2025: Learning to Listen Inward...

December 31, 2025 

By Julie Bolduc DeFilippo, PhD, MSW LICSW

“Let go, or be dragged.”

I first heard that phrase from a friend in recovery, and it lodged itself somewhere deep. It’s blunt. Uncomfortable. But it carries a truth that’s hard to shake once you feel it land.

For a long time, I didn’t realize how much I was being dragged—not by my children but by my own fear. In trying to protect them from harm, from systems that might fail them, from pain I knew too well, I was gripping so tightly that we were all being pulled along with me. What I thought was vigilance was, in many ways, fear wearing the costume of love.

I’ve spent much of my life in that posture: watching, anticipating, bracing. Wanting to make sure my children were seen, understood, and spared the kinds of hurt I carried forward from my own life. Some of that came from deep love. Some of it came from unhealed places—formed in a time when emotional attunement wasn’t widely named or valued, when “getting through” mattered more than being understood. Sensitivity was misread. Needs were minimized. Adaptation was praised. And many of us learned to survive by becoming hyperaware of the world around us.

With each generation, that awareness evolves. What once helped us survive becomes something we’re finally able to examine.

My mentor and dear friend, Elise Jacobson, LICSW, often labels this pattern as repetition compulsion—a psychodynamic concept that describes the unconscious drive to revisit unresolved experiences in hopes of changing their outcome. In her work with families, particularly those navigating PDA long before it was widely recognized, Elise has observed this dynamic again and again. She writes about it beautifully in her piece “The Fixer.”

Through her lens, I began to recognize the same pattern unfolding in my own life. And still, I began to notice something else: my deep desire to protect my children had quietly tethered my own sense of safety. I wasn’t only responding to the present moment—I was trying to heal myself by preventing wounds that did not yet exist for them.

At the time of diagnosis, I wholeheartedly believed that disability would expand my sons' lives, not narrow them. And yet, we encountered systems that were rigid and, at times, harmful—not because of who my children are, but because of how difference is treated. This activated a slew of unresolved feelings that I had unknowingly held long before I became a mother. 

Like Elise, I see this often in families navigating PDA and other neurodivergent experiences: caregivers doing everything in their power to protect their children from the pain they themselves once carried. Not out of control—but out of love. There is nothing wrong with that impulse.Children deserve to be seen. They deserve attunement, advocacy, and safety in every form, including relationally. 

Unfortunately, too often, when parents become caught in this pattern, the very thing they are trying to prevent begins to take shape. What starts as protection can slowly turn into pressure, and the cost can be profound. The pain that follows is often devastating—not only for the child, but for the parent as well. It’s a grief that lives quietly, born from love, fear, and the unbearable wish to spare our children from suffering we ourselves once carried.

My personal realization of didn’t arrive through insight alone. It came through exhaustion. Through grief. Through sitting with the raw, uncomfortable truth that I will miss something, make a decision (or not) that has unintended outcomes for my children now and in the future, no matter how deeply I love. 

So I began asking myself a different set of questions—the same ones I often ask clients when fear takes the wheel:

What if the thing you’re afraid of does happen?
What would that mean?
What would you do next?
Who would you become?

Sitting with those questions softened something in me. I could feel the grief beneath the vigilance—the ache of wanting to guarantee safety in a world that offers no such promise. I could see how much love had been doing the work of fear.

Over this past year, I’ve been paying closer attention to what stirs in me when I feel reactive or overwhelmed—especially in systems that echo old experiences of being unseen. I’ve been asking myself: What part of me is being touched right now? What am I trying to protect? Who am I hoping will finally see me?

And in that inquiry, something softened.

Letting go, I’ve learned, doesn’t mean disengaging or caring less. It means staying present with myself without trying to anticipate all the possible outcomes before choices are even made. It means trusting that attunement—not hypervigilance—is what actually creates safety. It means accepting that even with the best intentions, there will be uncertainty and missteps. 

Repair is the work of being in relationship—first with ourselves, and then with others. It’s an iterative process, one that doesn’t ask for perfection but for presence. It asks us to return again and again, to listen, to reflect, to try once more. This is the work I’ve become more deeply attuned to in this season of my life.