belonging

When our body contracts, clenches, and tightens because something has triggered us, there is nothing wrong with us.
It’s our body remembering what absence once meant, the quiet ache of being unseen, unheard, or forgotten.

When we feel upset or overwhelmed when we’re hurt, it isn’t an overreaction.
It’s our internal mapping, our system flooding with the old, frightened fear of disconnection. A younger response. Old messaging stored within the body, signalling: If I’m alone, I may not survive. Because as a child, this was reality — we were dependent on another.

In moments when we move away from another as they get too close, it is not pathology; it’s an old wisdom that once helped us survive.
It’s protection. If closeness was unsafe and belonging required us to self-abandon, or came with unkindness, criticism, or lack of care, our intelligence learnt to distance, because distance was safer than the love we once knew.

We are not flawed; our tenderness is not to be pathologised.
What we hold are old survival codes that once kept us alive. The psyche’s architecture for survival, built when safety was uncertain and love was conditional.

Psychotherapy isn’t about fixing what is broken.
It isn’t about getting over our wounds or erasing our responses; it’s about understanding and tending to them, coming to know the pathways of memory woven through the body. Seeing how our past shows up in our present. Never to shame, but to bring compassion to what was once unbearable.

Our healing begins in spaciousness, within the pause, that moment between reaction and awareness.
It’s where we come home to ourselves, no longer abandoning who we are for an illusory belonging. Here, we call ourselves back, and in this place, something new arises. Love begins to shift from survival to living the expansion and greatest expression of all that we are.

Healing becomes devotion to presence, to our innate aliveness as we come out of survival.
We begin to discern what arises, to reflect before responding, to reach for repair instead of retreat. We begin to put ourselves in situations and places that uphold transparency and truth, that honour us. In a supportive space, we grieve all those times we were unsafe so that safety can now be the foundation of our inner and outer world.

In time, we come to know another way to belong —
a belonging not earned through performance, or abandoning self, but through presence and authenticity.
We begin to know belonging inside safety, closeness with those who also belong to themselves.

This is our greatest freedom, this is our healing.