When the Song No Longer Hurts: From “Broken Home” to Survivor

The Night the Song Didn’t Hurt Anymore

A couple weeks ago, I got some last-minute floor seats to a Papa Roach concert. No expectations, just a night out. Loud music, moshing strangers, and the smell of cheap beer in the air — it felt like I’d time-traveled straight back to high school.

And then Broken Home came on.

“I can't seem to fight these feelings
I'm caught in the middle of this
And my wounds are not healing
I'm stuck in between my parents
I wish I had someone to talk to
Someone I could confide in
Broken home
All alone”

I used to live and breathe those lyrics. When the song first dropped in the early 2000’s, I was a pissed-off teenager navigating chaos. My grandfather — the one person who made me feel safe — had just died from cancer. My parents couldn’t stand each other. I was constantly switching schools, never feeling grounded. I was angry, confused, and desperate for someone to understand me.

This song was that someone.

It became my therapy before I had therapy. It was the soundtrack to my emotional survival.

But standing there in that crowd, singing along again, something changed.

I didn’t feel the pain anymore. I didn’t feel angry, or hurt, or small. I didn’t feel like that kid anymore.

The song didn’t hit the same. And that’s when I knew I had healed.

Over the past three years in sobriety, I’ve put in the work. Not just to stop using, but to finally face the parts of myself I used to drown out. I’ve grieved losses I never gave myself permission to feel. I’ve worked through trauma, confronted old belief systems, taken ownership, and rebuilt my life from the inside out.

What used to define me no longer fits. And that’s the quiet miracle of recovery — you don’t always notice the transformation until life hands you a mirror. That night, the mirror came in the form of a song I used to cry to.

And for the first time, I didn’t see a victim.

I saw a survivor.

“The Greatest Prison Is in Your Own Mind”

Dr. Edith Eger knows what it means to be stuck in the past. At 16, she was sent to Auschwitz. On the same day her parents were murdered, she was forced to dance for Josef Mengele. Somehow, she survived. But for years after, she lived in silence — haunted by what had been done to her.

When she finally began to heal, she wrote something that hit me like a gut punch:

“I was victimized, but I am not a victim.”

That’s the shift right there.

She explains that the biggest prison we live in isn’t our trauma — it’s our belief that we’re still trapped by it. She calls it the “prison of the mind,” and she reminds us: the key is in your pocket.

Reading her words after that concert made it all click.

I’d kept myself stuck in a mental prison for years — letting old pain, old wounds, old songs define who I was. I thought I was being honest about my past, but really, I was clinging to it. I was using my story as a shield.

Healing didn’t come from pretending it didn’t hurt.

Healing came when I finally admitted it did, and then chose to stop building my identity around it.

If You’re Ready to Go From Victim to Survivor…

Let me tell you something I’ve learned the hard way:

Pain is real. Trauma is real. But staying stuck in it — that’s a choice we often don’t even realize we’re making.

I know because I lived that choice for years.

I was addicted, angry, emotionally shut down. I used drugs to silence my grief, my confusion, my fear. I lived like a victim because, in many ways, I was one — of loss, of instability, of addiction. But at some point, that victimhood became a comfort zone. It gave me an identity. It gave me something to point to so I didn’t have to look inward.

Sobriety forced me to look inward.

And when I did, I found something terrifying — and freeing:

I had more control than I thought.

Not over what happened. But over how I carried it.

Recovery has taught me some brutal, beautiful truths:

• Just because something was true doesn’t mean it still has to be true.

• Not everyone who hurt you will ever apologize. Heal anyway.

• No one is coming to rescue you. That’s your job.

• The old story will keep repeating itself until you learn to stop telling it the same way.

And here’s the best part:

When you finally step into the survivor mindset — when you stop waiting for the pain to make sense and start creating something meaningful from it — everything shifts.

The music changes.
The story changes.
You change.

And the things that used to break you?
They become the proof you can survive anything.

So if you’re still singing old songs…
If you're still wearing the pain like a name tag…
If you're still stuck between who you were and who you want to be…

It’s time to pick up the key.

The prison is in your mind — but freedom is, too.