The story I’ve never fully told: releasing shame, reclaiming myself & finding belonging

When I was seven, my mom got into a car accident that left her bedridden for months. And unwell for years.
My dad worked nonstop to keep us afloat.
And somewhere between her pain and his absence, I unconsciously made a silent promise: I’ll make it easier for everyone.

I became the good girl — the helper, the achiever, the one who never needed anything. It looked like maturity. And I was praised for it.
But really, it was protection—survival.

I lived most of my life in a state of “survival”. I learned early that love was earned through performance, and that the safest way to exist was to never be a burden. As hard as I tried, I never felt like I truly belonged anywhere.

I didn’t realize it then, but I was already learning to abandon myself — in the same quiet ways I so often felt abandoned.

When the World Rewards Your Disconnection

My dad was a good man, but he didn’t understand my sensitivity.
He’d joke that I was clumsy, ungraceful, a “dumb blonde,” or that I’d “forget my head if it wasn’t attached.” My nanny (his mother) would often say that boys were better, that they were her favourite. I know neither of them meant any harm, but those words stuck like burrs under my skin - unconsciously creating the belief “You’re not good enough. You don’t belong.”

So I learned to be careful. To be competent. To be what was expected. I learned into the masculine energy of productivity and doing, and shamed myself for anything less than perfect.

By high school, I was the girl who could fit anywhere and belong nowhere.
I had friends in every group, but I never felt like anyone’s first choice.
I smiled through the loneliness and told myself independence was strength.
But beneath it was a quiet pain that whispered: “You’re not good enough. You don’t belong.”

You’re on your own kid

Although my heart longed to study psychology, I went to university for political science — I abandoned myself. Slowly over my time in university, I continued to self abandon to belong, until one night I was actually abandoned by my friends—left alone in the bar.

I remember looking around, realizing I was alone. The music was pounding, but everything inside me went quiet. I told myself I’d be fine — because that’s what I always did. But in trying to find a safe way home, I trusted the wrong person.

That night, I was drugged and sexually assaulted.

The shame was unbearable. I blamed myself — for trusting, for being naïve, for trying to be “nice” while ignoring what the truth I felt inside.
This confirmed my beliefs, and hardened me. I closed myself off to real friendships and relationships telling myself: You can’t rely on anyone.

It looked like independence.
But it was isolation disguised as strength.

the first wake up call

After that, I started questioning how I got there. I realized I didn’t want to finish my political science degree — it was never mine to begin with. So I changed my path, switching to International Development — because at least there, I could do something that felt meaningful. For perhaps the first time I remember in my life, I started to claim what I wanted for me.

I wanted to empower women and children. I wanted to make a difference.
I think in a way, I thought my helping them meet their needs and feel safe, perhaps I could feel safe.

Kenya: When the Body Says “No”

When I landed in rural Kenya for a student placement, I was determined to prove myself. But within days, my nervous system was in overdrive.

One of the local leaders — someone I was told to trust — kept joking that he would “sell me for cattle.” Maybe to him it was just a joke, but to me, it triggered trauma and a feeling of “unsafe” in my body that I could not recover from.
And I couldn’t un-know it.

Three weeks later, I came home, ashamed.
I told myself I’d failed — too sensitive, too weak, too much. I told myself they were right, that I just needed to follow the traditional path to success.

So, I buried it all — I got a corporate job as a “stop gap” until I could figure out my next move but I threw myself into work. Because when you don’t know how to sit with and process your pain, you avoid it—you translate it into busyness.

The Life That Looked Safe but Didn’t Feel Safe

I spent the next decade climbing the corporate ladder.
I built a life that looked successful from the outside — the career, the house, the family. But inside, I was collapsing. Exhausted. Disconnected.

I had become a master at holding everything together, but I couldn’t hold myself together anymore. I felt utterly alone.

I fell in love with a man who carried his own pain — my friend’s older brother.
She told me not to, but I did anyway. She ended our friendship for about a year.

My relationship with him was passionate at first and then complicated. He had his own demons and his avoidance had led to a hidden addiction. He drank too much. I was in denial and we were in debt. No matter how hard I worked at any of it, it was never enough to break me free of these patterns and to find a sense of safety.
When our daughter was born, the weight of it all finally cracked me open.

One night, she was melting down, screaming — pulling my hair, thrashing in my arms — and I didn’t feel safe. And I didn’t trust myself.
I put her in her room, held the door closed, and slid down the wall, sobbing.
It was the moment I realized:
I had built a life that looked safe, but didn’t feel safe. For any of us. I couldn’t live like that anymore and I didn’t want my story to be her story too. I decided I was going to fix it.

Learning to Be Held

Healing didn’t start with a grand transformation — it started with a whisper.
An Al Anon Family meeting. A book. A breath.
Letting go of everything I knew and believed about myself and rediscovering who I was, piece by piece.

I started trying to build better habits. I learned to sit with my feelings instead of avoiding them or trying to fix them.
I learned to set boundaries instead of building walls.
To listen to my body when it said “no.”

And slowly, everything changed.
I stopping judging myself and my husband and I became more supportive and compassionate. He got sober. Our relationship healed.
I began to create more safe for all of us — not because life got easier, but because I stopped abandoning myself. I started belonging to myself and that opened me up to a sense of belonging in relationship.

When I joined my first group coaching program, I sat with a group of women who didn’t need me to be perfect. They shared so many of the same struggles and I felt less alone. They saw me, they gave me presence, and held space for me in my struggles. It was powerful and healing.

That experience inspired me to create my own sisterhood circle — a community where women could be real, held, and seen.
And when my family moved to Spain, that sense of connection deepened.
I found people who feel like soul family — the kind of community I used to believe only existed for others. The proverbial village I’d been searching for.

For the first time in my life, I didn’t have to earn belonging.
I could simply rest in it.

Coming Home to My Nature

Today, I help high-achieving women — the strong ones, the capable ones, the caretakers — unlearn the belief that they have to hold it all together to be loved.

Because I know what it’s like to build a beautiful life that feels empty.
To confuse control with safety.
To mistake independence for strength.
To live your whole life proving your worth when you were worthy all along.

Healing taught me that you can’t find peace by controlling your environment.
You find it by softening into your environment — by taking back control of your inner world — your thoughts, your beliefs, your choices—because that’s where your power to create peace lies. In coming home to yourself — to your body, your truth, your nature.

Maybe you know that story too — the one where you’re holding everything together because deep down, you don’t trust anyone else will.
You call it independence, but it feels more like isolation.

If that’s you, I want you to know:
You don’t have to be so strong to be safe.
You don’t have to fix yourself to be worthy of love.
You belong — not because you’ve earned it, but because you exist.

And when we finally remember that, we stop merely surviving.
We start to flourish.