THE CONSEQUENCES OF CONDITIONING In a world where my feelings were dismissed and my reality denied, I learned to shape myself around what others seemed to want or need from me. To survive I became careful, watchful and learned how to read a room using invisible and unpredictable cues. Over time, that kind of survival begins to cost. I lost touch with what I truly thought or felt. My own needs blurred into the background, not just hidden, but forgotten. Even to me. I felt alone in rooms full of people. Terrified without knowing why. Trapped in a life that looked fine on the outside but left me dead on the inside. I felt disconnected from others, from myself and from any sense of deeper meaning. I questioned everything: Is this it? Is this what life is meant to be? Me? Following in the footsteps of my parents, drinking heavily into the evening, searching for a glimpse of peace in the bottom of a whisky tumbler. I carried a deep, unnamed hurt. A grief for something I couldn’t quite touch. A constant sense that something was missing. That’s the weight of long-term disconnection, the hidden cost of trauma conditioning and of becoming so stuck in survival mode that you forget what it means to truly live. ROCK BOTTOM I sincerely believed there was no way out. I had truly tried to keep up, but I repeatedly felt like a failure. Now a single parent to four young children, it felt as though I couldn’t even reach a baseline competence. At one point it was suggested I was suffering psychotic depression. A sense of shame washed over me as an echo of my enigmatic childhood illness seemed to reemerge. The stigma of mental illness was rife, and I was scared I would be cast as crazy. My father, faithful to the medical model, seemed to support that perspective over hearing or seeing the truth of me. I held onto his word and his responses as though they were the only explanation. At the time I was lost and vulnerable and desperately needed his connection, but instead, I received pathologisation. I genuinely believed my children would be better without me. That I had become nothing but a burden. Life was no longer living; it was enduring a daily crawl through shame, confusion, and blame. The dream I had as a little girl, to become a humanitarian, was now buried beneath a hashed pile of pain. Looking back now, I can understand that it was more commonplace for society to diagnose mental illness than acknowledge years of interpersonal trauma, and I can appreciate how complex it can be to witness your child’s pain when caught in your own worldview. Even so, I became a scapegoat. I later found validation for what I had experienced in Bessel Van Der Kolk’s acclaimed book ‘The Body Keeps the Score’ and as a person who has lived distortion, I can confirm ... the body really does keep the score. Emotionally starved of love, care, and affection, I reached outward again, desperate for someone or something to show me I had value. I met someone who made me feel seen. It didn’t take much for me to fall, but that relationship turned out to be the most destructive of all. What I endured was beyond anything I could have imagined. The aftermath stripped me bare. No home, no car, no money, poor health, no safety. I lost everything. I was left with nothing but the clothes on my back and £3.40 in my bank account. It was unfathomable. After years of trying to be good, to do better, to prove my worth this is where I landed? But this time was different, a sense of calm washed over me. The moment everything false had fallen away, and the truth began to rise.