Do You Have Fleas?

Nicholas Townsend Smith my12journeys.com The worst part is the echo.

The moment you hear their words, their tactics, their energy coming out of your own mouth.

It’s a moment of profound self-betrayal. You react in a way that makes your skin crawl. You become demanding. Controlling. Accusatory. All the things you hated, all the things that broke you down, and now you’re the one holding the hammer. The shame is instantaneous.

It’s a physical sickness.

This is the flea. The parasitic defense mechanism you picked up just trying to survive. You lived in a system so starved of oxygen, so devoid of truth, that you learned you had to scream to be heard. You had to control to feel safe for even a second. Your nervous system did what it had to do. It created a brutal, ugly, but effective strategy to keep you alive in an environment that was actively trying to erase you.

And now you’re out.

But the strategy remains. A ghost in your own machine.

I get pissed off just thinking about it. Pissed off at the injustice that the victim is left not only with the wound, but with the toxic coping mechanisms they had to invent to endure the wounding. It’s a special kind of fucking cruelty.

The work isn't to pretend it didn't happen. The work is to take responsibility for it now. I looked up that word recently. Responsibility. It comes from the Latin respondere, which means "to pledge back" or "to answer for." It’s not about blame. Blame is their game.

Responsibility is about us. It's the act of answering for our own actions and, in doing so, pledging back to ourselves. Pledging to return to our own core. Our own integrity.

Here is the entire difference.

They see their behavior as justified. You see yours and you feel horror.

That horror is a sacred thing. Do you hear me? That gut-wrenching cringe is the entire fucking point. It is the sign that your soul is still intact. It’s the sound of your own inner compass screaming, "This is not us. This is not who we are." Their compass is broken.

Yours is just rediscovering its true north.

I have been here. I have acted in ways that haunt me, born from a desperation to just get a single, honest answer in a house of mirrors. The work is slow. It’s brutal. It’s looking at the flea, seeing the echo of your abuser, and choosing, again and again, to pledge back to yourself. To answer for your healing.

It's the hardest part of the journey. And it's the only way through. I started thinking about that word. Flea. It’s more than just a metaphor for something you pick up.

It’s the whole damn map.

F.L.E.A.S.

Fear-driven. Because it’s born from terror, not malice.

Learned. Because it is not who you are. It was taught to you in a classroom of pain.

Emotional. Because it’s a raw, reactive nerve, not a cold, calculated choice.

Actions for Survival. That’s the key. It was a strategy to keep you breathing when the air was poison. That’s what you’re fighting. Not a character flaw. A survival strategy that’s past its expiration date.

What's a "flea" you're working to unlearn? No judgment here. Name it in the comments.

Follow for more on this journey. If you're ready to do the real work of separating your actions from their abuse, the program is linked in my bio.

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