The Little Fishy Song
There's one moment I return to when people ask me why this book exists.
It wasn't in a therapy office.
Not in research.
Not in training.
It was in my own bed.
I know with complete certainty the very moment I decided to write this book.
It was because of a Little.
Going to bed one night, I suddenly realized that the woman beside me had switched. I was no longer going to bed with my wife, but with her Little. I had met her before, but she seldom spoke.
She would curl up so close to me and hold me so tight.
My wife says that when she sees her internally, she's always running. When she fronts, her feet are constantly moving. Now I can tell she's on her way just by the way my wife's feet move as she drifts off to sleep.
This night was different.
This night she decided to speak to me.
It was about music.
I generally play soft music on a speaker beside my bed at night. She looked up at me and spoke in a childlike voice I had never heard before.
She had a lisp and a slight stutter, which is exactly what my wife had told me in the past and laughed about when describing how she spoke growing up.
The Little asked me about the music. She had never heard anything like it before. I told her who it was. That it was a genre she probably hadn't heard.
I wanted to know her.
I wanted to learn about her.
So I asked her, "What's your favorite song?"
I don't know what I was expecting. She's around five years old and believed it was 1985. I was expecting a Cyndi Lauper song or something similar.
She looked up at me with her big brown eyes and said,
"The Little Fishy Song."
In an instant, my heart and soul shattered and I was someone new.
Someone whose entire outlook shifted.
I know the research. I've read every study, every source in the bibliography at the end of this work.
I know the science. I know the theories.
At that moment there was a shift.
I went from knowing
to feeling.
I switched.
I knew that the abuse she endured happened at an extremely early age. But when she said "The Little Fishy Song," I suddenly felt the horror she endured as a child.
As a child.
She endured the unspeakable.
She survived it.
And I felt it in every part of me, not as a realization but as something that moved through me all at once, through my chest, my thoughts, something deeper than that, until there was nothing in me that hadn't been touched by it.
It was not something I processed.
As a rupture.
It took me over.
Like switching.
Like being dropped into a new version of myself without warning, without preparation, and knowing immediately that I could never go back.
I wasn't seeing the same world anymore.
I wasn't the same person in it.
Everything I thought I understood collapsed. Everything I had been holding onto to make sense of it was gone.
And what replaced it was a simple, brutal, unavoidable truth.
I was wrong.
I had been seeing her wrong. Responding wrong. Trying to control something I didn't understand.
And for the first time, I saw the only place left to look.
Myself.
I am the only person I can change.
The only person I have control over.
The only person responsible for how I show up in this.
And in that moment, it was not a decision.
It was not a question.
It was a knowing.
I had to become different.
Everything shifted.
Everything switched.
I went from seeing myself as the victim of what had happened in our marriage to understanding that it wasn't personal.
It wasn't because she didn't love me. It wasn't that she didn't value our marriage. It wasn't intentional. It wasn't malicious.
That wasn't it.
That wasn't it at all.
She was a completely innocent victim.
A victim of something she couldn't control, couldn't fight, couldn't escape. She lived through terror.
And it all hit me at once. Not one thought after another.
All of them. At the same time.
And in that moment, I made a decision I didn't even feel like I was making.
I was going to be the one who kept her safe. That she would never feel that kind of fear again. That I would protect her, emotionally and mentally.
Because my love wasn't what was missing.
Safety was.
From that moment on, I knew.
My job as a husband wasn't to problem solve and love more.
It was:
To Lead With Safety