Two things happened this month that cracked this article open in me. The first is that I have been spending time alone upstate New York away from the never present NYC, with more space and silence than I have had in years. In that space, when fear arises, I am practicing something new. Instead of pushing it away I sit with myself in it. I let myself feel it fully, and then I go deeper, past the first layer, into whatever is underneath. I ask questions of where the root pattern started and even knowing or not, I release it through movement, submerging in water, laughing and crying till it is willing to leave somatically.

The second is that my mother is flying from the west coast to the east coast next week for my nephew's wedding, and my sisters and I have spent the last several weeks doing what we have done our whole lives. Strategizing who will keep her calm, give her attention so she doesn't create problems, making sure she is fed and her needs met to minimize her outbursts or complaints that retrigger all of us. Each of us has had our own conversation about where our boundaries sit and what we will and will not accept this time, about how to be around her without shrinking the way we have shrunk our entire lives. And just as much, about how the three of us stay aligned with each other, so she cannot do what she has always done and turn us against one another.

Here is what I can tell you. Every family has its own frequency, a hum that every member feels running in the background whether they can name it or not, and we carry that hum with us into our own lives long after we have left the house it started in. For me, that hum has always been a victim hum, the belief underneath everything that I cannot fully do life on my own, that I cannot fully create what I actually want without struggle attached to it. With my family gathering again this week, I am in a rare position to really feel that hum instead of just living inside it. I am sharing it here because I believe you have a hum of your own from the family you grew up in, and that naming it is the first step toward feeling it fully and finally letting it go.

Where It Actually Started

I used to think the hum started in my teenage years, but looking back that is just when I felt the heaviness of it in my body. It actually started long before that, in the womb.

I could feel her huffing and puffing, the anger at everyone she believed had wronged her, the rage and anxiety she carried in her body and never learned to release. I was gestating inside a nervous system that was in a constant state of fight, and I absorbed it before I ever took a breath outside of her.

Then I was born, and for the first five years of my life I learned to take care of her instead of the other way around. I learned to stay quiet when she had a migraine, playing alone with my animals and my dolls instead of being played with. I got her water and checked on her, an isolated five year old checking on the adult instead of the other way around, carrying her pain for her mentally and emotionally so she would not have to carry it alone. Instead of getting to have my own tantrums as a small child, the healthy kind that help a child find the edges of the world and test their own boundaries. I watched a grown woman throw things, scream until she foamed at the mouth, and break things in rages off and on, all while she spent those years blaming my father for all her problems and plotting to get away from him. This is where the hum began, the family frequency I was born into and started carrying as my own before I ever had words for what was happening to me.

When she finally left my father, she became a victim to being a single mother. Then she turned that same rage toward my grandmother, a woman who loved me completely and who was genuinely fun to be around. My mother's fury at her own mother traced back to having been the one who cared for her alcoholic father through liver cancer after my grandmother had already left him. She never forgave her mother for that, and she never let any of us near the possibility that my grandmother's love for me was allowed to exist without being contaminated by her own old wound.

Between the ages of six and ten, she converted us to the Mormon church, and I understand now that this was her attempt to absolve herself of guilt and shame she would never have named out loud, because naming it would have made her responsible for it. So instead she became a victim to God and every rule she believed stood between her and heaven, and pulled me into that same experience with her, creating a deep dark fear inside of me of dying and what would happen to me

Then came my stepfather, and with him, two more children to raise, and she became a victim to that too. She controlled everyone around her to feel safe. She screamed about the house, about his kids, about how ungrateful we all were, and she put us to work constantly, only to tell us it was never enough while she lay in bed crying, deep in her own depression. In the middle of that depression she chose to have two more children, and then, because of her devotion to the church, the teenagers in the house, myself included, became full time parents to our own younger siblings.

I watched the same patterns play out with my little sisters, except this time, with five kids in the house, it was intensified. My young siblings had real needs, but she still put her own issues before them, which left my sisters in my care, protected from their own mother. So as the pattern of victimization passed down to each new child, the family hum only grew louder, and I found myself feeling hatred toward my own mother the same way she had always felt towards hers. That self hate taught every cell in my body to attack itself, and I stepped into the frequency my family lived by with despair.

My mother was a committed victim, so the idea of getting help didn't exist. Getting help would have meant taking responsibility, and responsibility was the one thing she could not survive. I shut down and shared nothing with her, not one question about becoming a woman, about my body, about boys, because the moment she sensed any vulnerability in me, I became prey instead of her daughter.

The Frequency I Was Putting Out

By the time I was a teenager I wanted nothing except to be out of that house, so I worked, and stayed at friends' houses as often as they would have me, and built an entire life outside the four walls she controlled. I thought I was escaping the hum. What I was actually doing was sending that hum out as my main energy frequency, and I pulled toward me exactly what I was putting out.

I was a victim to friends who left me out and boys who said they liked me and then just as quickly rejected me. Situation after situation that quietly confirmed the hum I was carrying. I was living inside the frequency of my own unworthiness, reaching for the equilibrium underneath it, the knowing that I was worthy, that I was enough, that I was lovable, but unable to fully land there because I was still broadcasting the old signal.

And here is the honest question I keep sitting with. If I had grown up under different circumstances, would that hum have ever been mine to carry at all. Being her victim was, in its own strange way, exactly what it was supposed to be, the way everything in this life is exactly what it is supposed to be. Understanding the full shape of the frequency I inherited has been one of the most valuable things I have ever done. Not to stay in it, but to finally see the whole journey from the beginning to now.

The Hum Underneath It All

The hum is not really mine. It did not start with me, and it was never only about my mother either. It is a survival hum, passed down through generations of unhealed pain, and every family has their own version of it running quietly beneath the surface of everyday life. In mine, that hum whispers that I am not enough. That I am not lovable exactly as I am. That life is hard and stays hard. That I cannot receive anything unless someone else has earned it for me first by doing something for me. That it is not safe to fully connect with another person or let myself be seen. That receiving at the level I actually desire, in love, in money, in ease, in joy, is unsafe.

None of that is truth. It is frequency, learned so early and repeated so often that it started to sound like truth. It was a survival strategy built by a small child who needed to stay safe inside a home ruled by someone else's unhealed pain, and for a long time it worked. And then it became the very thing standing between me and the life I actually wanted to live.

Choosing Something Different Now

This is exactly why the conversations with my sisters this week matter so much to me. It is not really about logistics, about who drives her from the airport or who sits next to her at dinner. It is about whether we can be in the same room as her without collapsing back into the eggshell version of ourselves. Whether we can hold a boundary without guilt. Whether we can let her have her outburst, if she has one, without absorbing it as our own.

I do not want to become her victim again. Not for a weekend, not for one dinner, not for a single car ride. And I am starting to understand that the way out is not to brace against her. It is to keep doing exactly what I have been doing alone upstate. When the old fear rises, I go into it instead of running from it. I feel it all the way down. And then I move it. I laugh, I spin, I get into the water and let it wash off me, because I am no longer willing to store what does not belong to me in my body the way she stored her whole life in hers.

That is the real shift. Not pretending the wound never happened, and not staying loyal to it either. Learning to live, most of the time, inside my own inner being frequency instead of the victim frequency I was handed before I even had words. Learning to feel the old pattern the second it appears and choose, on purpose, not to live there anymore.