What happens when yesterday’s protection enters today’s relationships
Drew had been standing in the prison queue for hours.
He was in a country he barely knew, waiting to see a brother he had not seen in five years. For three of those years, the family had not even known where Stalin was.
Then came the phone call. Prison. A foreign country. His wife was dead. Stalin had killed her. There are pieces of family news for which nobody has prepared the correct response.
For almost a year, Drew and his siblings had tried everything they could think of: lawyers, relatives, consular channels, friends of friends, anyone who might help them understand what had happened. Eventually, permission was granted for Drew to visit.
He had saved for months for the journey. Now he sat in a large visiting hall waiting for his younger brother. Ten minutes passed. Twenty. Thirty. Then a man appeared at the other end of the room.
Drew stared.
Stalin had always been tall and handsome. The family had been rather unfairly blessed in that regard. The brothers were the sort of African men who could make Greek gods nervous. The women in the family had received a slightly less enthusiastic allocation from the genetic department, which Drew occasionally attributed to God’s sense of humor.
But the man walking toward him barely resembled the brother he remembered. He was thin, his face aged, and lesions marred his skin. Prison had taken something from him.
Drew stood. By the time Stalin reached him, tears were already coming. For a while, the brothers held each other. Then they sat down. Drew had traveled thousands of kilometers with dozens of questions. When the moment finally arrived, he managed to say three words.
“What happened, man?”
Stalin looked at him.
“We have an hour,” he said. “Let me tell you.”
Before Cindy
Stalin met Cindy soon after arriving in the country. They were drawn to each other quickly and, within months, almost inseparable. They partied together, drank together and built a life with the intensity of two people who believed they had finally found someone who understood them.
In some ways, they had. Both had grown up afraid. Drew knew that world intimately. Their father had been controlling, angry, and unpredictable. When sober, his silence could fill the house. When drunk, everyone paid attention.
Five boys and three girls learned his moods long before they had the language to describe emotions. They didn’t know anything about nervous systems, emotional regulation, or protective responses. Nobody sat them down to explain fight, flight, freeze, or appeasement.
They became very good at surviving. When their father became angry, somebody disappeared. Somebody became very quiet. Somebody tried to keep him happy. Occasionally, somebody fought back.
The children grew up. The responses followed them. Some of the boys found sport, which provided a useful outlet for their aggression. Their sisters married young, partly because marriage seemed like an escape from home. One brother, Mathew, eventually became a priest. Stalin was the mild one. Sociable. Easy with people. At least that was how Drew remembered him.
Cindy had her own history. Her father had also been violent. Her mother eventually fled with the girls. The family escaped the house, but leaving a dangerous environment and recovering from one are not necessarily the same thing.
What happened later in Cindy’s family was devastating. One of her sisters died while still very young. Cindy carried on. Then she and Stalin had a baby. Something changed.
When the Past Enters the Room
Stalin struggled to pinpoint exactly when their relationship turned violent. There wasn’t a single dramatic beginning. There were arguments. Drinking. Jealousy. Shouting. Reconciliation. Another argument. Then pushing. Then hitting.
Neighbors intervened. Family members tried to separate them. Friends encouraged them to get help. For periods, they stayed apart, then found their way back to each other. Their daughter eventually went to live with her grandmother.
Listening across the table, Drew noticed how badly human beings want a clean explanation for something terrible. Perhaps Cindy’s childhood caused this. Perhaps Stalin became his father. Perhaps alcohol explains everything.
But people aren’t equations.
Childhood can shape what we expect from relationships without determining who we ultimately become. Repeated frightening experiences may affect how people respond to threats, but history does not absolve adults of responsibility. Stress matters. Alcohol matters. Personality matters. The relationship itself matters. Choices matter.
This was one of the distinctions we explored in Session 8 of The Clarity Room™: childhood is influential; it is not destiny. And violence is not emotional regulation. It is harm.
Whatever had happened inside Stalin’s body, whatever he had learned as a frightened boy, he remained responsible for what he did as a man. Stalin seemed to understand that now.
“I kept thinking I wasn’t like Dad,” he said.
Drew looked at him.
“Were you?”
Stalin was quiet for a while.
“Sometimes.”
That answer probably contained more truth than a longer one would have.
The Night Everything Ended
Stalin and Cindy had been apart for about a week when they reconciled. Both were drinking heavily by then. That evening, they argued about another woman. Stalin admitted there had been someone else.
The argument escalated. At some point, Stalin struck Cindy. She fell, hit the furniture and was fatally injured. One action. A life ended. A child lost her mother. Two families changed permanently.
Stalin went to prison. He told Drew that something inside him seemed to collapse afterwards. The outgoing young man disappeared. In his place was someone overwhelmed by grief, shame and the consequences of what he had done.
Prison wasn’t particularly interested in his self-image. There were men there who were more aggressive than he was, and he quickly discovered that anger is considerably less impressive when everyone around him is also angry.
Then something unexpected happened. He met a therapist.
The Question Changed
At first, Stalin wanted to understand why he had done what he did. Over time, the questions became more uncomfortable. What happened inside him when he felt challenged? What did anger feel like before it became behaviour? What did he believe disagreement meant? What happened when he felt rejected? What had he learned from watching his father? And perhaps most painfully: at what point could he have chosen differently?
Those questions sit very close to the work we explored in Session 8.
We used a simple coaching sequence:
Trigger → Body → Emotion → Protection → Story → Regulation → Choice.
It isn’t a neurological pathway. It is a way of slowing down something that can happen astonishingly fast and asking where awareness might create another option. That distinction matters enormously in a story like Stalin’s. Understanding why behavior developed is not the same as excusing it.
In fact, sometimes understanding increases responsibility because you begin to see the places where intervention is possible. Stalin started noticing his body. The tightening. The heat. The change in breathing. The urge to defend himself. The story arriving behind it: I’m being disrespected. I’m losing control. I have to do something.
Our bodies give us information, but as we discussed in Session 8, sensation is data, not diagnosis. A clenched jaw doesn’t tell you what happened in your childhood. It might, however, tell you that something is happening now. And if you learn to notice it earlier, you have somewhere to begin.
Meeting Yourself Earlier
Stalin leaned toward his brother. “Please get the others to talk about what happened to us.” Drew didn’t answer right away. Then he smiled. “I’m finishing my psychology course next month.” For the first time during the visit, Stalin laughed. Perhaps the two brothers had arrived at the same family problem from opposite directions. One had reached it through prison. The other through study.
Neither could change the house they grew up in. But they could decide what happened next.
This is what I keep returning to after our conversation about emotional regulation: progress isn’t becoming a person who never reacts. Regulation is what happens between having an emotion and what you eventually do with it. Perhaps last year you noticed anger in the aftermath of the damage later, while it was happening. One day, just before. Eventually, maybe you notice the jaw tightening.
That tiny movement matters. The emotion hasn’t disappeared. Your history hasn’t disappeared. The person irritating you may, in fact, still be extremely irritating. But you’ve met yourself earlier. And earlier gives you choices.
The Emotional Regulation Ladder™ we used in Session 8 moves from automatic reaction through noticing emotion and body activation, naming what is happening, regulating, investigating our interpretation and finally choosing a response that reflects our values. Nobody climbs it perfectly. That’s rather the point. The question isn’t simply: did I react? A better question might be, how quickly did I return to choice?
For Stalin, that understanding had arrived painfully late. He knew it. “I’ll regret Cindy for the rest of my life,” he told Drew. “I can’t undo that.” He still had years left on his sentence.
Therapy wasn’t going to open the prison gates. Understanding his childhood wasn’t going to bring Cindy back to her daughter. Emotional regulation wasn’t a clever excuse that made responsibility disappear. If anything, it made responsibility clearer. But Stalin could decide what would travel forward.
What Travels Home
When the hour ended, the brothers embraced again. Drew walked out of the prison carrying a different burden than the one he’d brought in.
On the flight home, he thought about his siblings. Eight children had grown up in the same house, but they hadn’t necessarily shared the same childhood. Each had found ways to adapt. Some had become quiet. Some accommodating. Some angry. Some independent. Some had left.
The behaviors that once helped children survive can sometimes carry into adults’ marriages, offices, friendships, and eventually into the homes of another generation. That doesn’t make them permanent. It makes them worth noticing.
Outside the aircraft window, the city shrank until Drew could no longer distinguish buildings from roads. Somewhere behind him was his brother, still serving his sentence. Somewhere ahead was the rest of the family.
Drew couldn’t rewrite what had happened in their father’s house, and he certainly couldn’t rewrite what had happened to Cindy. But perhaps the family could become curious about what they had carried out of that house.
Notice it sooner. Name it. Talk about it. Get help when help was needed. And when the old response appeared, learn to ask whether it still belonged in the life they were building.
Our bodies can inform the conversation. They do not have to make the final decision. Sometimes changing a family story begins there.
If this message stirred something in you, don’t let it fade.
1. Join my LinkedIn Habit Coaching Newsletter: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/habits-with-coach-edwin-7399067976420966400/
2. Join my Habit WhatsApp Community at https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VbAmKkOBvvsWOuBx5g3L
3. Join The Clarity Room at https://chat.whatsapp.com/HzoEAcKBM4lDHtzDnl6IL8
4. Ready to level up your life? Join my 12-Month Personal Transformation Program and let’s intentionally build the next version of you — with clarity, discipline, and momentum. Call or WhatsApp me directly at +254 724 328059, and let’s begin.
Comments
Post a Comment