There is a kind of wound that lives quietly in the body, one that rarely speaks in words. It is the wound of neglect, the body learning early on that needs are inconvenient, that asking for help is unsafe, that attention and care are unpredictable.
When our early needs go unmet — when love, safety, or guidance appear sporadically or not at all — our nervous system learns to survive without support. We internalize scarcity as the baseline. Over time, this neglect becomes the soil in which avoidance — of our own needs, our own longings — takes root.
Before I get into what I suspect will be a long essay, I want to share an analogy I often use with my clients: the analogy of the bench.
Recently, it’s been beautifully sunny where I live. Even as we approach the winter solstice—the shortest days of the year—I find myself exhausted and still drawn outside in the mornings, walking. Today, I passed a playground. A tired parent and their child arrived at the same moment I did. They chose a bench. The parent placed their backpack down. The child’s legs looked like electric spaghettis—wriggling and loose with pure impatience, all that energy with nowhere to go yet!
The child was waiting for their winter coat to come off. The second it did, they ran toward the playground as if their life depended on it. But as soon as they started climbing, they turned around and looked back.
The parent waved. Smiled. Nodded.
Yes, I see you. You’re safe. If something happens, I’ll be here.
In my work, I become the bench for as long as someone needs one. If safety wasn’t a given in their childhood, I offer a place to land when they fall. I am not their parent. They are not my child. They will build many benches throughout their life. But if they let me—if they look back—I will always wave. God knows I love waving.
The bench is where capacity is built. It’s where we return after life has thrown rocks at us: to catch our breath, assess our wounds, and figure out what kind of care we need. The body knows. The support meets it there. The parent’s role is not to stop the child from running toward the playground. The child is here to play. The parent is here to be available when they return. When kids ask me what it is that I do, this is what I tell them: I want adults to access the electric spaghetti legs. I want adults to play, too.
Harm is part of being alive, part of being in a body. As absurd as it is that we’ve engineered so much of it, we haven’t found a way around it. What makes the difference is not whether we fall, but whether someone is there when we do. Those who receive support recover differently than those who don’t. And for those of you whose precious heart tightens reading this—because there was no bench for you when you were small—I wish I could come out of your screen, take your face in my hands, and say this:
