My Story so Far…

Trigger Warning: The following text contains sensitive content related to sexual abuse.

Like everyone on the planet, I’ve known struggle. Starting with my childhood which held joy, love, and many moments of comfort, but also threaded through it were experiences that were dangerous, disorienting, and deliberately cruel. Aged five, I was sexually and emotionally abused by my “carer”, a woman who worked in our home, and her husband. It went beyond the physical. There was deliberate cruelty and humiliation. She would do odd things like braid my hair so tight I’d feel dizzy and my scalp would bleed. Once, she dragged me up seven flights of stairs by a plait and threw me and my rug-burnt skin into scalding water, because I asked if I could watch Thundercats. I was threatened into silence and I believed what they said they’d do if I ever told anyone.

At eight, my Venezuelan mother, grieving her own recently deceased mother and struggling with postpartum depression, was seen by a negligent psychiatrist. He later made headlines for sexual misconduct but was never struck off, in fact he’s still practising. I recently found his Twitter account, where he made jokes about immigrants drowning at sea. That moment taught me a lot about medical racism. His care left my mother bedridden for months, present but unreachable. My child’s mind couldn’t understand why she was gone when I needed her most.

By nine, OCD had taken hold of me. I hid it, terrified of being found out. I'd already seen how people were treated when their minds didn’t behave. As the eldest daughter, I felt it was my job to hold everything together. I was given the room at the top of the house, something I really wanted, but when the stairs creaked at night and the dark felt haunted, I couldn’t sleep because I was so afraid of all the ghosts. Boarding school was sold to me as salvation, a chance to start again, but I was going to a traumatising place, already pretty traumatised. The jolly hockey sticks dream I saw was nothing like the brochure. It seemed like everyone was a bully, and you had to manage relationships like in a prison buying your safety. All the girls were obsessed with thinness, perfection and beauty. I felt alien, too soft, too brown, too strange. At eleven, I was drowning. I felt alone rejected and confused. My coping mechanisms were showing and getting me even more bullied. I was so privileged in ways that made me feel overwhelming guilt and shame, but I felt deeply unsafe in ways no-one wanted to see. I began to believe what was already written in my nervous system: the world isn’t safe. People can’t be trusted and if I want to survive, I have to be perfect or twenty steps ahead.

By thirteen, I was slipping. My grades fell. My confidence evaporated. I saw myself as ugly, stupid, and broken. Teachers praised other students, whilst I was always in detention, which only confirmed my fears: I was a problem. I turned to sugar for comfort and slid into disordered eating. By fourteen, I had given up. I stopped trying. I was taken to a doctor who diagnosed me with a “chemical imbalance,” the same label given to my mother. He prescribed me, lithium. I was told this misery, was the best I could expect for my life. I felt like my future had been stolen. I stopped hoping. By seventeen, I could barely get out of bed. I was convinced I was too stupid to pass my A-levels. I hadn’t been present in school for years. I was miles from myself.

At eighteen, I began therapy more frequently. Over and over again. I would tell my story like an actor’s monologue, trying to be the perfect client. Reciting my pain was the only thing I knew how to do well, but I didn’t get any better. In fact, my OCD worsened, I was in constant fear. I became obsessed with being thin, with knowing everything, with pleasing everyone. I detached completely from reality.

I was placed on a trial drug by a psychiatrist who made inappropriate, sexual advances. The drug caused partial facial paralysis when I laughed. I felt like I was really going mad, I began collecting chaotic experiences, if this was the route I was heading, I might as well have some good stories to tell. That year, I was assaulted more than once, it was getting harder and harder to heal. By nineteen, suicide crossed my mind daily.

At twenty-one, my parents were afraid, so I moved to Barcelona to try and make a new start. For a while, I felt free. I created again. I fell in love. For the first time, I allowed myself to feel joy. Then my father was diagnosed with cancer. Though he survived another thirteen years and endured over sixty surgeries. Watching him deteriorate, mentally and physically, crushed me. It felt like nothing in life could ever stay good for long.

But then something changed for real. My mother came across an ad for something called Cognitive Hypnotherapy. She booked in with its creator, Trevor Silvester. I followed. That single act would change everything.

I began to understand how to speak to my subconscious. How to rewire what I believed. For the first time, I saw the truth: I was never broken. I just hadn’t been taught to trust myself. I had been taught to trust people who failed me, often abusive, evil people. Authority figures who pathologised my pain, silenced my voice, and confused harm with help.

Everything I had believed about myself, that I was destined for hardship, that I was too much, that I was damaged. It wasn’t me. It was the map I’d been handed and the road I had followed.

Learning how to rewrite that map was the beginning of everything. I began to unravel what had been knotted in me for years. I started speaking to the parts of me that had been silenced. I stopped chasing perfection as protection. I began building safety inside myself.

I stopped seeing my past as proof that I was doomed, and started seeing it as proof that I was powerful.

Now, I live a life I once couldn’t even let myself imagine. I am loved. Deeply. I have the dog I dreamed of as a child. I share a life with a partner who inspires me, plays with me, grounds me. We create together. We laugh a lot.

I live my goal of not having to take the medication I was told I’d need forever to be mildly ok (and I obviously hold no judgment for those who do). Most importantly, I have built a business that makes my heart proud, I am fascinated by healing, it is more than a calling, it is an obsession that gives my life and story meaning. I help others rewrite their own stories, people who, like I once did, believe they are broken beyond repair. Change is real. Healing is possible. I’ve lived it.

Your story might feel heavy or impossible. But it can become a source of strength. Your mind is not fixed. Your nervous system is not doomed. You are not your diagnosis or your past. You are wildly capable of becoming new. You are not broken. You are becoming. And I’m here to walk beside you on the way home.