Each year during the Thanksgiving season, I open my storage unit to retrieve my Christmas ornaments. Next to the boxes sits an antique grandfather wall clock that once belonged to my former mother-in-law’s family. It still chimes on the hour, but it no longer keeps accurate time. Every year, I pause and consider whether to donate it. Every year, it remains where it is.
The clock can’t be fixed, but it functions just well enough to insist on remaining in my life.
This year feels different.
Life circumstances have pulled me back toward a period between 2013 and 2016—years marked by chaos, conflict, and past trauma layered atop older wounds. I had long since moved forward, but I am again navigating doctors, therapists, and courts. Systems designed to help now mirror a time I worked hard to survive.
My former husband is reliving his own trauma history, responding to the present as though it were the past. Years ago, his serious mental illness was evaluated by doctors, and while some diagnoses were ruled out, his grasp on reality was not consistently intact. Anyone who has lived with someone in this condition knows this truth: you cannot reason with someone who is time-collapsed into trauma and out of touch with reality. Attempts to explain, correct, or defend only pull you deeper into the spiral.
As a parent, my primary task is containment—protecting my 15-year-old son from being drawn into an emotional reality that is not his responsibility to carry. And yet, even with firm boundaries in place, I find myself spending more time revisiting events I believed were behind me.
Like that clock in storage, the past keeps chiming—insistent, familiar, yet out of tune and slightly inaccurate.
So the question becomes essential rather than philosophical:
How do we keep another person’s unresolved trauma from pulling us out of the present and back into a time we no longer live in?
Trauma Lives Outside of Time
One of the most disorienting aspects of complex trauma is its relationship to time. Trauma does not age chronologically. It does not move forward simply because years pass. When someone has not processed or integrated their experiences, their nervous system can remain anchored to a moment of threat long after the danger has ended.
To the person holding the broken clock, the time it shows still feels very real.
For survivors of CPTSD, this can be especially dangerous. Many of us learned early that safety depended on vigilance—on monitoring emotional shifts, anticipating explosions, and preventing collapse. When someone around us becomes destabilized, our nervous system may respond automatically, pulling us into an old role: mediator, protector, translator, and peacekeeper.
But engaging with someone who is time-collapsed does not bring resolution. It brings reenactment.
You cannot convince a clock to tell the correct time by arguing with it.
When Compassion Turns Into Self-Abandonment
For trauma survivors, boundaries often come tangled with guilt. We confuse compassion with participation. We fear that stepping back makes us cruel, uncaring, or disloyal—especially when the other person is clearly suffering.
But compassion does not require immersion.
We can acknowledge another person’s pain without stepping into their emotional storm. We can recognize that someone is reliving something that feels real to them–without agreeing to live there, too.
CPTSD survivors are particularly vulnerable to emotional contagion. Another person’s dysregulation can feel physically destabilizing, triggering old survival responses: hypervigilance, dissociation, panic, or collapse. What looks like “overthinking” is often the nervous system scanning for danger it has learned to respect.
Boundaries, then, are not a moral stance. They are a physiological necessity.
Boundaries as Timekeepers
Healthy boundaries are not walls meant to punish or exile. They are closer to property lines—clear markers of where one person ends and another begins. They do not erase history. They simply prevent history from overrunning the present.
In trauma recovery, boundaries often function as timekeepers. They help us stay oriented to now.
When someone insists on engaging from an old emotional reality, a boundary says: I recognize that this feels urgent to you, but I am choosing to live in the present.
This may look like limiting conversations, declining emotional engagement, or allowing professionals—not family members—to hold therapeutic responsibility. It may feel cold at first, especially to those of us conditioned to respond in a dysregulated way.
But stability is not cruelty.
Parenting in the Presence of Unresolved Trauma
When children are involved, the stakes are higher. Children should not be asked—explicitly or implicitly—to inherit unfinished emotional business. They should not be pulled into loyalty binds, emotional caretaking, or adult conflicts rooted in the past.
As parents, we may feel torn between empathy for another adult’s suffering and fierce protectiveness toward our children. This tension is real—and exhausting.
Containment becomes an act of love.
Sometimes that means keeping our children anchored in the present, even when another adult is living in the past. It means refusing to let yesterday’s pain dictate today’s relationships. And it means protecting children from being pulled into someone else’s unresolved history.
Letting the Clock Stay in Storage
I still haven’t donated the clock.
That matters.
Letting something remain in storage is not the same as denying its existence. It is a recognition that while the object may hold history, it no longer belongs in my daily life. It does not deserve a place on the wall simply because it once did.
This is what healthy boundaries often look like in practice. Not dramatic cutoffs. Not erasure. But intentional distance.
I don’t have to throw the clock in the dumpster.
I don’t have to hang a clock on my wall that can’t keep time correctly.
I simply decided not to organize my life around it.
Choosing the Present
Healing often involves reclaiming our right to live in the current time—to experience relationships, parenting, and daily life without being pulled backward by someone else’s unresolved pain.
Some people will continue to measure time by moments of loss, betrayal, or fear. That does not obligate us to do the same.
Boundaries are how safety becomes predictable.
They are how compassion stays humane.
They are how the present remains livable.
And sometimes, healing looks like this:
Choosing a clock that keeps time with who you are now—and letting the others keep chiming quietly, somewhere out of view.
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash
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Wendy Hoke is the author of The Bishop’s Cross: A Journey to the Truth and co-author of The Church of Gomorrah: When Sexual Abusers Remain in the Church. Her grandfather was a pedophile who preyed on little girls in his own family. The Bishop’s Cross looks into the family dynamics that enable a child molester to continue unabated.
She has been successfully writing for others for many years, first in the financial industry and now as a content curator and ghost blogger. She has finally put pen to paper to tell her own story. You can contact her directly through her website, wendyhoke.com.
