I Began as a Daughter

I began as a daughter. A daughter of an alcoholic, born into the chaos and confusion of a narcissistic family system. Both of my parents inherited patterns and unhealed trauma from a long lineage before them. My father came from a long line of alcoholics, shame, and religious abuse, and my mother carried her own unhealed wounds born of deep family dysfunction and religious abuse. I was the youngest of four, the scapegoat, the one who carried the weight of unspoken truths and inherited pain.

I was also a highly sensitive child. One who knew love was the answer and could not bear its absence. I felt everything: the tension before a fight, the silence after, the sudden shift in the air when someone’s mood changed. I not only felt my emotions deeply, but I also absorbed and internalized the emotions of everyone around me. I experienced the world on a level that others, especially within my family, could not seem to understand. Where they deflected, denied, or numbed, I felt fully and painfully. In a home where emotions were avoided, my ability to feel and express them was seen as the problem.

My sensitivity was treated as weakness, my emotional truth as something to be corrected. In my family, emotions were not nurtured or understood. Only anger, rage, and self-pity were welcomed. The rage my mother carried for her own despair and helplessness was saved for behind closed doors, and I was often the target. My father’s self-pity became the center of gravity around which we all learned to orbit. My siblings and I were expected to present a happy front to the world, to keep the illusion of a family intact while the truth remained buried beneath denial and shame.

Even then, I wanted nothing more than to guide others back to love, because I couldn’t bear to witness the self-destruction that came in its absence. That longing to help others reconnect to what was lost became an intuitive gift — one that, years later, would become the foundation of my life’s work. Today, that same sensitivity that was once shamed and misunderstood serves as the compass I use to guide others home to themselves.

As I grew older, that longing turned into confusion, and the confusion turned into despair. Powerlessness, hopelessness, and helplessness became the air I breathed. No matter what I did, said, or expressed in any way, it was minimized, disregarded, made fun of, or deemed not good enough. The bullying and cruelty from my older siblings were ignored or even justified, leaving me to believe I somehow deserved it. When I began to retaliate in an effort to protect myself, it only confirmed the family’s narrative that I was the problem child.

By my early teens, the pain had become unbearable. I truly believed the only way out was to end my life.

My attempt was nearly successful, but when I survived, instead of being met with compassion or concern, I was met with dismissal and further abandonment. That moment cemented what I already believed deep down: that I was unwanted, a burden, and utterly alone in a world that didn’t seem to have room for me.

After that, something in me shut down. I became disconnected from who I truly was. It wasn’t even survival; it was a kind of unconscious autopilot, a numbness from the inside out. The madness of my chaotic home was only ramping up, and I spent many days lost in a fog of dissociation. On the rare occasions when I could feel anything at all, I drowned it out with highly risky behavior, rebellion, promiscuity, binge eating, and alcohol, each a desperate attempt to quiet the storm within me.

Whatever disempowering emotions, terror, fear, and pain I witnessed or endured, along with the physical abuse and emotional neglect, were now expertly stored within my body. I believed that if I could bury them deep enough, I could escape them all. But the things I buried were buried alive, and little did I know, they would begin eating me from the inside out. My system had become fragmented, guided by parts of me that each carried their own survival strategy: to numb, to please, to appease, to fawn, to fight, to dissociate, to reach for anything that could dull the ache. These parts worked tirelessly to protect me from feeling what once felt unbearable, not realizing that in doing so, they were keeping me disconnected from the self I was longing to return to.

My adulthood began when I left home at seventeen and moved two thousand miles away to New York City, desperate to escape. But everything I was running from was still frozen within my nervous system. At first, it seemed like I was getting my life together. I found work, built routines, and convinced myself that distance meant freedom. For a while, it looked like I was doing well. But beneath the surface, the unhealed parts of me were still carrying everything I had buried.

Then I was sexually assaulted, and the fragile sense of safety I had built shattered. In the aftermath, all the painful survival strategies I thought I had outgrown came roaring back. The numbing, the rebellion, the self-blame, the desperate search for something to quiet what I could not face. It was as if every wound I had tried to escape found me again, reminding me that nothing truly disappears until it is healed.

At nineteen, I discovered Adult Children of Alcoholics and felt I had stumbled upon pieces of truth that mirrored my story. But the message, and the depth of pain it revealed, was too overwhelming to stay with. Truthfully, I’m not sure I even knew enough of what had happened to me for ACA to have made a lasting difference at that time. I had gone from the frying pan into the fire, from small-town Great Falls, Montana, to New York City, and I wasn’t safe enough yet to take in what ACA had to offer. So I kept running, often running while staying in place.

Now, as a Somatic Wellness Practitioner and Parts Work Facilitator, I understand that I was being led by parts of me that had hidden my true self long ago. Those parts had one goal: survival. They carried the strategies that kept me alive in an environment where love was unsafe and truth was punished. But those same strategies, while once protective, eventually caused deep harm to myself and, at times, to others. It would take many years and immense compassion to begin teasing apart those patterns, one thread at a time, and finding my way back home to the person I had always been beneath the pain.

By the time I was a young woman, I had already learned how to protect myself in ways that weren’t true to my essence. Protection over connection, attachment over authenticity. I learned to perform, to please, to anticipate, to disappear. I gave as good as I got, meeting sharpness with sharpness, pain with pain, and each time, a layer of self-hatred grew thicker.

True to the traits I carried as an adult child of an alcoholic and a dysfunctional family, I married an alcoholic. He mirrored my father in nearly every way. I wanted nothing more than to be good enough for him to finally change and love me. We were married for just over three years. When I became pregnant, something inside me shifted. I suddenly knew that I was not going to allow what was happening to me to happen to this unborn baby.

After divorcing him, I was not out of the woods. I hadn’t healed any of my own wounds. I had simply survived while adding new ones to the pile. Still operating from unhealed trauma, I remarried into another toxic relationship. In true adult child fashion, I set out to fix what was broken so I could finally feel safe. I had a second son, and by the time that marriage ended nineteen years later, I was the alcoholic.

I have two beautiful grown sons that I am so deeply proud of. Because of my own alcohol abuse, which I have been in recovery from for ten years, I have walked a long road of healing. The rage and anger I carried were often internalized or projected onto my husband at the time. Deep down, I knew I was failing my kids, myself, my marriage, and my life, but all I knew how to do was double down on the belief that if I just kept trying hard enough, I could fix things, be better, and somehow make it through. I simply didn’t have the skills to make any of that happen. The deep love I held for both of my sons was often overshadowed by the survival strategies I had learned to live by, and I carried a constant, swirling mom guilt that I wasn’t enough. Yet through discovering and diving into Internal Family Systems and Parts Work, returning to Adult Children of Alcoholics, learning to be part of community, and healing through healthy relationships, I have been able to restore my relationships with my sons. I did, indeed, pass on the same shame, denial of emotions, anger, and rage that I had been raised with. Yet I am deeply grateful that I answered the call to return to them, just as I have found the courage to return to myself.

Healing has meant facing not only my pain, but the generations of pain that preceded me. It has meant accepting that my parents cannot see me as a person, as their daughter, only as the unhealed parts of themselves reflected back at them. After multiple attempts to reconcile with my family, I finally came to see that it wasn’t my fall from grace into alcohol addiction or the poor life choices I made along the way that kept me on the outside looking in. It had always been that way. That was the role I had been assigned. I began as a daughter but was cast into the role of scapegoat.

Now sober, recovering from my own generational trauma, and having repaired my relationships with my sons, my family still cannot see me. They remain locked into the same narrative that has kept them captive for generations. I have freed myself from it all, and to protect that freedom, I have been no contact for over a year now.

There are moments when the grief of being unseen by my own parents still aches deeply. But in their absence, I have found myself. I have walked through the fire of womanhood and motherhood and emerged connected to my truth. I am not the scapegoat. I am not the problem. I am the cycle breaker, the one who said no more.

I began as a daughter. Became wounded, lost, and searching, I walked through every shadow, heartbreak, and rebirth to get here. The journey of discovery has been hard and holy, and it has been worth it. I’ve learned that life isn’t about becoming someone new; it’s about remembering who you’ve always been. It’s a journey back home to your truest self, one step, one breath, one moment of awareness at a time. I no longer strive to be perfect or healed once and for all. Instead, I allow life to move through me, to teach me, to soften me. Each day brings its own flow, with lessons, grace, and gentle reminders that I am exactly where I’m meant to be. I am home within myself now, connected to that precious little girl who began as a daughter and who always knew that love was the answer. And that, I’ve learned, is the greatest healing of all.

Teresa Napierala

Somatic Wellness Practitioner

Founder of Energies in Motion