Meeting Opie: The 10-Year-Old Who Tried to Earn Belonging
This is the fourth installment in the story of what I call the “Parts Work” that ultimately formed my Oak Leaves Council within Living Oak Leadership.
Each article introduces you to a pivotal “part” (courtesy of the Internal Family Systems, IFS approach to inner healing) of me that carried the wounds, imprints, traumas and stories that shaped my life… AND the parts that hold strength, wisdom, and resilience.
This work matters because it is the foundation of everything I teach today. Living Oak Leadership was born from this journey, and it is the same path I now guide others through as they step into the level of leadership and impact they are truly meant for.
I am sharing this real, raw and vulnerable chapters in the hopes that it may resonate with others ready and willing to do the inner work…or even just be opened minded to learn what it’s about, to see how their inner world effects their outer impact.
CLICK HERE TO READ THE PREVIOUS ARTICLES
Let me introduce you to the 10-year-old part of me I call Opie.
I named her after the bathing suit she wore almost every day that summer.
It was teal and white.
A one-piece with a little white belt around the waist.
The brand name stitched across the front said Ocean Pacific.
For the first time in her life, she owned something that the other girls thought was cool, a real brand name article of clothing.
Until then, she hadn’t paid much attention to brands. She mostly ran around with the neighborhood boys, climbed trees, rode bikes, and followed my older friend Jon, whom you met as my defecto “older brother” in article #3. Fashion didn’t exist in that world.
But by 10-years old, she was starting to notice something. The girls had rules.
- Brands mattered.
- Clothes mattered.
- Looking the right way mattered.
And Opie was beginning to realize she didn’t understand the game. But the Ocean Pacific bathing suit felt like a bridge from one world to another. After losing Jon (and my ability to feel confident in my own skin, this was an important realization.)
Maybe this meant she finally belonged, finally could make sense of how she felt in her own skin.
One summer day Opie’s “cousin” (not a blood relative, but one of her first friends ever so she felt like a cousin) came to swim at the pool in her backyard.
But that day, Opie’s “fake cousin” brought her real cousin with her. And something changed.
All day long, Opie noticed something she couldn’t quite understand. Her “cousin” barely spoke to her.
She didn’t swim with her.
She didn’t laugh with her.
She didn’t include her.
Her and her slightly older cousin completely ignored Opie. It seemed as if all they did was take advantage of Opie having a pool in her backyard, but Opie herself wasn’t really needed or wanted.
Instead, Opie watched her “cousin” follow her real cousin everywhere.
They whispered.
They giggled.
They disappeared into their own little orbit.
And Opie suddenly realized something painful. She wasn’t part of it.
At 10-years old, our nervous systems don’t know how to interpret social exclusion. It just know something hurts.
My Opie stood there on the deck outside the pool trying to figure out what she had done wrong. Why she was ignored. It felt a little like what her 3-yr old “Curly” part must have felt like. Although her 5-year old self, “Lil’ Blu” had all the confidence in the world, 8-yr old “Snowbird” part was still reeling from the grief of losing her defecto older brother Jon.
So here she was, alone on the side of the pool watching…feeling the sting of the exclusion.
She looked down.
And that’s when it happened.
Her eyes landed on the white belt wrapped around her stomach, wrapped around that one-piece teal Ocean Pacific bathing suit.
That belt pulled slightly against her belly and it made the tiniest piece of her belly protrude out.
And in that tiny moment, something anchored into her body.
A voice appeared. Not a rational one. A survival voice.
A child’s interpretation of rejection.
It said:
They must be ignoring you because you’re fat.
Look at your stomach.
That’s why you can’t wear a two-piece like them.
You thought a brand name would make you cool.
But you’re still not chosen.
Something is wrong with you.
Don’t even try.
I am sure I (aka “Opie) weighed barely 55 pounds at this point.
Tiny. Petite. Slender.
But the imprint didn’t care about reality. It cared about making meaning.
And in that moment, Opie created a story that would quietly run my life for decades.
That afternoon was the beginning of something I would only understand much later.
- Body dysmorphia
- Disordered eating
- Over-Exercising
- Anorexia
- Bulimia
- Binge Eating
- Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
- Perfectionism
It took ten years before the consequences of that impactful day became serious enough that I was sent to an inpatient eating disorder program at 20-years old (more on that “part” later.)
But the seed was planted that day.
Not because of the bathing suit.
Not because two girls were cruel.
But because a 10-year-old nervous system tried to explain pain, abandonment, exclusion and fear.
It took me years, but developmentally it started to make perfect sense.
From birth to about age ten, children are primarily absorbing the world.
Language.
Patterns.
Behavior.
Belonging.
But around 10-years old, something shifts.
The mind begins forming interpretive stories.
Stories about identity.
Stories about worth.
Stories about safety.
Stories that can become the internal architecture of an entire life.
My Opie’s story became this:
If I am perfect enough…
If I take care of everyone…
If I never become a burden…
Maybe they won’t leave.
That story quietly shaped everything. It made me the Responsible One. The Over-Functioner. The Parentified Child who took on everyone’s problems.
The girl who tried to make everyone else’s life easier so that at the very least, she wouldn’t be abandoned.
But Opie carried something even deeper than that moment at the pool.
It took decades before I understood that part.
Because Opie didn’t just inherit her own story.
She inherited stories from the women before her.
Years later, as I learned more about my family lineage, I discovered decades of unspoken trauma among the women in my bloodline.
Physical abuse.
Sexual abuse.
Financial control.
Silencing.
Shame.
Women who had nowhere to process what happened to them. Women who survived but never got to heal.
In his groundbreaking work “The Body Keeps the Score”, Author and Doctor Bessel van der Kolk explains that trauma does not simply live in memory.
It lives in the body.
And modern research in Epigenetics now shows something even more profound.
Before our mothers were born, we already existed as cellular material inside our grandmothers. As they carried the eggs of what became our mothers and fathers, we were cellular material also.
Which means the emotional environments THEY lived through shaped the biology WE inherited. This is blame or an excuse or anger contained in a package of a social media influencer.
It’s just biological and energetic reality.
Unprocessed trauma changes cellular signaling.
Stress hormones alter gene expression.
And those patterns can be carried forward.
Not as destiny.
But as biological memory.
So when Opie stood there at the pool that day, she wasn’t just a 10-year-old girl feeling excluded.
She was a nervous system already carrying generations of bodily and public shame, survival, and silence.
Her young mind did the only thing it could do.
It created a story that explained the pain.
Meeting Opie during my healing work connected more dots than almost anything else in my life.
Suddenly the eating disorder made sense.
The body dysmorphia made sense.
The relentless drive to prove my worth made sense.
The fear of being left made sense.
But here is the part that matters most.
Opie wasn’t broken.
She was brilliant.
She was a ten-year-old strategist trying to protect me.
She believed that if she could fix the body…
Control the image…
Earn acceptance…
Then maybe the pain of being unseen would never happen again.
Today, Opie sits in my “Living Oak Leaves Council”, a relationship with my parts that help me navigate the world, that I can now summon when I am triggered …which brings me clarity and inner peace because I no longer react or operate from a place of fear and lack.
She’s no longer running the show.
But she still has a voice. And when I listen to her now, I don’t hear shame.
I hear a little girl who simply wanted to belong.
And honestly, don’t we all?
That’s why this is not a blaming or shaming of our parents or ancestry. It’s simply energetic technology that helps us understand the connective tissue of what makes up our inner ecosystem.
What I did not know then, but understand clearly now, is that Opie was never the problem.
She was the messenger.
She was the first part of me who tried to explain pain that my nervous system did not yet have the capacity to process.
In the language of Internal Family Systems, Opie was an exile.
A young part that absorbed the wound and carried the story so that the rest of the system could keep functioning.
But the moment she created that story, other parts immediately mobilized to protect her.
The Performer began to appear.
The Responsible One started working overtime.
The Achiever pushed harder.
The Caretaker tried to make everyone else happy so they would never leave.
The internal ecosystem of my Oak Tree began forming its rings.
And for decades, I lived from those protectors.
Many of us do.
We don’t realize that the voice telling us to work harder, look better, be stronger, prove ourselves, control everything… is often just a “Part” of us trying to make sure we never feel that moment of exclusion again.
For me, that protector system showed up as perfectionism, relentless over-functioning, body control, and an identity built around being useful, needed, and indispensable.
From the outside, it looked like achievement.
From the inside, it was survival.
But here is where the deeper work of Living Oak Leadership comes in.
Because the goal of this work is not to eliminate our parts.
It is to lead them.
That is the essence of Self-Leadership.
Want to be supported more deeply to do this profound work?
