My work with women began long before I trained as a Somatic Experiencing therapist.

I grew up with a mother who unknowingly lived with manic depression, and much of my childhood was shaped by the instability that came with it. She carried a deep sense of shame about who she was and often hid her struggles from the outside world. When life became overwhelming, she would isolate herself rather than ask for help.

From the outside, she worked hard to keep up appearances, sacrificing money, energy, and well-being to maintain a life that looked respectable. But behind closed doors, she was exhausted from trying to hold everything together. I watched a woman live in immense pain while pretending everything was fine.

And like many children do, I quietly believed I was responsible for her well-being.

I was the one who tried to calm her down when she was overwhelmed, the one who adapted to keep the peace, the one who learned to read the emotional atmosphere in the room before anything was said.

What I didn’t realise at the time was that my nervous system was learning to organise itself around instability.

In that environment, my own needs were not something I learned to recognise, let alone express.

Instead, I learned how to be useful, capable, and responsible for others.

For much of my life, that pattern continued. I became highly competent and dependable, but beneath that competence was a quieter truth: I had learned how to take care of everyone but myself.

Eventually, the cost of that pattern caught up with me.

After years of overworking and overextending, I reached a point of deep burnout that forced me to confront parts of myself I had spent years avoiding. I began to realise that the voice in my head constantly pushing me to do more and give more wasn’t guidance, it was a bully.

And beneath that voice lived a deeper truth.

I didn’t know what I needed.

The question had never really occurred to me.

So I began rebuilding my relationship with myself from the inside out.

I turned to Vipassana meditation to understand my mind, Somatic Experiencing therapy to reconnect with my body and nervous system, and Authentic Relating to learn how to bring honesty and clarity into my relationships.

Through this work, I began to recognise the subtle language of my nervous system, what safety felt like, where my boundaries lived, and how to sense the difference between a genuine yes and a reluctant one.

For the first time in my life, I felt what it meant to trust myself.

As I deepened this work personally and later trained as a therapist, I began noticing the same patterns in many of the women I worked with.

Highly capable women who were admired for their strength but privately exhausted from carrying too much responsibility. Women who struggled to ask for support feared being “too much,” and often lost touch with their own needs in the process of caring for others.

I recognised the pattern instantly. Because I had lived it.

Today, through Trust Your Nature, I support women to reconnect with the wisdom of their nervous systems so they can live, lead, and relate from self-trust rather than silent self-sacrifice.

Because when a woman learns to trust her nature, she learns to feel safe in the world again and everything changes.