I grew up in a home with alcoholism and domestic abuse and the best way to avoid explosive conflict was to become invisible. Neither seen or heard.

If I was seen or heard I made sure I was the “good girl”. I thought if I was “good” it would result in less conflict.

So I dimmed my light, over and over, and disowned the parts of me that I deemed disagreeable.

Outside of the home, I didn’t want to give people a reason to dislike and disown me, the way I disowned myself, so I tried to make out that everything was “just fine” when in reality I felt everything but fine.

As I grew up as a young woman this resulted in an undefined sense of self. I didn’t know how to set boundaries; I didn’t know what my values were or who I was at a core level because I had spent my whole life blending in and bleeding out.

All the time I thought I was keeping the peace but I started to notice how my friendships and relationships started to fall apart because I was “flaky” or “triggered”. All my attempts to keep the peace now started to turn on me and I noticed how I was instead letting people down.

It was at this point that I sat down and pointed the finger back at myself. In this moment, I took the first steps into my own empowerment.

From here, the road to recovery from total self-abandonment wasn’t easy. I tripped over numerous times. I lost more friendships. I was in a high-speed car crash. I almost went bankrupt. And then I hit a dark night of the soul where I finally surrendered. I stopped trying to be someone else; it was too hard and I simply didn’t have it in me anymore to keep up the ACT.  

So I set out to know myself deeply. To meet myself in sincerity. And the journey back to myself began by going outside of my self-image and explore the parts of me that I had repressed for as long as I could remember…

What I found was courage, humility, compassion, beauty and a life time of grief. As I sat with all that was coming up I slowly started to feel a sense of wholeness and aliveness that I had never experienced.

And now I want others to find their way back to wholeness. And experience radical aliveness. Life is now, press play.