From Ground Zero: How I Slowly Rebuilt Myself

Content note: This piece contains references to childhood abuse, domestic violence, and self-harm.

I am not healed. I want to say that clearly, right at the start, because this piece is not a story with a tidy ending.

What I am is stable. Happy, joyful, content, safe, functioning, rational and aligned most days. Settled in a way that thirteen year old me would not have believed possible. But healing, I have learned, is not a destination you arrive at and then just enjoy the stay. It is a relationship you keep having with yourself, for the rest of your life. Some years that relationship is easy. Some years it is hard work. And some years, life throws something at you, a health crisis, a bereavement, a difficulty you didn’t see coming, and that tests everything you thought you had already worked through.

So this is not a recipe. What works for me is specific to my life, my history and the particular shape of what I needed to heal from. If you haven’t read my last piece, the short version is that it was a childhood of ongoing abuse, in almost every form, by my single mother, up till I was about 21 years old. If you want a deeper picture, it’s here. This piece picks up from the other side of it, the slow, unglamorous, ongoing work of building myself from ground zero to the woman I am today.

Boarding School: The First Ally

I arrived at boarding school at thirteen, and the first thing I had to do was figure out how to be a kid, like the rest of my school mates. By twelve I had been running large parts of my mother’s life, managing money, food shopping, her violent moods and her addiction crises. So when teachers and housemasters started giving me instructions, my first instinct was outrage. Who were these people, telling me how to live, when I had been the one making real life decisions for years? But underneath that resistance was relief. I didn’t have to be the adult anymore.

The school had a counsellor, which in the early 1990s was very unusual. I immediately signed up and after a handful of sessions, I decided I could trust her, she would be an ally, and that was it. I saw her every single week for the rest of my time at that school. There were things I held back, not because I didn’t want to share them, but because I couldn’t find the words, or because some of it I was blocking out almost entirely. But everything I did have access to, I was fully willing to share.

She specialised in alcohol and addiction, so she understood exactly what I had grown up inside of and the damage it had done and was still doing. She was softly spoken, graceful and gently challenging. For the first time in my life, I had someone whose full attention, every single week, was focused on helping me. Being able to step into my own truth, openly, with no shame, felt like the most enormous relief.

When I left that school at sixteen, saying goodbye to her was devastating. If I had to put a number on where I was emotionally at that point, on a scale where 100 meant stable, happy and emotionally healthy, I would say I was at about twenty. At the time, that felt like real progress. Looking back, I can see it was the very beginning.

If healing has a starting point, mine was a school counsellor’s office, and the realisation that I no longer had to carry every secret alone.

Late Teens: The Backslide

By my late teens I ended up blackmailed and pressured into a relationship with a man more than twice my age, coordinated and arranged by my mother. He was abusive, coercive, controlling and domestically violent. During this period, the physical self-harming which I had started after leaving school became so serious and severe it required hospitalisation. I will not go into the details here, because this piece is about healing, and that period deserves its own space, written properly, another time. What I will say is that for a long time I carried the blame for how I ended up there. It’s taken many years to recognise clearly that it was never my responsibility. It was hers.

I have always had a deep interest in psychology, in the mind and in behaviour, and even then, in the middle of it, some part of me was watching and trying to understand what was happening and why. That curiosity, even when I couldn’t yet act on it, became one of the threads that eventually pulled me out.

Early Twenties: Structure, and the Cracks Underneath

Eventually I got away from him, lived alone and built a stable professional career. Corporate life gave me something I had never had before, structure, routine, expectations that were consistent and predictable. It was, in its own way, a kind of emotional scaffolding.

But underneath that structure, I was still carrying a huge amount of anger, and no matter how hard I tried to keep a lid on it, it would occasionally overspill. Emotional outbursts that felt disproportionate to whatever had triggered them, because they weren’t really about that moment at all. They were about everything underneath it.

I later moved overseas, closer to other family. But even with all that stability on the surface, I started to notice small anxious behaviours creeping in. Odd out of character rituals I needed, checking the car was locked, sometimes six times, before I could walk away. Little repetitions that I knew, even at the time, weren’t healthy. They were quiet evidence that everything I had lived through was still there, nervous energy that was still needing somewhere to go.

Research on trauma and the nervous system backs up what I was experiencing without having any language for it yet. Trauma creates lasting changes in neural pathways and brain chemistry, and the nervous system can lose its natural ability to return to baseline after a stress response. Mine hadn’t returned to baseline. It was just better disguised.

Mid Twenties: A Diagnosis that Changed Everything

At 24 I was diagnosed with endometriosis and it made me re-evaluate my health, my diet, my entire lifestyle. Around the same time I started a long-term relationship with the man who is now my husband, and for the first time, stability wasn’t just something I was trying to build around myself. It was something I was building with someone else, someone who fully prioritised routine and consistency, and valued us having a calm, relaxed home life.

I had to learn how to live inside that. Eating better, sleeping eight to nine hours a night, more time with family, some counselling, and even some crystal healing and reiki too. I think when someone is dealing with trauma, there should be no judgement about what they try, however unconventional or far out it might seem to anyone else. Each person is on their own healing path, and if something helps them feel better and moves them forward in a healthy direction, that’s what matters, regardless of what others may think. I have learned that healing isn’t one technique, there is no silver bullet. It’s a full mix of verbal, emotional, physical, spiritual, aimed at the whole body, not just the mind.

Then came the GnRH therapy, a medically induced menopause to treat the endometriosis, and what followed was intense emotional dysregulation. Anxiety attacks, rage outbursts that felt entirely irrational. Research shows that sharply reducing oestradiol with a GnRH agonist increases depressive symptoms and heightens activity in the brain regions responsible for processing emotion. I wasn’t imagining it, my hormones were in chaos.

This became one of the most important lessons of my life, though I wouldn’t fully understand it until much later: learning to separate what is hormonal from what is historical.

Thirties: Building Something that Could Hold Me

Through my late twenties and into my thirties, I started a business with my husband, which demanded full-time, consistent commitment from both of us. I worked hard to show up for the people I employed, staying emotionally stable, professional, mentoring and training them, building a workplace with clear boundaries where work and personal life didn’t bleed into each other.

Outside of work, life became deliberately calm. Weekends with family, gardening, cooking, watching films. I took up ballet and horse riding, both physical but quiet, both genuinely good for the nervous system in a way that high intensity exercise never was for me. Research on nervous system regulation consistently shows that this kind of regulation isn’t a luxury, it’s a skill worth developing and protecting, and that small, daily practices build the system’s flexibility over time.

When my mother died, I chose not to attend her funeral and to safeguard myself. Instead, I went back to counselling, months of grief counselling, to properly process the closing of that chapter. My husband and I also travelled a huge amount during these years, which was wonderful for seeing the world and gave us so many incredible experiences, but after enough years of long-haul flights and repetitive upheaval, I started having anxiety attacks on planes. That was my body telling me, clearly, that this particular kind of life wasn’t sustainable for me, however much I’d enjoyed it.

Healing isn’t always about doing more. Sometimes it’s noticing what your body can no longer tolerate, and being willing to listen.

Forties: A Life That Protects Me

In my forties, my husband and I moved country and built an entirely new lifestyle around slow living. Rural countryside, no overstimulation, low-key routines, gardening, cooking, working from home, two cats who are calm, loving presences in the house, and a genuine effort to notice and nurture the wildlife around us.

I am now very deliberate about protecting my nervous system from overstimulation. No horror films or distressing content, online or otherwise. No computer games, not that I ever played them, and social media is restricted to positive influences only with a zero tolerance for bullying, harassment, abuse or general nastiness. I will not engage in unhinged behaviour with others online or offline, and online I am very quick to hit the delete or block button. That is my responsibility to protect myself and I have recognised that I have the most important role to play in influencing myself, so I curate my content to always be full of aspirational, kind, creative, healthy, good wholesome people. Of course they have real moments of difficulty, I’m not trying to be unrealistic, but their focus overall is healthy, non-toxic content. When the algorithm goes off course occasionally I rein it back in or log off.

We enjoy good, home-cooked food, no fast food or highly processed foods, with a focus on a nourishing gut health diet. I avoid big spikes or crashes in anything like high sugar, excessive alcohol and try and ensure that what goes into my body helps me stay balanced. I aim for nine hours of sleep as a baseline, not an aspiration. Work is something that genuinely occupies and feeds my mind without overwhelming it, women’s health and hormones, a subject I find endlessly engaging without it ever feeling like overstimulation.

These last five years have been the most flourishing years of my healing journey. The commitment to a slower, more paced daily routine, physically and emotionally, has finally allowed me to come to a place of inner calm, genuine self-love and deep self-respect, and I have finally reached the woman I never thought I could become. I regularly check in with myself, noticing any shifts in how I’m responding or reacting to things, almost like a running health check on my own nervous system.

Perimenopause arrived too, and with it, a different emotional pattern to the one I’d experienced with the GnRH therapy. This time it wasn’t rage. It was catastrophising and anxiety spirals, a tendency to take a small worry and watch it grow, in my mind, into something much larger and more disastrous than it actually was.

What’s mattered most here is being able to tell the difference. Is this hormonal, a wave that will pass as my levels shift, or is this an old wound, something with deeper roots that actually needs attention? Research shows that around a third of women going through perimenopause experience what’s known as symptomatic menopausal transition, where mood and anxiety symptoms are significantly more pronounced, and knowing that gives me something to hold onto. It doesn’t mean the feeling isn’t real. It means I can ask the right question about where it’s coming from, rather than assuming every spiral is a crisis I need to solve.

Self-awareness, more than any single technique, has been the thing that’s allowed me to keep living well through all of this.

What I Know Now

I knew, from a very young age, younger than ten, that I had to do two things as I grew up. Not hold onto anger. And not repeat her behaviour.

My mother would tell me I deserved what she did to me, because she had been treated the same way as a child, a claim I was never able to verify. She also told me her behaviour towards me was justified because she was a divorced mother left to do everything alone, and livid that everyone in her life had let her down. I saw that bitterness in her. It was visceral. It was like an emotional cancer, eating away at her, every single day. And every day I saw it, I thought, no way am I letting you infect me with that.

So I am emotionally reactive. I react quickly, though I’m taming that more as I get older, but I am also very good at letting things leave me. Yes, I still overthink. Yes, I replay things, I’m working on it, chipping away at it slowly, but I am also at a place now where I don’t carry resentment for her, or grief for her, or anger, as a permanent weight. As you go through life other things come up, other people’s actions or words cause pain or disruption and I make it a choice, a priority, to unpack my own emotional suitcases regularly, rather than carrying things that will weigh me down so much that they get in the way of my future joy.

I allow myself to feel pain, grief, sadness and frustration when life goes wrong, because I know that if I let myself feel those things properly, the days of happiness and contentment that follow will be sweeter and more meaningful for it. When I start to feel like I am losing my way, going off the path of healing, I seek help quickly. A few years ago, my husband and I were struggling to communicate properly, after nearly 25 years together, and I found us a marriage counsellor almost immediately. It guided us through a genuinely bumpy patch. I feel no shame in that whatsoever. Having access to someone professional who can step in and help is a privilege, and using it as a tool to simply take care of myself, our marriage and our life together, is the same as anything else you want to protect in life.

In more recent years I’ve reached a point where I understand that being emotionally strong doesn’t mean being hard or stubborn. It actually takes more inner strength for me to be soft, to bend, to be understanding. I’m still quick to judge, so I’m actively working on a new mantra: “it’s none of my business” and stopping myself every time I catch judgement rising. And I’ve found something I didn’t expect, a much deeper compassion for other women, after a lifetime of feeling confused by them, even avoiding them. I feel entwined with women now, in a way I never did before, and I can see how much we all have in common.

It takes more strength to be soft than to be hard. I only learned that in the last five years, and it changed everything.

The Building Blocks

Healing is a continuous process, and it requires building blocks, though which blocks you need depends entirely on what you’re recovering from. For me, it’s a lifestyle that runs at a pace I can actually digest and enjoy. A relationship that is constant, reliable and stable. Family connections that are supportive, kind and gentle. Friends who don’t bring unnecessary chaos or drama. Work that’s fulfilling, builds confidence, and lets me operate from my safe space, home. Hobbies that are mindful and calming, gardening, crafts, painting.

Everything I let into my life now has to respect and protect my nervous system, help heal a gut that has spent decades storing my stress, and avoid flaring the chronic inflammation and conditions I live with.

I’m not healed, I’m not fixed. But I am here, I am stable, I am loved, I love others, and I’m happy most days, and most incredibly I’m alive, which is something that I honestly did not think I would be at 47, and all of those are things that I’m deeply proud of. We are if nothing else, all a work in progress, but what a gift to yourself when you finally feel that progress is healing.

Thank you for reading.

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If this piece has touched on anything that feels heavy for you, please be kind to yourself. The Samaritans are available 24 hours a day on 116 123. For survivors of childhood abuse, NAPAC offers a confidential support line on 0808 801 0331.

This article is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. If you have concerns about your health or are considering making any changes to your health regime, speak to a qualified healthcare professional first.