There wasn’t one defining moment that changed everything.
No grand awakening.
No lightning bolt of clarity.
Just a slow, quiet ache that began to whisper:
“There’s more to me than this.”
For a long time, I lived by the rules I thought I should follow. I was capable, kind, held everything together. From the outside, things looked fine. But inside? I felt tired. Disconnected. Like I was walking through life a few steps removed from myself.
I didn’t feel broken. I just felt far away.
From my truth.
From my body.
From the deeper self I somehow knew existed, even if I couldn’t reach her.
What I didn’t realise at the time was that this ache, this quiet discomfort, was not a problem to fix. It was a signal. A message. An invitation.
The invitation wasn’t to become someone new. It was to come home to the person I had always been, beneath the layers of coping, performing, pleasing, surviving.
But I didn’t know how to begin.
For a long time, I thought healing meant being stronger, clearer, wiser, having answers. What I found was the opposite: it began with curiosity, not certainty.
I began by noticing.
Tension in my chest that had always been there.
A tight smile that didn’t quite reach my eyes.
How I said yes when I meant no.
How I kept busy so I didn’t have to feel.
And then came the feelings I had spent years managing away:
Grief I hadn’t named.
Anger I had swallowed.
A longing I didn’t know I was allowed to have.
I realised I had learned to make myself acceptable, to be good, pleasing, reliable, in exchange for love, safety, or approval. But in doing so, I had lost the deeper thread of me.
And the body always remembers.
The stories I carried lived in the tightness of my shoulders, the shallowness of my breath, the way I tensed before speaking my truth. I had become so used to holding it all in that I didn’t even know I was bracing.
Healing invited me to begin again, not in my head, but in my body.
Not through pushing, but through presence.
Not through fixing, but through listening.
I learned that the parts of me I was most afraid to feel were often the parts that needed the most love. And that love, real love, the kind that softens something ancient, begins with allowing.
Why I Now Hold Space for Others on This Path
If you’ve landed here, and something in this feels familiar, the exhaustion of keeping it all together, the quiet question of “Is this all there is?”, the longing to just be without apology, I want you to know this:
You’re not too much.
You’re not behind.
You’re not broken.
You might just be at the start of your return.
Healing is deeply personal, but it’s not meant to be done alone. It takes relationship. Safety. Attunement.
That’s why I do the work I do, as a therapist, but also as someone who’s walked this path herself. I understand what it’s like to feel like a stranger in your own life, to long for authenticity but not feel safe enough to fully live it.
In my work, I offer a space where you can breathe again. Where you can stop performing. Where the truth of who you are is not too much, it’s welcome.
Together, we meet the parts of you you’ve had to leave behind and invite them home.
And when you’re ready to trust that it’s safe to be yourself again, I’m here.
With warmth,
Laura
