As a child I never felt like I belonged. I was born into a system ruled by a narcissistic mother, and a father who enabled her, protected her, forced me to stay in the family when I asked to leave and later on physically abused me in his own way.

My mother used me as her punching ball — I was the target for everything she refused to feel or face in herself. She was impeccable in public while in private I was fed hate, destruction, annihilation, sadism and gaslighting not knowing it wasn’t normal. There was deep sadism, there was light in her eyes when she saw she hurt me. She knew where to hit, it was precise, surgical cruelty. I was the only child in my family who carried the full weight of the abuse — scapegoated, silenced, and punished for what others refused to see. I was constantly confused, questioning my reality, I had no witness, no validation. I never had an external source of love or positive regard, that’s all I knew, so I had no self worth, thought I deserved it, and love felt dangerous and suspicious.

When I stopped enduring in silence and started to speak up at age 14, her abuse became more intense and my father not only protected her but took her side and started abusing me physically and emotionally too. Together, they ended up turning the entire family system against me and made me the monster. What was a covert abuse took a new dimension and became extreme violence. I collapsed, and they kept going. I started developing PTSD, I never felt safe in my own home, not even in my room. We had just moved to new continent and I had no adult support whatsoever, I didn’t know I could talk. I lost my Soul there, I broke entirely. I split my sense of self so strongly to survive that for years I couldn’t recognise myself in pictures at that age. I spoke, begged one to protect me from the other, but they protected each other, defended one another and blamed me. What a marriage. I kept it all together at school, I managed to get good grades, it helped me survive but kept the abuse undercover too. Until my body collapsed entirely the moment high school ended.

I used to think my mother would end up killing me, her abuse was so relentless, so covert and maddening, that my nervous system began to believe death was the only safe exit.

After leaving a narcissistic family system, I spent years as a student and in full-time healing. I wasn’t able to work full-time or generate stable income — my energy was devoted to survival and breaking generational patterns. It wasn’t a pause — it was necessary, invisible labor. Generational curse breaker is a full time job.

Even after I left the family system, I remained financially dependent. What was support in the beginning became partial and conditional — just enough to keep me tethered, never enough to fully land, never enough for health insurance. He knew. It kept me in a quiet state of instability, disguised as care. It was control. It kept me silent.

The pattern runs deep. Someone in the same bloodline didn’t survive. This is for him too. That’s how this system keeps itself intact — by breaking the ones who see it.

When I left their destructive system to survive my parents victimised themselves, they still do. Their level of denial is unheard of.

No one defended me. No one intervened. Not even my extended family.

At the age of 19, after dark years of intense abuse by my family, I became completely debilitated with severe depression, PTSD and C-PTSD. I couldn’t function, I was completely hopeless and my body was in complete collapse. I was ashamed of my symptoms, afraid of asking for help, and thought I didn’t have my place in the world. I lived in survival and control, afraid of the world, triggered by others constantly. I thought others were fine and that there was something deeply wrong with me.

So I did what I thought I had to, I started “traditional talk therapy”. Even though I had a safe space and an empathetic and loving witness, no matter how much effort I put into healing, I wasn’t getting better.

I gave myself a year to get better, and out of a mix of determination and hopelessness, I started researching ways to heal. I cut ties with my abusive family. I didn’t tell this to anyone but I decided that if I couldn’t heal within that year I would kill myself. It was a bet with life. And weirdly enough I’m still here.

During that year I started researching everything I could find on trauma work. I didn’t know back then, but I know realise I was doing advanced research on trauma alone in my room with books and experimentally through my own journey. I researched everything I could find, tried every modality on the market. I didn’t want to just get better, I wanted to understand the deep principles behind healing, the most efficient way to heal, why certain modalities worked and not others, how they could work hand in hand even if no one else was doing it yet. I thought I was researching for myself but I was looking for a map, for Truth. I didn’t know then that my own journey was the map.

I wanted to find the “best way to heal”, “the most efficient modality” and the best therapist. I did Somatic Experiencing, Internal Family Systems, EMDR, Brainspotting, EFT, FasterEFT, IEMT, breath work, shamanic healing. I approached healing as something to be fixed or changed in me, a “problem to be solved”. I found all these techniques amazing, but I was confused because I felt like they complemented each other and a more holistic approach combining them was needed.

While looking for an EFT therapist, I found a very special wise woman, a Soul kin, who was able to hold and guide me on that deep journey, welcoming and loving every part of me, not only the nice ones.

Early on the journey, I remember feeling that if I could get myself through it, I would help others on the way, I felt like it wasn’t only about me.

I then went through a five year initiation. Five years of darkness.

After every big trauma I would heal, another wave of trauma would come to the surface to be seen and healed. I was never given room to breathe. Life was forcing me to not have a life and heal in the dark. I didn’t understand why, I didn’t know anyone on the healing path, I was alone in it, I didn’t know if the healing path existed at all.

I had no life, no map, no spiritual guidance, no framework — barely any support around me, apart from a deeply karmic relationship that was emotionally abusive and narcissistic in nature. It was disguised as love, wrapped in smiles, masked by charm, jokes and warm meals but fueled by control. It constantly oscillated between moments of care and acts of harm and violence. Manipulation, lies, yelling, rage, threats, silent treatments, betrayals of trust, shaming and boundary violations were normalized. My body was objectified, violated, and used. My voice was silenced. I was gaslit, shamed, and left in confusion. He threatened to withdraw support, to kick me out, to remove the very safety he claimed to offer. He often used my deepest traumas against me — not to help me heal, but to destabilize and hurt me, for me to react and then shame me for my reactions, to turn me into the bad one. And then, in the next breath, he’d offer genuine tenderness — just enough to make me question what I knew in my bones.

I was without a home for a long time. I needed rest, safety, a pause to find one. I had no family, no support apart from him. The intensity of my healing process and his abuse left me drained. He kept pushing me out, then letting me back in, but never gave me the stable ground I needed to actually move forward. It wasn’t support — it was control masked as kindness. His abuse and manipulation drained me leaving me with no life force to look for safety. And my body, shaped by ancestral exile, didn’t know how to seek safety anyway. I wasn’t just without a home. I was without the instinct to find one. And I had absolutely no one to call for help, for months on end.

He held the life support. And he used it as a leash.

I was constantly walking on eggshells, I was a queen one moment and a piece of shit the next. His social mask was perfect, the rescuer, the nice one, “celui qui fait gaffe aux autres” and I never dared to break it. I kept the lie in front of others with him. He kept telling me he would heal and change and I waited endlessly.

His kindness was confusing, there were grand gestures and acts of kindness but I always ended up realising that they served his interest or his self image, it was never true generosity, never true care. I arrived at the conclusion that he never truly cared, but he faked it brilliantly, even to himself. And being raised in the family that I was raised in, I didn’t know that it wasn’t normal, I didn’t know true love existed.

I had seen signs of emotional abuse from him towards others before, but never ever to the extent that he was with me, not even close. And that made it so much more confusing.

There were moments of support and genuine good moments, the relationship became abusive gradually — and that’s what made it so hard to name. the rescuer became the abuser.

But I now name it fully. For myself, and for every woman still questioning what she lived through. My mother was never nice so I thought nice was safe, but even the nice ones can destroy, even the nice ones.

Turned out the one Soul who claimed to walk in love and rescue me from my mother was actually her exact mirror.

Two families linked by fate,

two mirrors,

two styles (one has better food),

One Soul sent to break the code.

Update: Code broken. 👑

I didn’t know if what I was doing meant something or was pure madness, but I kept going. Something deep in me kept me going, before I could name it. My therapist never gave me the map because I believe I was meant to become it. Persephone had to rise alone.

I became a toddler again, a 3, 4, 5 year old craving for the love, touch and nurture she never got. All the buried pain I had in me, from the womb to now, as well as generational pain became accessible. I felt like I was transmuting trauma constantly for myself and for the collective, from my past and my ancestors. It felt like a dark tunnel that would never end, there was always more darkness to sit with, and I couldn’t live a normal life.

I sat with grief, hopelessness, rage, deep sorrows, fears and a lot of confusion.

I uncovered layers of pain, sometimes thousands of years old that I could barely hold myself. I processed collective pains that weren’t mine — wounds sometimes too big, too open, too raw to feel on my own.

It was ugly and very messy, but equally beautiful and freeing, because it was true.

New parts of me I didn’t know existed emerged, it turned out that what I thought as my personality were defence mechanisms to my past trauma.

Slowly, I started to heal. I started not only understanding what had happened to me, but feeling it. My childhood became a very nasty picture to look at. The extreme scapegoating, narcissistic abuse from my mother, physical abuse, sexual trauma and extreme neglect that I had suppressed came back strongly. Traumas way back in my ancestry started calling me. I wasn’t sure what I was doing, why I couldn’t rest on Saturday and had to cry fro the wars and exile my grandparents suffered but I did. I accessed trauma from ancestors way back in my line, healed generational patterns and wounds, reconnected to the ones who were here before me, and to the Earth, all of that while thinking I was half-crazy and in the midst of a very chaotic, scarce and unstable external life.

My journey was very shamanic, Earthy and grounded. I started connecting to the Earth as a living, breathing Mother, I started feeling Her pain and shedding Her tears and the trees started singing back to me. I wasn’t completely alone anymore, She held me. It was Jyn — a very wise and loving dog — who taught me presence and unconditional love.

My scientific mind began to trust this process, and my thirst for finding the best way to heal stopped. It became obvious that I had been guided in this process, and that behind all that darkness, was a lot of love and light.

I had been on a spiritual quest for years, looking for Truth and finding pieces of it in many traditions but I could never follow a teacher or a specific path. No path seemed to hold it all and it was extremely confusing. I was alone trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together, not knowing if the puzzle was even real.

I was in a very dark tunnel. I didn’t know what faith meant — but I kept going without proof. And that was faith.

Although I fell in a lot of spiritual bypassing on my journey, it started to be clear that my healing journey WAS the spiritual journey all along. I discovered that there isn’t one way to heal, that healing is a holistic process that requires a loving presence to feel the past together, so that is doesn’t become the future.

I slowly and with great difficulty learnt to Let It Happen.

I also sat with Ayahuasca which has been huge in my journey, and had a spontaneous Kundalini awakening, so even though I don’t consider myself a spiritual mentor, I can hold space for this type of experiences, for the mystical. I know the language of the Soul, the signs, the symbols, the synchronicities that are above the mind.

I know the pain of sitting with your trauma for years and being completely misunderstood by others around you. I know the loneliness of this sacred path as well as the magic and beauty of it.

I crawled my way back form hell, without a map, became the map so you don’t have to do it alone. I walked through the desert and found a way out.

I also know the Light at the end of the tunnel, the quiet return of the Self, the embodiment of truth, voice, power. I know the magical life that unfolds after, where we can flow with the flow of life in a magical way that the logical mind will never comprehend. I know Home, imperfect, human, embodied, but Home still.

I truly believe you can’t guide others in deep waters if you haven’t been there yourself, and this is my humble contribution to the world.

I am still on the journey, and my will to learn on the topic never stops.

At the moment, I enjoy digging into ancestral and collective trauma healing, and the interdependence between the spiritual journey and the healing journey.

I truly feel that this work is what I was meant to do here, and it’s an honour to hold others on the path.

My story is not what any healing journey looks like — and it was never meant to be. I did it without a map, so no one else has to walk in complete darkness again. I hope my story doesn’t scare you, but gives a sliver of hope to anyone lost between hell and despair. Because I had no hope, no proof — and I still made it.

And if I did, so can you. So can you.

Love Always,

Zoe

“Il faut se méfier des petites filles, elles touchent le fond de la piscine, elles se cognent, elles se blessent, mais elles rebondissent"

Judith Godrèche

“Don't you know I'm still standing better than I ever did?
Looking like a true survivor, feeling like a little kid
I'm still standing after all this time
Picking up the pieces of my life, without you on my mind”

Elton John

To the very few who held my hand with true love and support at some point on the journey, Merci, I won’t forget.

Born a 19th of August, once a shy cat, now a lioness.

"Jusqu'ici tout va bien. Jusqu'ici tout va bien. Jusqu'ici tout va bien.

Mais l'important, c'est pas la chute, c'est l'ATTERRISSAGE."

Moses entered the Promised Land.

Pharaohs (plural) stay in Egypt.

“Quand le cheval se tient mal, ce n'est jamais la faute du cheval mais celle du cavalier”

Azur et Asmar

“No one wants to be defeated
Showin' how funky and strong is your fight
It doesn't matter who's wrong or right
Just beat it”

Michael Jackson