Born Tired: Where Survival Meets Healing

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Eirene: Some fears don't hide in the dark. They live in the bloodstream. Pass down through silence and survival. They echo in the tone of your voice when anger rises in the words you swallow before they reach the air. In the way your body braces for storms that never come, some fears don't need a reason.

They live inside memories you never speak of. The smell of liquor, the sound of a door slamming, the way you tiptoe around someone that could love you one moment and destroy you the next.

I didn't just grow up afraid of my father's drinking. I grew up afraid of what it might awaken in me, afraid of what I might inherit, afraid of what I might repeat. Because children of alcoholics don't only fear addiction. We fear the anger. We fear the control.

We fear the emptiness that hides beneath both. [00:01:00] We learn early that love can wound and still be called love. That silence can keep the peace, but never really bring it. For years, I tried to outrun everything that reminded me of him. His laugh that came too loud, his charm that turned to anger, his way of twisting truth until it served him.

But resistance has its own gravity. Even when I thought I was free, I was still orbiting his shadow. It took me years to understand that becoming the opposite of him still meant he was the center of my story and this. This is the story of what it looked like to finally step out of that shadow, to face the fear that maybe he wasn't only in my past but still living quietly in the parts of me I was still learning how to love.

This is Born Tired, Where Survival Meets Healing. A podcast for those of us who grew up in survival mode but are ready to heal and speak our truth. I'm Eirene, a [00:02:00] cycle breaker, learning what peace feels like after years of survival. Every episode is an invitation to rest inside your truth, to feel seen, and to remember you are never alone. This is what it sounds like when silence finally breaks.

Before we begin, I want to share a gentle reminder. This episode includes stories and reflections about domestic violence, childhood trauma, and abuse. Please listen in a way that feels safe for you. If at any point you need to pause or step away, honor that. Your wellbeing matters more than finishing the episode.

If you or someone you know is in danger or needs support, you can reach out to the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1 800 7 9 9 7 2 3 3 or visit thehotline.org for free. Confidential help is available 24 hours a day. And if you're listening from outside the US you can find international hotlines and local resources at findahelpline.com. You are not [00:03:00] alone. Take care of yourself while you listen.

This episode is about fear, how it shaped my choices, how it followed me into adulthood, and what it took to separate who I am from who I was afraid to become. Growing up with an alcoholic parent changes how you see everything, especially yourself.

I wasn't just afraid of alcohol. I was afraid of becoming him. In high school, a lot of my friends were experimenting, drinking, smoking, trying new things. And me. I refused. People thought it was weird that I graduated without experimenting. They teased me and said I was too serious. But I knew exactly what I was protecting myself from. I wasn't trying to fit in. I was trying to stay free. I was determined to be the opposite of my father. But the truth is I've always seen parts of him in me. We were both scapegoats in our families, both truth tellers. The difference [00:04:00] was how we told it. He said his truths when he was drunk, loud, messy, cruel. And I think that's why he hated that I could see through him even when I was quiet.

I remember in fifth grade he got into a car accident. Someone had ran a red light. It wasn't his fault, but the car accident triggered something in him, he was different. He started going to Alcoholics Anonymous with my uncle, and I was so proud. I even went to some of the family events, sat in those rooms and thought maybe this is what healing looks like. For a year he didn't drink, and for a year I believed he could change.

But after he won the settlement from the accident, that was the end of AA and the end of that version of him. Like I mentioned in the previous episode, the abuse had escalated to the point Child Protective Services got involved. He stopped the physical abuse after they showed up at our house, [00:05:00] but the verbal and emotional abuse never stopped. He'd break furniture tables, chairs and make me drag them outside. Then tell me to bring them back. We'd do that for hours until he was done playing whatever twisted game that was.

Once he kicked me out, but when I started packing my clothes and he saw I wasn't scared, just ready to go, he changed his mind. He told me if I walked out that door, he'd kill me. He never kicked me out again after that. Some people only hold power when they can convince you you're trapped. My friends and I used to joke about it. We called them Martin, like Martin Lawrence from the show, always yelling, get out, but it wasn't really funny. It was just easier to laugh than admit how unsafe home felt.

He had kicked out most of my cousins and friends at some point, too. It was almost a rite of passage. No one lasted too long around him. If I brought friends home when he was sober, they'd be confused. [00:06:00] They look around and say, he seems nice because sober, he could charm anyone. But eventually they'd see him drunk, and in that moment they'd get it. They'd get a glimpse of what I was living through every day.

The truth always finds its way to the surface, even when you try to hide it. The last time I went to Dominican Republic with my family was after CPS got involved. We were staying at my grandmother's house. There was a lot of people at the house. Everyone was talking and laughing. Then from a distance, I heard him screaming, where is she? Everything went quiet. I knew he was coming for me. He burst through the door drunk, angry, shouting that here in Dominican Republic, he could kill me, and no one would stop him.

People were yelling, trying to hold him back. I was swinging my arms trying to push him away from me, trying to protect myself. At some point I scratched his face and he looked at me like I'd done [00:07:00] something unforgivable. He said, look at what you did to my face, not even a whore would do that to me. He didn't speak to me for the rest of the trip, and I wasn't sad about it. I was relieved he wasn't speaking to me, and part of me was glad everyone got a glimpse of what it was like living with him.

When I left for bootcamp, everyone kept writing to tell me how much he missed me, how he cried, how he was such a great dad, how proud he was I joined the Navy. I wanted to believe them. I wanted to believe him. I wanted to believe maybe the distance had changed something that maybe we'd get another chance at a different kind of relationship.

But when I came home on leave, nothing had changed. He was still the same man. Angry, unpredictable and cruel. No matter how careful I was. He found a way to twist my words, to break me down. Even across oceans, Hawaii, Okinawa, anywhere, he still found a way to make me small. I [00:08:00] used to dread calling home. I'd have to prepare myself before, and it took days to recover after. And still a part of me hope he'd love me differently next time. It took me years to understand that I wasn't healing from one version of him. I was healing from all of them, the drunk, the sober, the father who cried when I left, and the one who tore me apart when I stayed.

The fear of becoming him is what kept me sober, but not becoming him meant learning how to love myself in all the places he couldn't. For a long time, I thought healing meant distance. If I could stay far enough from what hurt me, maybe it couldn't reach me anymore. Maybe it couldn't shape me. So I built my life around what I didn't wanna become. I wouldn't drink, I wouldn't yell. I wouldn't repeat the chaos that raised me. Every rule I made for myself was written in fear. Fear of repeating him, fear of losing myself to something I spent my whole [00:09:00] life surviving, and for a while it worked. I felt safe, controlled, disciplined, proud of all the walls I built. But over time, those walls started to feel heavy. Because even if you never become them, you're still living through them when everything you do is in reaction to who they were.

I was so focused on not becoming him that I forgot to become me. I kept carrying his story just in reverse. Every choice was a correction. , Every boundary was a shield. And somewhere in all that protecting, I forgot that I wasn't broken. I was just afraid. Healing asked me to stop defining myself by what I was trying to escape, to stop fighting ghosts that only lived in memory. It asked me to see that not every similarity was a sentence, that I could share his intensity, his passion, even his stubbornness, and still use those things differently because the truth is I didn't inherit his [00:10:00] demons. I inherited his fire and what I do with that fire, that's my story now. Some traits only destroy when they're unloved. When you bring them into awareness, they become power. It took me a long time to understand that healing wasn't about erasing him. It was about releasing the hold he had on how I saw myself. To realize that forgiveness wasn't about excusing what happened.

It was about freeing the part of me that kept reliving it. I used to think forgiveness meant letting him off the hook, but really it meant letting myself off from all the stories that said I was destined to repeat his pain. I see now that the similarities don't scare me anymore.

They remind me I have a choice. To speak when he would've shouted. To pause when he would've exploded, to love when he would've withdrawn. I'm not the opposite of him, i'm the evolution. Focused on choosing to begin [00:11:00] again instead of becoming what broke me. There's a freedom that comes when you stop trying to prove you're nothing like them. When you realize you've already rewritten the story just by surviving it differently. When you stop fighting their reflection and start honoring your own. The fear of becoming him kept me small for years. But facing that fear, naming it, speaking it out loud is what finally set me free. Now I know I can hold both truths that I came from him, but I am not him. That I carry his fire, but I use it to build, not burn. Learning that your story doesn't end where theirs did, you get to write a new ending and it doesn't have to look like survival anymore.

We can't erase the past, but we can change our relationship to it so that we can hold our own story without letting it crush us. There was a time when every reminder of him felt like proof that I [00:12:00] was still broken. The sound of a bottle opening, the way someone raised their voice. Even the look in my own eyes when I was angry, it all felt too close, too familiar.

I used to think I could only be safe if I erased every trace of him. But healing has shown me that safety isn't found in avoidance. It's found in awareness. It's being able to say, yes, that sound still makes my body tense, but I can breathe through it now. Yes, that memory still hurts, but it no longer defines me. For so long I carried his voice inside mine, the critic, the storm, the volatility that lived in my nervous system. And I hated those parts of myself because they reminded me of him. But healing invited me to stop hating those parts. To see that the anger I inherited wasn't my downfall. It was my body's way of protecting me when no one else did. [00:13:00] To see that my intensity wasn't a flaw, it was the same fire that kept me alive. I think that's what recovery really is. Not from alcohol or addiction, but from the emotional inheritance of chaos, from the constant bracing, the overthinking, the fear of who you might become. Healing asks you to trust that the version of you who survived was doing her best with what she knew.

There's a softness in seeing what survival really was, devotion. To yourself. To the child who just needed somewhere to feel safe. And when that truth sinks in, when you stop needing to prove you're not them and start honoring the person you became in spite of them, something shifts.

You stop fighting your reflection. You stop shrinking every time you feel a familiar emotion. You stop fearing your own fire because the thing about fire is it's neutral. It only [00:14:00] destroys when it's uncontained, but when you learn how to hold it, it becomes light, it becomes warmth.

That's what I've learned about my father's shadow. It never really fades. It shifts, becoming a reminder of how far I've come and who I'm still becoming. I used to think I was healing from him, but I was really healing the parts of me that believed I couldn't exist without his permission. There's peace that comes with that kind of clarity, the kind that lives in your body, when you finally stop waiting for someone else to apologize. These days, I don't measure my healing by how far I've gotten from my past.

I measure it by how gently I could look back. By how I can hear his name and not flinch, by how I can talk about him without losing my voice. That's the kind of healing that doesn't erase you. It restores you. I don't fear becoming him anymore because I already became something he never had the courage to be soft, [00:15:00] self-aware, accountable. I know how to name my pain without passing it on, and that's how the cycle ends. It's showing up for yourself when no one taught you how. It's forgiving yourself for the years you spent surviving. It's realizing you've already broken the pattern just by choosing peace when chaos is an option. You are the interruption in your bloodline, the one who turns survival into softness and pain into presence. And that doesn't mean that fear never comes back.

Sometimes it still does. In the middle of a hard day, or when I raise my voice and I hear a tone that sounds too familiar, but now I know what to do with it. I breathe. I remind myself that awareness is what separates me from the past, that I am not him. That my story didn't end where his did, because healing isn't about running from who raised you.

It's about becoming the kind of [00:16:00] person they never learned how to be. So if you've carried that fear that maybe the worst parts of them live somewhere inside you, I hope you remember this. You're not doomed to repeat what hurt you, your proof that it can end with you. Your proof that love when it's conscious can rewrite a whole lineage, and that's the real legacy, not the pain that got passed down, but the peace you're building in its place. If today's story brought something up for you, a memory, a truth, a part of yourself, you're still learning to hold take a moment to breathe because some episodes don't just land in the mind. They land in the nervous system. They land in the places where fear has lived for a long time, in the places where you've had to stay alert even when nothing is happening.

And if you're someone who knows what it feels like to carry the fear of becoming them, of repeating what you survived, I want to say this gently and clearly. [00:17:00] The fact that you're afraid of it is already evidence of your difference. The fear means you have awareness. It means you have a conscience. It means you're paying attention in a way they never did. You don't have to prove you're not them by being perfect. You don't have to be calm all the time. You don't have to erase anger to be safe. You're allowed to be a person who has triggers and memories and hard days and still be healing.

And if this episode made you look at yourself more closely, if it made you question parts of you that you've judged, I hope you hold those parts with compassion, not shame, because healing isn't just about what you stop doing. It's also about what you stop carrying. The belief you're destined to repeat the past. The belief that your one mistake away from becoming the monster you survived. The belief that you're only good if you stay small, quiet, controlled, and easy to be around. You don't [00:18:00] have to figure out your whole story today. Just notice what wants to be seen, and what your body is ready to release. Thank you for spending this time with me and for walking this path of healing, one story, one breath at a time.

If this episode resonated with you, please share with someone who might need it and take a moment to leave a review wherever you listen, your review helps more people find the podcast and reminds others they're not alone. Don't forget to subscribe or follow the show so you never miss an episode. You can also join me on substack, where I share weekly reflections and gentle reminders to help you feel less alone on your healing journey. You'll find the link in the show notes. If you'd like to connect beyond the podcast you can find me on Instagram @borntiredpodcast. I'd love to hear what resonated with you. And if you'd like to support the podcast, there's a link there to buy me a coffee. Thank you for being here, [00:19:00] for listening with an open heart. Most of all, remember this, your story matters. Your voice matters, and you are not alone.

This episode was written and narrated by Eirene Torres. Audio production by Carlos Torres. Original music composed by Carlos Torres.

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