Showing Up In My Power: My Healing Journey

There comes a moment on the healing journey when staying quiet costs more than speaking out.

For me, that moment came somewhere along my path to becoming a Reiki Master and helping others with their healing.

When you commit to this work, it asks you to stop performing wellness and to start living it. To look honestly at yourself. At your patterns. At the stories you have been telling yourself for years just to survive. And part of that, for me, meant finding the courage to name what had happened to me. To stop pretending everything was fine when it wasn't.

Speaking out about abuse is not the brave, liberating moment people imagine. Sometimes it costs you relationships and the version of yourself that kept everyone comfortable. Sometimes the repercussions feel worse, in the short term, than the silence ever did.

But what I know now is that silence kept me in survival mode. My voice began to set me free.

This is me showing up in my power. Not because I have it all figured out. But because I refuse to keep shrinking to make others comfortable.

— ✦ —

So here is my truth.

For most of my life, I didn't know what it felt like to feel safe in my own body.

I grew up carrying things no child should ever have to carry. For decades I had no words for what was wrong. I just knew I was afraid — not of anything specific, but of everything. Of getting it wrong. Of being too much. Of someone's mood shifting without warning. Of the silence that meant something bad was coming. I learned to read every room before I entered it. To watch faces for the first flicker of emotion. To make myself small and invisible — because staying under the radar felt like the only way to stay safe.

My nervous system was working around the clock, scanning for danger that never seemed to stop coming.

This is complex trauma.

It doesn't always look dramatic. Sometimes it looks like people-pleasing so ingrained you don't know you're doing it. Shame with no logical cause. Anger from nowhere. Dissociation — feeling like you're watching your own life from slightly outside your body. Loving people with everything you have while waiting for them to leave, because in your body's memory, everyone always does.

Trauma doesn't just live in your memories. It lives in your body — in your tight chest, your shallow breath, the exhaustion that no amount of sleep can fix.

— ✦ —

And then life adds its layers.

There came a point where I had to make one of the hardest decisions of my life — I chose to leave my first marriage. It was, for me, a choice between life and a slow disappearing act. A place where I didn't feel safe, or held, or seen. Where I had to fight — quietly, every single day — just to keep hold of my own soul.

My children were still small, and the guilt of that has sat with me in ways that are hard to describe. And then came the judgement.

"Just try harder. Pray more. Good Christians don't leave. Divorce is the easy way out."

Ha — if they only knew.

When you already carry childhood trauma, that judgement doesn't just sting. It lands in the oldest, most wounded places and confirms every lie you were ever told about your own worth.

But I knew my children needed to see their mother choose herself. That the most important thing I could model for them was not a "perfect" marriage, but a mother who saves herself in order to show up better for them.

So I left the marriage. And I rebuilt. And I kept going.

Co-parenting after divorce is one of the most quietly brutal things that I have had to deal with. When the relationship that caused many of your triggers is also the one you are forever linked to through your children, healing becomes very complicated. Triggers don't announce themselves politely. They arrive in a text message. A tone of voice. A look. And suddenly every cell in your body is responding to something that happened years ago. I am still navigating this — almost seven years later — learning as I go along.

— ✦ —

Being truly loved by a safe person.

Along this journey I found my soulmate — someone with whom I can completely be myself. My best friend, my husband, showed me quietly and consistently what safety feels like. Not the absence of conflict — but the presence of someone who stays. Who holds space for the frightened parts of you without making you feel broken for having them.

We have built something I didn't know was possible for me — an equal partnership and an emotional safety born from years of working through our past traumas and hurts together. A knowing that nothing can come between us unless we allow it.

That kind of love doesn't fix you. But it creates the conditions in which you can finally begin to heal.

Learning to receive love — to trust it, to stop waiting for it to be taken away — has been some of the hardest and most transformative work I have ever done.

Building a life together in the same town where we both went through divorce brought its own quiet challenges. Learning to be a stepmother, watching him become a stepfather, the children adjusting while still spending half their time with their other parent — all of it required patience and more grace than either of us knew we had. But our children have been extraordinary. Resilient in ways that still surprises me. I am deeply, profoundly grateful.

I remember standing at the beginning of last year thinking — we did it. Everyone is finally okay. It felt like we had navigated everything life could throw at us. Like we had finally earned our happily ever after.

And then life threw another curve ball.

— ✦ —

My husband was diagnosed with cancer.

There is a specific kind of shock that comes with those words. The world doesn't stop — it just becomes unrecognisable. Nothing is ever the same again. And for someone who carries complex trauma, a diagnosis like this doesn't just feel like bad news. It feels like confirmation of every fear your body has ever held.

My husband has faced this with such grace and courage and quiet strength. He has let me love him through this and we are doing this together.

It has not been easy for either of us. Cancer doesn't just affect the person diagnosed — it moves through a family like weather, changing everything, touching everyone. There have been really hard days, but we have refused to let it break us. We have held each other through the fear, chosen honesty over pretending, and leaned into the people who love us.

The foundation we built together has held firm. We are getting through this. Together. One day at a time, and sometimes one breath at a time.

— ✦ —

I don't have it all together and that is okay.

I am raising three children, running a business, and finishing a children's book that refuses to leave me alone no matter how full life gets.

I share all of this not for sympathy — but because I am not someone who has it all together, I am a someone who is doing the work in real time and trying to help people as I go along.

What has helped me is not one single thing — it has been a whole constellation of support, built slowly over years. Therapists, family, friends, yoga teachers, healers and counsellors who each held a torch in a different dark corridor. Every single one has contributed. Every single one still does.

And through all of it, Reiki has been the thread that runs through everything. Learning to work with my body instead of fighting it. Letting my creativity flow — through painting, writing, and the creation of new oil blends — finding anchors of safety my nervous system could finally recognise.

Slowly but surely — I began to come home to myself.

I became a healer because I know what it is to need one.

— ✦ —

If you are exhausted in a way you can't explain — always on edge, always waiting, always too much or completely numb — I see you. I have been you.

Healing is possible. Not perfect. Not linear. Not without pain, but real, and gentle, and worth every step.

You don't have to keep surviving alone. I am here if you want to reach out.

With love

Larissa

Dragonfly Healing