I’m sitting cross-legged on the couch in my office, my eyes closed, and I want to escape. I can’t make sense of the feeling or what I want to get away from.

My classmate Anna is guiding me through a Hakomi session. She encourages me to stay with the sensation, and I relax into it. An image emerges.

“I’m seeing an old memory,” I say.

“Is it okay to stay with it?” she asks.

“Yes.” I pause. “Strange. I haven’t thought about this in decades.”

“How old are you? Where are you?”

Eight years old. Camp Bauercrest. 1988.

I’m pacing in the cramped back room of the head bunk. It’s where they send the worst kids to be disciplined. Around me are lost-and-found scraps, a megaphone, a tennis racket, and a few deflated volleyballs. The smell of mildew from damp clothing fills the air.

I’m scanning for a way out. Sheets of thick wire cover the windows, and a door separates me from the main room, where the group leaders and counselors-in-training gather, talking about the Sox. Someone much older and bigger is guarding the door. I can’t leave.

This awful place defined that summer. I was there just about every day.

Outside, the rest of the campers are swimming at the waterfront, making art, playing whist and pickup basketball, and roaming the hillside. I can hear the whistles and the laughter from inside. I want to be out there with them, playing and being a kid.

“What’s coming into view?” Anna asks.

“I’m trying to find a way out. Maybe I could break through the screen or run out the front door. But I’m afraid they’ll catch me and bring me back. I might get beaten.”

As I picture myself making a run for the front door, I imagine counselors tackling and hitting me. I was beaten at camp that summer and in other years. Every escape I can imagine ends with me back in that room.

“What would it be like if you did get outside?”

“They’d still be watching me. Everywhere I go, I’m watched. It feels like I have a target on my back, like everyone is waiting for me to do something wrong.”

“That sounds really hard. No little boy should feel that way.”

“Yeah. I feel misunderstood. Everybody thinks I’m bad. I’m not a bad boy. I’m a good boy. I have a good heart. They just can’t see it.”

I feel myself shrink, my shoulders rounding forward and my weight sinking into the couch. I’m growing more and more hopeless.

I keep telling Anna I’m a good boy. I want her to see more than the little punk everyone makes me out to be. Listening to myself say it, I realize how long I’ve believed their story instead.

I’m a bad boy. There’s something wrong with me.

“Would you like to get out of here?” Anna suggests. “We can go anywhere you want. I’ll help you. Where would you like to go?”

“I can’t. If I leave camp, I’ll get in even more trouble. And if we go somewhere else in camp, they’ll find me and put me right back here in the head bunk.”

As I hear myself explaining why I can’t leave, I’m struck by how trapped I still feel, sitting in my office nearly forty years later.

“What if someone came to get you? Who would you want to see at the door?”

I picture my twin brother, Dave, and my older brother, Jon, waiting for me. The activity period is over. I’ve done my time, and I’m allowed to leave. I walk through the main room to meet them. No one stops me. By the time I reach the door, I’m grinning.

We go to the canteen. I get a soda and some candy, then find a spot on the hillside where I can sit in the open air. No one is coming after me. I can stay here.

“Would you like to join him there, as your adult self?”

I nod. “Uh-huh.” I picture myself sitting beside him. Together, we look down at the head bunk. From up here, it’s one of dozens of bunks across camp. I have the freedom to roam and explore.

The session is coming to a close. I open my eyes. As Anna and I debrief, memories of feeling unwanted and unwelcome come rushing back. The belief that I was fundamentally bad colored much of my childhood and early adolescence. Shame followed me through those years, but only now do I understand why I was so ashamed to be myself.

In the days since that session, I’ve started to see how much effort I put into being the good boy as a young adult. I stopped causing trouble and rocking the boat. I fell in line. I wanted everyone to think highly of me, and I hid the parts of my life that might change their minds, including my addictions and behavior I was ashamed of. If anyone found out, it would prove I was bad after all.

I keep coming back to the boy on the hillside. He was mischievous and sometimes a punk, but he was also just a kid who wanted to play and have fun. I hadn’t understood how much shame he was carrying or how alone he felt. I’m only now seeing how deeply that belief shaped my life. I wish I could have been there for him then.

For so long, I was convinced he was fundamentally bad. Yet in that session, he kept insisting he had a good heart. He wanted someone to believe him, and I did. I’m realizing how much I still want someone to see that goodness in me.