Somatic Recall and the Return of the Inner Child 

UNDER THE BED — A MEMORY IN INTERVIEW FORM

Q: What brought the memory back? It wasn’t therapy or a conversation or a photograph. It was me lying flat on my stomach under my own bed at 53, reaching into a narrow gap for last night’s hairband. My body felt calm, safe and something in me recognized it before I did. The angle, the quiet, the smallness — it was like a door opened without knocking. A familiar position. A moment that felt known.

And suddenly I was eight again.

(But underneath small, face up holding on to the wire frame)

Q: What do you remember about being under the bed as a child? I remember the bunkbeds. I remember the space underneath — not big, not comfortable, but mine. I remember hiding if I was afraid, or not wanting to be found. I don’t have many memories before seven; trauma wipes things clean, but it leaves outlines.

I remember my closest brother — eleven months between us — pulling the big ugly 70s bear out of the way to get to me. Everyone had one of those bears: rubbed nose, picked-off eyes, fur rolled between anxious fingers. Mine was a barricade. A blockade.

I remember him coming under the bed to tell me — or ask me — what was happening. I remember us looking out the window together. I remember the police car. I remember the noise — anger, shouting, something breaking.

I don’t remember the words. Trauma doesn’t keep dialogue; it keeps impact.

I don’t know where the other two brothers were. I only remember him. And me. And the bed.

Q: Why do you think you hid there? Because it was the only place that made sense. Because the world was too big and too loud and too unpredictable. Because adults were exploding and imploding and never explaining anything. Because I needed a space with edges — a space I could manage.

Maybe the smallness calmed me. Maybe shrinking the world made it safer. Maybe I felt that if I took up less space, I’d be less of a target. Maybe I just needed a place where no one could suddenly appear shouting.

I didn’t have a safe space, so I built one.

Q: What about your dog — how does he fit into this? My dog used to crawl under the bed during thunder. He’d wedge himself right underneath me, pressed into the same smallness I once used. I made him safe. I didn’t have that safety myself, but I knew how to create it for him.

Maybe that’s the saddest part: I learned to comfort others long before anyone learned to comfort me.

Q: What do you wish you’d asked your father? I wish I’d asked him why. Why the police came. Why the shouting. Why the chaos. Why the silence afterwards. Why he never explained anything. Why he never showed up emotionally. Why he gave me back a present because he didn’t have one for me. Why he told me he didn’t buy me birthday cards — not that he forgot, not that they got lost — but that he simply didn’t bother.

I wish I’d asked him for his version. But I know he wouldn’t have told me. He would have acted like none of it happened. He always spoke badly about my mum, as if that erased what he did.

He wasn’t a father. He was a man who contributed DNA and chaos. That’s why I call him Derek. He never earned anything else.

Q: How does this memory sit in you now, at 53? It sits like something that was stuck for decades and finally loosened. Not gone — just no longer frozen.

It’s strange: I’m claustrophobic now. Or maybe I’m not. Maybe I just refuse small spaces. Maybe I won’t ever again put myself somewhere I had to hide to survive. Maybe it’s not fear — maybe it’s a boundary.

Reflection does that. Retrospection does that. You look back and realise what was actually happening — not what you thought was happening, not what you were told, not what you filled in with childhood imagination.

Footnote He died aged 52. I had not long had my second child. I never thought to ask all the things I later realised mattered — the questions I was too young to push, too unsure to demand, too used to accepting silence instead of answers.

I originally hated him. And then I pitied him. But I don’t remember loving him.

That part is sealed away in my no‑memory — the years before seven, the years the fog took, the years where whatever love existed didn’t survive the impact.