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※ This article is a fictional case reconstructed from multiple real-world examples.
The Day She Fled Home
Noriko (33) was diagnosed with depression in her eighth year of working life. She left her job on her own terms and went to a psychiatric clinic without telling her parents. They found her appointment card and confronted her.
“So you got fired and your head’s broken too?!”
They were about to have her admitted to a psychiatric ward. Noriko walked out of her parents’ house ready to be killed.
The phone calls from her parents did not stop. Instead of answering, she would cut her arm to settle herself. Without it, she could not stay sane.
A Quiet Life Five Years Later
Almost five years had passed. She took the medication exactly as her psychiatrist prescribed, rested, and eventually started a new job. She was still on the medication, but the depression had largely settled down.
What still threw her off were the approaches of Obon and New Year. As those holidays neared, her body would slip.
“When are you heading home?”
That single line from a coworker terrified her, every time. To avoid being asked, she would take leave around those holidays whether or not she had any plans. Even so, people asked it as a kind of greeting.
“We had a falling-out, more or less…” — she would offer something like that. What came back was always well-meaning.
“How long ago was that, now? Your parents miss you, of course they do. Go and see them.”
“If you keep being stubborn about it, you’ll miss your chance to be a good child to them — you’ll regret it.”
The Brand of “Unfilial Child”
The coworkers meant no harm. They were simply living inside the assumption that “parents and children understand each other,” that “blood ties beat everything.” They didn’t know that some homes do not work that way.
Noriko felt it again, in their kindness: we must just be different. Different from “ordinary people,” different from “ordinary families.” Whatever an ordinary person took for granted, we cannot understand. So abnormal that even our existence is wrong.
In her one-bedroom apartment, no one shouts at her. But the coworkers’ voices play on inside her head.
“Living all comfortable on your own, leaving your parents alone like that. Being unfilial means you’ve failed as a human being.”
“After everything they did to raise you — and you call it a falling-out? Punishment will catch up with you.”
The accusing voices and cold faces fill her head.
I have to make up for what it took to raise such a defective person. I have to be a good child to them. And yet my body will not move. The constant pounding in her chest, the lead weight of her body. Noriko closed her eyes inside her futon. The tears no longer came.
Note ① — Where the Fear of “Being Unfilial” Comes From: An Internalized Prohibition
Noriko’s experience of “the coworkers’ voices playing inside my head” is, psychologically, close to what is called an internalized prohibition. External criticism, repeated for years, comes to play continuously inside the self even after the external voices have stopped.
“To be unfilial is to fail as a human being.” Noriko’s parents may not have said that line directly. But a child raised in an abusive environment learns, from thousands of accumulated micro-experiences, the message “if I don’t meet my parent’s demand, I have no value.” When that overlaps with the social norm of “filial duty,” the message becomes harder to dislodge still.
One counselor frames the survivor’s situation through the concept of “injunctions” — “Don’t exist,” “Don’t feel,” “Don’t think” — messages an abusive environment etches into the child as “things you must not do.” “Don’t leave your parents,” “Don’t be a burden” do not stop running once the survivor has physically left. They keep playing, inside.
Note ② — Why Guilt Arrives Before Anger
“Inside her futon, the tears no longer came.” From outside, it is plain that Noriko is the victim. So why does guilt — not anger — arrive first?
For a child raised under abuse, the order of emotional processing is reversed. In ordinary development the sequence is: “something bad was done → I feel anger → I express the anger → repair happens.” In an abusive environment it becomes: “I show feeling → I am attacked further.” A body that has learned “expressing feeling is dangerous” fires the inhibition circuit before the anger has even formed.
The result is that, with terrible facts standing right behind the survivor, what rises is not anger but the self-criticism “maybe it was me.” Anger is locked down; guilt steps forward in its place. Noriko’s “my body will not move” is the result of that reversed processing.
Note ③ — The Letter That Was Never Delivered: Where Unsaid Words Go
Many survivors of childhood abuse have written a letter to a parent that they never sent. “You did this to me.” “At that time, I felt this way.” Words written, erased, written, erased — many times, in the chest.
That a survivor cannot deliver the letter is not weakness. It is the survivor knowing, well, the danger of delivering it. And it is the survivor’s long, hard-won awareness that delivering it would change nothing.
The words that could not be written down, the letter that could not be sent — they have not vanished. In recovery, in counseling, inside a safe relationship, the words start to come, a little at a time. They are aimed at the parent and at the survivor themselves at once. “I was hurt. I remember it. It was real.” For the survivor to bear witness to their own experience — that is one of the steps of recovery.
Cutting Your Arm Will, One Day, Stop Working
Cutting her arm kept Noriko sane because, on its own terms, it functioned. Bodily pain genuinely sedates an emotional flood for a while. But, as one counselor puts it, “every defense eventually stops functioning. The thing to do isn’t to fear the day it stops; it is to prepare for that day. The preparation is what becomes the entry to recovery.”
When the current method stops working, a person stands at a fork: either reach for a stronger stimulus, or open a different door. If Noriko begins to drift toward counseling or a safe relationship, that may be a signal her body has started to register that the old defense is no longer enough. The point at which every workaround has been exhausted is, sometimes, the actual entrance to change.
The Weight of Saying Goodbye to “the Life You Lived Until Now”
Change comes with loss. Letting go of self-harm is not simply changing a behavior. It is telling the method that protected you for years, “I will not lean on you anymore.” One counselor calls this “the death of the old way of living.” A death needs grief. Rather than blaming or denying “the previous self,” quietly mourning “the self who knew only this method” is what makes the next step possible.
What the “Commands” Inside Your Head Actually Are
Inside Noriko’s head, the line “an unfilial child has failed as a human being” goes on playing. This is not a simple belief, easily talked out of. As one counselor puts it, “Someone raised in an abusive environment has installed the parent’s voice inside themselves. It does not function as an external voice anymore — it functions as a command directed at the self.” “Don’t feel.” “Disappear.” “Be useful.” These commands were accepted by the child as the price of survival. But the one who issued them was not the self.
Recovery is the process of noticing each command, recognizing “that is the parent’s voice,” and gradually distinguishing it from the survivor’s own voice. Noticing the command sits a long way before disobeying it. If Noriko has begun to notice “the voice in her head,” that itself is already a sign that recovery has started moving.
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