The Pit They Dug and the Climb I Had to Make Alone

There is a particular kind of wound that does not come from enemies.

It comes from the people who were supposed to love you best. The ones who held you when you were small and frightened. The ones whose opinion you wanted more than anyone else’s. The ones you kept going back to, kept trying with, kept believing would eventually see you clearly.

The wound from those people goes deeper than anything a stranger can do to you. Because a stranger does not have access to your softest places. The people who love you – or who are supposed to love you – they know exactly where to press.

And some of them press. On purpose. Over and over again.

I am writing this from the other side of one of those relationships. Not all of them – I will get to that. But one of the hardest ones. And I want to talk about what it actually takes to climb out of a pit that someone you love helped dig for you.

The complicated truth about people who dim your light.

My mother has dementia. Not exactly dementia – years of undiagnosed high blood pressure caused bleeds into her memory cortex that mimic it. She is 89 now and in a nursing home. She does not know me when I visit. And it hurts every single time. Every time.

But here is the complicated part that most people do not tell you about caring for a parent you have a painful history with.

My mother and I were close. We were also deeply complicated. She was warm and present when I was young. And then adolescence hit – mine and her menopause at the same time – and something shifted. She became my harshest critic. My most consistent antagonist. The person most likely to twist the events of my life into a story that made me look bad, feel small, question myself.

I spent years in therapy understanding it. What I came to – slowly, painfully, with resistance – was that my mother was a Silent Generation Black woman who had lived a hard and painful life that most people never fully saw. She grew up in South Carolina, moved to New Jersey chasing a better life, and spent a brief time working as a clerical staff member – a woman of her caliber doing work that did not require a degree – until the school system would finally accept her. Once inside, she built a reputation as one of the very best. A music teacher who could challenge and stand out in any room with grace, clarity, and complete control. She ran enormous choirs. She mentored people who went on to become recognized names in music locally. Her outside persona was vibrant, caring, and funny – she was always the life of the party, the person everyone was drawn to, the woman who could light up a room without trying.

And she was deeply wounded. Her marriage to my father was its own private war. A factory worker who knew he had married above his station – and never forgave her for it. His punishment was financial. She paid the mortgage. She paid the bills. She paid for my sister and my private school education, our activities, our college. All of it. Alone. While he withheld what little he contributed as a form of control – because her degree, her profession, her excellence in rooms he could never enter, threatened something in him that he could not name and could not manage. So he managed her instead.

There was emotional abuse. Occasional physical abuse. Constant infidelity. And the particular cruelty of a man who minimized her reality at home while maintaining an immaculate public image everywhere else. He was charming in rooms full of people. Inside the house he was something else entirely. My sister and I learned early that we were most valuable to him when there was an audience – when the glad-handing required a picture of family. Otherwise we were largely invisible. My parents divorced when I was 11. He died almost twenty-five years ago. Poor and alone.

My mother survived that marriage carrying wounds she never fully named and never fully healed. And wounded people wound people – especially the ones closest to them, especially the ones who remind them of the roads not taken and the dreams quietly set aside.

A life mired in racism, in every form of abuse a woman can survive, in the particular suffocation of being a brilliant Black woman in an era that had no room for her brilliance unless it was useful to someone else.

She was extraordinary. And some of what she did was rooted in fear for me. Some of it was the generational pattern of women who were never allowed to fully bloom, redirecting that frustration onto the daughter who refused to shrink. And some of it was something harder to name and harder to forgive.

She worked, sometimes deliberately, to dim my light.

And I loved her anyway. Which is the most exhausting thing about this kind of relationship. The love does not go away just because the person is hurting you. You keep loving them and hurting at the same time, for years. You keep trying to make it better. To appease. To contort yourself into being more lovable – as if the problem was ever the amount of love you were offering and not the vessel you were offering it to. Until the hurt becomes the water you swim in and you stop noticing how hard it has become to breathe.

The pit.

I want to describe what the pit actually feels like from the inside – because if you have been in one, you know. And if you have never been in one, you cannot imagine it from the outside.

The pit is not depression, exactly. It is not a breakdown. You are functional. You are high-functioning, often. You go to work. You make decisions. You build things. From the outside you look like someone who has it together.

But inside, there is a voice that was installed by someone else. A voice that sounds like criticism but feels like truth. A voice that knows your specific vulnerabilities – because the person who put it there had access to your specific vulnerabilities – and uses them against you in your quietest moments.

You second-guess your own judgment. Not about work, not about the external things – you are excellent at those. You second-guess yourself about whether you deserve the things you want. Whether you are too much. Whether the people who leave, or hurt you, or fail to see you were right to do so.

That voice is not yours. But it lives in you like it is.

And the people who installed it do not always know they did it. Some do. Some did it on purpose and would do it again. But some – most, maybe – were themselves in a pit. Passing down what was passed to them. Loving you imperfectly in the shape of the wounds they never healed.

That does not make it acceptable. It makes it understandable. Those are not the same thing.

What dementia did that nothing else could.

When my mother’s illness progressed, her filters went with it. The version of my mother that dementia produced was unguarded in ways that were sometimes devastating.

She would reach into the most vulnerable moments of my life and reshape them into weapons. I had known she had dementia for almost ten years before I turned her over to my sister. Nobody believed me. She covered it well – the vibrant public persona that had served her entire life became the perfect camouflage. By the time anyone else could see what I had been seeing, I had already been carrying it alone for nearly a decade. I understood cognitively that the illness was driving the cruelty. And still – hearing your deepest insecurities voiced out loud by your own mother, shaped into an indictment, would send me from the room in tears.

Because the dementia did not make up new material. It worked with what was already there.

I kept her in my home for the first year of the pandemic. Just the two of us. And then I had to make the hardest decision I have ever made. I put us both on a plane and turned her over to my sister. I could not do it anymore.

The guilt from that decision lived in me for a long time. I had never wanted to put my mother in a home. She had told me once, clearly and with grief in her voice, that she would rather die any other way than lose herself the way her aunt had – to Alzheimer’s. And here she was. Losing herself. And I was not there.

But here is what therapy and time and brutal honesty helped me understand.

I had to save myself. And saving yourself from someone you love is the hardest thing a human being can do. It requires you to hold two truths at the same time: I love this person. And staying is destroying me.

Both things are true. Simultaneously. Without resolution.

The pattern that outlived her presence.

I wish I could tell you that understanding all of this freed me completely.

It did not.

What I have learned about the pit that people who love us dig is that it does not just hold you in one relationship. It becomes a template. A familiar shape that you recognize without knowing you are recognizing it. And you keep walking toward that shape because it feels like home – even when home was never entirely safe.

I am on the other side of the pit with my mother. I have done that work. I carry the grief of who she was before the illness, and the grief of what our relationship could have been, and the grief of the woman sitting in a nursing home who does not know my name anymore.

But I have made peace with most of it – and that peace did not come on its own. When I turned her over to my sister, my therapist walked me through an actual grief process. Not a future grief. A present one. We treated it like a death because in many ways it was.

I had to thank my mother out loud. For being a fabulous caretaker when she could be. For loving me in the ways she knew how, even when those ways were imperfect and sometimes painful. For helping make me independent, capable, and unbreakable in ways I did not ask for but cannot deny. I had to acknowledge my own part in my journey – because however it started, the journey is mine alone. I grieved. I cried more than I expected to. I prayed. My heart broke over and over again in that process – not once, but in waves, each one uncovering something new underneath.

And then, slowly, the clouds shifted. I felt lighter. Not healed – lighter. Every year since, that pain has slowly ebbed. The grief is still there. When she eventually leaves this earth, I will feel it again – I know that. But it will not be the same devastation it would have been had I not done that work. My therapist walked me through releasing her hand before I had to let go completely. That gift is immeasurable.

But the pit left marks I did not see until I saw them reflected in my daughter’s face.

She grew up watching me in it. A Gen Z young woman with clear eyes and zero tolerance for what she was witnessing – her mother, the person she had once looked at like she could do anything, diminished by a relationship she could not understand and could not fix. There is a moment when your child stops looking at you like a superhero and starts looking at you like a cautionary tale. I saw that moment happen. And I climbed deeper into the pit because of it.

She is 25 now. She carries her own resentment – some of it toward my mother, some of it toward the version of me that the pit produced. The holding on too tight. The over-sharing. The opinions offered when silence would have served better. The ways that pain, when you do not fully process it, leaks out onto the people standing closest to you.

That is an open wound that I am still tending. The hardest part of climbing out of a pit is discovering how far the damage traveled while you were in it. My daughter deserved better than a front row seat to my unfinished business. I know that. And the repair between us is its own slow, tender work.

I continue to fall into the same architecture in romantic relationships too. Men who see me as something to manage rather than someone to love. Who are most comfortable when I am smaller than I actually am. Who find ways, subtle and not, to press on the places that were already pressed before they arrived.

I know this about myself. I am doing the work on it. One day I will fully accept someone who does not need me to be diminished in order to feel sufficient themselves. I am not there yet. And I am telling you that because I think the most dishonest thing a person can do is stand at the top of the climb and tell you it is easy from where they are.

It is not easy. It is ongoing. And the work is not linear.

What the climb actually requires.

Therapy. Not as a suggestion – as a requirement. The voice that was installed by someone else will not leave on its own. It needs to be examined, identified, separated from your actual self. You need someone trained to help you do that because the people who love you – even the good ones – cannot see it clearly enough. They are too close to you. You need someone whose job it is to look at the architecture of how you got here without judgment and without agenda.

The decision to stop accepting the pit as normal. This is harder than it sounds. The pit becomes familiar. The pit feels like reality because it has been your reality for long enough. The day you decide – really decide, not just intellectually understand – that this is not the truth about you, that this is a story someone else wrote and you have been living inside it – that day is the beginning of the actual climb.

Pulling back slowly from the relationships that keep you in it. Not always dramatically. Not always with a confrontation or a final conversation. Sometimes just – less. Less access. Less availability. Less of yourself given to people who spend what you give them on making you feel small.

Forgiving yourself for how long it took. This one is underrated and essential. You were not stupid for staying. You were not weak for loving people who hurt you. You were human – doing what humans do, which is try to make the love work, try to find the version of the relationship that does not hurt, try to be enough that the person finally sees you the way you need to be seen.

That is not failure. That is love, imperfectly applied in an impossible situation.

You did not fail. You were hurt. Those are different things.

What I know from the other side.

I keep having to save myself from people who fail to see me as anything other than their emotional support or their verbal sparring partner. And every time I do it – every time I choose myself over the familiar pain – it gets a fraction easier than the last time.

Not easy. A fraction easier.

The pit does not disappear. But you get stronger than the pit. And one day the distance between who you are and the voice that was installed in you is wide enough that you can hear the difference. Your voice and theirs. Your truth and the story they told about you.

Your voice is the one that knows you are enough.

Theirs is the one that always needed you not to be.

Trust yours.

Have you been in this kind of pit – the one dug by someone who was supposed to love you? Where are you in the climb? Drop it in the comments if you are ready. Or just read this and know you are not alone.