"Sometimes the reason you still feel eight years old around your family is that no one ever let you resign from the job you were given at eight."
If this resonates with you, what follows may help you see something about yourself.
Seeker
I need something practical. When my mom calls and starts in about how lonely she is and how my brother never visits, I need a way to end the call without it turning into an hour. Just a script. What do I say?
Guide
I can try, but tell me what actually happens in that hour. Where does it go?
Seeker
She talks, I fix. I suggest things. I say I’ll call my brother, I say I’ll come by. Then I hang up and I’m wrecked for the rest of the night and I don’t even know why. I’m thirty four. I feel like a kid who got yelled at.
Guide
That “wrecked” is what I want to slow down on. When you say you feel like a kid, is that a figure of speech or does it actually feel like that?
Seeker
It feels like that. Like I’m small. Like I’m back in the kitchen when I was little and she’d be crying at the table and I’d stand there trying to make it okay. Same feeling exactly. I don’t turn into an adult on those calls. I just get younger.
Guide
So the script isn’t going to reach it, is it. You can have the perfect sentence and still be that kid at the table.
Seeker
Maybe. I don’t know. I just want it to stop. Can we just do the script?
Guide
We can. But I keep thinking the words are downstream. What was your job in that kitchen.
Seeker
To make her okay. That was the whole thing. Dad wasn’t around much and she’d fall apart and I was the one there. I got good at it. Everybody said I was so mature.
Guide
Mature. That word costs something when you look at it.
Seeker
It wasn’t mature. She’d tell me things. Adult things. I’d lie in bed working out how to cheer her up the next day. That’s not, that’s not maturity, that’s.
Guide
Keep going.
Seeker
I’m angry. There, I said it. I’m angry and then immediately I feel like garbage for being angry because she was struggling, she was actually alone, it wasn’t her fault. See, I can’t even hold it for two seconds.
Guide
I notice how fast the guilt comes in to take the anger away. Almost the same reflex as fixing her. You cover the anger the way you used to cover the crying.
Seeker
Because the anger is disloyal. She did her best. And I love her.
Guide
Both true. And you were still handed something that wasn’t yours. The guilt you feel now, I think that’s the same wall that kept you at that table. It stops you standing up.
Seeker
So I never quit. That’s what you’re saying. I’m thirty four and I still show up for a shift I got assigned when I was eight.
Guide
You just said that, not me. You never resigned. Nobody ever told you that you could. Well, I am not sure if this was the right way to put it.
Seeker
I don’t even know what it would mean to. I can’t picture a phone call where I’m not managing her. It’s not that I won’t. I genuinely don’t know who I am on that call if I’m not doing that.
Guide
You don’t have to know that right at this moment.
Seeker
I don’t like this. I came here for a script. This is bigger than a script and I don’t want it to be. I have to call her Sunday and now I’m just going to be sitting in this the whole week.
Guide
Yeah.
Seeker
I don’t have anything for that. I don’t know what I do with it.
If you set down the job of keeping them okay, whose feeling would you be left holding, and what have you never let yourself feel about carrying it this long?
If you read back the conversation: notice where the guide quietly became the one who knows — naming things, settling them. That feels normal because it happens so often. It's also where your own sense of direction can go quiet. SelfChatter adds a second voice that just makes those moments visible, so the direction stays yours.