You Weren’t Mature for Your Age—You Were Traumatized, According to ‘Let’s Try This Again’

Teachers loved you. Relatives praised you. “So mature for your age,” they’d say, like it was a compliment. You were the kid who didn’t cry at the divorce announcement, who mediated your parents’ arguments, who kept your siblings from falling apart while your own world was crumbling. Everyone called you strong, responsible, the easy one. But no one called it what it really was: trauma.

On Let’s Try This Again, host B. Simone sits down with model and creator Ella Halikas to unpack how family chaos turns kids into fixers, and why that pattern doesn’t just disappear when you grow up. 

You weren’t the glue—you were a child playing therapist

Family trauma isn’t rare. According to the CDC, nearly two thirds of U.S. adults say they lived through at least one major childhood stressor, and one in six experienced four or more. That’s a lot of people who had to grow up before they were ready.

When that happens, kids often take on adult jobs. There’s even a name for it—parentification. It’s when a child becomes the emotional support, problem-solver, or peacekeeper in the family. Instead of being taken care of, you start taking care of everyone else.

Halikas knows the feeling. “I was nine when it happened,” she tells B. Simone. “I remember my parents walking me to school in fifth grade, telling my fifth grade teacher, ‘She’s going through a lot. We’re going through a divorce this year.’” But the divorce wasn’t really the problem. It was what came after. Halikas says she became the middleman, running damage control and holding everything together like it was her job. She was the one coordinating rides, smoothing over tension, keeping her parents “cordial.” Before her 10th birthday, she’d basically become the family’s project manager.

That’s not being “mature.” That’s a kid trying to hold mayhem together. And while parents don’t usually mean to put that pressure on their kids, it leaves a mark. You learn to read the room, stay small, and handle everything yourself. Eventually, it stops feeling like a role and starts feeling like your identity.

When crisis becomes normal, you forget how to feel anything else

Growing up in constant emergency mode rewires you. Your brain learns that calm isn’t comfort, but the calm before something goes wrong. Safety becomes vigilance. Love becomes fixing. Your worth gets measured by how little space you take up. Halikas remembers living that way. “Every time he went to the bathroom, I’d think, ‘Is this the day he’s going to die?’” she says about her brother’s addiction. “It was a very triggering experience growing up.”

That’s hypervigilance, the state of being permanently on guard. It’s not a personality trait, but a survival response. Research shows kids raised around addiction or violence often develop a sixth sense for danger—they read tone shifts, track tension, and absorb emotions like weather forecasts. It’s your body’s way of saying, “If I can sense it early, maybe I can stay safe.”

But in families with addiction, everyone adapts. Therapists call it a family system: one person becomes the “identified patient,” while everyone else reorganizes around them. Some enable, some control, and some become the peacemakers. That was Halikas. “I kept hearing those voices like, Stop being a victim, don’t be a victim, stop crying, there are people dying,” she recalls. In her house, showing emotion was seen as weakness, so shutting it down became second nature. “I had to grow up at such a young age, like, ‘Let’s f*cking go, you can’t complain.'”

That mentality helped her hold it together when everything around her was falling apart. And for a while, it worked. “That mindset was there to protect and save me,” she says. “It’s a coping mechanism now that I still use…It’s gotten me so far, but there’s times where I’m like, I don’t want to always be okay. I don’t always want to be the strong one.” That’s the paradox of trauma adaptations—they’re genius in survival mode and exhausting everywhere else. 

How to stop being the fixer

The hardest part about healing from being the “fixer” isn’t realizing what happened, but letting yourself stop. Because fixing worked, it made things look okay, even when they weren’t. It gave you control when you didn’t have support. It got you praise for being “mature.” So when someone says, “You can stop now,” it can feel like erasing the only version of you that ever felt safe.

For Halikas, that started with therapy. “I just went to therapy for the first time like two weeks ago,” she admits. Sitting in a room where someone’s job is to focus on your feelings after years of focusing on everyone else can feel weird at first. Like B. Simone says, “Sometimes you don’t want to go, but it’s so helpful.”

Therapy, journaling, or even slowing down are ways to teach your nervous system that calm isn’t dangerous. Halikas says she’s now reconnecting with the part of herself that never got to be a kid. “There’s that younger me, and that younger child in me, I’m like, Let’s take care of her,” she says. That’s the work—not becoming someone new, but finally letting the fixer in you take a breath.

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