The Weight of Unanswered Cries

How a lifetime of fierce independence masks the primal terror of never being picked up, and what happens when you finally let someone hold you

I spent decades believing my strength was my identity. As I grew older, I became the woman who learned how to survive, who had to become her own anchor while the world around her kept shifting. I became a master at moving forward, keeping my footing, and never letting myself lean on anything too long in case it disappeared.

And if you’ve walked with me through the most recent chapters of my life, you know what it looks like when a woman tries to make herself small enough to fit inside someone else’s storm. You take on the weight of things that were never yours to carry. You tell yourself that if you’re just patient enough, flexible enough, and quiet enough, room will eventually be made for you. It never is. You just end up living behind a wall of absolute armor, convincing yourself that carrying everything alone is the same thing as being safe.

I thought that armor was protection. I thought staying guarded, managing every outcome, and carrying the entire weight of the world was simply what strong women do. I had been doing it since before I could speak.

That’s what I discovered during this last retreat that I attended.

During one of our deepest processes, I realized something about my own foundation that I had never let myself see clearly. I don’t have many memories of my childhood. Not the good ones, not the bad ones. Just blank space where memory should be. Worse than the blank space was what my body had kept locked away underneath it. I don’t have a single memory of being held by my parents. Not one. Not because it’s buried too deep to find, but because I don’t think it happened enough to leave a mark. Deep down, I never learned how to feel safe enough to receive affection, because affection was never something offered to me consistently enough to trust.

My mother used to tell a story like it was harmless family lore. As a baby, I would cry in my crib at night, not wanting to be alone, desperate to be picked up. My parents didn’t come. They let me cry until I wore myself out and passed out from exhaustion. She told it like a funny anecdote about what an intense baby I was. I heard it several times and never once let myself feel what it actually meant.

When you learn before you can even speak that your cries will not be answered, you stop asking. You build a fortress around your nervous system before you have language for what a nervous system even is. You become fiercely, terrifyingly independent, and you call it strength because the alternative, needing someone who might not come, is unbearable. You tell yourself you don’t need anyone. You tell yourself softness is a liability.

That survival mechanism followed me into every room I ever walked into as an adult. It shaped how I loved, how I partnered, how I stayed in a marriage where I was fundamentally unseen, and how I kept guarding my heart long after I finally walked out that door. It shaped how I stayed in the chaos of my last relationship, patient and easygoing, waiting for room that was never going to be made. My body was still that infant in the crib. Still bracing for the silence. Still bracing to be left.

During an exercise in this last retreat, I let myself be held by another woman on this path; a sister I had known for less than 48 hours. And in that embrace, something in me broke open so completely it shook something loose in my soul. For the first time in my entire life, I felt safe. Not managed-safe, not performed-safe. Actually safe. Zero armor. Zero defense. Zero walls between me and being held.

The body doesn’t lie, and it doesn’t wait politely for your mind to catch up. I have struggled with sleep for as long as I can remember. I am a light sleeper who guards her nights the way she’s guarded everything else, half-awake, half-vigilant, waiting for the shoe to drop even in rest. But last week, for the first time in my life, I slept soundly every single night. Deep, uninterrupted, actually restorative sleep. Because when the nervous system finally learns it’s safe to be held, it can finally put the shield down.

We spend so much of our lives trying to strategize our way into healing. Reading the books. Building the routines. Forcing ourselves to evolve through sheer discipline. But I don’t think real transformation happens in the mind. I think it happens in the body, in the exact moment you finally let someone in, let the armor actually fall, and discover, maybe for the first time since you were an infant crying in a dark room, that you are safe being held.

Soléa