What is my core wound?
Your core wound is the specific conclusion you drew, early and wrongly, about what you have to be in order to be safe or loved, and it is still running the show. It is not the bad thing that happened to you. It is the belief you built out of it.
What is actually running
A core wound is a belief formed young, before you had language sophisticated enough to argue with it, that got treated as fact instead of interpretation. A kid whose parent worked two jobs and was too tired to ask about her day does not think 'my mother is exhausted.' She thinks 'I am the kind of person people don't have energy for.' That sentence gets filed as truth, not theory. Thirty years later she is still testing every friendship and relationship against it, watching for the moment people run out of energy for her too, and calling it intuition.
Why it makes sense and is not a flaw
You formed the belief because it was the most useful explanation available to a small person with no other data. A child cannot afford to conclude 'the adult in charge of me is unreliable,' because that is too dangerous to sit with. It is safer to conclude 'something about me causes this,' because at least then there is a version of you that could fix it. The wound is not evidence you are broken. It is evidence you were resourceful under conditions you did not choose. The problem is only that the strategy outlived its usefulness and nobody sent the update.
How to actually find it
Do not look for the memory. Look for the sentence that shows up right before you overreact. Notice what you say to yourself in the half second after someone cancels plans, gives flat feedback, or goes quiet in a text thread. That half-second sentence, not the polished story you tell about your childhood, is the wound talking. Common ones sound like 'I am too much,' 'I am replaceable,' 'if I need something I will be a burden,' or 'I have to earn the right to take up space.' Write down the exact words. Vague words like 'abandonment' or 'not enough' are your brain protecting you from the specific sentence, which is usually more embarrassing and more precise than the category.
What genuinely helps
Stop trying to prove the sentence wrong through achievement, because the wound does not respond to evidence, it only responds to being outgrown. You outgrow it by acting against it on purpose in small moments, not by winning some final argument with it. If the sentence is 'I am a burden,' the move is not becoming more impressive, it is asking for something small and staying in the room while the other person actually gives it to you. The wound gets quieter every time you generate a real counter-experience, not a real counter-argument. It was installed by repetition, so it only comes out through repetition.
When this runs your life, it usually traces to one underlying pattern. For this, it is most often the Ghost rhythm, the thing under the behavior.