She wasn’t trying to say anything profound.
She just looked at me, smiled, and said: “We’re so lucky to have each other, aren’t we? We’re happy.”
And I just… stopped.
Not because it was sad, but because it was true.
Because somewhere in the middle of all the hard years, we’d made it through – and my now-grown-up daughter standing in front of me already knew it, even if I hadn’t let myself feel it yet.
We’re happy.
For a while, I’d been sharing a lot about narcissistic abuse on social media and in my wok. My own lived experience of it, not from a clinical distance – from inside it. And I knew it was helping people. People I worked with told me so, regularly.
But people who knew me, who knew us personally, had started to ask: are you sure you want to keep sharing this?
I felt defensive when they did because my intentions were good. People were telling me I was helping them, so how could something that was helping people be the wrong thing to do?
And then my daughter said that sentence.
And I realised: I’d been so focused on the people I was helping that I hadn’t stopped to ask what it was costing the people closest to me.
What it meant for them to live inside a story that was still being told. What it created – that invisible cord and energetic loop – to keep circling back to the hardest chapter of our lives, over and over again.
It wasn’t a dramatic moment, nobody was upset, there was no blow-up, or confrontation.
Just a “we’re happy” from my daughter who had no idea she’d just changed something in me.
That’s often how it works, isn’t it. The big, dramatic moments shake you, but it’s the small ones that tell the truth.
So I made a decision: I don’t need to lead with that story anymore.
I’m still here for every client who has been through something similar. My work with the nervous system will always connect me to people healing from trauma and abuse – because that’s exactly what it causes in the body.
If you come to a 1:1 with me, I’ll let you know I understand it from the inside. On retreat, if I’m teaching a vagus nerve reset, I’ll tell you I came to this work through my own burnout and lived experience.
But I don’t have to carry it in my marketing – in public.
We made it through, and now we’re rebuilding our lives in the certainty that that’s never happening again.
One of the most powerful things you can do when you’re ready to step into a new chapter — is take yourself somewhere completely outside of the everyday.
That’s why I’m running three retreats in Portugal this year, so you can join a welcoming group, relax by the coast and feel held.
It’s the kind of place where you can fully release and let go.
Our Portugal retreats are: