⚔️ What it means to have grown up with domestic violence
Violence or the threat of it hung in the air like smoke—you never felt completely safe in the place that should have protected you.
Your home became a battlefield where you learned to read micro-expressions, scan for warning signs, and calculate escape routes. While other kids felt secure in their own space, you developed a hypervigilant nervous system that never truly relaxed. Every raised voice, sudden movement, or slammed door triggered your internal alarm system, teaching you that safety is always temporary and danger is always possible.
This constant state of alert didn't just shape your childhood—it rewired your brain for a lifetime of expecting threat, creating a cruel paradox where you became both hypervigilant to danger and mysteriously blind to the warning signs when they mattered most. You learned that power comes through force or intimidation, and that love and violence can coexist in the same space.