I Am Not Broken | Healing From Trauma, Grief and Survival Mode

It took me a long time to realise I am not broken. I actually built myself from everything that I had been through. For a very long time, I believed I was the problem.

I did not arrive in the world believing that. No child does. It was something I learned through the way I was spoken to, treated, blamed, and reminded of the circumstances around my birth. I grew up with the belief that my life was an inconvenience, that my existence caused problems, and that love was something I had to earn by being useful, quiet, strong, or needed.

When that belief starts early enough, it does not stay as a thought. It becomes part of your body, your nervous system, your relationships, and the way you move through the world.

For many years, I did not understand that. I only knew that I felt unsafe, unwanted, and different. There was always this deep feeling inside me that I had to prove I deserved to be here. I had to prove I was good enough. I had to prove I was not the burden I had been made to believe I was.

That kind of pain does not just disappear because you grow older. It follows you until you are ready to face it.

When My Body Started Speaking For Me

Throughout my twenties and thirties, my body carried so much of what I had not yet been able to process. I experienced autoimmune symptoms, PCOS, glandular fever, lung issues, pneumonia, pleurisy, CPTSD, blood clots, fibroids, miscarriage, and eventually a hysterectomy after years of health complications.

At the time, I was looking for answers in all the usual places. I went to doctors,had tests, tried to understand why my body kept breaking down, why symptoms kept appearing, and why no one could ever seem to explain the whole picture.

It took me years to realise my body was not betraying me. It was speaking for the parts of me that had been silenced for too long.

My body was holding rejection. It was holding grief. It was holding shame, fear, anger, trauma, and all the emotions I had been taught to bury. I had also experienced sexual abuse as a child and sexual assault as an adult, and those wounds became part of the healing journey too.

They were not the whole story, but they were part of it.

For a long time, I carried those things quietly because that is what many women do. We survive, we get on with it, and we become functional. We learn how to smile, work, help others, and keep moving while carrying pain no one else can see.

Eventually though, what is buried will ask to be healed.

For me, that request came through my body, my grief, my losses, and the moments where life stripped me back so deeply that I could no longer keep pretending I was fine.

The Losses That Changed Me

One of the hardest chapters of my life was losing my twins at 11 weeks.

I had wanted to be a mother. I had felt so much hope, love, and excitement during that pregnancy, and when I miscarried, it broke something very deep inside me. The physical process became dangerous, and I was told I may not have survived if it had happened outside the hospital.

Not long after that, I developed a blood clot on my lungs. Later, a fibroid grew so severely that what was meant to be a myomectomy became a full hysterectomy.

Losing my ability to carry children was not just a medical event. It was grief. I lost my identity, and the future I had imagined. It was also the loss of a version of womanhood I thought I was meant to experience.

That pain changed me, but it also opened a doorway.

After everything my body had been through, I started asking different questions. I no longer wanted to only know what was wrong with me physically. I wanted to understand what my body had been carrying emotionally, energetically, spiritually, and subconsciously.

That was when I began to truly explore healing.

Choosing To Live For Myself

In 2013, I made a decision that changed the direction of my life.

I decided I wanted to live for me.

That sounds simple, but for someone who had spent most of her life feeling unwanted, blamed, and undeserving, it was not simple at all. It was massive. It meant I had to stop building my life around pain, fear, rejection, and other people’s opinions of me.

I began studying Reiki, crystal healing, emotional healing, psychic development, spiritual healing, mindset, and anything else that helped me understand the connection between the body, emotions, energy, trauma, and the soul.

The more I learned, the more I could see the patterns in my own life.

When I was happy, connected, purposeful, and aligned, my body responded. I was healthier, lighter, more alive, and more able to move forward. When I buried my emotions, ignored my truth, swallowed my pain, or lived from fear, my body showed me very quickly that something was not right.

This was not about blaming myself for illness. That is not healing, that is just another stick to beat yourself with.

It was about understanding that my body, mind, emotions, and spirit were not separate. They were all speaking to each other, and when I finally started listening, my whole life began to change.

Building Something From My Soul

After everything I had been through, I started a crystal business from scratch with $200.

That business became so much more than selling crystals. It became a doorway back to myself. I shared what I was learning, offered psychic readings, taught Reiki, held healing sessions, ran spiritual development classes, and helped people understand energy in a way that was grounded, practical, and deeply personal.

For the first time, I felt like I was creating something from my soul.

I had found something that gave meaning to what I had survived. The crystals, the readings, the healing work, and the spiritual teaching were not just services. They were part of my own recovery, my purpose, and the way I started to give back to others.

Then that business collapsed.

Due to a very bad partnership and a series of devastating events, I lost not only the business but also my home, my car, my income, and the dream I had poured myself into. After losing my ability to carry children, that business had felt like my baby. It was my purpose, my family, my identity, and my proof that I could create something beautiful from nothing.

When it fell apart, I fell apart too.

The Moment The Fight Fell Out Of Me

There are moments in life where you do not just feel sad or disappointed. You feel emptied out.

That is where I found myself.

I had fought for so long. I had fought to be wanted, fought to be seen, fought to be loved, fought to heal, fought to build, and fought to make something meaningful out of my life. When the business collapsed and I had no resources, no real support, and no clear pathway to justice, the fight just fell out of me.

I was angry, and devastated. I was mentally and emotionally at my lowest point, and I knew I needed help because I did not trust where my thoughts were going. So I took myself to hospital.

That decision was one of the most powerful choices I ever made.

Not because the system saved me. In many ways, it failed me. I found the mental health system incredibly unhelpful because I did not fit neatly into the boxes they seemed prepared to deal with.

Still, I chose not to become the worst version of myself. I chose to seek help, and to remove myself from danger. I chose to stay.

Even then, in all the darkness, my intuition and connection to spirit kept telling me I was strong and that I would come back again.

At the time, I did not know how.

I only knew that somewhere inside me, there was still a part of me that was not finished.

Rebuilding From Nothing

My rebuild did not happen in a straight line.

I spent time in a women’s refuge, moved around, and stayed with friends. I went to Maitland, then Rockhampton, and in those places I was given the space to breathe, heal, study, and reconnect with myself.

That period of my life became one of the most important turning points in my transformation.

• I studied coaching.
• I did free courses online.
• I read books.
• I listened to everything I could find about mindset, healing, emotional transformation, trauma, and purpose.
• I worked with my own thoughts. I questioned the story I had been living in. I sat with my pain instead of running from it.

Most importantly, I started to understand that if I wanted a different life, I had to become an active participant in creating it.

No one was coming to hand me a new identity.

No one could give me back what I had lost.

Nobody else could make me believe I was worthy if I refused to choose that for myself.

So I started choosing differently.

I chose to believe there was a reason for my life. I chose to believe my pain could be used for something meaningful. And I chose to believe that if I had survived that much, maybe I was not weak at all. Maybe I was powerful. Maybe I had been powerful the whole time, but I had never been taught how to own it.

That was when everything began to shift.

Learning To Be At Cause

One of the most life-changing things I learned was the idea of being at cause.

Being at cause does not mean you blame yourself for what happened to you.

I did not cause the abuse or the rejection. I did not cause the assault, the cruelty, the betrayal, or the losses that came through other people’s choices.

There is no healing in taking blame for someone else’s harm.

Being at cause means something very different.

It means I get to choose what I do with the story now.

Like deciding whether my past becomes a prison or a pathway. Understanding my patterns without making them my identity. Taking responsibility for my healing without taking responsibility for the things that wounded me.

That distinction gave me freedom.

For so long, I had been asking, “Why did this happen to me?”

Eventually, I started asking, “What can I become because I refuse to let this be the end of me?”

That question changed my life.

It moved me from victim to creator. It did not erase the pain, but it gave me somewhere powerful to stand.

Investing In The Woman I Was Becoming

Healing myself was not an accident.

I invested in it.

I invested time, energy, money, focus, faith, and commitment into becoming the woman I am today. Studied Reiki, energy healing, crystal healing, spiritual development, coaching, NLP, NLP Mastery, emotional healing, neuro transformation, and the deeper patterns that drive human behaviour.

I wanted to understand how people change, not just in theory, but in the body, mind, emotions, energy, language, nervous system, and soul.

Through that process, I learned that transformation does not happen because you read one book, attend one session, or repeat one affirmation. Real transformation happens when you begin to see yourself differently and then make choices that match the woman you are becoming.

That is what I did.

I stopped treating myself like the unwanted child.

I stopped seeing myself as the woman who had lost everything.

Slowly, I began valuing myself as someone worth protecting, supporting, investing in, and listening to.

That was new for me.

At first, it felt uncomfortable because when you have spent your life proving your worth to others, it can feel almost rebellious to choose yourself without apology.

But I kept going.

I kept learning, healing, showing up, asking better questions, listening to spirit, and I kept rebuilding my identity from the inside out.

Now, I love the woman I have become.

I value her deeply.

I invest in her because she is worth investing in.

And I continue to grow every day, not because I am broken, but because I am worthy of becoming more.

Why I Do This Work Now

Healing myself gave me the pathway to help others.

That is the truth of it.

I did not learn this work from a textbook and then decide to teach it. I lived the breakdown, the grief, the trauma, the illness, the spiritual awakening, the identity loss, the nervous system collapse, and the rebuild.

Then I studied, trained, practised, refined, and turned that lived experience into a body of work that now helps other women find their own way forward.

This is why I created my coaching work, my spiritual development classes, my readings, my healing sessions, and my Shine program.

I know there are women out there who look like they are coping, but inside they are exhausted. They are overgiving, people-pleasing, second-guessing themselves, carrying old trauma, repeating painful patterns, and wondering why they cannot just “move on” when they have already done so much work.

I understand those women because I was one of them.

I know what it feels like to have done the therapy, read the books, listened to the podcasts, pulled the cards, journalled the feelings, prayed for guidance, and still feel stuck in the same emotional loop.

The missing piece is not more information.

Most of the time, the missing piece is integration.

It is learning how to regulate your nervous system, shift the story in your body, rebuild self-trust, clear the emotional charge, reconnect with your intuition, and choose from the woman you are becoming instead of the wound you are protecting.

That is the work I love.

It is not surface-level positivity. I am not here to paint glitter over grief and call it healing.

Real healing is deeper than that.

It is honest, powerful, spiritual, practical, emotional, and sometimes uncomfortable. Yet on the other side of it, there is freedom.

I Am Not Broken – I Am Grateful For Who I Am Now

I would never pretend my life has been easy.

There were parts of my story that were brutal, unfair, lonely, and heartbreaking.

Still, I can honestly say I am grateful for the woman I am today.

I am grateful for my strength, my intuition, my compassion, my humour, my fire, my wisdom, and my ability to sit with people in their pain without being afraid of it.

The things I went through did not make me who I am on their own.

What made me who I am was the decision to keep choosing myself through it all.

• I chose healing.
• I chose growth.
• I chose purpose.
• I chose to listen to my soul.
• I chose to stop abandoning myself.
• I chose to become someone I could be proud of.

That is why I feel happy now.

Not because everything is perfect.

It is because my life has meaning.

My work has meaning.

My story has meaning.

I know who I am, I know why I am here, and I know that everything I have overcome allows me to stand beside other women with real understanding.

Not pity.

Not judgement.

Real understanding.

You Are Not Broken Either

If you have been through your own darkness, I want you to know this.

Your past may explain some of your patterns, but it does not have to define your future.

You may have been hurt, rejected, betrayed, abused, dismissed, abandoned, or made to feel like you were too much. That does not mean you are broken. It means you have been carrying things that were heavy.

There is a way forward.

You can rebuild your identity, regulate your nervous system, reconnect with your intuition,stop living from old survival patterns, and learn to trust yourself again.

Most importantly, you can become proud of who you are.

That does not mean pretending the past did not happen. It means owning your story without letting it own you.

I believe every woman has a light within her that life cannot fully destroy. Sometimes that light gets buried under trauma, grief, fear, shame, and survival. My work is about helping her find it again.

Because when a woman remembers who she is, everything changes.

She stops begging for scraps.

She stops shrinking to keep others comfortable.

And she stops calling survival a life.

Then slowly, choice by choice, she starts building something new.

That is what I did.

That is what I now help other women do.

Coming through my darkness to become the woman I needed when I was lost, I now help other women turn their pain into power, their survival into strength, and their story into something they no longer have to be trapped inside.

I am not broken. “I did not come through all of that to stay quiet. The reason I came through it is to become the woman I needed when I was lost.”

Ready to stop surviving and come back to yourself?

If this story spoke to something inside you, you do not have to keep doing this alone. Book a free 30-minute clarity call and let’s talk about what healing, rebuilding and rising could look like for you.

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