As a kid I was painfully shy. At family gatherings I sat in the corner and hoped nobody would ask me anything. At school I was the outsider who fit into no group.
When I was eleven, I read The Arsonists and made myself a promise: I would never lie to myself. I've kept it. It took me much longer to learn that seeing clearly was only the first step.
In my last years of school we read Sartre's Huis clos and its famous line: "L'enfer, c'est les autres". I understood exactly what he meant. I was living in it. I kept changing how I looked and thought I was changing myself. I still depended on what others thought of me, and I knew it. Knowing didn't get me out.
After school I spent a month in Málaga to learn Spanish. For the first time I met people I could simply be myself with. We laughed, we danced, we stayed up far too late. I wanted more of that, so I kept going. One country turned into seven. Every time I started from zero, and every time I built a life and a circle of friends. My inner critic was never impressed.
What I didn't see for a long time was where my patterns came from. Early on I had learned to doubt my own perception and to keep problems to myself. So I adapted, stayed quiet and ended up in relationships with men who were very good at making me doubt myself even more. It took me years to call it what it was: emotional abuse. Each time, what finally got me out was someone who put into words what I had sensed all along.
Healing took years. Therapy and coaching, a stay in a psychosomatic clinic, a ten-day meditation retreat and years of daily meditation practice. Many honest conversations, and plenty of setbacks. In the clinic I let people see that I wasn’t okay, and they held me. That one experience did more than years of understanding why. My body still notices danger fast, sometimes faster than I'd like. I've stopped treating that as a flaw. It's a warning system that learned early, and today I can listen to it and decide for myself.
That’s why I work the way I do. You already know your patterns. What helps is someone who takes what you saw seriously and stays with you in the moment it happens, while there’s still something you can change. Then you try something new, in small steps. Each new experience writes over a little of the old one, and slowly the new way starts to feel like yours.
