I'm "thawing" out after a lifetime of living in a chronic state of stress.

I’ve been consciously healing-shedding-dying-surrendering-growing-transforming for just over three years now, and most especially since meeting my partner Brad in 2023 — he has been a huge catalyst in my journey of healing from complex trauma.

The day I moved out of my childhood home and into my partner’s home in July, one of the biggest shifts I’ve experienced happened in me — energetically and emotionally. I ended up having a nose bleed that didn’t stop for about 20 minutes, something that’s never happened before. It happened again the very next day and many times since. I intuitively knew it was deeply symbolic of energetic cords being cut and my body releasing trapped trauma and emotions that had been held in my body for a very long time. I will remember this day, as it was a huge turning point in my journey; a time where the deepest healing started to occur and the hardest truths revealed themselves.

“You can’t heal in the same environment that made you sick.” - Unknown

The most confusing part isn’t that I feel bad sometimes — it’s that I can go from feeling powerful and alive to barely able to get through a conversation, go for a walk or even sleep some weeks and I never know which version of myself I’ll wake up as. It’s the unpredictability of it that makes me question everything. The fear takes over me sometimes, where old shame-based thought patterns resurface - “there’s something wrong with me” or “I must be broken.” I cycle between feeling like I’m on top of the world and finally healing, and the next moment wondering what the hell is happening to my body.

There’s a real paradox to trauma healing that no one prepared me for… that when I finally felt truly safe, that I would feel like I was falling apart, breaking down and even dying at times… that my body would feel worse than it ever has… and that the healthy, conscious relationship that I’d always dreamed of would bring up every painful story, memory and belief that I was holding onto from my past relationships and childhood.

The deepest irony is that I’ve spent years wanting to feel safe in my body, yet when I reach it, I feel terrified, confused and exhausted, because everything that I’ve absorbed and not been able to move through and feel in the past, is being purged from my body, and it’s happening at a rapid rate.

What I’m learning is that safety is where the real healing work begins and it is harder than I’d ever imagined.

The Landscape of my Trauma

Growing up, there were things that I felt inside of me — things too complex for me to understand at the time — that I couldn’t name up until recent years. One of those things is that for most of my life I have felt chronically unsafe in my body, as I never felt truly safe to be the truest, rawest and most authentic version of me since I was a child — and I still carry some of that trauma in my body to this day.

“Complex trauma does its damage over time. It is prolonged, repeated, and often inflicted by people who were supposed to keep us safe.” - Pete Walker

My childhood taught me that love came with conditions and if I didn’t fit those conditions, it meant that I was unloveable, unworthy and therefore I would be rejected if I didn’t meet my parents’ expectations of me — which in my experience, I was the one that met them the least out of my siblings, therefore I felt I was rejected, name called, shamed and made to feel like I was a bad person more than any of the others. I became what you would call the “scapegoat” — a term used to describe one of the roles that are played in dysfunctional families.

The trauma I have experienced from my parents was in many ways very indirect, subtle and covert, however I felt every unspoken word, patronising look, energetic violation and judgement deeply in my bones — which has made figuring out all of my trauma a lot more confusing for me because it wasn’t obvious to the untrained eye. And some would look from the outside and see that I was physically cared for — I was fed, clothed, and came across happy and polite, so the majority would look straight past me as a child, not seeing the emotional weight that I was carrying deep down of never feeling that I was loved, that I mattered, or that I was truly known for the truth of who I am.

It feels pretty dark and insidious at times because the trauma I have experienced leaves no evidence, you cannot name it or even see it sometimes. But my body most definitely FELT it. Covert abuse can be so damaging because you can’t prove it, it makes you doubt your own reality, someone can masquerade it as “normal” by framing it as a joke and you can’t protect yourself from something that you cannot articulate. For example, a child being seen through a predatory lens — a profound betrayal and energetic violation — something a child cannot understand, but their nervous system and body would recognise as a threat. This is particularly insidious because it warps their sense of self and teaches them that love and violation go together — eventually leading them to date and surround themselves with individuals when they’re older, who will do the exact same type of covert, insidious, manipulative and dark behaviours to them. Which by the way, they will blame themselves for. Covert abuse doesn’t just hurt you in the moment — it programs you to accept further violation as normal, to seek out familiar danger, to distrust your own instincts. And then it makes you feel crazy for being affected by something “that wasn’t even that bad.”

I realise now, that they never chose or learnt to love themselves unconditionally, so how could they love me unconditionally? You cannot give something to another that you have not firstly given to yourself. I hold the awareness that things were definitely different back then and they didn’t have access to the things we have now. Knowing this helps me to empathise, but in no way does it negate the way they behaved at times and the covert and overt abuse I experienced from them.

I am done with over-empathising, over-understanding, enabling bullshit and bypassing my valid healthy anger so that others feel comfortable — whether they meant well or not, whether they acted unconsciously or not — it does not matter, it was NOT ok. It does not change the fact that they have done things that have affected me negatively to this day. What matters most to me is taking accountability for our actions and how they impact others — to which they never did and I don’t see my dad ever doing if I’m honest and I’ve learnt to be at peace with that reality.

I’ve kept myself quiet and bypassed my anger for too long, to protect them, and others, at the expense of myself.

Not anymore. I’m using my most powerful tool — my voice.

Meeting Safety

There are many layers to what I have endured, which are being revealed to me in recent times. This is mainly due to the deep somatic work I have been doing for years now, that has helped me to unearth some of the deeply stored grief, rage, pain and sadness that has been held in my being since I was a child, and also due to being with a man that is truly safe for my soul, heart, womb and body.

This is a man who sees me as a person and not an object to be used and abused — something that has been deeply unfamiliar to me my whole life. He has helped me to remember what it feels like to be loved unconditionally, to have healthy boundaries, to be truly safe with another human and the importance of speaking my TRUTH.

When I first met Brad, I felt a deep sense of peace and inner stillness I’d never felt in the presence of another before — my body was relaxed, at ease and my mind didn’t feel any need to “work” him out whatsoever. I knew that this was the felt sense of safety I’d been longing for my whole life, yet a part of me felt deeply terrified by it as it was so unfamiliar to me. But the deeply intuitive knowing part of me knew that this safety would be the foundation that would help to heal and liberate me from everything I was carrying. It would help me to become the woman that I knew I was underneath the trauma and pain. This knowing within me stayed with me even in the darkest moments, where it was excruciatingly painful and all I wanted to do was put my walls of steel up and run away from all the pain that was resurfacing due to what Brad would mirror back to me.

3 years later, our bond is unbreakable and we are more deeply in love than ever.

The Paradox — Why Safety Makes Things Harder at First

The more safety I cultivate, the more I am in my body, the more the truth is being revealed to me — which is agonising to hold sometimes. It is raw, messy and downright exhausting. I’ve had nosebleed after nosebleed, days where I am so achy and exhausted I struggle to get out of bed, weeks where I can’t sleep and days of continuous crying. My body is finally expelling what it has absorbed. For years, I’ve taken in predatory, toxic and intrusive energies, because I had no idea how to protect myself from them and I had nowhere to put them, so my body held it all.

“Trauma is not a life sentence. It’s not a story about the past. Trauma lives in the present, in your body, and can be healed through the body.” - Peter Levine

The truth is, I thought leaving my parents’ house and moving away from home, would make the symptoms, exhaustion, anxiety and sleepless nights get better pretty quickly, but they’ve actually been a lot worse some weeks. The heaviness in my body makes me feel like I am an old woman at times, it makes me feel scared and confused that something is wrong with my body and that I won’t be able to do the things that I used to love doing —hiking, walking, climbing, and exploring — ever again. I have such contrasting weeks at the moment, some where I feel so alive, energised and in love with my life again and then others where I feel heavy, exhausted and depressed. It’s so unpredictable and exhausting.

What I’m Learning

I’m realising that sometimes, things have to get worse before they can get better and that the intelligence of the body is far beyond what the mind can comprehend. My body knew moving in with Brad was safe before my mind did, that’s why my nose poured with blood and why I have been releasing emotions daily — it knew it was safe to finally let go.

My nervous system had been stuck in survival mode and I’d been living from the neck up for so long — I forgot what it felt like to inhabit my body, which meant that I could not feel the stress, tension and trauma compounding within me, therefore I could not feel what my body was trying to communicate to me. It wasn’t until I started to go into full blown collapse / freeze mode and had to quit the gym, struggled to go for walks and to have conversations, that I started to realise my body was seriously trying to get me to listen and look inwards.

Through the somatic experiencing sessions I have been able to develop a bigger capacity to be with the most uncomfortable and painful sensations I’d been avoiding for years. It has helped me to inhabit my body more fully and therefore become much more aware of how my body feels around certain people and places. I now see the physical symptoms as messengers rather than as burdens to be worried about and I now know that cognitively understanding your trauma is not the same as working through the body to heal trauma because trauma lives in the emotional and survival brain, the nervous system, the body’s tissues and cellular memory. It is not only important to work with the mind but with the body too, because only through the body is the trauma released — like my nosebleeds — I can’t think my way to a nose bleed, my body just does it when it feels safe enough.

You cannot think your way out of a dysregulated nervous system and traumatised body, you have to feel your way through it. This is why somatic work is so important and why it feels more destabalising than talk therapy — I’m actually touching the trauma where it lives, not just talking about it and understanding it from a safe distance.

I’m writing this after moving through some heavy emotions this past month, whilst learning more fully that this journey of “healing” never truly ends because we are never “fully healed and perfect,” so I’m starting to let go of the idea and instead be here now. I don’t know when the heavy weeks will stop coming or when the nosebleeds finally cease. But what I do know is this: my body was never broken and neither am I. Every symptom, every release, every moment of exhaustion is my body doing exactly what it needed to in perfect timing. And for the first time in my life, I’m learning to finally trust it and let it lead — letting go of control and surrendering to its ancient wisdom. Maybe that’s what healing truly is: not the absence of pain, but having the safety to feel it all the way through.