You've become very good at being who everyone else needs you to be.

Maybe you can't even pinpoint when it all began. You just suddenly notice that that's how it is.

That somewhere along the way, you learned which version of you kept the peace, earned the love, stayed safe.

Maybe it happened so gradually you didn't notice until one day you looked in the mirror and couldn't quite find yourself in there.

You function. You cope. You hold it together.

And underneath all of that a part of you is quietly, but ever more persistently: is this it?

You're not broken. You're not too much. You're not NOT ENOUGH. You're not too late.

You're just carrying an identity that was never really yours.

To the outside world, you seem fine. Inside, there's a version of you that has never been allowed to breathe.

On the inside, you feel a great big void that nothing seems to fill...

You've held yourself together for so long you've forgotten what it feels like to fall apart safely.

You've shaped yourself around other people's needs so completely that you can't even see what you need or desire for yourself.

You're like a stranger to you.

You keep finding yourself in the same patterns, the same dynamics, the same exhaustion, the same gap between the life you have

and the one you can almost imagine.

That gap isn't a failing. It is the distance between who you've had to become and who you actually are.

This is where all that changes.

Not through me fixing you, because you were never broken. Not through repeated talking about your experiences that just puts you

right back into the very moments you are trying to leave behind.

Through being fully seen. Through understanding where the patterns came from and why they made complete sense at the time.

Through learning to work with your nervous system rather than being hijacked by it.

Through meeting the parts of you that have been working hard to keep you safe, by gently and compassionately showing them

that they don't have to work so hard anymore.

I've been where you are. To all of those places. I understand that feeling, the sensation as if it was my own.

And I know that the real you underneath all the armour, the you who got buried underneath the fight survival, is not gone.

You've just been waiting for it to be safe enough to come home.

I'm Radka. And I know the way.