Some nervous systems are shaped by wars they never lived through.
My father was five when he was stationed with his family in Malta during the Second World War. Malta was bombed almost daily between 1939 and 1942. Sirens carved themselves into the day. Nights disappeared underground. Buildings trembled awake in the darkness. The island starved quietly. Entire communities learned how to hold their breath together.
Those years, between five and eight, are when the developing nervous system learns what safety feels like. They are meant to be the years of play, co-regulation, and unburdened connection. Instead, my father’s body learned that danger arrives without warning, silence reduces risk, adults are frightened, and joy takes up space you cannot afford.
When he returned to Liverpool in 1943, the Blitz had technically ended, but vigilance still hung in the air like leftover smoke. Two years later, his father was killed by a V-2 rocket in Belgium. There was no language for trauma then. No therapeutic lens. No nervous system literacy. Just endurance.
At the age of thirty-nine – the same age his father died – my father developed multiple sclerosis. The body keeps anniversaries the way trees keep rings, marking seasons of stress and scarcity even when the conscious mind has forgotten the dates.
Growing up, I inherited the echo of Malta without ever seeing the island. I absorbed tension in the shoulders of adults. Hypervigilance drifted through my childhood like faint weather. Belonging always felt conditional, as if some unseen hand might quietly remove it.
Inside our home, illness gradually pulled my father into distance. My mother carried more than one nervous system should. My sister was almost killed in a road accident not long after the MS diagnosis, and catastrophe became a third parent in the house. I learned to be helpful rather than needy, to anticipate rather than express, to disappear rather than add one ounce to a mother already drowning. Competence became safety; responsibility became identity.
School offered no refuge. I attended a Christian Brothers Catholic school in the 1970s, where shame, secrecy, and humiliation passed as teaching. My form tutor and chemistry teacher was Alan Morris, later named publicly in Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil by David Nolan. In that environment, visibility was dangerous. Silence was survival. Many years later, a therapist asked how I became a teacher after such schooling. The answer is simple: I wanted to build the classroom I needed and never had.
Decades later, something curious happened. I woke up on a sunny September Sunday morning with an unexpected question: “Whatever happened to that bastard?” I had not seen him since 1979. When I searched his name, pages of articles appeared. He had been sentenced to prison two weeks earlier. Something in me stirred at the moment collective silence broke. It felt less like memory and more like thaw, an old freeze melting because the world was finally naming what my nervous system had carried without language. Two months later, I enrolled in my first mindfulness-based stress reduction course. The timing never felt accidental. Sometimes the body begins to remember just as we learn how to pay attention.
People often say, “I’ve never felt at home,” as if it were a preference. It isn’t. It is what happens when the nervous system never learns to exhale fully. Home becomes something you protect yourself from. Now, at sixty-two, living in Canada with love and meaningful work, there is still a faint whisper beneath the floorboards: don’t unpack. That is not geography. That is neuroception – the ancient watchman doing their rounds.
Here in Canada, I live among newcomers who know bombardment in their bones. They arrive from Syria, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, Palestine. They carry separation, scarcity, and grief into a new country, only to face a second wound when their credentials, languages, and capacities are quietly dismissed. They are grateful to be here, and gratitude does not erase heartbreak. When your skills are not recognized, your nervous system is not recognized. Recognition is regulation.
All of this unfolds on land shaped by the displacement of Indigenous peoples whose stewardship predates every arrival. To speak of belonging here requires humility. Remembering who we are must include remembering where we stand.
There is another inheritance I did not understand for a long time. My father’s nervous system learned urgency under bombs. Delay was dangerous. Hesitation threatened survival. His adult body, ravaged by MS, lived in cycles of forced shutdown: fatigue, collapse, withdrawal. As a child, I watched a father sprint through what strength remained, then disappear into exhaustion. Something in me learned there are only two speeds: go faster, or give up. That pattern threaded itself quietly into adulthood. Urgency arrives like weather. Overwhelm follows closely behind. When demands stack too high, something inside sinks toward collapse, a dorsal quiet I once mistook for personal failure.
The nervous system does not distinguish between historical threat and imagined deadline; it simply interprets load. And urgency, carried long enough, becomes indistinguishable from identity. For years, I thought this was weakness. Now I understand it as ancestral strategy. It kept my father alive. It kept his father alive. Today, the task is to teach my body that deadlines are not bombs and rest is not death. Completion is no longer survival. There is time.
Trauma does not always announce itself. Sometimes it simply displaces joy. By the time I wanted my father to play, he no longer had the capacity. Playfulness—the body’s rehearsal for safe unpredictability—evaporated. Seriousness arrived and stayed for decades. Only later did I learn that play is what happens when the body trusts that nothing will explode.
A Buddhist teacher once told me, joking but not joking, that I had a responsibility to cheer up. I hear that differently now. Joy is regulation. Cheerfulness is co-regulation. Play is an invitation for others to soften their guard. When sensation, thought, and circumstance integrate, possibility returns. Possibility opens curiosity. Curiosity opens play. Play completes loops trauma leaves unfinished. When I allow myself to play now, I feel generations resting.
My father once dreamed of studying history. He was advised that law was the respectable path—the honorable route for a Kitchener scholar. He followed expectation instead of desire and lost the thread of himself long before MS claimed his strength. Part of remembering who I am involves refusing that inheritance. Authenticity should never be traded for applause.
What I hope my children inherit is not vigilance, sleeplessness, displacement, or urgency disguised as purpose. I hope they inherit deep rest, grounded play, the feeling of home in their bones, and the knowledge that meaning does not require collapse. I hope they learn how to cheer others into safety.
We break cycles quietly. Often without recognition. Sometimes with one slow exhale.
If you feel misplaced across oceans, careers, classrooms, or your own body – if you are recertifying your worth in a new land, if urgency is tightening around your calendar, if you are learning to play again—you are not alone. This work is not about adding anything. It is about reclaiming everything survival buried.
Welcome. You can rest here. You can play here. And you can remember who you are.
Which part of you was displaced by survival, and what might it feel like to invite it home?