The Geography of Fear: A Vignette on Childhood Hypervigilance and the Cost of Safety

Trauma scholar Bessel van der Kolk articulates that trauma represents far more than a discrete event from the past; it is an enduring imprint on mind, brain, and body that continues shaping how we navigate the present (2014, p. 21).

Keywords: childhood hypervigilance, trauma, nervous system, body memory, fear, safety, somatic experience, scholarly personal narrative, vignette

States of Being Rather Than Events

Content Warning: This vignette contains discussion of childhood exposure to parental alcoholism and domestic violence. While free of graphic detail, the material addresses trauma, fear, and hypervigilance that some readers may find distressing.

There are childhood memories constructed from discrete events, moments with clear beginnings and endings. And then there are memories that exist as states of being rather than as events, atmospheric conditions that pervaded entire years. This vignette attempts to capture one such state: the pervasive fear that characterised my childhood from approximately ages three through twelve, the years when my father’s alcoholism and violence made our home a place of constant threat. This is the texture of hypervigilance itself rather than the memory of a single incident, the embodied experience of a nervous system locked in perpetual defensive mobilization.

Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk (2014) has demonstrated that trauma represents far more than a discrete past event; it is an enduring imprint on mind, brain, and body that continues shaping how we survive in the present. For children living in homes characterised by unpredictable violence, the imprint forms through chronic activation rather than through isolated traumatic events of threat-response systems.

Neuroscientist Stephen Porges (2011), developer of Polyvagal Theory, explained that the autonomic nervous system continuously evaluates environmental cues for safety or danger through a process he termed neuroception, an unconscious detection of threat that occurs beneath conscious awareness. In homes where violence erupts unpredictably, children’s nervous systems become calibrated to constant danger, their neuroception tuned to detect the subtlest indicators of impending harm.

This memory uses Scholarly Personal Narrative methodology to explore how chronic childhood fear shapes lifelong patterns of relating to solitude, safety, and the possibility of rest.

By examining the embodied experience of hypervigilance through the lens of contemporary trauma neuroscience, I illuminate connections between early survival strategies and my current inquiry into alonetude as healing practice. The capacity for generative solitude, I argue, requires a foundation of safety that was systematically undermined in my childhood. Understanding this foundational disruption is essential to understanding both what was lost and what the current healing journey seeks to reclaim.

The Architecture of Chronic Threat

What I am attempting to document here defies conventional narrative structure. There is no rising action, no climax, no resolution. There is only the ongoing state of estar alerta, being alert, a way of inhabiting the world that became so normalised I forgot there was any other way to be. The challenge in writing about this lies in conveying the atmospheric quality of constant vigilance, the way fear became the background hum against which all other experiences played out.

Scholarly Personal Narrative, as articulated by education scholar Robert Nash (2004), legitimises the use of personal experience as scholarly data when that experience is critically examined, carefully contextualised, and theoretically grounded. My childhood hypervigilance is far more than personal history; it is a case study in how developing nervous systems adapt to chronic threat, how children organise their entire beings around the imperative of survival, and how early experiences of danger foreclose later capacities for rest and solitude.

Psychiatrist Judith Herman observes that children living in chronically threatening environments organise their entire existence around preventing further harm, shaping every aspect of their development and behaviour (1992).

Complex Trauma and Deformation of Personality

Before entering the narrative itself, it is essential to establish the neurobiological and psychological frameworks that make sense of chronic childhood fear. Psychiatrist Judith Herman (1992) introduced the concept of complex post-traumatic stress disorder (complex PTSD) to describe prolonged, repeated trauma occurring in contexts where escape is impossible, particularly during developmental years. Herman distinguished complex PTSD from single-incident trauma, noting that repeated trauma in adult life erodes the structure of an already-formed personality, but repeated trauma in childhood fundamentally shapes and deforms the personality as it develops. Children exposed to ongoing domestic violence develop far more than memories of specific frightening events; they develop an altered baseline state characterised by constant vigilance, disrupted attachment, and a compromised sense of safety.

This distinction matters profoundly. Single-incident trauma, while devastating, occurs against a backdrop of relative safety. The person knows what normal felt like before the trauma and can potentially return to that baseline. But for children in chronically threatening environments, a safe baseline is absent. The threat is the baseline. Safety, when it occurs, feels like an aberration.

Polyvagal Theory and the Hierarchy of Survival Responses

Polyvagal Theory, developed by Stephen Porges (2011), provides a crucial understanding of how chronic threat shapes the nervous system. Porges described three hierarchically organised subsystems of the autonomic nervous system: the ventral vagal system, which supports social engagement and feelings of safety; the sympathetic nervous system, which mobilises fight-or-flight responses; and the dorsal vagal system, which produces freeze, collapse, and shutdown responses. In safe environments, the nervous system flexibly moves between these states as situations require. However, in chronically threatening environments, the system becomes biased toward defensive states, with the ventral vagal social engagement system chronically inhibited (Porges, 2011).

For children in violent homes, this means the nervous system rarely experiences the regulation that comes from safe, attuned relationships. Instead, as van der Kolk (2014) documented, traumatised individuals carry fundamentally different bodily experiences than those who have felt safe and welcome in the world. The chronic activation of threat-detection systems creates what trauma researcher Janina Fisher (2017) termed structural dissociation, the fragmentation of the personality into parts that carry different survival strategies. Children develop what Fisher described as trauma-related action systems, including fight, flight, freeze, submit, and attach-cry-for-help responses, each associated with specific bodily states and relational patterns.

Hypervigilance as an Adaptive Strategy

Hypervigilance, which van der Kolk (2014) characterised as the persistent expectation of danger that keeps the body in a state of high alert, becomes a chronic state rather than an acute response. Clinical psychologist Christine Courtois (2008) noted that children in abusive homes develop what she termed anticipatory anxiety, constantly scanning environments and monitoring adult moods to predict and potentially avoid danger. This anticipatory stance, while adaptive in the moment, creates lasting alterations in how the nervous system processes safety cues even in genuinely safe environments.

Hypervigilance is best understood as an intelligent adaptation rather than a pathology. The child who learns to read micro-expressions, to detect shifts in vocal tone, to map escape routes through the house, that child is surviving rather than malfunctioning. The problem emerges in the persistence of the adaptation long after the threat has ended, in the way the nervous system continues signalling danger even in contexts of genuine safety.

Betrayal Trauma and the Violation of Reality

The specific experience of being falsely accused connects to what trauma researchers call betrayal trauma, a concept articulated by psychologist Jennifer Freyd and summarised in Freyd (2008). Freyd argued that when those who should protect us instead harm us, or when we are blamed for harm done to us, the violation cuts deeper than the harm itself because it undermines our basic capacity to trust our own perceptions. For children, false accusations by abusive parents create a double bind: the child knows they were innocent of the accused act, yet the parent’s power requires submission to the false narrative, creating a fundamental rupture in the child’s sense of reality and worth.

Freyd (2008) distinguished betrayal trauma from other forms of trauma by emphasising that it occurs when the people or institutions on which a person depends for survival violate that trust. For a child, there is no one more dependent upon for survival than parents. When parents both harm and deny the child’s reality, they commit what might be understood as epistemic violence, an assault on the child’s capacity to know what they know.

Parentification and the Burden of Protection

Finally, the pattern of attempting to protect younger siblings represents what family therapist Salvador Minuchin (1974) termed parentification, a developmental distortion in which children assume caretaking roles beyond their capacity. Jurkovic (1997) further described how parentification places the child in an impossible position, simultaneously serving as both a caretaker and a dependent. The child becomes hypervigilant for their own safety as well as their siblings’, exponentially increasing the burden on their developing nervous system.

Most relevant for the current inquiry into alonetude, parentified children often struggle with solitude because their nervous systems learned early that constant vigilance is required for self-protection as well as for the protection of others. Rest feels like a dereliction of duty. Solitude feels like abandonment of the post.

van der Kolk (2014) demonstrates that the body continues to register and respond to danger signals even when conscious memory holds no record of the original trauma.

The Vignette: The Feeling in My Stomach

The Constant Companion

I am seven. Or eight. Or nine. The specific age matters less than the constancy: from my earliest memories until approximately age twelve, I live inside a particular sensation. It sits in my stomach, a tight ball of readiness. Neither quite nausea, though sometimes it tips that way, nor quite pain, though it aches. It is the feeling of waiting. Esperando (waiting). Always listening and waiting for the sound that will tell me whether this evening will be safe.

The sound is the garage door. My father’s car is pulling in at the end of the day. My body knows before my mind processes: the particular rhythm of his footsteps tells me everything I need to know. Heavy, deliberate steps mean danger. Lighter, quicker steps might mean safety, though guarantees are absent. The ball in my stomach tightens, and my breathing changes without my choosing to change it. I am listening with my whole body, with every sense.

By the time I hear the garage door, I have already assessed multiple variables. What day of the week is it? Fridays are more dangerous. How late is he? Later means more drinking. Did my mother seem tense at dinner? Her tension means she has already sensed something. Is my younger sister being too loud? Noise draws attention, and attention is dangerous. The youngest is seven years younger than me, still small enough that sometimes she cries in ways I cannot quiet, and this terrifies me more than my own danger.

Reading Atmospheres

I develop a hyperawareness of atmospheres. I can feel the charge in the air before anything visible changes. My mother’s shoulders tighten in a particular way. The house itself seems to hold its breath. By age eight or nine, I have learned to read micro-expressions, shifts in vocal tone, the precise degree of door-closing force that indicates anger. I am fluent in the language of approaching violence in ways that children should never need to be fluent.

The worst moments arrive before violence, during the hours of waiting, the ball in my stomach wound so tight I think it might tear something open. During these hours of waiting, I strategise. Where are my sisters? If something happens, can I get to them? Are there obstacles between me and their rooms? I map the house in my mind like a battlefield, planning routes and refuges. The hall closet has been my hiding place before. The space under my younger sister’s bed. The corner behind the living room chair where I can pull my knees to my chest and make myself small. Pequeña. Invisible. (Small. Invisible.)

The Geography of Hiding

The house has its own geography of fear. Certain rooms are more dangerous than others. The kitchen, where my father drinks after work, where the counter holds the evidence of how many bottles have been opened. The living room, where he sits in his chair and calls us to him. The hallway between my room and my sisters’ rooms, which I must cross to reach them if they need me, which feels impossibly long and exposed.

I learn to move through the house silently. I learn which floorboards creak, which doors squeak, how to open cabinets without sound. I learn to make myself unnoticeable, to exist without creating disturbance, to breathe so shallowly that even my breath draws no attention. This skill, this ability to minimise my presence, will follow me for decades, will manifest in adult relationships as difficulty taking up space, as apologising for existing, as constantly making myself smaller to accommodate others’ needs.

But in childhood, this skill keeps me alive. Or at least, it keeps me safer than I would otherwise be. Which is something entirely different from safe. Genuine safety was absent there. There are only degrees of threat, gradations of danger that I learn to navigate with the precision of a cartographer mapping treacherous terrain.

The Sound of My Name

Sometimes my father calls my name. This sound, my own name spoken in his voice when he has been drinking, produces a physical response I have no control over. My heart accelerates. My vision narrows. The ball in my stomach clenches. I freeze, completely still, as if stillness might make me invisible. But I must answer. Silence is worse. I force my legs to move, force my voice to work, force my face into neutrality. The walk down the hallway to wherever he is calling from feels like walking to execution. Caminar hacia el miedo (walking toward fear).

“Did you do this?” His voice, accusing.

The meaning of “this” remains unclear. A glass left on the counter. A door left ajar. A light left on. The television too loud. The offense varies and often makes no logical sense. But the pattern is always the same: I am accused of actions I never committed, actions I would avoid because I am so careful, so hypervigilant about avoiding any reason for attention, for anger, for danger.

“No,” I say, my voice small. This is true. I was innocent of whatever he accuses me of. But truth carries no power here.

Freyd (2008) explains that betrayal trauma occurs when those we depend upon for survival violate our trust, creating wounds that extend beyond the traumatic event itself to undermine our capacity to trust our own reality (pp. 76-77).

The Fracturing of Reality

The moment stretches. He decides whether to believe me. Sometimes he does. Sometimes he refuses to. When he refuses to believe me, when he insists I am lying even though I am telling the truth, something breaks inside me each time. Beyond the fear of punishment, though that fear is real, Something deeper: the understanding that reality itself can be overwritten by someone else’s version, that my knowing what is true offers no protection, that I can be blamed for actions I never committed simply because someone with power over me decides I am guilty.

This lesson embeds itself deep. Decades later, I will struggle to trust my own judgment, will defer excessively to others’ interpretations of events, will doubt my own memory and experience even when I have clear evidence of their accuracy.

The Leaving

During these moments, I split. Some part of me goes away to a place where his words cannot reach. My face remains neutral. My body stands still. But I am elsewhere entirely. Years later, I will learn this is called dissociation, a survival strategy my nervous system deployed to protect me from unbearable psychological pain. In the moment, I only know that I must conceal my tears, restrain my defence, and hide how afraid I am. Any emotional response increases danger.

Where do I go when I leave? The answer eludes me. It is an automatic response rather than a conscious choice, my body’s wisdom protecting me in the only way available when fight and flight are both impossible. I exist in some internal space that feels grey and distant, muffled, as if I am underwater and the sounds are reaching me from far away. This internal refuge keeps me functioning but at a cost: I lose pieces of my experience, cannot fully remember what happened during these dissociated moments, carry gaps in my memory that will later make me doubt whether events occurred as I recall them.

The Weight of Protection

After these confrontations, after he has yelled or grabbed or made his point through whatever means he chooses, I go to check on my sisters. My younger sister, only one year younger than me, has often heard everything through the walls. I find her frozen in her bed, eyes wide, her own body locked in the same sympathetic activation that grips mine. “It is okay,” I tell her, though we both know the reality is far from okay. “He is calmer now.” Ya pasó. (It has passed.) Though we both know the calm is temporary, that it will come again, that this is merely intermission.

I smooth her hair the way our mother does, or used to do before exhaustion made all gestures mechanical. I try to absorb her fear into my own body, try to create a buffer between her and the violence, try to convince both of us that I can keep her safe when in reality I am just another child, just as powerless, just as frightened.

The youngest, still small, often sleeps through these episodes. When she wakes confused by the atmosphere, by the tension that lingers in the house like smoke, I make up reasons. “Dad was just talking loud about work.” Anything to preserve her innocence a little longer, though I suspect she absorbs the fear even when its source lies beyond her conscious awareness. Babies know. Children know. Bodies know what minds try to deny.

The Vigil

I lie awake long after the house has gone silent. The ball in my stomach slowly, slowly begins to unclench, though it never fully releases. My body remains ready, vigilant. Sleep comes late and lightly. I will wake at any unfamiliar sound, my heart already racing before I am fully conscious. Tomorrow I will move through school in a fog of exhaustion, but I have become skilled at hiding this too. At appearing normal. At performing the role of child who is fine when everything inside me is wound tight as wire.

The Normalization of Terror

This is hundreds of memories rather than one single memory, thousands of moments of fear spread across years. This is the texture of my childhood, the baseline state against which any moments of safety appear as aberrations. The ball in my stomach becomes so constant I forget there was ever a time I existed without it. It becomes my normal, the lens through which I perceive the entire world: dangerous, unpredictable, requiring constant vigilance.

Even in moments that should be safe, the fear persists. At school, I scan constantly for social threats, for signs that peers might reject or exclude me. During rare family outings when my father is sober, I remain tense, waiting for the mood to shift. The nervous system, once calibrated to constant threat, cannot easily recalibrate even when external circumstances temporarily improve. Safety feels temporary, fragile, a gift that can be revoked at any moment.

What I lacked understanding of then but comprehend now through trauma neuroscience is that my body is accurately responding to chronic threat by remaining in a state of mobilised defense. The hypervigilance is entirely rational, a genuine response to genuine danger. The problem emerges later, when the danger has ended but the defensive mobilization persists, when my adult nervous system continues responding as if I am still that child in that house, still needing to monitor constantly for threats that no longer exist.

Analytical Reflection: How Chronic Fear Shapes the Developing Self

The Colonization of the Body by Trauma

The experiences documented above illustrate what van der Kolk (2014) described as the colonization of children’s bodies by trauma, the way threat becomes inscribed in their nervous systems at the most fundamental level (p. 62). Several interconnected concepts warrant explicit examination. First, the constant monitoring of environmental cues for safety represents Porges’s (2011) concept of faulty neuroception, in which the nervous system becomes so calibrated to threat detection that it perceives danger even in neutral or safe situations (p. 18). For children in chronically dangerous environments, however, the neuroception is accurately attuned to real threat rather than truly faulty. The problem emerges later, when the nervous system maintains this threat-detection bias long after the environment has changed.

The ball in my stomach described in the vignette represents what trauma therapist Peter Levine (2010) identified as chronic sympathetic nervous system activation combined with freeze response. Levine (2010) explained that when fight or flight responses are impossible, as they often are for children in abusive homes, the nervous system enters a state he termed frozen flight, in which mobilization energy remains trapped in the body, creating sensations of constriction, tightness, and readiness that never discharge (p. 97). This trapped activation, maintained over years, creates lasting alterations in how the body experiences and responds to stress.

Disorganised Attachment and the Impossible Bind

Second, the hypervigilant monitoring of my father’s moods and movements exemplifies what attachment researcher Mary Main (1991) termed disorganised attachment, the attachment pattern that develops when caregivers are simultaneously the source of comfort and the source of fear. Main (1991) noted that children with disorganised attachment display contradictory behaviours, alternately approaching and withdrawing from caregivers, because their attachment system and their defense system are simultaneously activated. The child needs the parent for survival but also needs to protect themselves from the parent, creating an irresolvable paradox that fragments their sense of self and safety.

Adults with histories of disorganised attachment often experience relationships as simultaneously compelling and dangerous. They crave intimacy while fearing engulfment. They seek closeness while maintaining defensive distance. The nervous system never learns to distinguish between connection that nourishes and connection that harms, because in childhood, these came from the same source.

Epistemic Violence and the Undermining of Reality

Third, the experience of false accusation illuminates what Freyd (2008) termed institutional betrayal, extended here to familial betrayal. When authority figures who should protect us instead harm us and then blame us for the harm, they violate both our physical safety and our cognitive integrity. The child knows themselves innocent of the accused act, yet the parent’s insistence creates what psychologist Albert Biderman (1957) identified in his study of prisoners of war as forced compliance with false narratives, a form of psychological torture that undermines the victim’s grip on reality itself.

Freyd (2008) argued that betrayal trauma is particularly damaging because it involves violations by those on whom we depend for survival (pp. 76-77). For a child, parental accusations of wrongdoing against an innocent child create a double trauma: the initial experience of being blamed, and the deeper violation of having their reality denied. Over time, this pattern erodes the child’s capacity to trust their own perceptions, creating what trauma therapist Alice Miller (1981) described as a dynamic in which children learn to doubt their own experiences and instead adopt the abuser’s version of reality as protective strategy.

Parentification and the Foreclosure of Childhood

Fourth, my role as protector of my younger sisters represents destructive parentification. Jurkovic (1997) distinguished between instrumental parentification, taking on practical household tasks, and emotional parentification, providing emotional support and regulation to family members. My hypervigilance extended beyond self-protection to constant monitoring of my sisters’ safety, effectively requiring me to function as parent, protector, and threat-assessor simultaneously. Jurkovic (1997) documented how this impossible burden reshapes identity in ways that persist long into adulthood.

The long-term consequences of parentification include difficulty accepting care from others in adulthood, persistent sense of responsibility for others’ emotional states, and compromised capacity to recognise and communicate one’s own needs (Hooper, 2007). Most relevantly for the current inquiry into alonetude, parentified children often struggle with solitude because their nervous systems learned early that constant vigilance is required for survival. True rest, true solitude, true letting go of protective vigilance can feel dangerous even decades after the original threat has ended.

Dissociation as Survival and Its Lasting Costs

Fifth, the dissociative response I described, the sense of going away during unbearable moments, represents what van der Kolk (2014) termed the last resort of the organism when fight, flight, and freeze are all impossible (p. 98). Trauma researcher Ellert Nijenhuis (2004) explained structural dissociation as the division of the personality into parts: an apparently normal part that attempts to function in daily life, and emotional parts that remain stuck in traumatic states. For children in chronically abusive environments, dissociation serves crucial protective function, allowing them to continue functioning while parts of themselves remain frozen in moments of overwhelming threat.

However, as psychiatrist Frank Putnam (1997) documented, chronic dissociation in childhood creates lasting alterations in consciousness, memory, and sense of self. The capacity to leave one’s body during threat, while adaptive in the moment, can become an automatic response triggered by even minor stressors in adulthood. This creates a fragmented relationship to embodiment, making it difficult to remain fully present in one’s body even when genuinely safe.

Table 1

Neurobiological and Psychological Impacts of Chronic Childhood Fear

Domain	Childhood Manifestation	Neurobiological Mechanism	Adult Legacy
Threat Detection	Hypervigilance, constant monitoring of environments and people	Amygdala hyperactivation; sensitised stress response systems (van der Kolk, 2014)	Difficulty distinguishing safe from unsafe situations; chronic anxiety in neutral contexts
Autonomic Regulation	“Ball in stomach,” chronic tension, shallow breathing	Sympathetic nervous system dominance; vagal brake inhibition (Porges, 2011)	Difficulty accessing ventral vagal calm; limited stress tolerance window
Embodiment	Dissociation, “going away,” numbing	Dorsal vagal shutdown; structural dissociation (Nijenhuis, 2004)	Fragmented body awareness; difficulty staying present in body
Attachment	Simultaneous fear and need for caregiver; protective of siblings	Disorganised attachment; unresolved fear (Main, 1991)	Difficulty trusting others; push-pull in relationships
Reality Testing	Forced compliance with false accusations	Betrayal trauma; cognitive dissonance (Freyd, 2008)	Difficulty trusting own perceptions; excessive self-doubt
Identity Formation	Role confusion; parentification	Disrupted developmental trajectories (Jurkovic, 1997)	Overdeveloped responsibility for others; underdeveloped self-care
Capacity for Rest	Sleep disturbances; inability to fully relax	Chronic sympathetic activation; fear conditioning	Solitude feels unsafe; difficulty with unstructured time

Note. This table synthesises neurobiological and developmental impacts of chronic childhood exposure to domestic violence. The mechanisms and legacies interact in complex ways; separating them into discrete categories oversimplifies their interconnected nature.

Critical Interrogation: Limitations, Risks, and Ethical Considerations

Academic integrity requires examining what this vignette might distort or what ethical concerns it raises. First, writing about childhood trauma risks what trauma studies scholar Roger Luckhurst (2008) called wound culture, the commodification of suffering for narrative purposes. By making my childhood fear into scholarly material, I risk flattening its complexity, turning lived anguish into theoretical illustration. Luckhurst (2008) cautioned against trauma narratives that serve primarily to elicit sympathy rather than advance understanding.

However, feminist scholar Wendy Brown (1995) argued that strategic deployment of injury narratives can serve political and epistemological purposes when done critically. Brown (1995) distinguished between wounded attachments, identities organised entirely around injury, and critical injury discourse, which examines structures of power that produce suffering. My intention here aligns with the latter: using personal experience to illuminate how chronic childhood threat shapes lifelong patterns of embodiment, relationship, and capacity for rest.

Second, this vignette focuses on my experience as oldest sibling and temporary protector, potentially obscuring my sisters’ distinct experiences. They lived in the same house but occupied different positions in the family system, different ages and therefore different developmental impacts, different strategies and different injuries. My narrative must resist presuming to speak for them or to represent the definitive truth of our shared childhood. Philosopher Linda Alcoff (1991) cautioned about the problem of speaking for others, noting that even well-intentioned representation can silence those whose experiences differ from the narrator’s.

Third, by focusing on my father’s alcoholism and violence, this vignette might appear to pathologise addiction or to reduce complex family dynamics to simple perpetrator/victim categories. Addiction medicine recognises alcoholism as disease requiring treatment rather than moral failure. My father’s violence and my fear are both real, and neither negates the other’s reality. Trauma-informed practice requires holding multiple truths simultaneously: that my father likely experienced his own traumas, that addiction reflects neurobiological dysregulation, and that none of this erases the harm caused or reduces my right to name my experience honestly.

Fourth, the emphasis on hypervigilance as survival strategy risks romanticising trauma’s adaptations. While it is true that children develop remarkable capacities for threat detection and self-protection, these deserve recognition as costly adaptations rather than gifts that trauma provides. What psychologist Mary Sykes Wylie (2004) called the myth of resilience obscures the profound costs of surviving chronic trauma. I did survive, but survival came at enormous developmental, neurobiological, and relational expense. The hypervigilance that kept me alive also kept me from experiencing protected childhood, from developing secure attachment, from knowing my body as safe space.

Finally, memory’s limitations apply here as powerfully as in any autobiographical narrative. The experiences I describe occurred decades ago, filtered through a child’s understanding and shaped by adult meaning-making processes. As Schacter (2001) documented, memory is inherently reconstructive rather than reproductive. I cannot know with certainty which details are accurate recall, and which are narrative elaboration. What I can attest to with confidence is the affective truth, the emotional and somatic resonance of these memories, the way my body still responds to certain triggers in ways that suggest deep encoding of threat.

My stomach still clenches in ways. My breath still catches when I hear certain vocal tones. My shoulders still rise toward my ears when doors close with force. These somatic responses suggest that whatever the precise accuracy of my narrative recollection, something real was encoded, something that continues living in my nervous system.

Porges (2011) demonstrates that when a nervous system has been shaped by chronic danger, safety itself can feel foreign and unfamiliar, requiring conscious relearning of what secure states feel like.

Conclusion: From Hypervigilance to Alonetude

The Legacy of Chronic Threat

This vignette matters to the larger Alonetude project because it illuminates why solitude, why rest, why the very idea of letting down my guard feels so dangerous even five decades after the original threat has ended. Trauma researcher Pat Ogden (2006) explained that traumatised individuals often experience solitude as threatening rather than restorative because their nervous systems learned that constant vigilance is required for survival. The capacity to be alone, truly alone without hypervigilance, requires what Porges (2011) termed safety signals, environmental and relational cues that allow the ventral vagal system to inhibit defensive mobilization.

The thirty days in Loreto represent an attempt to provide my nervous system with sustained safety signals: predictable routine, absence of threat, permission to rest, solitude that is chosen rather than imposed. This is about healing rather than getting over childhood trauma or transcending its effects through willpower. Rather, as van der Kolk (2014) argued, healing from trauma requires finding a way to become calm and focused while remaining in connection with one’s body and emotions. The retreat offers conditions for what trauma therapist Janina Fisher (2017) described as healing the fragmented self, the gradual integration of dissociated parts through experiences of sustained safety.

Retraining the Nervous System

The ball in my stomach, that childhood sensation of perpetual readiness, still activates under stress. My nervous system still scans environments for threat more vigilantly than necessary. I still experience difficulty with unstructured time, with true rest, with letting my guard down. These are accurate indicators of deep fear encoding rather than failures of healing of how deeply fear became inscribed in my body during formative years. Understanding this through trauma neuroscience helps me recognise that my struggles with solitude reflect nervous system adaptations to real threat rather than characterological weakness to real threat.

What the Loreto retreat offers is gradual, patient retraining rather than erasure of these patterns. Porges (2011) explained that the nervous system can learn new responses through sustained exposure to genuine safety combined with therapeutic relationships. While I am alone physically in Loreto, I carry with me the relational safety of chosen connections, including therapeutic relationships that have helped me begin to recognise safety cues. Each morning when I wake without the ball in my stomach, each hour I spend in my body without dissociating, each moment of genuine rest represents small victories in retraining a nervous system calibrated long ago to perpetual threat.

Honoring the Child Who Survived

The child who learned to make herself small, to anticipate danger, to protect her sisters at cost to her own development, that child still lives in my nervous system. Todavía está aquí. (She is still here.) This retreat offers her at last what she needed then and never received: sustained safety, permission to rest, recognition that the hypervigilance that kept her alive is no longer required. This is alonetude’s deepest promise: solitude as sacred space rather than isolation in which I can finally, slowly, begin to put down vigilance’s exhausting burden.

In moments of particular stillness here in Loreto, I sometimes feel her presence, that vigilant child-self. She is always scanning, always alert, always ready. “You can rest now,” I tell her, speaking internally in the way therapy has taught me. “Puedes descansar.” You can rest. The fight is over. The danger has passed. You kept us alive, and now you can rest.

She struggles to believe me. Decades of hypervigilance dissolve slowly, and thirty days by the sea brings only beginnings. But sometimes, in the early morning light when the pelicans glide past my window, when the only sound is the gentle pulse of waves against shore, I feel her soften slightly. The ball in the stomach unclenches, just a degree. The breath deepens, just a fraction. The shoulders drop away from the ears, just momentarily.

These are quiet healing moments rather than dramatic ones. They are quiet, incremental, easily missed. But they matter. They represent the slow work of teaching a nervous system calibrated to danger that safety is possible, that rest is permitted, that solitude can be restorative rather than threatening. This is the work of alonetude: integrating rather than transcending the past, honoring rather than erasing the hypervigilant child but finally giving her what she always needed and deserved.

The Ongoing Nature of Healing

Healing from complex childhood trauma follows a winding course, achieved through ongoing effort rather than once and maintained. It requires ongoing, patient attention to the body’s responses, compassionate curiosity about triggers and patterns, willingness to remain present even when every instinct says to flee or freeze or fight. It requires what van der Kolk (2014) called befriending the body, learning to listen to its signals as information rather than threat.

The thirty days in Loreto are practice rather than cure. Practice in staying present. Practice in recognising safety. Practice in allowing rest. Practice in trusting that perpetual vigilance is no longer required for survival. The hypervigilant patterns will persist for some time. But perhaps, with sustained attention and compassionate patience, they can soften. Perhaps the nervous system can learn, slowly, that safety is genuinely possible, genuinely sustainable rather than merely temporary.

This is what brings me here, to this casita by the sea, to these thirty days of chosen solitude. Engagement with the past rather than escape from it. Acknowledgment of trauma’s impacts rather than denial. Honoring her intelligence, her survival, her fierce protection of those she loved, while gently teaching her that the time for such fierce protection has passed, that she can finally rest, that she is safe now, que está segura ahora (that she is safe now), that alonetude offers refuge rather than threat, possibility rather than danger, peace at long last.

References

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Biderman, A. D. (1957). Communist attempts to elicit false confessions from Air Force prisoners of war. Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, 33(9), 616–625.

Brown, W. (1995). States of injury: Power and freedom in late modernity. Princeton University Press.

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Fisher, J. (2017). Healing the fragmented selves of trauma survivors: Overcoming internal self-alienation. Routledge.

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Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence: From domestic abuse to political terror. Basic Books.

Hooper, L. M. (2007). The application of attachment theory and family systems theory to the phenomena of parentification. The Family Journal, 15(3), 217–223. https://doi.org/10.1177/1066480707301290

Jurkovic, G. J. (1997). Lost childhoods: The plight of the parentified child. Brunner/Mazel.

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Miller, A. (1981). The drama of the gifted child: The search for the true self. Basic Books.

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Nijenhuis, E. R. S. (2004). Somatoform dissociation: Phenomena, measurement, and theoretical issues. W. W. Norton & Company.

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Translation note. Spanish language passages were generated using Google Translate and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.

Childhood Memory: The Spruce Tree

Content Warning: This post contains reflections on difficult childhood memories and family pain. Please care for yourself as you read, and feel free to step away if you need to.

Title: The Spruce Tree

Artist Statement:

This drawing emerges from an early memory of solitude, belonging, and attention. At eight years old, I wandered alone into the winter woods of northwestern Ontario and found shelter beneath a low spruce tree, its branches heavy with snow. Beneath that canopy, time softened. The forest became a room, a witness, a presence that required nothing of me except that I be there.

The repeated spruce forms in this work are remembered gestures far more than botanical studies. Each branch carries the imprint of slow looking and quiet recall. Drawn decades later, they are shaped by the body's memory rather than by precision, by sensation rather than replication. The marks hold the weight of snow, the hush of winter, and the feeling of being held by something larger than oneself.

This work reflects an early knowing that solitude differs entirely from loneliness, and that belonging can be relational without being human-centred. The spruce tree was literal then, entirely real: a companion, a shelter, a teacher. Returning to this memory now, I recognise it as foundational to my understanding of presence, aloneness, and listening.

Created while residing beside the Sea of Cortez, far from spruce forests and snow, this drawing bridges landscapes and lifetimes. It acknowledges that while places change, the body remembers what it once knew: how to be still, how to belong, and how to listen when the world speaks without words.

Created by Amy Tucker, January 2026

I was eight years old, and the forest was mine.

We lived on several acres outside of town, the kind of place where you could walk in any direction without hitting a fence or a neighbour for a long time. The house sat at the edge of the woods, and the woods stretched out behind us like an invitation, like a promise, like something waiting to be discovered.

It was winter in northwestern Ontario, the kind of winter that turns the world into something else entirely. The snow had fallen for days, and when it finally stopped, everything was buried and quiet. The air was so cold it hurt to breathe, but I welcomed it. I liked the way it felt in my lungs, sharp and clean, like drinking something pure.

I walked into the woods alone. I simply went without asking, without telling. Permission never crossed my mind. I went the way children go, following something that called without words.

I knew these woods. I knew the path to the beaver dam, about a ten-minute walk if you walked straight through, longer if you wandered. In winter, the pond the beavers had made froze thick and clear, and we would skate there, my siblings and I, our blades scratching lines into ice that had waited all winter for us. The beaver lodge rose from the frozen surface like a small mountain, sticks and mud frozen solid, and sometimes I wondered if the beavers inside could hear us laughing and calling to each other above their heads.

But that day, the pond was beside the point. That day, I was just walking, just being in the woods, letting my feet decide where to go.

The snow came up past my knees in places. I had to lift my legs high with each step, like a deer, like something wild. My breath made clouds in front of my face. The only sound was the crunch of my boots and the occasional soft thump of snow sliding from a branch.

I found the spruce tree partway along the path, before the land sloped down toward the beaver dam. It was unremarkable in size, ordinary in beauty, yet something about it drew me in completely. The lower branches swept down and touched the snow, creating a space underneath, a room, a secret place entirely my own.

I crawled under.

Inside, the world changed. The branches above me were dark green, almost black, heavy with snow. The ground beneath me was soft with fallen needles, dry and fragrant, protected from the white that covered everything else. I lay on my back and looked up through the lattice of branches at the sky beyond.

The snow on the branches was so white it seemed to glow, luminous beyond ordinary brightness, as though it held light inside itself and let it out slowly. I watched a few flakes drift down through the gaps in the branches, lazy and unhurried, taking their time to land on my jacket, my mittens, my face.

How long I stayed there, I am unable to say. Time worked differently under that tree. Time was entirely mine. The day stretched open, unscheduled, unhurried. There was only the soft green dark of the branches, the impossible white of the snow, and my own breathing, slow and steady, matching something beyond naming.

The forest was speaking to me. I know how that sounds. I knew even then that this was beyond explaining to anyone, that adults would smile and nod and miss the point entirely. But it was true. The forest was saying something, beyond words, in the way the cold felt on my cheeks, in the way the branches creaked when the wind moved through them, in the way the silence was full, so full of presence that I felt held.

Somewhere in the distance, I could hear the creek that fed the beaver pond, the part that never quite froze, water moving under ice, a soft murmur beneath the silence. The beavers were asleep in their lodge, or doing whatever beavers do in winter, living their secret lives beneath the frozen surface. The chickadees were calling somewhere nearby, that two-note song that sounds like they are saying hey, sweetie, over and over, untroubled by the cold.

I was free of loneliness. That is what I remember most. I was alone, completely alone, a ten-minute walk from home, hidden under a tree in my own secret world, and I was entirely free of loneliness. I was exactly where I was supposed to be, held by something larger than myself, known by something that accepted me entirely as I was.

I was eight years old, lying under a spruce tree in the snow, and I was perfectly, completely happy.

What I could never have imagined then was how thoroughly I would spend decades forgetting this feeling. I would grow up and learn to fill silence with noise, to fill solitude with productivity, to convince myself that the forest had never really spoken to me at all. The acres would be sold. The beaver dam would become a memory. The path I knew by heart would fade into someone else’s property.

But my body remembered, even when my mind forgot. My body remembered the smell of spruce needles, the cold air in my lungs, the soft give of snow beneath my back. My body remembered what it felt like to be held by something that asked nothing in return.

Here, by the Sea of Cortez, fifty-some years later, I am remembering.

The landscape is different. There are no spruce trees here, no snow, no cold that hurts to breathe. No beaver dam, no frozen pond, no chickadees calling hey, sweetie in the winter air. But the feeling is the same. The feeling of being alone and free of loneliness. The feeling of being spoken to by something that speaks beyond words. The feeling of being exactly where I am supposed to be.

The eight-year-old girl who lay under that tree knew something. She knew that the world was alive. She knew that solitude was fullness. She knew that belonging asked nothing of other people, that you could belong to a forest, to a winter, to a moment of snow falling through spruce branches.

She knew what I am only now remembering.

I was eight years old, and the forest was mine.

I am in my early sixties, and the world is still speaking.

I am finally learning, again, to listen.

I was alone, completely alone, a ten-minute walk from home, hidden under a tree in my own secret world, and I was entirely free of loneliness. I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

Part 3: The Long Echo

Content Warning: This series contains discussion of childhood exposure to parental alcoholism and domestic violence, as well as exploration of ongoing healing processes. While absent of graphic detail, the material addresses trauma, hypervigilance, and the challenges of learning to rest that some readers may find distressing.

How Fear Becomes Structure

Image: The Architecture of Vigilance

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Note. Threat became structure; vigilance became design.

The house where I learned hypervigilance no longer exists. My father has been dead for decades. My sisters are safe adults, living their own lives thousands of miles from that childhood home. The original threat has ended.

But my body held no record of this information.

van der Kolk (2014) describes how trauma reorganises the brain’s alarm system to interpret the world as a fundamentally unsafe place. For those of us who grew up in chronically threatening environments, this reorganization happens during the years when the nervous system itself is still forming. Durante los años de formación. During the formative years. The architecture has no foundation built on top; the threat becomes the foundation itself.

“The architecture has no foundation built on top; the threat becomes the foundation itself.”

The ball in my stomach, that tight readiness I described in Part 2, still activates five decades later. Never always. Never constantly. But predictably, under conditions that my conscious mind fails to always recognise as threatening.

I notice it most in restaurants.

Before I can focus on the menu, before I can settle into conversation, I need to map the space. Where are the exits? Who is seated near us? Can I see the entrance from where I am? If I cannot see who is coming through the door before they arrive, my shoulders rise toward my ears. My breath becomes shallow. Some ancient part of me needs to know who is approaching before they reach our table.

“Some ancient part of me needs to know who is approaching before they reach our table.”

This is what Porges (2011) calls neuroception, the automatic, unconscious detection of safety or danger in the environment. My nervous system, calibrated during childhood to constant threat, remains hypertuned to detect dangers that no longer exist. It scans for the heavy footsteps, the sound that meant violence was coming. It looks for the micro-expressions that once told me whether this evening would be safe.

“My nervous system, calibrated during childhood to constant threat, remains hypertuned to detect dangers that no longer exist.”

I do this in meetings. In classrooms, when I taught. At social gatherings. My eyesare constantly moving, constantly assessing, constantly ready.

Image: Mapping the Room

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Note. The nervous system scans for exits long after danger ends.

van der Kolk (2014) describes how traumatised individuals spend tremendous energy suppressing inner chaos, often becoming so skilled at ignoring their physical sensations that they fail to recognise when they are actually safe. This describes my adult life with painful accuracy. I became extraordinarily skilled at appearing calm while my nervous system churned with activation. I was performing competence while my body signalled danger.

“I was performing competence while my body signalled danger.”

At functioning while afraid.

When Survival Skills Become Professional Assets

“At functioning while afraid.”

Image: Productive Vigilance

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Notation: Survival strategies translated into institutional competence.

“But they also made me exploitable.”

There is a particular irony, una ironía amarga, a bitter irony, in how childhood hypervigilance prepared me for academic labour.

The constant monitoring of authority figures’ moods. The ability to detect subtle shifts in power dynamics. The skill at making myself useful while remaining invisible. These survival strategies translated seamlessly into navigating precarious academic employment.

I excelled at reading what was wanted before it was articulated. Anticipating needs. Managing up. At making myself indispensable while taking up minimal space. At absorbing emotional labour without complaint. At knowing when to speak and when silence would serve me better.

These abilities made me valuable in academic settings, particularly in administrative roles where the dynamics of reading rooms mattered. Where sensing institutional politics before they became explicit could prevent disasters.

But they also made me exploitable.

I lacked the capacity to say no. I lacked the ability to recognise when I was being asked to carry more than my share, nor could I distinguish between genuine professional responsibility and the compulsive caretaking that emerged from trauma. No podía distinguir. I was unable to distinguish.

When I was finally terminated from my faculty position after years of contract renewals, the loss activated every childhood fear. The ball in my stomach returned with an intensity I had gone decades without feeling. The hypervigilance that had kept me employed, that had made me useful, valuable, necessary, had also blinded me to the disposability of my position.

I had survived by being needed. When I was no longer needed, some part of me held no certainty of surviving.

“I had survived by being needed.”

Why Safety Feels Like Danger

This is what I am trying to understand during these thirty days in Loreto: why solitude, which should feel safe, instead triggers all my oldest survival responses.

The research literature is clear about loneliness, the unwanted, painful experience of isolation. But there is remarkably little scholarly attention to chosen solitude. To what I am calling alonetude: intentional, embodied, meaning-rich engagement with being alone.

Long and Averill (2003) distinguish between different types of solitude, noting that positive solitude involves freedom from social demands and provides opportunities for self-discovery and restoration. But they acknowledge that whether solitude feels restorative or threatening depends significantly on attachment history and prior trauma.

For those of us with hypervigilance rooted in childhood trauma, solitude activates specific fears that I am only now beginning to name.

When there are no others to monitor, where does the vigilance go?

Image: Solitude as Surveillance

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Note. When external threats vanish, vigilance turns inward.

My nervous system, calibrated to constant external scanning, turns inward when external threats are absent. I become hyperaware of bodily sensations, interpreting normal physiological processes as signals of danger. My heart rate increases slightly during my morning run, and I fear cardiac problems. I feel fatigue, and I fear illness.

Without external threats to track, I track myself with the same relentless attention I once used to monitor my father’s moods.

Rest feels like abandoning my post.

As I wrote in Part 1, parentified children learn that constant vigilance is required as much for the protection of others as for the self. Even though my sisters are safe adults and no one currently depends on my vigilance, some part of me believes that letting my guard down means someone will be harmed.

Solitude removes the immediate object of protection. But it leaves the compulsion to protect fully intact.

My own body feels like unsafe territory.

van der Kolk (2014) describes how trauma fundamentally reorganises the relationship between body and mind, making the body feel like a source of danger rather than safety. For years, I managed this through constant activity. Through staying busy enough that I could avoid feeling what my body carried.

Solitude removes that buffer.

The Long Echo· Post

It demands that I be present to myself. And myself includes all the unprocessed fear still stored in my tissues, still activating when I sit too still for too long, still insisting that rest invites disaster.

Image: Alonetude

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Note. Finding a place in rock painting.

Intentionality as the Intervention

This is where alonetude diverges from both loneliness and passive solitude.

“It is something beyond something happening to me.

It is something I am choosing.”

It is something I am choosing rather than something simply happening to me. Estoy eligiendo esto. I am choosing this. Deliberately. With full awareness of the difficulty.

Alonetude, as I am theorising it, is intentional, embodied solitude undertaken with explicit healing purpose. It differs from loneliness (which is unwanted), from social isolation (which is often imposed), and from passive solitude (being alone without deliberate engagement).

The critical distinction is agency.

I am here beyond being rejected or abandoned. I am here beyond lacking social skills or opportunities for connection. I am here through active choosing rather than passive acceptance.

I am choosing this. Choosing to spend thirty days primarily alone. Choosing to face what arises when I cannot distract myself with work, with caregiving, with the constant activity that has kept me from fully inhabiting my body and my history.

Kabat-Zinn (1990) describes mindfulness as intentional, non-judgmental attention to the present moment. Alonetude applies this same quality of attention to the experience of being alone.

It is about something far beyond achieving some idealised state of peaceful solitude. It is about bringing full, compassionate awareness to whatever arises, including fear, hypervigilance, and resistance to rest.

Small Victories in Recalibration

Image: Touching the Foundation

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Note. The body returns to stone, tracing what held it when nothing else did.

I want to be honest about what healing looks like from inside the process.

“There is no dramatic before-and-after.”

It bears little resemblance to the transformation narratives that saturate popular culture. There is no dramatic before-and-after. No breakthrough moment. No complete resolution.

van der Kolk (2014) makes clear that trauma is both an event from the past and an ongoing imprint on mind, brain, and body. This imprint resists simple erasure. It can be worked with, integrated, and metabolised. But it resists disappearing.

What shifts is my relationship to the imprint.

My capacity to recognise when my nervous system is responding to past threats rather than present ones. My ability to compassionately witness the activation without being completely overtaken by it.

My aim is to work with the hypervigilance rather than eliminate it. I am learning to create space for other responses to coexist alongside it.

The Practice Looks Like This

Morning beach walks, where I notice when my scanning becomes hypervigilant versus when I am simply observing. When I catch myself scanning for threats, I meet it without judgment. I acknowledge: This is my nervous system doing what it learned to do. This kept me safe once.

Image: Morning Beach Walks

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Notation: Morning beach walks allow me to rest.

Then I gently redirect attention to what is actually present. Pelicans gliding. Waves breaking. The texture of sand underfoot.

Longer runs where I allow my sympathetic nervous system to activate through movement rather than through fear. This is the paradox: I need to learn that activation itself is safe. That my heart rate can increase without signaling threat. That I can mobilise my body through choice rather than terror.

Stillness practices where I sit with the discomfort of simply being, releasing production, releasing usefulness to anyone. These are the hardest. My body wants to move, to busy itself, to find some task that justifies existence.

Image: Rest

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Note. Learning how to rest.

Learning to simply be, estar, rather than hacer, challenges everything my childhood taught me about worth through utility.

Creative practices like photographing shells, driftwood, and the way light moves across water. These engage moments of absorption where self-consciousness and hypervigilance temporarily quiet (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). In these moments, my attention narrows through interest rather than fear.

This is a different quality of focus entirely.

The Parts That Protected Me Still Protect

I need to name something crucial: the parts of me that remain hypervigilant are protective parts beyond fixing.

They are protective parts that kept me alive.

Fisher (2017) describes how trauma survivors can learn to recognise their survival responses as distinct parts of the self, strategies that emerged to handle different aspects of overwhelming experience. The Internal Family Systems approach suggests that what we often pathologise as symptoms are actually protective parts trying to keep us safe using the best strategies they developed during the trauma.

The part of me that scans restaurants for exits is entirely rational. It is a guardian. It remembers when knowing the exits mattered for survival. It has yet to fully trust that I am safe now.

Image: The Guardians

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Note. Protective parts remain, even as new responses emerge.

And perhaps it never will entirely.

But I can appreciate its vigilance even as I gently work to expand my window of tolerance for feeling safe.

The part that makes me want to check on my sisters, even though they are grown women living their own lives, this is something beyond codependent pathology. This is the part that kept them safer than they otherwise would have been when we were children.

Les mantuvo más seguras. It kept them safer.

I can honour what it did while also recognising that the situation has changed. That they no longer need my hypervigilance. That I am permitted to rest from this particular guard duty.

This reframing matters profoundly.

For years, I approached healing as if I needed to eradicate the hypervigilance, to eliminate the freeze response, to become someone who naturally feels safe in the world. But this framing positioned my survival strategies as enemies to be defeated.

What I am learning instead is to approach these parts with gratitude and compassion while also creating space for new responses to emerge.

Who Gets to Choose Solitude

I cannot write about alonetude as a healing practice without acknowledging the profound privilege embedded in this project.

I can rent a casita in Loreto for thirty days. I can take time away from employment because I no longer have employment to take time from, which is both a loss and an unexpected opening. I am white, educated, a cisgender woman with Canadian citizenship and mobility rights. I am without dependent children or elders requiring my care.

The very concept of choosing solitude for healing purposes assumes a baseline of material security and social support that vast numbers of people are without.

hooks (2000) reminds us that contemplative practice has historically been the province of those with sufficient privilege to withdraw from the demands of survival labour. This matters for my analysis. I am arguing something beyond the claim that alonetude represents a universal solution to trauma healing.

I am examining what becomes possible when someone with my particular history gains temporary access to conditions that support deep rest and intentional solitude.

The economic precarity of academic labour, the contract renewals, the contingent employment, and the constant uncertainty itself constitute a form of structural trauma that compounds childhood trauma. My termination activated childhood fears precisely because both experiences involved powerlessness, expendability, and the message that my value was provisional.

But losing that employment also freed resources. Beyond financial resources. Temporal and psychological ones. I no longer carry the cognitive load of constantly managing precarious employment. I no longer perform the emotional labour of remaining pleasant and productive despite chronic uncertainty.

This created space for this retreat that would have remained beyond reach had I remained employed.

I name this to resist romanticising job loss, rather to acknowledge the complex relationship between structural conditions and individual healing possibilities. The alonetude I am practicing here is both enabled by and in tension with systems of privilege and precarity.

I am here to heal.

The Difference Between Withdrawal and Return

There is a crucial distinction between using solitude to avoid relationships and using solitude to develop the capacity for relationships.

The first is escape. The second is preparation.

I came to Loreto out of something other than hatred of people or fear of connection. I am here because my nervous system needs sustained exposure to safety in order to recalibrate. Because I need to practice being with myself before I can be fully present with others.

Because the hypervigilance that protected me in childhood now interferes with the intimate relationships I want in adulthood.

Winnicott (1958) describes the capacity to be alone as a developmental achievement that paradoxically requires the internalization of a reliable other. The child must first experience being alone in the presence of someone trustworthy before they can be comfortably alone in physical solitude.

For those of us who never had that reliable presence in childhood, we must somehow learn this capacity in adulthood, often without the scaffolding that childhood should have provided.

This is what the thirty days offer: a laboratory for learning to be reliably present to myself. To notice when fear arises and to meet it with compassion rather than judgment. To recognise when my body signals danger and to gently offer evidence of current safety.

To practice rest without the constant inner voice insisting I should be doing something productive.

But this represents a temporary retreat, with permanent withdrawal being the furthest thing from the intention.

The aim reaches beyond living forever in solitary retreat but to develop the internal resources that allow me to engage with others from a place of genuine presence rather than compulsive vigilance.

Kornfield (2000) describes contemplative practice as preparation for engagement rather than escape from it. The goal lies in returning to everyday life rather than becoming enlightened in isolation with transformed presence.

Similarly, the goal of alonetude is the development of internal safety rather than permanent solitude that allows for authentic connection.

Recognising the Incremental

Image: Incremental Safety

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Note. Finding peace in the night sea.

It is Day 20 of my retreat.

I thought victory would mean no longer startling at sudden sounds. That it would mean sleeping through the night without vigilance. That my shoulders would remain relaxed, my jaw unclenched, my stomach soft.

I thought healing would mean the hypervigilance would leave.

What I am learning instead is that victory looks like this:

Yesterday morning, I woke at dawn and lay still for ten full minutes before my body insisted I get up and do something productive. Ten minutes of simply being. Of breathing. Of existing without purpose.

This may sound small.

It is vast.

It is revolutionary for a nervous system that learned rest equals danger.

Victory looks like recognising when the ball in my stomach clenches and being able to say to myself, This is old fear. This is my body remembering. I am safe now. Even when my body remains uncertain, I can hold the truth alongside the fear.

Victory looks like going to the beach and allowing myself to simply sit and watch the pelicans without bringing my camera, without documenting, without turning the experience into something useful.

Estar sin hacer. Being without doing.

These transformations are incremental rather than dramatic. They are incremental shifts. Moments when my nervous system practices something new. Brief windows when rest feels possible rather than dangerous.

What My Body Now Knows

After twenty days of sustained alonetude practice, here are the shifts I notice:

My breath sometimes deepens on its own. This happens beyond the reach of my attention, when I am absorbed in watching light change on water or in the intricate architecture of a shell. The diaphragmatic breathing that signals safety to the nervous system arrives without my effort.

The space between stimulus and response occasionally widens. When I hear a sudden sound, there is sometimes, beyond always, a fraction of a second where I notice my body’s response before it overtakes me entirely. In that space, I can choose.

Rest feels possible in small doses. Beyond hours. Beyond days. But for minutes at a time, I can simply be without the voice insisting I should be working, should be useful, should be justifying my existence through productivity.

I can sometimes distinguish between different kinds of alone. Loneliness, the painful sense of unwanted isolation, still visits. But it is far from constant. There are increasing moments when solitude feels neutral or even nourishing rather than threatening. When being alone with myself feels like coming home rather than abandonment.

These are the victories.

Beyond dramatic. Beyond complete. But real.

Son reales. They are real.

What Continues

In ten days, I will leave Loreto. I will return to my regular life. To job searching. To navigating the practical realities of middle age after employment termination. To relationships with friends and family who love me but cannot fully understand this particular journey.

The question reaches beyond whether the hypervigilance will disappear.

It will remain.

The question is whether I can continue the practice, the daily, incremental work of teaching my nervous system new possibilities while honouring the wisdom of old protections.

Brown (2010) describes vulnerability as involving uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure, while also being the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change. Alonetude as I am practicing it requires profound vulnerability, the willingness to be alone with all that I carry, to feel what I have spent decades avoiding, to rest when rest feels dangerous.

But vulnerability without support becomes retraumatization.

This is why the temporal boundedness of this retreat matters. Thirty days is long enough to create new neural pathways, to practice unfamiliar ways of being. It is short enough that I remain connected to the relationships and structures that support my ongoing healing.

The alonetude practice I am developing here is a temporary renewal rather than permanent solitary withdrawal. It is meant to be a renewable resource, something I can return to when my nervous system needs recalibration. When the hypervigilance becomes overwhelming. When I need sustained exposure to safety in order to remember what safety feels like.

Integration Beyond Resolution

Fisher (2017) writes about trauma healing as integration rather than resolution. The parts that protected me through hypervigilance remain present. They have no need to disappear.

What changes is my relationship to them.

My capacity to hold both the protective impulse and the present reality. To appreciate what they did while also creating space for new responses.

Some days, this integration feels possible. Some days, the old patterns overtake me entirely, and I spend hours caught in hypervigilance that serves no current purpose.

Both are part of the process. Neither represents failure.

The body learned fear across years. It resists unlearning over the course of weeks. But it can learn new possibilities alongside the fear. It can practice safety even while remembering danger.

Puede practicar la seguridad mientras recuerda el peligro.

It can hold both the truth of what was and the possibility of what might be.

Where Transformation Happens

Image: The Third Shore

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Note. Where land and sea meet, transformation is negotiated.

I chose Loreto because it sits beside the sea. Because there is something about the rhythm of waves that mirrors the rhythm I am trying to find, the inhale and exhale, the arriving and receding, the constant motion that is somehow also constancy.

I call this project The Third Shore because the shore is neither ocean nor land, but the meeting place. The threshold. The liminal space where transformation happens.

This is what alonetude offers: threshold space. A place to practice being between who I was and who I am becoming.

The shore holds the tension between land and sea without resolving it. It holds both. It is where waves have been shaping sand for millennia, grinding rock into powder, polishing glass smooth.

The shore is patient.

It understands that transformation takes geological time. That healing is measured beyond breakthroughs, in in the accumulation of small moments when something shifts, softens, and the body remembers, even briefly, what safety feels like.

This is what I am learning to trust.

That the small shifts matter. That my nervous system is doing the work even when I am beyond consciously perceiving the change. That rest is deep labour rather than dereliction.

That solitude can be refuge rather than abandonment.

Alonetude offers refuge rather than resolution. Capacity rather than the elimination of fear to be with fear without being overtaken by it. Beyond the achievement of permanent safety, there are moments, increasing moments, when safety feels possible.

And for a nervous system that learned early that the world is fundamentally unsafe, that rest invites disaster, that vigilance is required for survival, these moments are everything.

They are the shore where new life becomes possible.

What These Three Parts Have Traced

This series has moved from childhood hypervigilance to adult manifestations, and now to the practice of alonetude as a healing intervention.

Part 1 established the theoretical framework for understanding how chronic childhood trauma shapes the developing nervous system. Part 2 provided the embodied narrative of what hypervigilance actually felt like, lived like, inhabited a child’s body and world.

This final part has examined how those childhood adaptations persist in adulthood and why intentional solitude, alonetude, offers possibilities for healing that differ fundamentally from both loneliness and passive alone-time.

The body keeps the score, yes.

Image: Refuge and Integration

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker 2026

Notation: The body keeps learning.

But the body also learns.

Slowly. Incrementally. Through patient practice, the nervous system that learned danger can also learn safety. Beyond complete safety. Beyond permanent safety. Moments of safety remain. Windows of rest. Brief experiences of what it feels like to simply be rather than constantly, vigilantly, doing.

These moments accumulate. They create new neural pathways. They teach the body new possibilities without requiring it to forget old protections.

And this, this is revolutionary for those of us who learned early that we existed to serve, to protect, to scan, to anticipate, to prevent. That our worth was measured by our usefulness. That rest was dangerous, and solitude was abandonment of our post.

Alonetude says: Rest is permitted. You are allowed to simply be. Your worth exists independent of constant productivity. Solitude can be a refuge rather than a threat.

The body holds this truth tentatively, still learning.

But it is learning.

Slowly. Incrementally. Through twenty days of practice by the sea. And ten more days to come. And whatever comes after.

The work continues. The body continues learning. The shore continues shaping what the waves bring.

La curación continúa. Healing continues.

Ya no tengo que vigilar todo el tiempo. I no longer have to keep watch all the time.

Except I do, still, sometimes.

The difference is that now I sometimes notice when I am keeping watch. And I can choose, sometimes, slowly, to gently set down the vigilance and rest.

This is what healing looks like.

Beyond dramatic. Beyond complete.

But real.

For readers struggling with trauma histories: Healing is rarely linear. It is rarely complete. But it is possible. These small moments of rest, these brief windows when safety feels real rather than theoretical, these matter profoundly. They accumulate. They create new possibilities. You remain whole. Your nervous system is doing exactly what it learned to do. And it can learn new responses while honouring the wisdom of old protections.

Con cariño y esperanza. With care and hope.

References

Brown, B. (2010). The gifts of imperfection: Let go of who you think you are supposed to be and embrace who you are. Hazelden.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. Harper & Row.

Fisher, J. (2017). Healing the fragmented selves of trauma survivors: Overcoming internal self-alienation. Routledge.

hooks, b. (2000). Feminist theory: From margin to centre (2nd ed.). South End Press.

Kabat-Zinn, J. (1990). Full catastrophe living: Using the wisdom of your body and mind to face stress, pain, and illness. Delacorte Press.

Kornfield, J. (2000). After the ecstasy, the laundry: How the heart grows wise on the spiritual path. Bantam Books.

Long, C. R., & Averill, J. R. (2003). Solitude: An exploration of the benefits of being alone. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 33(1), 21–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5914.00204

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.

van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.

Winnicott, D. W. (1958). The capacity to be alone. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 39, 416–420.

Here rests vigilance, laid down with care.

Translation note. Spanish-language text in this post was translated into English using Google Translate and reviewed by the author. Translations are intended to convey general meaning rather than certified linguistic precision.

Memory: The Kitchen Table

Content Warning: This post contains reflections on difficult childhood memories and family pain. Please care for yourself as you read, and feel free to step away if you need to.

“I was learning that what matters to me is allowed to matter.”

My grandmother’s kitchen table was oval, oak, scarred with the evidence of living. A burn mark from a forgotten pot. A gouge from something dropped or dragged. Rings from glasses placed without coasters during conversation are too absorbing for caution. I spread my rocks across that table, and she pushed nothing aside to make room for proper things. She let them stay. She let me sort and re-sort, building small cairns that meant nothing to anyone but me. The table held it all.

“I carry it with me, beyond furniture: as a method.”

I had no idea then that kitchen tables carry their own literature. June Jordan wrote of Kitchen Table: Women of Colour Press, founded in 1980, deliberately naming itself after the place where women had always done their realest thinking, beyond offices or academies, in domestic spaces where hands stayed busy, and mouths could speak truth (Jordan, 1980). Barbara Smith, who co-founded the press, understood that the kitchen table was a site of knowledge-making beyond lesser, perhaps the most honest one. The table where meals are prepared, where children do homework, where bills get sorted, letters get written, arguments get had and resolved, this is where theory meets the texture of actual living.

My rocks on my grandmother’s table were part of a long tradition of important work. tradition of kitchen-table meaning-making that predates and outlasts the institutions that later claimed authority over knowledge.

bell hooks wrote about the homeplace as a site of resistance, the domestic sphere that dominant culture dismisses as trivial but that actually sustains everything worth sustaining. In Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (1990), hooks describes her grandmother’s kitchen as a place of profound teaching, where lessons arrived through doing, snapping beans, rolling dough, and washing dishes side by side. The kitchen table is where hooks learned that theory and practice are inseparable, that the hands and the mind work together, that wisdom passes through presence as much as words.

While my grandmother peeled apples, I sorted my rocks, receiving an education I had no words for then. I was learning that what matters to me is allowed to matter. That there is space at the table for my small concerns. That someone will witness my treasures without asking what they are for.

Miriam Greenspan (2003) writes of kitchen table wisdom, the knowledge that emerges from lived experience, from the ordinary intimacies of daily life, from sitting with what is rather than theorising about what should be. This wisdom requires no credentials, no publications, to be valid. It requires presence, patience, and the willingness to stay at the table long enough for understanding to emerge. My grandmother never told me what my rocks meant or what I should do with them. She simply made space. She simply witnessed.

In that witnessing, I learned that my meaning-making mattered.

The kitchen table is where Scholarly Personal Narrative finds its truest home. Robert Nash (2004) argued that the stories we tell from our own lives carry legitimate scholarly weight when carefully theorised and ethically contextualised. But long before methodological language existed to justify it, women were already doing this work at kitchen tables, sharing stories, finding patterns, building knowledge from the raw material of experience.

The academy eventually caught up to what grandmothers always knew: that the particular illuminates the universal, that one life carefully examined reveals something about all lives, and that the table where we sit with our small treasures is exactly the right place to make meaning.

Now I sit at a small wooden table in Loreto, sea glass and shells spread across its surface. The table here is rented, free of scars from decades of family living. But it holds the same possibility my grandmother’s table held: that what I find might become what I know, that sorting and arranging might teach me something words alone cannot reach.

I think of all the women at all the kitchen tables across all the years, spreading out their own versions of treasure, trusting that the pattern would reveal itself. I am held here, even in solitude. I am in conversation with a lineage of kitchen-table scholars who never called themselves scholars, who simply showed up, paid attention, and let their hands learn what their minds would understand later.

La mesa recuerda.
The table remembers.

It holds the memory of every object placed upon it, every hand that reached across its surface, every conversation that unfolded in its presence. My grandmother is gone now, and I have lost track of what happened to her kitchen table. But I carry it with me, beyond furniture: as a method.

I still spread my treasures across whatever surface is available. I still sort by colour, by size, by feels right. I still trust that the pattern will emerge if I stay long enough, present enough, and am willing to let the objects teach me what they know.

“The table remembers.”

Reference

Greenspan, M. (2003). Healing through the dark emotions: The wisdom of grief, fear, and despair. Shambhala Publications. https://books.google.com/books?id=ZfvRo3PkDcwC

hooks, b. (1990). Yearning: Race, gender, and cultural politics. South End Press. https://philpapers.org/rec/HOOYRG-2

Moraga, C., & Anzaldúa, G. (Eds.). (1981). This bridge called my back: Writings by radical women of color. Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. https://hal.science/hal-04262369/

Koren, L. (1994). Wabi-sabi for artists, designers, poets & philosophers. Stone Bridge Press. https://books.google.com/books?id=jQelDAgr63oC

Juniper, A. (2003). Wabi sabi: The Japanese art of impermanence. Tuttle Publishing. https://books.google.com/books?id=objWAgAAQBAJ

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1966). The savage mind (G. Weidenfeld & Nicholson, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1962). https://books.google.com/books?id=JI6GVFbP9hAC

Nash, R. J. (2004). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative. Teachers College Press. https://books.google.com/books?id=wvSMDwAAQBAJ

Rose, G., & Bingley, A. (2019). Creative methodologies in trauma-informed research. In J. Sunderland et al. (Eds.), Arts-based approaches to trauma and healing (pp. xx–xx). Routledge. https://books.google.com/books?id=MROSEQAAQBAJ

Here is What the Table Had

Translation note. Spanish language passages were generated using Google Translate and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.

Part Two: The Geography of Fear: The Ball in My Stomach

Content Warning: This post contains discussion of childhood exposure to parental alcoholism and domestic violence. While absent of graphic detail, the material addresses trauma, fear, and hypervigilance that some readers may find distressing.

Van der Kolk (2014) writes that the body continues to register and respond to danger signals even when conscious memory holds no record of the original trauma.

But what about when the body remembers everything? When the danger was less a single event than the air you breathed for years?

The Constant Companion

What the Walls Remember

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

I am trying to describe a sensation that lived in my body from my earliest memories until approximately age twelve. It sat in my stomach, this tight ball of readiness. Almost nausea, though sometimes it tipped that way. Almost pain, though it ached.

It was the feeling of waiting. Esperando. Always waiting.

Waiting for the sound that would tell me whether this evening would be safe.

The sound was the truck engine. My father’s truck is pulling in at the end of the day. And before I even consciously registered the sound, my body knew. The particular rhythm of his footsteps as he walked from the garage into the house told me everything I needed to know. Heavy, deliberate steps meant danger. Lighter, quicker steps might mean safety, though there were no guarantees.

The ball in my stomach would tighten. My breathing would change without my choosing to. I was listening with my whole body, my whole being rather than just my ears.

Here is what I have learned from the trauma neuroscience I read in Part 1: this lay beyond clinical anxiety. This was neuroception. My autonomic nervous system is reading environmental cues for danger beneath my conscious awareness, exactly as it was designed to do. The problem was that it was designed for occasional threats, never the chronic kind, never for years of this.

By the time I heard the garage door, I had already assessed multiple variables without thinking about it. What day of the week was it? Fridays were more dangerous because he stopped at the bar on the way home. How late was he? Later meant more drinking. Did my mother seem tense at dinner? Her tension meant she had already sensed something I had yet to detect. Was my younger sister being too loud? Noise drew attention, and attention was dangerous.

The youngest was seven years younger than me, still small enough that sometimes she cried in ways I was unable to quiet. This terrified me more than my own danger. My hypervigilance extended far beyond myself. I was responsible for them, too.

Reading the Air

Atmosphere Before the Storm

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

I developed what I can only describe as a hyperawareness of atmospheres. I could feel the charge in the air before anything visible changed. My mother’s shoulders would tighten in a particular way. The house itself seemed to hold its breath.

By age eight or nine, I had become fluent in the language of approaching violence. I could read micro-expressions. I could detect shifts in vocal tone that signalled danger was escalating. I could calculate the precise degree of door-closing force that indicated anger.

These were skills no child should need to develop. But I was brilliant at them. I had to be.

The worst moments came before violence actually occurred. The worst moments were the hours of waiting, the ball in my stomach wound so tight I thought it might tear something open. During these hours, every small sound required assessment. Was that his chair scraping against the floor? His glass was set down hard on the counter. Is the refrigerator door closing with force?

Each sound was data. Each piece of data helped me calculate the probability of eruption.

During these hours of waiting, I strategised. Where were my sisters? If something happened, could I get to them? Were there obstacles between me and their rooms? I mapped the house in my mind like a battlefield, planning routes and refuges.

What Survived

The Geography of Hiding

The house had its own geography of fear. Certain rooms were more dangerous than others.

The kitchen, where he drank after work, where the counter held the evidence of how many bottles had been opened. I learned to count them without appearing to count them. One bottle was manageable. Two meant higher risk. Three or more meant I needed to get my sisters to their rooms and keep them there.

The living room, where he sat in his chair and called us to him. Sometimes these summons were benign. Sometimes they were otherwise. I learned to read the kind from the quality of his voice when he said my name.

The hallway between my room and my baby sisters’ rooms felt impossibly long and exposed. I had to cross it to reach them if they needed me, and crossing it meant being visible, being available to be called, being vulnerable.

I learned to move through the house silently. I learned which floorboards creaked. Which doors squeaked? How to open cabinets without sound. I learned to exist without creating disturbance, to breathe so shallowly that even my breath would remain undetectable.

This skill, this ability to minimise my presence, to make myself unnoticeable, would follow me for decades. Would manifest in adult relationships as difficulty taking up space. As apologising for existing. As constantly making myself smaller to accommodate others’ needs.

But in childhood, this skill kept me safer than I would otherwise have been. Which is far from safe. There was no safety. There were only degrees of threat, gradations of danger that I learned to navigate with the precision of a cartographer mapping treacherous terrain.

The Sound of My Name

Voice Like a Weapon

Sometimes my father called my name.

Even now, five decades later, sitting in Loreto with the sound of the sea outside my window, I can feel my body’s response to that memory. My heart accelerates slightly. My vision narrows at the edges. The ball in my stomach clenches.

This is what van der Kolk (2014) means when he writes about how the body keeps the score. The original threat is gone. My father is long dead. But my nervous system still responds as if the danger were present.

In childhood, the sound of my name in his voice when he had been drinking produced a physical response I had no control over. My heart would accelerate. My vision would narrow. The ball in my stomach would clench. I would freeze, completely still, as if holding utterly still might make me invisible.

But I had to answer. Silence was worse. I would force my legs to move, force my voice to work, force my face into neutrality. The walk down the hallway to wherever he was calling from felt like walking to execution. Caminar hacia el miedo. Walking toward fear.

“Did you do this?”

His voice, accusing.

I remained without understanding of what “this” was. A glass was left on the counter. A door left ajar. A light was left on. The television is too loud. The offence varied and often made no logical sense. But the pattern was always the same: I was accused of something I had left undone, something I would never do because I was so careful, so hypervigilant about never creating any reason for attention, for anger, for danger.

“No,” I would say, my voice small.

This was true. I had done nothing of what he was accusing me of doing. But truth had no protective power.

When Reality Breaks

I wrote in Part 1 about Freyd’s (2008) concept of betrayal trauma, how, when those who should protect us instead harm us, when we are blamed for harm done to us, the violation cuts deeper than the harm itself because it undermines our basic capacity to trust our own perceptions.

This is what those moments of false accusation did. They broke something deeper than the fear of punishment.

The moment would stretch. He would decide whether to believe me. Sometimes he did. Sometimes he refused. When he refused to believe me, when he insisted I was lying even though I was telling the truth, something fractured inside me each time.

I knew with certainty that I had done nothing he accused me of. I knew it with absolute certainty. But his version of reality had power over mine. His insistence that I was guilty could override my knowledge of my own innocence.

This is epistemic violence. The assault on a child’s capacity to know what they know.

I am still, decades later, unlearning this. Still working to trust my own perceptions. Still catching myself doubting what I know to be true when someone else insists on a different version of events.

The Leaving

Underwater Silence

During these moments of accusation, of being blamed for things left undone, I would split. Some part of me would go away to a place where his words could find no purchase.

My face would remain neutral. My body would stand still. But I had barely remained there.

Years later, I learned this is called dissociation. A survival strategy my nervous system deployed to protect me from unbearable psychological pain. Fisher (2017) writes about structural dissociation, the fragmentation of the personality into parts that carry different survival strategies. In the moment, I only knew that crying was forbidden, that defending myself too vigorously was forbidden, that showing fear was forbidden.

Any emotional response increases danger.

Where did I go when I left? The answer remains beyond me. It was less a conscious choice than an automatic response, my body’s wisdom protecting me in the only way available when fight or flight were both impossible.

I existed in some internal space that felt grey and distant, muffled, as if I were underwater, with the sounds reaching me from far away. This internal refuge kept me functioning, but at a cost. I lost pieces of my experience. Unable to fully remember what happened during these dissociated moments. Carried gaps in my memory that would later make me doubt whether events occurred as I recalled them.

This fragmentation, this sense that parts of me exist in different places, holding different pieces of the experience, has never entirely healed. I recognise it even now when stress triggers those same dissociative responses. The going away. The watching myself from a distance. The sense that I am barely inhabiting my body.

The Weight of Protection

I tried to absorb her fear into my own body,
to create a buffer between her and the violence.
Even now, some part of me keeps scanning for their safety.

Still Holding

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

After these confrontations, after he had yelled or grabbed or made his point through whatever means he chose, I would go to check on my sisters.

My younger sister, only one year younger than me, had often heard everything through the walls. I would find her frozen in her bed, eyes wide, her own body locked in the same sympathetic activation that gripped mine.

“It is okay,” I would tell her, though we both understood it was far from true.

“He is calmer now.” Ya pasó. It has passed.

Though we both knew it had barely passed. That it would come again. That this was merely an intermission.

I would smooth her hair the way our mother did, or used to do before exhaustion made all gestures mechanical. I tried to absorb her fear into my own body, tried to create a buffer between her and the violence, tried to convince both of us that I could keep her safe when in reality I was just another child, just as powerless, just as frightened.

The youngest, still small, often slept through these episodes. When she woke, confused by the atmosphere, by the tension that lingered in the house like smoke, I would make up reasons. “Dad was just talking loudly about work.” Anything to preserve her innocence a little longer, though I suspected she absorbed the fear even when she lacked conscious understanding of its source.

Babies know. Children know. Bodies know what minds try to deny.

I wrote in Part 1 about Jurkovic’s (1997) work on parentification, the way children who become caregivers for their siblings carry consequences into adulthood. Difficulty accepting care. Persistent sense of responsibility for others’ emotional states. Compromised capacity to recognise their own needs.

Most relevant for this alonetude project: the way parentified children struggle with solitude because rest feels like a dereliction of duty. Their nervous systems learned early that constant vigilance is required as much for protection of others as for the self for the protection of others.

Even here in Loreto, alone by choice, with my sisters safe in their own adult lives, some part of me keeps scanning for their safety. Keeps wondering if I should check in. The hypervigilance that served us then persists decades after we no longer need it.

The Vigil

The Edge of Rest

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

I would lie awake long after the house had gone silent. My body refused sleep because sleep meant vulnerability, meant I might miss the return of danger.

The hypervigilance that kept me alert all day persisted through the night rather than releasing. Instead, it intensified in the dark. Every small sound required assessment. The house is settling. The refrigerator is cycling on. A mine whistle is blowing at the end of the shift.

Each sound had to be categorised as normal or threatening. Safe or dangerous? Requiring response or allowing rest.

But rest never truly came.

Tomorrow I would move through school in a fog of exhaustion, but I had become skilled at hiding this, too. Appearing normal. At performing the role of a child who was fine when everything inside me was wound tight as a wire.

Teachers remained unseeing, or if they noticed, they remained silent. This was the early 1970s. People avoided speaking of such things. Families were private. What happened in homes stayed in homes.

I learned to carry my fear silently, to show no external evidence of the constant internal vigilance.

The Normalization of Terror

This is every memory combined. This is hundreds of memories, thousands of moments of fear spread across seven years. This is the texture of my childhood, the baseline state against which any moments of safety appeared as aberrations.

The ball in my stomach became so constant that I forgot there had ever been a time when I had ever been free of it. It became my normal, the lens through which I perceived the entire world: dangerous, unpredictable, requiring constant vigilance.

Even in moments that should have been safe, at school, during rare family outings when my father was sober, visiting friends’ houses, the fear persisted. My nervous system resisted recalibration even when external circumstances temporarily improved.

Porges (2011) writes about how the nervous system, once calibrated to constant threat, cannot easily recalibrate to safety. Safety feels temporary. Fragile. A gift that can be revoked at any moment.

This is what I carry still. This sense that safety is a state beyond my trusting but rather a temporary condition that requires its own kind of vigilance. That letting my guard down means disaster. That rest is dangerous.

What the Body Remembers

What the Body Keeps

Vigilance Without Threat

What lay beyond my understanding then but is clear to me now through trauma neuroscience is that my body was accurately responding to chronic threat by remaining in a state of mobilised defence. The hypervigilance was entirely rational. It was a rational response to genuine danger.

The problem emerges later, when the danger has ended, but the defensive mobilization persists. When my adult nervous system continues responding as if I am still that child in that house, still needing to constantly monitor for threats that no longer exist.

The ball in my stomach. The scanning for danger. The inability to rest. The sense that solitude is dangerous rather than restorative.

These are accurate indicators, rather than failures of healing. They are accurate indicators of how deeply fear became inscribed in my body during formative years.

This is why I am here in Loreto. Why I am attempting to give my nervous system sustained exposure to genuine safety. Why I am practicing, every day, the radical act of rest.

But the body resists unlearning what it learned during the years when the personality itself was forming. The vigilance persists. The ball in my stomach still activates under stress. The sound of heavy footsteps still makes my shoulders rise.

And yet.

There are moments here, in the early morning light, when the pelicans glide past my window, when the ball in my stomach unclenches slightly. When my breath deepens a fraction. When rest feels possible, even if only for a moment.

These are the victories I am learning to recognise. Beyond the dramatic transformation I once hoped for, but the small, incremental shifts. The brief moments when my nervous system registers safety. When the vigilance softens. When I can simply be.

Even the body needs a point of reunion

What Comes Next

In Part 3, I will examine what these childhood adaptations mean for adult life. How hypervigilance shapes capacity for solitude. Why my thirty-day retreat in Loreto represents an attempt to finally teach my nervous system that rest is permitted. How alonetude offers refuge rather than threat.

The vignette has shown the wound. The analysis will show the path toward healing.

When I can simply be.

References

Fisher, J. (2017). Healing the fragmented selves of trauma survivors: Overcoming internal self-alienation. Routledge.

Freyd, J. J. (2008). Betrayal trauma. In G. Reyes, J. D. Elhai, & J. D. Ford (Eds.), The encyclopedia of psychological trauma (pp. 76–77). John Wiley & Sons.

Jurkovic, G. J. (1997). Lost childhoods: The plight of the parentified child. Routledge.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.

van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.

Part 1: The Geography of Fear (Ball in My Tummy)

Content Warning: This series contains discussion of childhood exposure to parental alcoholism and domestic violence. While the material is free from graphic detail, it addresses trauma, fear, and hypervigilance that some readers may find distressing.

This is Part 1 of a 3-part series exploring childhood hypervigilance and the journey toward healing through solitude. This series draws from my Creative Master’s thesis on alonetude: intentional, embodied solitude as healing practice.

“This is a memory of a way of being, rather than a memory of something that happened.”

I am trying to write about fear. Beyond the kind that arrives and then leaves, beyond the sharp spike of adrenaline when something startles you, but the other kind. The kind that becomes the water you swim in. The kind that becomes so constant you forget you are afraid at all.

Van der Kolk (2014) writes about trauma as an enduring imprint on mind, brain, and body, something that continues shaping how we navigate the present long after the original event has passed (p. 21). But what happens when there is no single event to point to? What happens when the entire landscape of childhood is the event?

When Fear Has No Beginning

Image: Early Atmosphere

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

There are childhood memories I can pull out like photographs, discrete and framed. The time I fell off my bike. My eighth birthday party. The day we got our dog.

And then there are the other memories. The ones that exist as atmospheres rather than moments. As textures. As the constant hum underneath everything else.

From approximately age three to twelve, I lived inside a particular sensation. It sat in my stomach, a tight ball of readiness. This is a memory of a way of being, rather than any single event that happened. A state I inhabited the way other children might have inhabited safety or joy or the simple pleasure of coming home from school.

My father’s alcoholism and violence made our home a place where I learned to calibrate my entire nervous system to threat. Where I learned to read micro-expressions the way other children learned to read books. Where I learned to map escape routes through rooms, the way other children might have mapped their way to the playground.

I am writing this now from Loreto, Mexico, thirty days by myself in a casita by the sea, trying to understand why solitude feels so dangerous. Why rest feels like a dereliction of duty. Why does my body still, five decades later, refuse to believe that it is safe?

The Neuroscience I Needed to Understand

I came to the trauma literature looking for a map. Looking for some way to make sense of why, at fifty-something years old, my shoulders still rise toward my ears when I hear heavy footsteps. Why does my breath still catch at the sound of a door closing with force? Why does being alone with my own thoughts feel more dangerous than being in a crowd?

What I found changed how I understand my childhood, and the body I still carry through the world.

The threat is the baseline. Safety, when it occurs, feels like an aberration.

When Trauma Shapes the Personality Itself

Herman (1992) introduced the concept of complex post-traumatic stress disorder to name what happens when trauma extends beyond any single terrible event into a chronic condition of childhood. She makes a distinction that stopped me cold when I first read it: repeated trauma in adult life erodes the structure of an already-formed personality. But repeated trauma in childhood? That shapes and deforms the personality as it develops.

I had to sit with that for a long time.

Single-incident trauma, devastating as it is, happens against a backdrop of what came before. The person remembers what safe felt like. The nervous system has a baseline to which it can potentially return.

But for those of us who grew up in homes where violence was the organising principle of daily life? We have no safe baseline. The threat is the baseline. Safety, when it occurs, feels like an aberration.

This matters for understanding why solitude feels dangerous to me now. My nervous system was calibrated during its most formative years to expect threat. It learned early that vigilance is required for survival. And when that learning happens during the years when the personality itself is forming, it goes deeper than sitting on top of the self. It becomes the foundation of the self.

How Your Nervous System Learns the World

A neuroscientist I am far from, but I have spent years trying to understand what Stephen Porges (2011) calls Polyvagal Theory because it finally gave me language for what I carry in my body.

Image: The Neuroscience I Needed

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Porges describes three systems in the autonomic nervous system, organised hierarchically:

The ventral vagal system supports what he calls social engagement. It is the system that allows you to feel safe, to connect with others, to rest. When this system is online, your face is mobile, your voice has prosody, and you can take in information without constant threat assessment.

The sympathetic nervous system mobilises the fight-or-flight response. This is the system that floods you with adrenaline, that makes your heart race, that prepares your body to defend itself or run.

The dorsal vagal system produces freeze, collapse, and shutdown. This is the oldest system, the one that takes over when fight or flight are both impossible. When you cannot escape and cannot defeat the threat, this system makes you disappear inside yourself.

In safe environments, Porges (2011) explains, the nervous system moves flexibly between these states as situations require. You can engage socially when appropriate, mobilise when needed, and return to calm.

But in chronically threatening environments, the system becomes biased toward defensive states. The part of you that should be able to rest and connect gets chronically inhibited. Your body learns that the world requires constant defence.

For children in violent homes, this means the nervous system rarely experiences the kind of regulation that comes from safe, attuned relationships. Van der Kolk (2014) writes about how traumatised individuals carry fundamentally different bodily experiences than those who have felt safe and welcome in the world.

I think about this often here in Loreto. About how my body learned early that the world held no safety. About how that learning lives in my nervous system, deeper than thought. About how no amount of cognitive understanding that I am safe now can simply overwrite what my body knows.

Image: Relearning Rest

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

When Survival Requires Fragmentation

Janina Fisher (2017) writes about something she calls structural dissociation. The way chronic threat fragments the personality into parts that carry different survival strategies.

Image: Structural Dissociation

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Survival Intelligence

Children develop what she describes as trauma-related action systems: fight, flight, freeze, submit, attach, and cry for help. Each is associated with specific bodily states. Each is a different way of trying to survive.

Image: Intelligent Adaptations

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

I recognise all of these in myself. The part that freezes when someone raises their voice. The part that apologises compulsively for taking up space. The part that scans every room for exits. The part that overexplains, trying to prevent misunderstandings before they happen.

These are adaptations, beyond pathologies. They are intelligent adaptations. They kept me alive.

The problem is that they persist decades after the threat has ended.

Hypervigilance as Intelligent Adaptation

Hypervigilance as Adaptation

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Van der Kolk (2014) characterises hypervigilance as the persistent expectation of danger that keeps the body in a state of high alert. Courtois (2008) calls it anticipatory anxiety, the constant scanning of environments, the monitoring of adult moods, the perpetual effort to predict and potentially avoid danger.

I need to say this clearly: hypervigilance is clarity under threat. Beyond pathology. Beyond dysfunction. Beyond weakness.

The child who learns to read micro-expressions, to detect shifts in vocal tone, to map escape routes through the house, that child is surviving. Far from malfunctioning.

I was brilliant at survival. By age eight, I could assess a room in seconds. Could tell you from the sound of footsteps whether this evening would be safe. Could make myself small enough, quiet enough, invisible enough to avoid attention.

Image: Survival Intelligence

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

This intelligence saved my life.

But intelligence calibrated to perpetual threat recalibrates to safety only slowly. My nervous system still signals danger in contexts where there is none. Still prepares for threats that no longer exist. Still cannot quite believe that rest is permitted.

When Those Who Should Protect You Betray Reality Itself

Freyd (2008) writes about betrayal trauma, what happens when those we depend upon for survival violate our trust (pp. 76–77). But she is writing about something deeper than mere trust violation. She is writing about the violation of reality itself.

I remember being accused of things I had never done. Small things, meaningless things, a glass left on the counter, a light left on. But the accusation came with absolute certainty. My father’s insistence that I was lying when I was telling the truth.

The terror was beyond punishment, though punishment was real. The terror was about the understanding that reality itself could be overwritten. That my knowing what was true offered no protection. That I could be blamed at will, simply because someone with power over me decided I was guilty.

Image: When Reality Fractures

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

For children, this creates what Freyd (2008) calls a double bind. The child knows the truth. But the parents’ power requires submission to the false narrative. And that submission? It ruptures something fundamental about the child’s sense of reality and worth.

When parents harm and also deny the child’s reality, they commit what might be understood as epistemic violence. An assault on the child’s capacity to know what they know.

I am still, decades later, unlearning the habit of doubting my own perceptions. Still working to trust my judgment. Still catching myself deferring to others’ interpretations of events, even when I have clear evidence of their inaccuracy.

“The threat is the baseline. Safety, when it occurs, feels like an aberration.”

When Children Have to Become Parents

Minuchin (1974) described parentification as a developmental distortion in which children assume caretaking roles beyond their capacity. Jurkovic (1997) distinguishes between adaptive parentification (helping with household tasks during a temporary crisis) and destructive parentification (providing ongoing emotional regulation to family members in chronically dysfunctional systems).

I was the oldest. Seven years older than my youngest sister. I learned early that my vigilance needed to extend beyond my own safety. I needed to monitor whether I was in danger, and whether they were. I needed to comfort, to protect, to absorb their fear into my own already-overloaded nervous system.

Image: Carrying More Than One Nervous System

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Jurkovic (1997) writes about the consequences: difficulty accepting care from others in adulthood, a persistent sense of responsibility for others’ emotional states, and a compromised capacity to recognise one’s own needs, as well as what he calls premature identity closure, when children define themselves primarily through their caretaking role rather than developing authentic selfhood.

And this: parentified children often struggle with solitude because their nervous systems learned early that constant vigilance extends beyond self-protection to the protection of others.

“This is a memory of a way of being, rather than a memory of something that happened.”

Image: Staying With What Is

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

Rest feels like a dereliction of duty. Solitude feels like abandonment of the post.

This is why I am here in Loreto. Why I am trying, for thirty days, to teach my nervous system that rest is permitted. That Vigilance for anyone else’s safety can rest here. That solitude can be restorative rather than dangerous.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

Image: Stairway to Heaven

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

References

Fisher, J. (2017). Healing the fragmented selves of trauma survivors: Overcoming internal self-alienation. Routledge.

Freyd, J. J. (2008). Betrayal trauma. In G. Reyes, J. D. Elhai, & J. D. Ford (Eds.), The encyclopedia of psychological trauma (pp. 76–77). John Wiley & Sons.

Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence, From domestic abuse to political terror. Basic Books.

Jurkovic, G. J. (1997). Lost childhoods: The plight of the parentified child. Routledge.

Minuchin, S. (1974). Families and family therapy. Harvard University Press.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.

van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.

Here rests vigilance, laid down with care.

Memory: The Moment That Changed Everything

Content Warning: This post contains reflections on trauma, childhood experiences, and the body’s memory of harm. Please care for yourself as you read, and feel free to step away if you need to.

May 2, 2025. Friday morning. My kitchen table at home.

The notification sound chimed while I was grading papers, the familiar tone I had conditioned myself to respond to instantly after seventeen years of contract teaching. I reached for my phone expecting routine correspondence, perhaps a student question or a committee meeting notice. Instead, the subject line read: “Employment Status Update.”

My contract position for the fall of 2025 and 2026 was uncertain.

The email was brief, professional, and efficient. It explained enrolment shifts, budget realities, and difficult decisions. It thanked me for my service. It wished me well in future endeavours. It arrived without conversation, without the relational check-in that twenty-five years at Thompson Rivers University might have warranted. It arrived as data, a notification, a conclusion reached somewhere in a spreadsheet I would never see.

I sat at my kitchen table, the same surface scarred by coffee rings from decades of grading student papers, and stared at the screen. Seventeen years as contract faculty. Twenty-five years total at the institution. Course materials I had developed, teaching awards I had won, students I had mentored, committees I had served. Excellence that had earned institutional recognition but never security, never permanence, never the guarantee that May would arrive without this particular notification.

The plaques were arranged on my shelf, forming a timeline of institutional validation: the TRU Student Empowerment Award (2021), the TRU Interculturalisation Award (2023), and the Faculty Council Service Award (2024). Each one represented students who had written nomination letters, colleagues who had advocated, and committees who had deliberated. Each one testified to work that the institution deemed exemplary. Yet on May 2, 2025, none of that mattered against the budget’s arithmetic.

Thirty days later, another notification arrived. This time, the subject line read: “Congratulations.” I had won the Faculty Council Teaching Award for 2025. The irony possessed a weight that was almost architectural. The institution that had deemed me expendable simultaneously declared I was exemplary. The same system that processed my termination processed my commendation. Two documents, two logics, two entirely separate bureaucratic pathways that never spoke to each other.

I understood something sitting at that kitchen table, something I had been circling around for years without language to name it: I had forgotten how to simply be. I could perform brilliantly. I could show up on time, deliver lectures, grade papers, serve on committees, support colleagues, and mentor students. I could produce evidence of my value constantly, compulsively, because survival demanded it. But when the institution finally severed that demand, when performance could no longer protect me, I discovered I had no idea who I was underneath all that doing.

The months between May and December 2025 felt like slow-motion drowning. I woke at 3 AM with panic attacks, my heart racing, convinced I had forgotten something critical, only to remember I had nothing to forget because I had no employment requiring vigilance.

I checked my email compulsively, even though I had no employer to email. I filled every hour with tasks, projects, obligations, anything to avoid the emptiness that waited when I stopped moving. The relief I expected from no longer needing to perform never arrived. Instead, what came was a vast, disorienting blankness, an inability to rest even when rest was finally possible.

Thompson Rivers University – Faculty Teaching Award 2026

Photo Credit: Jesal Thakkar, 2025

Finding Myself in Another Woman’s Silence

There is a particular kind of recognition that happens when you encounter a book that seems to have been written for you, even though the author has never heard your name.

Sara Maitland’s A Book of Silence (2008) arrived in my hands on Day Four of my thirty-day retreat in Loreto, Mexico, and I felt, for the first time since arriving, that I was accompanied in what I was attempting, if only across time. Maitland came to silence in her late forties, after her marriage dissolved and her children grew into their own lives. I came to solitude at sixty, after decades of caregiving, teaching, committee work, and the relentless noise of being needed.

She walked into the moors of Scotland and the deserts of Sinai seeking something beyond language. I stepped onto a malecón in Baja California Sur, watching pelicans dive into water the colour of jade, trying to understand who I might become if I stopped performing the person everyone expected me to be. We are separated by continents, by decades, by the particular textures of our lives. And yet, reading her words, I felt the shock of kinship that comes when someone articulates what you have only half-known about yourself.

What draws me most powerfully to Maitland’s work is her insistence that chosen silence differs fundamentally from imposed silence (Maitland, 2008). This distinction sits at the heart of what I am calling alonetude, an intentional, contemplative orientation toward solitude characterised by volition, presence, meaning, and felt safety. Maitland (2008) argues that the quality of silence depends entirely on whether one has entered it freely or been forced into it against one’s will. Solitary confinement destroys the psyche; a hermitage can heal it. The difference lies in the presence of choice rather than the absence of sound or company.

I think of my mother, now eighty, widowed and living alone in Lethbridge, her solitude arrived at through loss rather than chosen. I think of the years I spent in relationships where I was technically accompanied but profoundly unseen. And I think of these thirty days in Loreto, where every morning I wake in a casita that holds only my breath, my books, my slowly settling self, and I know that I am here because I chose to be here. That choice, Maitland helps me understand, is everything. It transforms absence into presence, emptiness into fullness, aloneness into something that, with patience and courage, might become its own kind of home.

Maitland (2008) also names something I have struggled to articulate: the cultural suspicion that attaches to women who choose solitude. She observes that female aloneness has historically been constructed as dangerous, improper, or indicative of failure. A man alone on a mountain is a philosopher.

A woman alone in a cottage is a witch, a madwoman, or a woman whom no one wanted. When I told friends I was taking thirty days in Mexico by myself, I watched their faces cycle through concern, confusion, and something that looked uncomfortably like pity. “Will not you be lonely?” they asked, as though loneliness were the inevitable destination of any woman who steps outside the orbit of others’ needs.

Maitland’s work gives me language to push back against this assumption. She demonstrates, through both scholarly analysis and lived experience, that a woman can choose solitude because she has succeeded at knowing herself well enough to understand what she requires. What I need, it turns out, is this: mornings on the malecón, the soft fascination of waves against stone, the slow unravelling of decades of noise, and the quiet company of a book written by a woman who walked this path before me and left breadcrumbs I am only now learning to follow.

The Book of Silence

Note. Spanish-language passages were generated using Google Translate (Google, n.d.) and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.

References

Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com

Maitland, S. (2008). A book of silence. Granta.