notice. Maybe I am worth noticing. And then there were the pastries. It's funny, the things we remember. Her sister would come from Argentina and bring pastries with her, and her mom would share them with me. We didn't really have sweets growing up, so the pastries actually were incredibly special. I can still remember what it was like to be included in something that wasn't mine. To be handed something simply because there was some and I was there. And these were like a special commodity. No earning, no explanation, no reason I deserved one more than anyone else, just here. I think that's why the pastries stayed in my memory too. They were small, but they contained something much larger. It was enoughness. There is enough. And you can have some. You deserve some, right? For someone who carried a belief that her very existence needed to be justified, that is no small message. Maybe that's why I started seeing these people differently. I've become fascinated by these tiny things. And maybe it's because I have space now. I have room for that. Because when we imagine changing someone's life, we tend to imagine something enormous. We imagine rescuing them from a burning building, giving the perfect speech, showing up at exactly the right moment with exactly the right answer. But almost none of the people I'm remembering did anything dramatic. One sang, one called me a queen, one moved over, one opened her home and shared pastries. And yet here I am, decades later, telling you about them. This makes me wonder how many moments of love are moving through the world completely unnoticed by the people who started them? How many sentences are still living inside someone who heard them 30 years ago? How many adults are gentler because someone was gentle with them once? How many people learned how to make room because someone somewhere once moved over and said, hey, sit here. And I didn't know it yet, but there were still more people waiting for me, people who would show me different versions of the same thing. Not just what it felt like to be welcomed, but what it felt like to have someone believe in me, to have someone notice the moment I began disappearing inside myself, to have someone recognize the ability in me that I had already decided wasn't there. One of those families who would become part of that story was the Humphreys. The Humphreys were from Canada. Mr. and Mrs. Humphreys were missionaries, and they were the parents of one of my classmates. And much like my best friend's mother, there was something about their home that made you understand super quick that hospitality wasn't something that they performed. It was just how they lived, how they chose to live. Their doors were open, kids were welcome. There wasn't this feeling that you needed some special invitation or explanation for why you were there. You could just be there. I think honestly, looking back, that was one of the things I was unknowingly collecting those years. Examples, examples of home, of marriages, of adults, examples of what happened when children entered a room. I didn't know I was doing that. I obviously wasn't consciously comparing families or taking notes on how other people lived. That would be kind of creepy. But I was just beating a kid. But children are always learning what relationships are supposed to feel like and storing them, storing that, right? We learn it in thousands of tiny moments, in the way someone's face changes when we walk into the kitchen, in whether laughter feels safe or dangerous, and whether mistakes create tension, and whether adults apologize, and whether affection comes with conditions attached to it, and whether we have to study the emotional weather before deciding who we're allowed to be that day. And every once in a while you walk into a home where your body doesn't seem to have quite as much work to do. The Humphreys home was one of those places for me. They were tender, kind, gentle, they loved me. And again, I don't think they had any real understanding of what my life was like behind closed doors. There wasn't some dramatic moment where I sat down and told them my story. I couldn't have. I didn't even fully understand my story myself. They simply treated me like someone worth welcoming. And Mr. Humphreys particularly became very important to me because he wasn't just the father of my friend, he was my basketball coach. And I loved basketball. I also really, really looked up to him. He had been a basketball player himself, and he was good, really good. So his opinion mattered to me. When you're young and someone you admire sees something in you, their belief can carry an unusual amount of weight. And Mr. Humphreys believed in me. And it wasn't in that, you know, vague way that some adults do, right? That they tell children, you can do anything and you put your mind to. He actually watched me, he coached me, he knew what I could do. And when I couldn't see it, he reminded me. If I made a mistake, he didn't let the mistake become the entire game. That was really important for me because I was incredibly hard on myself. I didn't really know how to fill gently. A mistake wasn't just, oh, I messed that up. A mistake could very quickly become what's wrong with me. There wasn't much distance between something I had done poorly and who I believed I was. Mr. Humphreys helped me create some of that distance. He taught me to look for what went right. He taught me to forgive myself for what I did, or what I what didn't, right? What didn't go right. He helped me understand that a bad play wasn't a bad player. You adjust, you learn, you keep going. I don't remember him ever being mean or harsh towards me. Just very supportive. I don't know whether he ever realized how much I needed that lesson outside of basketball. Because when your existence already feels questionable, mistakes can feel strangely dangerous. They seem to confirm something. See, this is why you shouldn't have trusted yourself. This is why you're not enough. This is why everyone else knows something you don't. But a good coach sees the whole player, not just the last play. And I think that's what Mr. Humphreys gave me. For however long I was standing on that court, I got to be more than the thing I had just done wrong. I was still someone he believed in. I could borrow that. I could borrow his certainty when mine disappeared. I could look at myself through his eyes for a moment and think, well, if he thinks I can do this, maybe I can. I think sometimes that's how self-belief begins. Not from nowhere, not because one morning we stand in front of a mirror and suddenly decide we're wonderful. Sometimes another human being holds a belief about us steady enough that eventually we become curious about whether they might be right. He is one of the reasons I believed that I was fast as well. I never really thought that I was fast until he highlighted that for me. And honestly, that made me faster. Right? So when somebody highlights something about you, it tends to spark something within you, within your brain. And it can set the train in motion. So just a reminder for future reference. Somewhere around those same years, volleyball gave me another coach, Miss Burkett. Miss Birquette was different. She was tougher. She could be harsh. She was also my seventh grade teacher, and I remember, or seventh or eighth grade, I don't remember, but I remember chewing gum in her class, not really recognizing I wasn't supposed to. And she made me take the gum out and put it on my nose and hold it there for the whole class. And that wasn't super cool, but it taught me. It taught me to obey the rules, right? Anyway, so this was Miss Burkett, you know. It's not a negative thing. She was strict, you know. She she was respected. And she was a really good coach. She expected us to work. She had high expectations for us. She expected us to listen. She expected us to play. There was a lot of discipline there. And I respected her for that. But what I remember about Miss Burkett all these years later isn't really what she taught me about volleyball. It's that she figured me out. I don't even know exactly when she noticed it. Maybe coaches learn their players the way music or musicians learn an instrument, right? They begin noticing the subtle things, the slight change in posture, the hesitation that wasn't there five minutes ago. The difference between someone who needs to be pushed and someone who needs 30 seconds to become themselves or to come back to themselves.

unknown 30:54

Ms.

SPEAKER_00 30:55

Burkett learned something about me. If I made a mistake in a game, I could unravel. And I really mean unravel. If I missed a serve, I hit the ball wrong, I made a play that cost us a point. Whatever it was, the mistake itself was usually over in seconds. But inside me, it kept happening again and again and again. I would replay it. I'd start beating myself up. How could you do that? Come on, don't mess up again. Everyone saw that. And of course, the more desperately I tried not to make another mistake, the tighter I became. And then I'd miss something else. And now there were two mistakes, then three. And eventually I wasn't responding to the volleyball anymore. I was responding to myself, to the shame, to the internal voice telling me I was ruining everything. I couldn't shake things off. Miss Briquette noticed, and this is the part that still touches me. She didn't try to coach that out of me in the middle of the spiral. She didn't leave me on the court and yell, get it together. She didn't interpret my dysregulation as a lack of effort. She learned that when I reached that place, I needed to come out. So she'd pull me. I'd sit on the bench. The game would keep moving without me for a little while. The noise of the gym would still be there, and shoes squeaking against the floor, balls hitting palms, whistles, voices. But for a few moments, I wasn't responsible for the next play. I could settle, I could breathe. The mistake could become something that just happened instead of something that was still happening. And when she saw that I was okay again, she put me back in. That's what gets me now. She put me back in because she because pulling me out wasn't rejection or punishment. It wasn't you can't handle this. It was, I know you, I know what happens to you here. Take a minute, I'll know when you're ready, and then go back in. There is something so incredibly loving about being known that specifically. Not just I care about you, but I've paid enough attention to you to recognize when you've left yourself. I didn't have that very often. I didn't have someone consistently noticing my internal world and adjusting to it. And I certainly didn't have the language I have now. I didn't know anything about regulation or trauma responses or what shame does to the brain. I didn't know that when the nervous system perceives a mistake as something much larger than a mistake, the body can move into protection before the thinking mind has any chance to intervene. I just thought I was terrible at recovering. But Miss Briquette didn't need the language to understand the pattern. She watched and learned and responded. And there was something happening beneath the surface when someone does that for a person with complex trauma that I think is worth slowing down for. Because here's the thing: complex trauma isn't created only by terrible things happening. It can also be shaped by what repeatedly doesn't happen. No one notices you're overwhelmed. No one comes when you're frightened. No one changes course when something is too much. No one wonders what your behavior might be communicating. You adapt, you learn to handle it, or hide it, like I did, or push through it like I did. You become extraordinarily skilled at surviving your own distress without expecting anyone else to notice. And then one day, someone notices. You don't have to explain yourself perfectly. You don't have to reach complete collapse before your need becomes legitimate. Someone simply plays it, pays attention closely enough to recognize she's gone. Give her a minute. And then they wait for you to return. That kind of attunement gives the brain an experience it may not have had enough of. My internal world can affect what happens around me. Think about that. Something is happening inside me, and another person notices. They don't ridicule it, they don't punish it, they don't make it about themselves, they respond. For a child who has learned that her inner experience is largely irrelevant to the outside world, that is huge. It says your experience counts. And when your deepest belief is my existence isn't valid, being treated as though your internal experience actually matters, that's a direct contradiction. It's not an intellectual contradiction, an embodied one. Nobody had to sit me down and convince me that my needs mattered. For a few minutes on a volleyball court, someone behaved as though they did. Maybe that's part of why these memories are returning to me now, because I can finally recognize what was happening inside of them. At the time, I knew I liked Mr. Humphreys. I knew Miss Briquette understood me. I knew I felt better after she pulled me out and let me reset. But I couldn't yet see those moments as evidence of my own worth. I didn't have anywhere to put that interpretation. Now I do. Now I can look backward and say, oh, that was actually someone believing in me. That was someone attuning to me. That was someone deciding I was worth understanding. And strangely, once I started looking at my life through that wider lens, another memory surfaced. This one took me backward. Before basketball, volleyball, before high school. Back to a classroom where a much younger version of me had finally reached the point where she couldn't pretend she was okay anymore. I can still see her, head down on the desk, arms folded beneath her, trying to disappear into the small space between herself and the tabletop. And then Mr. Felix walked over. I think I was third or maybe fourth grade, probably third grade. I'm not sure which one anymore. I don't remember what subject we were supposed to be learning that day. I don't remember what was written on the board. I don't remember who was sitting around me. But I remember the desk. I remember my head resting on my arms, and I remember the feeling. I was tired, not sleepy. Tired in the way that children can become tired when they've been carrying something that they don't have words for. I had been bullied. I had felt different. And that day, whatever small amount of energy I used, I usually use to hold myself together, was just gone. I put my head down and I shut everything out. There were moments from childhood that when I look back at them now, make me want to reach through time. Not to change everything, but just I imagined simply just sitting beside that little girl and not asking her to explain or telling her that everything will eventually be okay, just letting her know I know, I know this is hard.

unknown 37:39

Mr.

SPEAKER_00 37:40

Felix couldn't have known everything that was happening either. He didn't know what my life was like behind closed doors. He didn't know everything I was carrying into his classroom. But I guess he knew enough to recognize that the little girl with her head on the desk wasn't simply refusing to participate, something was wrong. And instead of calling my name from across the room, he came over and he knelt beside me. And that has stayed with me. He knelt. He didn't stand over me, he didn't make me lift my head first. He required he didn't require me to come toward him. He came toward me and he asked, Lizzie, are you okay? I wish I remembered exactly what he said after that. I I really don't. It was it was encouraging though. I know he talked to me about the kids who were hurting me. I remember him trying to help me understand that what they were doing had more to do with them than it had with me. I remember him reminding me of my own worth. But I can't put quotation marks around most of it because I don't know the exact words anymore. What I remember with complete clarity, though, is what those words became inside of me. He sees me. Someone had noticed that I was hurting, not because I finally screamed loud enough or because I told the whole story or I had earned someone's concern. He simply saw a little girl with her head down and wondered what had happened to her. That matters to me now. Because there's a world of difference between asking what's wrong with you and asking what happened. And there's a world of difference between seeing behavior and seeing the person underneath it. Mr. Felix saw the person. And I wonder sometimes whether he remember remembers that day at all. Teachers have thousands of interactions with students over the course of their careers, thousands of desks, thousands of conversations, thousands of children who eventually grow up and disappear into lives the teacher may never know anything about. Maybe for him it was Tuesday. Maybe he went home that afternoon and never thought about it again. But for me, the moment crossed decades, that's incredible to me. Something can be ordinary in one person's life and sacred in another person's memory. And neither knows it at the time. Maybe that's one of the reasons I'm telling these stories. Because we usually measure impact by what we can see. We look for outcomes, results, thank yous, evidence that we did matter, but human beings don't always get to witness the consequences of their kindness. Sometimes you kneel beside a desk and then you go back to teaching. You don't get to see where the moment travels. You don't know that a little girl will grow up, that one day she will sit across from hurting people for a living. And that she will learn to look beneath behavior. That she will become deeply interested in the stories underneath people's reactions, that decades later she will still remember what it felt like when someone looked beneath hers. Maybe that's how care travels. Not in a straight line, not with anyone keeping track. It simply enters us and sometimes much later comes out through the way we treat someone else. By the time I reached the later years of high school, though, the questions I carried about myself had changed. I wasn't only wondering whether I belonged. I had begun deciding what I was capable of. And somewhere along the way, I had decided I wasn't very smart. I really believed that, which is interesting to say now because I can look backward and see so many things I couldn't see then. I dissociated a lot, I struggled to stay present. And then there was something almost painfully practical that nobody seemed to understand for a while. I couldn't see. I meant that literally. My eyesight was really bad. At one point I did get glasses, but they were hand-me-down glasses, and they didn't fit me correctly. They weren't actually my prescription, and I was embarrassed by them. So I didn't want to wear them. Instead, I developed these little tricks. I would squint at the board. Sometimes I would pull at the corners of my eyes because somehow that made things a little clearer. Just enough to try to figure out what the teacher had written. Think about that for a second. I'm sitting in a classroom, unable to properly see the information I'm supposed to be learning, frequently dissociating, carrying everything else my nervous system was already carrying. And the conclusion I came to wasn't, wow, learning under these conditions is incredibly difficult. It was, I'm children are so good at doing that. Actually, adults are too. We take an adaptation, a circumstance, a limitation, a wound, and turn it into an identity. I can't focus because I'm lazy. I'm overwhelmed because I'm weak. I don't know how to do this because I'm stupid. Someone didn't love me well because I'm unlovable. We turn experiences into definitions. And once we have a definition, we start living inside it. Then I had Mr. Heinrich. He was my history teacher. I think I had him in 11th or 12th grade, possibly both. The exact timeline is kind of fuzzy now. But he's not fuzzy. What he gave me is not fuzzy. Mr. Heinrich didn't look at my grades and decide that my grades told him everything he needed to know about me. He didn't tell me I needed to try harder. He didn't treat motivation like something I was withholding out of stubbornness. He taught me, he really, really taught me. He showed me how to study, how to take information apart, how to understand what I was learning instead of desperately trying to memorize words long enough to reproduce them on a test. He gave me tools, but most importantly, he seemed completely unconvinced by the story I had already written by myself, or about myself. I thought I wasn't smart. He didn't. There is something wonderfully destructive about meeting someone who refuses to agree with a limitation you've placed on yourself. I could bring him all of my evidence, my grades, my struggles, my history, and his response in one form or another kept being, No, I think you can do this. So I tried, and then I started doing well. I thrived in his class, actually. I earned an A, and by my senior year, I earned all A's. I sometimes wonder what could have happened or what would have happened if Mr. Heinrich had looked at the version of me who was struggling and simply accepted my interpretation. Maybe school isn't your thing. Maybe you're just not academically inclined. But instead he gave me another possibility. What if intelligence wasn't the problem? What if I needed tools? What if I needed someone to teach me how I learned? What if I needed someone who expected me to succeed? What if I had mistaken difficulty for capability? That changed something. Because Mr. Heinrich did. didn't make me intelligent. I already was. He made it possible for me to discover that. And there's the difference. He didn't put something inside me that wasn't there. He recognized something and helped me find it too. When I think about all of these people together now, I do keep noticing this pattern. They weren't creating versions of me. They were just recognizing versions of me that had already existed. The man with the guitar didn't give me joy. He found a little girl who could still feel it. The woman in Brazil didn't make me worthy when she called me a queen. She reflected worth that was already there. Mio didn't manufacture my belonging. She behaved as though my belonging didn't require debate. My best friend's mother didn't make me deserving of protection. She simply responded as though I was. Mr. and Mrs. Humphreys didn't create my right to be welcomed. They welcomed me.

unknown 45:35

Mr.

SPEAKER_00 45:35

Humphreys didn't create my potential. He saw it. Miss Burquette didn't give me needs. She noticed the needs I already had.

unknown 45:44

Mr.

SPEAKER_00 45:45

Felix didn't make my pain legitimate by kneeling beside me. It had always been legitimate and legitimate. He was simply one of the people who treated it that way. And Mr. Heinrich didn't make me smart. He refused to mistake struggle for a lack of intelligence. That's what being seen is. Maybe that's why it's so powerful. Someone isn't telling us who to become. For one brief moment, they are meeting who is already there. And when you've spent years believing that your existence itself is somehow questionable, being met like that can leave an imprint you won't understand until much later. I carried those imprints with me into adulthood, into college, into the next version of myself. By then I had become more capable, more independent. I had learned how to function, I knew how to work, I knew how to keep moving. But being capable and feeling inherently valuable are not the same thing. So you can become very good at life while still quietly believing you need to earn your place in it. And then there was Barb. I worked as a student worker in college, and Barb was there. I wish I could give you some enormous story about what she did for me, some defining conversations, some dramatic moment when she changed the course of my life. That's not what I remember. I remember the way she looked at me. She was my biggest fan. That's really the only way I know how to describe her. When I talked, Barb listened. And not the kind of listening where someone is waiting for you to finish so they can tell you their story. She took me in. That's the phrase that comes to mind. She took me in. There was warmth in the way that she looked at me, interest, affection. She seemed genuinely happy that I existed in her world. Do you know how powerful that is? To encounter someone who seems delighted by you, not impressed, not dependent on you, not pleased because you've done something useful, just glad you're there. I don't think I understood at the time how unusual that felt to me. I just knew I loved being around her. She took me under her wing, she encouraged me, she made me feel completely accepted. And when I think about her now, I realize Barb gave me something slightly different from everyone who had come before her. She gave me the experience of being enjoyed. There was nothing to accomplish in that, nothing to fix or prove. I didn't have to win the game, I didn't have to get the A. I didn't have to be hurting enough to deserve comfort. I could just walk into the room and someone was happy to see me. And maybe that sounds small, but it isn't. Not when you've spent years believing your value is connected to what you provide. Not when some part of you has been quietly keeping a ledger your entire life, making sure you're giving enough, helping enough, performing enough, being useful enough to justify the space that you occupy. Delight asks for none of that. Delight simply says, there you are, and smiles. I hope you all know how that feels. I don't know if Barb knows what she gave me. I don't know if Mr. Heinrich knows or Mr. Felix or Miss Burkett or the Humphreys or if Mio remembers that first day the way I do. I don't know if my best friend's mother remembers handing me those pastries. I don't know if the woman in Brazil remembers twisting that towel onto my head or remembers me at all. And somewhere in the world, or perhaps no longer in it, there may have been a man who once played a guitar for a group of children in Spain who absolutely who had no idea, absolutely no idea, that one little girl would still be humming fragments of a song for more than 40 years. And that realization has been sitting with me because for so much of my life, I thought I understood who shaped me. I knew the wounds. I knew the people attached to them. I knew the experiences I had spent years healing. Pain made its fingerprints easy to identify, but love, love had left fingerprints too. I just hadn't learned how to see them yet. And once I did, my entire understanding of my life became a little larger. Not easier or rewritten, just larger. And I think that's important to distinguish between the two. Because sometimes when we talk about healing, especially healing from trauma, there's this temptation to search for the silver lining, to find the lesson, to make what happened somehow necessary because something beautiful eventually grew from it, right? We've heard that many, many times. I don't believe that. There are things that happened to me that never needed to happen. There are things that no child should have had to carry. Finding love scattered among those years doesn't make any of that less true. The woman who called me a queen doesn't erase what happened in Brazil. Mio making room for me doesn't erase the bullying that came before her. Mr. Felix kneeling beside my desk doesn't erase what caused me to put my head down in the first place.

unknown 51:00

Mr.

SPEAKER_00 51:00

Heinrich's believing in my intelligence doesn't give me back all the years I spent believing I wasn't smart. That's not what that is. Healing didn't ask me to trade one version of my childhood for another. It gave me the capacity to hold more than one truth at the same time. There was pain and there were people, there was harm, there was tenderness, there were adults who failed me, and there were adults who, sometimes without knowing anything about my story, offered me something I desperately needed. There were places where I'd learned to disappear. There were people around who, for a few minutes, I didn't have to. Both are true. I think that there was a time in my life when holding both would have felt almost threatening. Because when you've worked so hard to finally acknowledge what happened to you, noticing the good can sometimes feel strange as strangely dangerous. It's almost as though recognizing kindness somehow weakens the truth of harm. Doesn't. The truth doesn't become less true because another truth is allowed to stand beside it. And I think that's part of what has changed in me. For years the belief that my existence isn't valid had a tremendous amount of authority over the way I understood my life. It wasn't just a thought, it was an organizer. It decided what information made sense. It decided which memories seemed important. It decided what I noticed about relationships. It decided what I expected from people. It even helped me determine which explanations felt believable. Rejection, that made sense. Being overlooked, of course. Feeling like a burden, absolutely. Being treated as though my needs were inconvenient, that fit perfectly. Those experiences could walk straight through the front door of that belief without ever being questioned. But kindness, that kind of created a problem for me. Because what do you do when a woman who looks at you and sees a queen? Or with a woman that looks at you and sees a queen. When somewhere inside of you, you don't believe you have the right to exist fully? What do you do with a girl who immediately makes room for you? When you're already expected to be excluded? What do you do with a mother who protects you? When you've learned that your discomfort isn't important enough to change what adults do? Not my mother, but my best friend's mother. What do you do with a coach who believes in you when one mistake feels like proof of your inadequacy? And what do you do with another coach who notices exactly when you're overwhelmed and changes what she's doing because of it? When you've learned that other people's needs matter more than yours? What do you do with a teacher who kneels beside you when you've become accustomed to suffer quietly? What do you do with another teacher who looks at the evidence you've collected about your own intelligence and essentially says, I don't believe your conclusion. And what do you do with a woman like Barb who seems genuinely delighted that you're there when you've spent so much of your life believing your place in the room needs to be earned? I think for a very long time I didn't know what to do with any of it. So those moments remained memories without becoming evidence. And I guess that's the distinction I've been trying to understand. I remember the moments. Evidence that the belief wasn't completely true, evidence that there was that there were people who experienced my existence as something worth welcoming, worth protecting, worth teaching, worth understanding or believing in or enjoying. And when I finally began clearing that old belief for myself, when my existence isn't valid, stopped being the unquestioned truth beneath everything, it was almost as though all of these old memories raised their hands. What about me? And another one, what about me? And another, you forgot what this meant. Not forgotten memories, forgotten meaning. I think that maybe one of the most unexpected gifts healing has given me, not a different past, a different relationship with the past I already have. Because now when I look backward, I don't only see what was done to me, I can also see what was given to me. And that hasn't always been that way. And some of what was given was so incredibly small or seemed so small. And that's what keeps getting me. Nobody needed to know my whole story, nobody needed a diagnosis or to understand complex trauma. The man with the guitar didn't need to know what my childhood would become. He played, and for a little while I got to play too. The woman in Brazil didn't need to understand my relationship with Worth. She wrapped my wet hair with a towel and saw a queen. Mio didn't need to understand abandonment or rejection or belonging. She saw the new girl standing there and moved over. My best friend's mother didn't need a full disclosure of what was happening in my family. Something in her notice, so she opened her home. She defended us when she could. She shared what she had. Mr and Mrs. Humphreys didn't need my history before deciding I was welcome. Their home simply had room for me.

unknown 56:26

Mr.

SPEAKER_00 56:27

Humphreys didn't need to understand why mistakes could become so enormous inside me. He taught me that one bad play didn't define the player. Miss Burkett didn't need the language of trauma or nervous system regulation. She learned my face, my body, my patterns. She learned when I needed to come out and when I was ready to go back in. Mr. Felix didn't need to know everything that had happened before I put my head on that desk. He saw that I was hurting, and he knelt. Mr. Heinrich, he didn't need to repair my entire education. He needed to refuse the story that I wasn't capable. He gave me tools, he expected me to use them. And slowly I discovered myself inside that expectation. And Barb, Barb didn't need to do anything extraordinary at all. She was simply happy to see me. When I put them together like this, I'm struck by how little any one person had to carry. No one person had to become everything. No one person had to rescue me. Not one person had to undo my child. They simply brought my childhood. They simply brought what they had: a guitar, a compliment, an empty chair, an open home, a little protection, a coach's belief, a few minutes on the bench, a conversation beside a desk, a way of learning, a face that brightened when I walked into the room. Maybe that's what makes this realization feel so full of love to me. Because we can become intimidated by the idea of making a difference in someone's life. We think that we need to know what to say, we think that we need to understand everything they're going through. We think we need to solve something, and sometimes we don't. Sometimes another human being simply needs to experience us being fully there. Because for someone with complex trauma, being seen can be profoundly regulating. That can go for anybody as well. The body has often spent years preparing for what other people might do: watching, predicting, adjusting, protecting. And when another person responds with attunement, when they notice rather than demand, become curious rather than assume, make room rather than require us to earn it, the nervous system receives information that is different from what it has learned to expect. It's not an affirmation written on a mirror, an experience. I showed up and someone was glad I came. I struggled and someone stayed. I made a mistake and I wasn't discarded. I became overwhelmed and someone adjusted. I hurt and someone noticed. I couldn't see something in myself and someone held it in view until I could. Those experiences matter because complex trauma is relational, and some of its healing is relational too. Not just in therapy, not just in carefully designing healing spaces. Sometimes it happens in gyms and classrooms and kitchens at work, in the ordinary places where human beings encounter one another and decide, often without thinking about it, to be kind. And I wonder how many times I've been that person for someone else and never known it. Not because I'm a therapist, but just because I'm a human. I wonder how many times you've been that person. Maybe there's someone walking around right now carrying a sentence you don't even remember saying. Maybe someone remembers the day you scooted over, the day you defended them, the day you noticed they weren't okay, the day your face lit up when they walked into the room. Maybe something you considered completely ordinary became evidence for someone else. Evidence that they weren't invisible, that they weren't too much, that someone could be gentle, evidence that their existence had an effect on the world around them. We don't usually get to know, and maybe that's part of the beauty of it. There's so much love moving between humans, human beings that will never be documented. No ceremony ceremony, no recognition, no moment where someone announces, you just changed something in me. Most of the time, life simply continues. The bell rings, the game starts again, someone eats the pastry, the class moves on, the towel comes off, the sun the song ends, years pass, and somewhere inside another person the moment remains. I find myself wondering about all of them now. I wonder where that man from Spain went after our lives crossed, whether he continued playing guitar. I wonder whether the woman in Brazil ever wrapped another little girl's hair and called her a queen. I wonder whether Mio has any idea that what that empty chair meant. I wonder whether my best friend's mom knew just how safe her open door felt to me. I wonder if Mr and Mrs. Humphreys knew that their gentleness became part of my understanding of what adults could be. I wonder if Mr. Humphreys knew how much his belief mattered. I wonder whether Miss Burkett remembers recognizing that look on my face and knowing she needs a minute. I wonder if Mr. Felix remembers a little girl with her head on her d on a desk. I wonder if Mr. Heinrich knew that he wasn't simply changing a grade. He was changing a definition. And I wonder if Barb knew that being someone's biggest fan could become a memory that carried into middle age. Maybe some of them knew, maybe none of them did. But I know now, and I think that's enough. Because when I look back today, I don't see a childhood suddenly transformed into something it wasn't. I see a life with more people in it. I see hands I hadn't noticed before, faces I had allowed to fade into the background. Moments that once seemed too small to compete with everything else, and no longer need to compete. That's important. The love doesn't have to be bigger than the trauma to be real. It doesn't have to win some imaginary contest. It gets to exist beside it. It gets its own place in his in the story. And maybe for me, that is part of what it means now to say my existence is valid. Because if my existence is valid, then so are the moments when someone enjoyed it. If my existence is valid, then the chair meal offered matters. The concern on Mr. Felix's face matters. Miss Burkett's noticing my overwhelm matters. All of it matters. The song matters. The towel matters. I matter enough for those things to count. That might be the piece I couldn't understand before. And maybe there's someone in your own life whose memory has been waiting for you to understand it differently. Someone you haven't thought about in years, not necessarily the person who rescued you, maybe nobody did. I'm talking about someone much easier to overlook, the person who noticed, the person who made room, the person whose house felt different, the teacher who didn't embarrass you. The coach who knew when to push and when to stop, or the parent friend's parent who fed you. The person who treated some part of you as precious before you had any idea that it was. Maybe their face came to you while you were listening. If it did, don't rush past it. Stay there for a moment. Look again. Not because healing requires us to search our past for something beautiful, but because sometimes, once we are no longer looking at ourselves through the eyes of our wounds, we discover that there was more love in our story than we had been able to receive. And perhaps someone who thought they were only offering a chair or a pastry or a few minutes on a bench was quietly giving us something we would carry for the rest of our lives. I don't know whether the people I've talked about today will ever hear this episode. But wherever they are, I hope somehow the love finds its way back. Because I can see them now, all of them. And after spending so much time in my life believing that my existence wasn't valid, there's something incredibly tender about realizing there were people scattered throughout my life who had been treating my existence as though it mattered all along. Until next time, thank you for being here and thank you for seeing me.