The Pressure to Dream Big and the Beauty of Wanting Less

“What if I accept that all I really want is a small, slow, simple life? A beautiful, quiet, gentle life. I think it is enough.” ~Krista O’Reilly-Davi-Digui

Why do we feel such pressure to dream big? I think it starts in childhood when parents, teachers, and other adults start asking the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

One of the many problems with this question is its premise. In the classroom, at church, at youth camp, and at home, you are not alone, and you’re able to hear, understand, and internalize how others might answer this question. If you pay close attention, you’ll notice changes in responses from one age group to the next.

For young children, the answer is very simple and correlates with their immediate environment. A little girl may answer that she wants to be a mother when she grows up. A little boy may answer that he wants to be a police officer. A pre-teen girl might say she wants to be a teacher, while a pre-teen boy might say he wants to be a detective. A teenage girl might want to be a singer when she grows up, or a teenage boy might want to be a football player.

By the time most of these children reach young adulthood, the answers will not be as varied and light-hearted as they used to be. The answers will start to have a certain pattern. The most common answers will be doctors, lawyers, investment bankers, pilots, engineers, etc.

There are certainly many reasons for this, but the one I want to highlight is financial freedom and all that comes with it.

At some point in our lives, we become aware of the power that money wields, and our dreams, aspirations, desires, and lifestyles begin to shape around it.

Where I come from, it’s not uncommon for teachers to advise students not to become teachers but to try to become doctors or pilots because those professions usually make more money. Everything else is less urgent.

There is a strange story that we tell ourselves that states that, as long as there is money, everything else will fall into place. If you’re already well into your adulthood, you’ve probably made the unpleasant discovery of how untrue this story is. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve changed your goals.

Whether you become a doctor, a teacher, a creative, a small business owner, or something else, our dreams and aspirations usually take on very similar shapes.

Our dreams are no longer just about having a comfortable roof to call home but about having an enviable location, income-generating properties, and vacation homes as well.

Our desire is no longer just to own a car for convenience but to own two or more cars, preferably expensive and good-looking ones.

Our goal is no longer just to be healthy, to have a perfectly functioning body in terms of strength, balance, flexibility, and proportions; it now has to be defined, toned, provocative, and basically a work of art to see, admire, and discuss.

Even a simple walk is no longer just a walk. You need to count your steps, calculate calories burned, and share your results.

Financial freedom is no longer about meeting everyday needs or putting a bit aside for a rainy season or emergency, but it is now a full-time job on top of your full-time job and side hustle.

With the advent of happiness gurus, vision boards, affirmations, and feel-good culture, our dreams and desires are becoming unbearable. There is now a formula to dreaming and desiring and an expected, standard result to match.

I always find it curious how almost all vision boards across the globe tend to look the same. It is even more curious when you account for the fact that we are all raised in different homes and different cultural and religious backgrounds, we physically look different, and our educational background is varied. Yet our desires, dreams, visions, and aspirations seem to have morphed into one.

Most common on the vision board are all the material possessions. The unique home, the expensive car, and the enviable vacation destinations. And despite our different genes, bone density, height, etc., the body goals are very similar if not identical.

We are all reciting the same morning and evening affirmations of prosperity and abundance.

You will be hard pressed to find a vision board that is filled with desires related to patience, kindness, apologizing, picking up trash, checking on your neighbor, calling family members more, feeding stray animals, finding contentment in your finances as opposed to making more money, being thankful that the bus stops next to your dwelling and that in that season you have no desire for a car, or making peace with the changes that come with an aging body, a pregnant body, a sick body, a body that has carried and birthed other humans, a differently abled body, etc.

There could be vision boards like this, but it’s not the norm.

We are all free to dream, desire, and visualize the kind of lifestyle we want; we all know this. What needs to be said is that you can also desire little and dream simply, and that your dreams and desires are still worthy.

You are not lazy. You do not possess little or no faith at all because your dream life, the one you visualize and create in your mind, those deep desires and longings, looks something like this:

Walking or cycling to all the places you need to get to, buying secondhand clothes, living in a simple home, eating what you grow and keep, creating your own entertainment with what you have and having a good time while at it, working and earning less, napping in the afternoon, reading on the balcony guilt-free, spending your evenings or weekends just chatting with people, be they family, neighbors, friends, or just strangers, and showing up in your life make-up free, or without having to spend many hours and dollars on your appearance.

If you have never desired to wear expensive perfume and you are happy with a basic body spray or nothing at all, your desire is of value.

If you have crooked teeth but don’t have an overwhelming desire to get braces, you are not settling for less; you, my friend, have been touched by contentment.

Maybe you prefer to take walks, practice yin yoga or mat Pilates, or dance to your favorite music as opposed to doing HIIT and sweating at the gym. Yes, you have wide hips, a good dose of cellulite, stretch marks, perhaps a tiny stomach pooch, and the workouts you enjoy will not sculpt that body, but maybe you couldn’t care less.

No, you are not lazy for not wanting to put yourself through military-like training on a daily basis for a lifetime just to be an art form for others to enjoy. If you are at peace and see the value in the kind of body movements you enjoy, that is all there is to it.

If you don’t plan expensive vacations but instead choose to take small breaks in your everyday life—be it going to the seaside on the weekends, going to the beach in the afternoons, or just going for a hike once a week or treating yourself to lunch at a nice restaurant—these are all ways to relax and experience new things. You are not settling for a mediocre life just because you are doing life differently or cheaply.

Being financially poor by today’s standards should not equate, nor does it, to being mentally poor, physically poor, emotionally poor, friendship poor, relationship poor, happiness poor, or joy poor.

You are not less of a person because you do not drive a fancy car (or any car), you live in a small apartment instead of a house you own, you do not own any luxury brands or items, you do not vacation in Greece, and you attended a small vocational college (or none at all).

Define what’s important and meaningful to you, and do not cast it in stone. Always allow yourself, your definitions, your ethos, your values, your dreams, your desires, your visions, your affirmations, your emotions, your body, and your belief systems to change, to evolve with time and the changing seasons of life.

Life doesn’t always have to expand, ascend, and increase. It also descends, decreases, and compresses. This is okay. All stages of life are worthwhile and hold value, and you are allowed to enjoy them, be in them, and be at peace while at it.

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About Muthoni Amran

Muthoni Amran lives in the coastal area of Kenya. She is a freelance Mandarin Chinese tutor who enjoys reading, taking walks, long conversations, and the art of just being.

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The Seven Strengths: A Rare Free Training

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how easy it is to feel overwhelmed—by the news, by life, by everything we’re carrying day to day. I know I’ve been feeling this lately.

And when things feel like a lot, the question becomes: How do we stay grounded in the middle of it all?

If you’ve been wondering this too, I have a feeling you’ll appreciate The Seven Strengths—a free, live 7-day global online course taking place May 13–19.

It’s all about building the qualities of mind and heart that help you access your calm center no matter what’s gong on around you.

Reserve your free spot here

Each day includes a short teaching and a guided practice exploring one core strength that helps you:

• find calm amid chaos
• shift out of reactivity and stress
• reconnect with compassion, courage, and clarity
• build a steady inner foundation for life

It also features teachers I deeply admire and respect, including Rick Hanson, Sharon Salzberg, and Kristin Neff.

When you register, you’ll receive instant access to a special gift pack, including:

 The Seven Strengths Meditation Pack
An e-copy of the bestselling book Deep Resilience
A 12-month Foundations subscription to the Mindful.org app

(These gifts are valued at $97 and are yours to keep for life.)

The Seven Strengths course is normally valued at $110, but for this live experience, it’s being offered free as a gesture of support during these challenging times.

If you’re interested in finding a deeper sense of calm and steadiness in the chaos of daily life, you can sign up for this special event and claim your free gifts here.

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About Lori Deschene

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If You Feel Lonely Around People, Here’s Why

“The loneliness of the connected age is not about being alone. It’s about being unseen in a crowd.” ~Unknown

For a long time I thought I was broken.

Not in a dramatic way. In a quiet, persistent way—the kind you learn to manage so well that most people can’t tell, and eventually you almost can’t tell either.

I had a full life by any external measure. Work I cared about. People around me. Invitations to things. And yet there was this gap I couldn’t close—a feeling I can only describe as being on the wrong side of glass. Present in rooms but not quite in them. Watching conversations happen at a frequency I could hear but not tune into.

I spent years trying to fix myself. I said yes more. I pushed through the discomfort of social situations that drained me. I got better at small talk, which mostly meant I got better at pretending small talk wasn’t quietly hollowing me out.

Nothing touched the actual problem. Because the actual problem wasn’t me.

The moment I started asking different questions

It started with a late night on Reddit—the kind of spiral that usually ends with you feeling worse but this time didn’t.

I’d searched something vague, something like “Why do I feel lonely even around people?” and found myself reading for two hours. Post after post after post from people describing exactly what I’d felt but never named. The specific exhaustion of performing sociability. The hunger for conversations that went somewhere real. The strange guilt of wanting connection so badly while simultaneously finding most social situations depleting.

These weren’t isolated people. They weren’t broken people. They were people who needed a different kind of room.

That realization, so simple, so obvious in retrospect, quietly rearranged something in me. I hadn’t been failing at connection. I’d been looking for it in places built for someone else.

What the research kept pointing to

I became a little obsessed after that. I started reading everything I could find on how people actually form close bonds, not the surface-level advice but the research underneath it.

What I found kept contradicting the conventional wisdom. Proximity and shared interests, the things we’re told to optimize for, matter far less than we assume. What actually creates genuine closeness is something harder to manufacture: shared vulnerability, a similar life stage, the sense that someone else is navigating the same uncertainty you are.

Not “We both like the same music.” More like “we’re both trying to figure out what a meaningful life looks like from here, and we’re both a little lost, and we’re both tired of pretending otherwise.”

For introverts, people who find depth energizing and volume draining, this gap between how connection is supposed to work and how it actually works is especially acute. We need slower, lower-stakes environments to open up. We do better when trust is established before vulnerability is required. We’re not bad at connecting. We’re consistently placed in contexts optimized for the opposite of how we connect.

The Quiet Shift

Understanding this didn’t fix everything overnight. But it changed what I was looking for.

I stopped trying to get better at the contexts that didn’t work for me and started looking for different ones. Smaller gatherings. One-on-one conversations. Online spaces built around specific life experiences rather than general socializing. Places where showing up as you actually are is the point, not the risk.

I also started going first. This was the harder part. Introverts tend to wait for proof that a space is safe before being honest in it, which means we often stay on the surface in exactly the places where depth might be available, because we haven’t tested it yet.

Going first meant being honest a little earlier than felt comfortable. Not performing vulnerability, just offering a real answer when someone asked a real question. It felt exposed every time. It almost always landed.

What I Wish I’d Known Earlier

The loneliness I felt for so long wasn’t a character flaw. It was a context problem.

I wasn’t too much. I wasn’t too selective. I wasn’t fundamentally unsuited to close friendship, though I’d quietly started to believe I might be.

I was just in the wrong rooms. And the right rooms exist; they’re just not always the ones we’re pointed toward.

If you’ve felt that glass wall feeling, that particular ache of being surrounded but not reached, I want you to know that it’s one of the most common things I’ve encountered since I started paying attention. You are not alone in feeling alone in this specific way. And the solution probably isn’t becoming someone who finds loud bars energizing.

It’s finding your room. It exists. Keep looking.

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About Fiona Yu

Fiona is the founder of Introvrs (introvrs.com), an app in private beta built for introverts looking for genuine friendship without the performance pressure of mainstream social apps. She writes about connection, introversion, and the gap between how we're told to socialize and how we actually thrive.

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When Self-Awareness Turns into Overthinking and How to Stop

“Be gentle with yourself. You’re doing the best you can.” ~Unknown  

For years, I believed self-awareness was the answer to everything.

If I could just understand myself better—my triggers, my patterns, my childhood wounds—I would finally feel calm. Stable. Healed.

So I read the books. I journaled every night. I replayed conversations in my head, analyzing what I said, what I meant, and what I should have said instead. I studied my reactions like they were puzzles waiting to be solved.

At first, it felt empowering.

I was becoming “conscious.” Reflective. Emotionally intelligent.

But slowly, something shifted. Instead of feeling freer, I felt tighter. Instead of finding clarity, I felt constant mental noise.

Instead of healing, I found myself overthinking everything.

When Growth Turns into Self-Surveillance

It happened subtly.

After a conversation with a friend, I would lie awake replaying it.

Why did I phrase it that way? Did I sound defensive? Did I overshare? Was that insecurity showing?

I told myself this was growth. I was being responsible. Self-aware people reflect, right?

But the truth was harder to admit: I wasn’t reflecting. I was scrutinizing.

There’s a difference between noticing your patterns and putting yourself under a microscope. I didn’t see it at the time, but I had turned self-awareness into self-surveillance. And living under constant internal surveillance is exhausting.

The Moment I Realized Something Was Off

One evening, after mentally dissecting a completely ordinary interaction for nearly an hour, I felt a wave of frustration.

Not at the other person. At myself.

I remember thinking, “If this is what growth feels like, why do I feel worse?” That question stopped me.

Because self-awareness was supposed to make me feel more at home in myself—not less.

That’s when I started to understand something important: I hadn’t been growing. I had been trying to control.

Overthinking had become my way of trying to prevent rejection, embarrassment, or mistakes. If I could analyze everything deeply enough, maybe I could avoid pain next time.

But no amount of mental rehearsal creates emotional safety.

It only creates more anxiety.

What I Learned About Overthinking and Self-Awareness

Looking back, I can see that my self-awareness wasn’t the problem.

It was the energy behind it.

Curiosity had quietly turned into fear. Reflection had turned into correction. Growth had turned into pressure. And pressure is not healing.

If you’ve experienced this too—if your desire to grow has somehow made you more anxious—you’re not broken.

You might just need to approach self-awareness differently.

Here are some lessons that slowly helped me shift from overthinking to something gentler.

1. Noticing is enough.

I used to believe that every realization required immediate improvement.

If I noticed I was people-pleasing, I had to fix it.

If I noticed insecurity, I had to correct it.

If I noticed discomfort, I had to solve it.

But sometimes, noticing is enough.

There’s a quiet power in simply saying, “Oh, I see that.” Without judgment. Without urgency.

When I stopped demanding instant transformation from every insight, something softened. Awareness became lighter. Less aggressive.

Growth doesn’t always require action. Sometimes it just requires acknowledgment.

2. Ask “What do I need?” instead of “What’s wrong with me?”

Overthinking often starts with a harsh question:

Why am I like this?

That question carries accusation. When I began replacing it with:

What do I need right now?

Everything shifted.

After replaying a conversation, instead of analyzing it for flaws, I started asking: Am I tired? Am I anxious? Do I need reassurance? Do I just need rest?

Often, the answer wasn’t more thinking. It was comfort.

Overthinking is sometimes a sign of unmet emotional needs, not personal failure.

3. Regulate before you reflect.

I used to reflect while emotionally activated. Heart racing. Chest tight. Mind buzzing.

That’s the worst time to evaluate yourself.

Now, if I notice I’m spiraling into analysis, I pause. I take a slow walk. I breathe deeper than usual. I put my hand over my chest and focus on lengthening my exhale.

When my body feels calmer, my thoughts become clearer—and kinder.

Reflection works best from safety.

If you feel tense, anxious, or unsettled, your first step isn’t insight. It’s the regulation.

4. Imperfection doesn’t require immediate repair.

This one was hard for me.

I used to believe every awkward moment needed fixing. Every misstep needed correction. Every uncomfortable feeling needed resolution.

But part of being human is being imperfect in public sometimes.

Not every moment needs optimization. Not every sentence needs analysis. Sometimes you can let it be what it was.

When I stopped trying to repair every tiny flaw in real time, I started trusting myself more. And trust quiets the mind in a way analysis never can.

5. Growth should feel safe.

This might be the most important lesson of all.

If your self-improvement journey feels tense, punishing, or relentless, something needs adjusting.

True growth feels steady. Spacious. Encouraging. It challenges you, yes—but it doesn’t attack you.

The moment I stopped treating myself like a project to fix and started treating myself like a person to support, overthinking began to lose its grip.

Self-awareness became something softer. More like companionship. Less like surveillance.

My Gentle Reminder

You don’t have to monitor yourself into healing. You don’t have to dissect every reaction. You don’t have to earn peace through perfect self-analysis.

It’s okay to grow at a human pace.

It’s okay to leave some conversations unanalyzed.

It’s okay to be aware without being harsh.

If self-awareness has started to feel heavy, maybe what you need isn’t more insight.

Maybe you need more safety. And safety doesn’t come from thinking harder. It comes from being kinder.

Growth isn’t about catching every flaw. It’s about learning to stay on your own side.

And when you do that, self-awareness becomes what it was always meant to be: a bridge back to yourself.

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About Dakota J. Dawson

Dakota J. Dawson writes about overthinking, emotional healing, and self-sabotage recovery. She explores gentle, practical ways to build self-trust and inner calm. Author of "Quit Letting Everything Affect You - Unshackled." Find her e-book and Free PDF of 13 Daily Practices for Inner Peace : https://linktr.ee/dakotajdawson Join Instagram with Daily Inspirational Posts:  https://www.instagram.com/dakota_j_dawson/

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How to Tend to Yourself When Being Vulnerable Feels Raw

“Vulnerability is the only path through the wall that separates us from each other.” ~Brené Brown

Every time I share something deeply personal—an article, a post, a piece of my story somewhere or to someone—there is a part of me that lights up with energy. I feel a sense of urgency, a pull to share now. A belief that some humans will need to hear it, relate, and feel less alone. And often, it helps me make sense of my own experiences, too. Even if I’m not always conscious of it, there is a higher reason guiding me.

Storytelling is healing—for the writer, the storyteller, and the reader. Raw, human-truth experiences hold power.

And yet… after pressing “publish” or opening my heart to a friend or loved one, something familiar arrives post-sharing.

A wave. An intensity. Tightness in my chest. A sinking feeling in my belly. Second-guessing.

Did I say too much? Did I overshare? Was that courageous—or careless? Will I still be loved and accepted now that I’ve been seen like this?

I remember the first time I shared something deeply raw in a public post. I wrote about a moment from a yoga retreat when our group was hiking through the Australian rainforest and came upon a little creek that shimmered as if it had been waiting for us. The water was clear, fresh, and utterly inviting. None of us had brought swimsuits—swimming hadn’t been part of the plan.

That didn’t stop some of the women. Feeling free, embodied, and deeply connected, they stripped down and swam naked in the creek. I stood there in quiet awe of their boldness and courage.

I hesitated, caught between wanting to join and the voice of my conditioning: my body wasn’t perfect, not thin enough, too post-motherhood, and I hadn’t shaved in a while…

Eventually, I let go and partly undressed. I stepped into the stream, letting the water embrace me. In that moment, I felt a liberation I hadn’t known I needed. My skin feeling the soothing, cooling effect of the fresh spring on my being. My body—with its newfound curves, softness, and life—was a miracle, a vessel for experience, not a source of shame. I felt so alive.

I hit “publish” on the story with excitement. Immediately post-publishing, the wave arrived: a ball in my stomach, a knot in my solar plexus. Shame. Embarrassment. Did I reveal too much? Was I a women’s coach talking about naked bodies while struggling with insecurities of my own? What would my clients think?

Yet the response was beautiful. Women wrote back, saying the story resonated. Some remembered that magical day. Others recognized their own struggles with body image. Some felt inspired. That first act of vulnerability—raw, imperfect, human—planted seeds far beyond my own awareness.

This experience taught me something essential: the intensity we feel after sharing doesn’t mean we’ve done something wrong. It means we’ve touched something true.

Now, I share more and more of myself: my perceived failures, hopes, insecurities, and the wisdom I’ve gained from experience. I continue to push the edges of my comfort zone, lately sharing very personal matters such as my ADHD diagnosis and, more recently, my strong views on patriarchy and current societal issues.

Each time I step into a space outside my comfort zone, I feel it again: the nervous system’s response, raw and real. But each time, the intensity is a little milder, and I meet it with more patience, compassion, and understanding.

Vulnerable sharing is still an act of truth, trust, and connection.

The Vulnerability Hangover No One Talks About

What I’ve learned is that this emotional aftermath is incredibly common. Some people call it a vulnerability hangover—the emotional comedown that follows openness.

When we share something real, we step out from behind our protection. We let ourselves be seen. And once the moment passes, the nervous system asks a very old question:

“Am I safe now?”

That question can show up as sadness, anxiety, shame, regret, fear of rejection, or the urge to pull back and hide. It doesn’t mean the sharing was wrong. It means we are human—and wired for belonging.

Oversharing vs. Conscious Sharing

For a long time, I thought this wave meant I’d overshared. Now I see it differently.

Oversharing isn’t about how much you reveal. It’s about how and why you reveal it. Oversharing often happens when:

• We share to regulate our emotions instead of first holding ourselves.
• The wound is still bleeding, not gently forming a scar.
• We seek reassurance, validation, or relief from others.
• We share without considering the container or the relationship.
• We feel depleted, ashamed, or fragmented afterward.

Oversharing isn’t a failure—it’s a signal that a part of us needed more support before being seen.

Conscious sharing, on the other hand:

• Comes from self-connection rather than a need for emotional regulation.
• Happens with intention and choice.
• Respects timing, boundaries, and context.
• Leaves us tender but still intact.
• Feels aligned, even if uncomfortable.

Both can feel emotional. Only one honors us.

The Questions That Changed How I Share

Before sharing now—whether in writing or conversation—I pause and ask myself those simple questions:

“Am I sharing from wholeness, or am I asking to be held?”

There is no judgment in the answer. Both are deeply human.

If I’m asking to be held, I know the sharing might be better suited for a private, resourced space—therapy, close friendship, journaling, or simply sitting with myself.

If I’m sharing from wholeness—even a tender wholeness—I trust it more.

“Who needs to hear this, and what truly needs to be said?”

This question invites me to step out of making it about me and into service of the message—the deeper intention and mission of the story.

If the honest answer is that I’m speaking to one specific person I’m upset with, then I know a private conversation would be more aligned.

But if the answer is that this is for women who are living with self-doubt or navigating a similar experience in silence and loneliness, then I trust the story. I trust that it carries wisdom, that it can be healing, and that it is meant to be shared.

When the After-Feeling Still Comes

Even conscious, aligned vulnerability can leave you feeling raw afterward. Feeling exposed does not mean you overshared. It often means you touched something true.

For sensitive, empathic people—those who feel deeply and care deeply—vulnerability activates the nervous system. And the nervous system doesn’t speak in logic—it speaks in sensation.

That’s why how we care for ourselves after sharing matters as much as the sharing itself.

How I Nurture Myself After Vulnerability

I’ve learned not to rush past the aftermath—to meet it with gentleness. An inner river of love.

Here’s what helps me after I’ve shared something vulnerable post:

1. Mark the completion

I consciously close the moment—closing my laptop, placing my phone face down, washing my hands.
I say quietly, “What needed to be shared has been shared.”

2. Come back into my body

A hand on my heart. A deep inhale. A longer exhale. A gentle stretch.

No analysis—just presence. I imagine the intensity of the sensation I feel being wrapped by an inner river of love as I breathe in and out.

3. Witness my courage

Instead of replaying the story, I acknowledge the act:

“That was brave.”

“I didn’t abandon myself.”

“I chose to stand up for myself.”

4. Reclaim my boundaries

I imagine my energy returning to me and repeat the following:

“What’s mine, I keep. What’s not mine, I release.”

5. Ground in the ordinary

A warm tea. A shower. A walk. Something simple and human. Life continues. I am safe.

The Deeper Truth I’ve Come to Trust

For a long time, especially women, we were taught to call truth-telling “oversharing.” Not because it was wrong but because it made others uncomfortable.

The goal is not to be less honest.

We don’t need to soften our stories, hide our feelings, or edit our truth to make others comfortable. Honesty is not the problem—it is the path to connection, healing, and self-understanding.

The goal is to be more loyal to ourselves.

Being loyal means sharing from alignment, caring for our own boundaries, and tending to ourselves afterward.

It means knowing the difference between an open wound that needs more internal support before being shared and a scar that can be safely held in the hands of others.

When we are loyal to ourselves, vulnerability becomes a gift—both to us and to those who receive our story—because we remain intact, grounded, and whole, even as we are deeply seen.

Some stories heal us privately.

Some heal collectively.

Some are seeds planted quietly, without us ever seeing how they grow.

And sometimes, the intensity after sharing is simply the nervous system learning that it is possible to be seen—and still be safe.

A Mantra I Return To

When the doubt creeps in, I repeat:

“I share from wholeness, not hunger.”

“I trust the part of me that chose to speak.”

And I let that be enough.

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About Dorothee Marossero

Dorothee is a conscious, compassionate empowerment coach who is redefining what women were conditioned to believe success, beauty, and life ought to be. Dorothee supports women who are struggling with a harsh inner critic, a sense of misalignment, and lack of clarity in their life, to reconnect to their inner-powers and rediscover self-love, presence, and joy. Download her FREE booklet: "Nurturing Harmony: A Guide To Thriving As A Highly Sensitive Being." here IG: @dorotheemarossero

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Growing Up Without a Family: From Survival Mode to Thriving

“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” ~C. S. Lewis

I started life in a poor household with one parent who left when I was very little, never to be seen or heard from again, and another who stuck around but made it very clear I wasn’t wanted and I had ruined their life by existing.

For some reason, I never had any contact from either of their parents, my grandparents, and very little to no contact from their wider families.

So, as a young child, I knew I had no practical or emotional safety net. There was no one to fall back on, no one to soften the impact if things went wrong. I needed to stand on my own two feet to survive.

As an abandoned and scapegoated child, I was very independent and resilient, and I was driven by the goal of getting away and creating a life for myself. But I couldn’t take risks or focus on studying because I had no safety net.

During my school exams, I would work full time during the holidays beforehand and part-time during term time. I was then exhausted when it came to exams and had little time to revise. At points in my undergraduate degree, I was working almost full time to keep a roof over my head, always living off my overdraft.

I kept what had happened and was happening at home inside. I never talked about it. No one knew. All of my peers had two parents, and they couldn’t understand my life or provide support. In those days, teachers and other adults weren’t as knowledgeable as they are now, and I was never asked about my home life or offered support. So there was no emotional safety net either.

Since I was responsible for myself financially, I really learned to budget. This meant that when I started in a career in my twenties, I excelled much quicker than my peers. They were learning the world of work following university; I had already been in it for years.

Not Fitting the Mold 

Well into my adulthood, when I found myself in a professional-class world, my friends would assume I was like them. They would talk about people from single-parent families and broken homes as those who would not achieve.

I wasn’t used to talking about my situation. It’s not something that comes up naturally in conversations, and, as with many difficult family situations, people are generally awkward in responding and can, unwittingly, say things that make you feel worse. (I’ve even heard “My father would never leave me!” as if they couldn’t believe it or focus on me at all.)

There isn’t a common toolkit for supporting someone who has been abused or abandoned by their family, and it’s a topic that has only recently started to be more openly talked about in social discourse. So I didn’t know how to talk about myself in an authentic way when it came to family.

On a daily basis, at work or at social occasions, at Christmas or on Mothers’ or Fathers’ Days, people talk about their families of origin and assume others have the same. It’s the norm for most people, and they struggle to support someone who has a different reality.

I realized a few years ago that many of my friends had no idea about my circumstances, so I felt misunderstood and like a core part of myself was unseen.

Filling the Void… or Learning to Live with It

As a young adult, I decided to build a friends’ family, or chosen family, with people I met while studying or through work because I needed to have people around me. Years later, I understood that all my relationships were affected by growing up feeling unwanted and unloved. So, I wasn’t discerning about who was in my life and didn’t understand that I had my own needs in relationships. If someone wanted to spend time with me, who was I to say no?!

This led to friendships and romantic relationships that were, at best, mismatched without real connection and, at worst, abusive. Also, when the holidays came around, my friends’ family would disappear to be with their real families. So I hadn’t filled the void in my life, despite my energy and efforts.

I was trying to distract myself from the pain of not having a family by developing new relationships. Through therapy, though, I realized that the key is learning to live with the void of what I didn’t have—processing it, facing up to it, and actually feeling that pain.

Reconnecting with myself, particularly my child self, was key. I had to take some of the energy I had expelled outward to please others and turn it inward to learn to cope with my loss, heal, and improve my choices.

An amazing therapist helped me understand that I was living with a form of grief. She explained, “Grief is being attached to something that isn’t there.” I now live with the void and the pain, grieving the feeling of loss and abandonment rather than distracting myself from it. Not trying to fix it or fill it but learning to acknowledge it as part of my story.

While the pain will never fully leave, I now make choices from a place of connection to myself, which has led to more fulfilling relationships and much more energy to put into meaningful activities.

Surviving and Even Thriving

Growing up without a safety net means focusing on survival. Throughout my childhood, I worked hard to get somewhere safe and secure with my own independence. Between these efforts and what I was enduring, I was exhausted. Well into adulthood, I kept working toward building a secure life of my own.

By my mid-thirties, I had some basics: a safe home, financial security, and some good people in my life. That’s when it crept up on me—that I was constantly imagining and planning for terrible things that never happened, that I was always on high alert in normal situations, and that I was exhausting myself with my incessant rumination.

I was still operating in survival mode when I didn’t need to. My body and mind hadn’t caught up to the reality that I was finally safe. I needed to learn to live, not just survive.

Some talk about recovering from trauma as getting back to oneself, but when you endured it throughout childhood, you weren’t given the chance to know who that self is. Who would I be if not in survival mode? I had to discover who the core of me was and learn how to just live.

Realizing this was the first step. I was lucky to have great therapists, a complete course of EMDR to process and re-install new pathways in my mind, group therapy, where I learned from others, and other treatments.

There was a moment during installation EMDR (a process that helps to replace negative beliefs with positive ones) when I was asked to imagine what would have helped me as a child during a difficult experience I’d had.

At first, all I could think of was changing what was happening to me and someone being there to intervene. But then I imagined giving my child self a hug. That’s what she needed in that moment, and in many others.

Since then, I have tried to focus on my needs and nurture myself, which has helped to shift me from just practical surviving to thriving.

It wasn’t easy or immediate, but after a while of going out in the world post-therapy, I noticed I had an abundance of energy. It felt like I had been carrying a dead weight around me my whole life that had lifted, and I suddenly felt lighter in my day-to-day activities.

I was able to identify and move away from unhealthy relationships, which reduced negative, depleting interactions and increased my positive interactions.

I put this energy into nourishing and meaningful activities in my time outside of work—volunteering, researching, engaging in active hobbies. In turn, I got energy from doing them and reached toward my potential. I became myself. Beyond being a victim of my circumstances, I could thrive.

If you’re also navigating life without a traditional family of origin, know that you are living with a little-understood form of grief, and as much as that will never leave you, a loving, safe, and fulfilled life is still possible.

The first step is understanding and processing what happened to you so you can give to yourself the care and nurturing you need. That’s what will give you the strength, resilience, and empathy to thrive.

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About Nisha Wilkinson

Nisha Wilkinson holds a PhD in War Studies and has worked on international conflict and security for over fifteen years. She is interested in human behavior driving violence and insecurity, and advocates for socio-economic diversity of voices in state institutions.

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Escaping an Abusive Situation: The Hardest Parts and Greatest Lessons

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” ~Rumi

I watched my son get hit by his father, and something inside me finally broke open.

Not broke apart. Broke open. There’s a difference.

For years, I had absorbed the chaos. I had made myself smaller, quieter, more accommodating. I had convinced myself that if I could just love harder, be better, try more, something would change. But in that moment, watching my child suffer at the hands of the man who was supposed to protect him, I understood with absolute clarity that nothing I did would ever be enough to fix this. The only thing left to do was leave.

It took me three months to plan our escape. Three months of pretending everything was normal while quietly gathering documents, saving money in secret, and mapping out a future I could barely imagine. Three months of holding my breath and praying my children could hold on just a little longer. Then, I moved myself and my four kids to safety.

I wish I could tell you that was the hard part. I wish I could say that once we were physically free, the healing began and everything got easier. But the truth is, leaving was just the beginning. The real transformation, the part that would eventually turn my deepest wounds into wisdom, was still waiting for me on the other side.

What nobody tells you about escaping an abusive relationship is that sometimes your children don’t escape with you. Not emotionally, anyway. Sometimes they carry the trauma in ways you can’t predict or control. Sometimes they blame you for disrupting their world, even when that world was hurting them.

My oldest daughter decided to go back to live with her father. She was angry with me. Teenagers often are, but this felt different. This felt like a rejection of everything I had sacrificed to keep her safe.

I begged her for months to come home. I cried myself to sleep more nights than I can count. I questioned every decision I had ever made. Had I been wrong to leave? Had I destroyed my family for nothing? Was I the problem all along, the way he always said I was?

The grief was suffocating. I had fought so hard to protect my children, and now one of them had chosen the very thing I had tried to protect her from. And then something happened that I never expected. She came back.

Not because I convinced her. Not because I begged hard enough or said the right words. She came back because she finally experienced for herself exactly what I had been trying to shield her from. The reality I had tried to describe in a thousand different ways suddenly became her own lived truth.

When she returned, she was different. Stronger. More awake. She had learned something that my warnings could never teach her. Today, she’s one of the most resilient young women I know.

Her coming home taught me something profound. It showed me that it was okay to come home to myself too. For so long, I had abandoned my own needs, my own voice, my own worth. I had been so focused on saving everyone else that I forgot I also needed saving. Watching my daughter find her way back reminded me that I could find my way back too.

This is what I mean when I say wounds become wisdom. Not that suffering is good or that pain has some cosmic purpose that makes it worthwhile. But that the very experiences that break us can also be the experiences that show us who we really are. The places where we have been hurt most deeply often become the places where we have the most to offer. I learned this lesson again just this past year.

My son, now fifteen, decided he wanted to live with his father. History was repeating itself and every cell in my body wanted to scream, to fight, to do whatever it took to stop him from making the same mistake his sister had made. But because I had walked this road before, I knew something I didn’t know the first time around. I knew I couldn’t protect him from his own journey.

This time, things were harder. He began acting out. Drugs. Alcohol. Trouble with the law. Probation. Every phone call brought new heartbreak. Every update reminded me of all the ways I wish I could fix this for him.

But here’s what my wounds had already taught me. Sometimes the most loving thing we can do is give someone space to learn their own lessons. Sometimes our children have to touch the fire themselves before they believe it’s hot. And sometimes, the hardest part of loving someone is trusting that they will find their way, even when the path they’re taking terrifies us.

So I did something that once would have felt impossible. I let go. Not of loving him, not of believing in him, but of trying to control the outcome. Instead, I held the door open. I stayed present. I stayed steady. I trusted that the love I had poured into him all those years was still alive inside him, even if I couldn’t see it yet.

And then something happened I could never have forced. After sixty days in a treatment facility, during one of our visits, my son looked at me with tears in his eyes and said, “Mom, I see it now. I don’t ever want to go back to Dad’s house, and I don’t want to be anything like him.”

In that moment, I realized that the patience, trust, and love I had held onto when I felt most powerless had been working quietly beneath the surface all along.

His sister, who had once walked that same road herself, embraced him with a quiet understanding that only comes from lived experience. Their bond also deepened in that moment. Shared truth, shared healing, shared resolve.

And just like his sister before him, he found his way home. Not because I convinced him. Not because I fought harder or found the right words. He came home because he had walked far enough into his own experience to see clearly for himself. The truth had become his own. That’s the paradox of love and letting go. When we stop trying to control someone else’s path, we create the space for them to choose their own.

My son’s journey didn’t unfold the way I would have wished. It involved pain, consequences, and lessons learned the hard way. But it also revealed something powerful. The foundation we lay for our children—the years of love, safety, and truth—it doesn’t disappear when they leave. It stays with them. And when they’re ready, it calls them back home.

This is the alchemy of transformation. The pain we survive becomes the medicine we offer. The wisdom we gain from our hardest seasons becomes a lantern for others still walking in the dark. We do not heal despite our wounds. We heal through them.

If you’re in the middle of something that feels impossible right now, I want you to know that you are not alone. Whatever fire you’re walking through, whatever heartbreak is keeping you up at night, whatever impossible choice is sitting in front of you, please hear me when I say this. You are stronger than you know.

The wound you’re carrying right now may one day become the very thing that helps someone else survive. Your story, the messy and painful and imperfect truth of it, has power. Not someday when you have it all figured out. Not when you reach the other side and can tie it up with a neat bow. Right now, in the middle of it, your survival matters.

Here’s what I’ve learned about turning wounds into wisdom.

First, let yourself feel it.

Don’t rush past the pain to get to the lesson. Grief is not a problem to solve. It’s a process to honor. The only way out is through and trying to skip the hard parts only means you’ll have to circle back later.

Second, resist the urge to control what you cannot control.

This was the hardest lesson for me. I wanted so badly to protect my children from every consequence of their choices. But some lessons can only be learned firsthand. Our job is not to remove every obstacle from the path of the people we love. Our job is to be there when they stumble, ready to help them back up.

Third, come home to yourself.

So many of us spend our lives abandoning ourselves for others. We shrink, accommodate, disappear. We make everyone else’s needs more important than our own until we forget we even have needs. Healing requires us to turn back toward ourselves with the same compassion we so freely offer everyone else.

Fourth, trust the timing.

Your breakthrough will not look like anyone else’s. Your healing will not follow a predictable schedule. The wisdom that’s being forged in you right now may not reveal itself for months or even years. But it is coming. Every hard thing you survive is adding to a reservoir of strength you don’t even know you have yet.

Finally, let your story be medicine.

When you’re ready, and only when you’re ready, share what you have learned. Not from a place of having it all figured out, but from a place of honest, imperfect survival. The world doesn’t need more people who pretend they have never struggled. The world needs people who are willing to say, “This nearly destroyed me, and here’s how I survived.”

I still have hard days. I still worry about my children. I still carry scars from a marriage that tried to convince me I was worthless. But I also carry something else now. I carry the unshakable knowledge that I’m capable of walking through fire and coming out the other side. I carry the wisdom that came from my deepest wounds. I carry a story that might just help someone else believe they can survive too.

For years, I believed that loving my children meant fighting every battle for them. Now I understand something different. Love sometimes looks like holding the light on the porch and trusting that when they’re ready, they will see it and walk toward home.

The wound is where the light enters. Not because pain is good, but because pain cracks us open in ways that nothing else can. And in those cracks, if we’re brave enough to look, we find something unexpected. We find ourselves. We find our strength. We find the wisdom that was waiting for us all along.

You are not broken. You never were. You’re being refined.

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About Rebecca Wells

Rebecca is a soul midwife, life coach and health counselor specializing in attachment theory and trauma-informed healing. She is the author of Refined by Love and six companion workbooks. A mother of four, she lives in Tennessee where she helps others transform their wounds into wisdom. Connect with her at wellnesswithrebecca.com.

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Gratitude: The Amazing Superpower Inside Us All

“When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive—to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.” ~Marcus Aurelius

Gratitude.

It used to be a very triggering concept for me, and sometimes it still is.

It’s been a process to unravel what it means to me and to be okay with days where I am in active trauma or grief, when I feel there is nothing to be grateful for. It’s okay to be in those places.

Gratitude is but one of the plethora of tools I’ve used to shift my perspective on my circumstances (when I am able to) and feel a little better—and it’s one of the things that’s kept me alive.

Statistically, I shouldn’t be here. Not only alive, but healthy and safe.

You know the ACEs (adverse childhood experiences) test? Yeah, well, I aced (pun intended) that test. Ten out of ten, which gives me the prize of… a significantly higher chance of mental, physical, and behavioral health problems and a lower life expectancy.

My whole childhood was a tornado of chaos. I had parents who were severely addicted to crack. was physically, sexually, and emotionally abused. Drug dealers were in and out of the apartment. Children’s Aid workers stopping by for visits was a common occurrence.

I didn’t know if I was going to come home from school, little nine-year-old me, and find my parents dead from an overdose. Sometimes they didn’t leave their room for days, which left me full of anxiety that felt like a heavy rock in my stomach.

Family and friends either ended up in jail, on the streets, in addiction, or dead way before their time.

Sometimes we got evicted, and sometimes I didn’t have food to eat, so I would stash packets of oatmeal in my room for emergencies. Like I said, chaos. Maybe you can relate?

This is where gratitude came into the picture. It seems like there would be nothing to be grateful about in the midst of this nightmare I was living in, right? Well, call it delusional optimism, call it whatever, but I found things to be grateful for.

Oh, I had a teacher say that they believed in me? Grateful. Oh, I got lunch today and dinner? Grateful. Mum and dad are alive today? Grateful. I didn’t get beaten today; I’m grateful.

You see, I firmly believe that surviving my childhood gave me a super-powered sense of gratitude that I carry with me today. And I believe this exists in all of us, but sometimes we cannot access it, and that’s okay. When we can, though, it can be a beautiful thing.

I am so grateful sometimes, I can hardly stand it, and I cry happy tears. I am living in my own safe home, where I can go into the kitchen and get what I want to eat without fear of being beaten? Wow. It doesn’t even have to be tied to trauma or grief either, this feeling of gratitude. You mean I can turn on the tap and get clean water on demand? Grateful.

I have all my limbs. I can see. I can write. I can read. I have a smartphone. I can drive. Grateful.

Sometimes, if we stop for a second and think about things that we are grateful for, if we are able to, it can literally change our brain. The more we think about things we are grateful for, the more we start to notice and see things to be thankful for. It becomes our default programming.

Please hear me here. I’m not suggesting that we pretend everything is sunshine and rainbows. (But when is the last time you noticed and appreciated a rainbow?) We are all hurting. Things happen, bad things.

Sexual abuse survivors, hi, how are you? I see you. Domestic violence survivors, hi, nice to meet you. I hear you. I’m with you.

Life is flippin’ hard, and if anyone gets that, I do. I have a diagnosis of complex post-traumatic stress disorder that is a lifelong friend I’ve had to learn to accept. Some days I feel like throwing gratitude out of my window.

But I know it makes a huge difference in my mental state, so I keep working at it.

Here are some practical steps and lessons I’ve learned from gratitude. Please don’t take these as things that must be followed or judge yourself on the gratitude scale. If these things aren’t accessible to you, that is okay.

Starting (and ending) your day with gratitude is powerful.

Starting your day with gratitude has the ability to color the rest of your day in a positive light. This doesn’t have to be a complicated time-consuming ritual; one second when you open your eyes in the morning is all you need. You can spare one second just for you; you deserve that.

To keep it super simple, just think of one thing that you’re grateful for—anything. It sounds cliche, but how about the fact that you were able to open your eyes and see? If you can write it down, even better, which is my next tip.

Write it down.

If you are able to start writing down things that you are grateful for, try it. Writing things down allows you to keep track, go back and look at, and remember all the big and little things that you are grateful for. You can carry a little notebook around, keep one beside your bed, or jot things down in your phone—whatever is most accessible for you.

Have fun with it.

Be silly and imaginative with the things that you are grateful for; the little kid inside will thank you. You get to watch a cartoon or read a book that brought you joy when you were a kid? That can be a moment of gratitude. You do a little happy dance while you’re brushing your teeth just because you can move your body? That can be another one. It can be anything.

Be gentle with yourself on hard days.

Some days are difficult, and all we have enough energy for is to barely survive the day. Some days even the word “gratitude” can be overwhelming, never mind thinking of things to be grateful for. That’s okay. Let yourself feel whatever feelings you are feeling and try to be gentle with yourself. That’s enough, my friends.

The beautiful thing about finding things to be grateful for is that the more you practice, the more it can become a habit and a game, and the easier it might become. You might begin to look at situations in your life differently.

If you are in a difficult situation or season right now, whether you’re dealing with abuse, grief, divorce, loss, health problems, or just regular ol’ life getting you down, I want you to know that I see you and I get how hard this is. I’ve been there, and I will be there again.

If you are able to access gratitude, it can be a supportive tool. If you can’t access it, that is okay. Please hear me: if you do not or cannot feel grateful, there is nothing wrong with you, and you are not doing healing wrong.

Here are three things I am grateful for today.

I am grateful for having the ability to write this message to you, my heated blanket, and the hummingbirds playing outside my window. Your turn—if you’re able and it’s accessible to you, please leave some things you’re grateful for in the comments below. I’d love to hear them.

Take good care, you beautiful humans.

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About Jade Dorrington

Jade Dorrington is a writer living on the land of the Lekwungen speaking peoples, also known as Victoria, British Columbia. He has an unquenchable curiosity about the world, and always has a book on the go. When he is not writing, he enjoys being outside, travelling to new places, and moving his body in ways that bring him joy.

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