It was a Tuesday in December when someone asked me what I deeply yearned for. Without hesitation, I said, a deep and loving relationship. Then I sat with my own answer. I had been with a wonderful, loving man for twelve years, and I had never once really believed he would stay. I didn’t believe he actually loved me. I was convinced I was replaceable. That if he looked closely enough, he would eventually find the thing that made me not worth loving. I had spent my whole life learning how to need no one, and I had become very, very good at it.

By then, I had built a life that looked like proof that I was fine. I opened a restaurant in Portugal without speaking Portuguese. I built companies. I ran a social media agency that made a million dollars in one year with a team of five. I co-founded a healthcare startup. I moved countries, learned a language, raised two daughters. I could tell you the revenue, the headcount, the plan for the quarter, what everyone in my life needed from me and exactly when they needed it. People saw me as confident. Capable. Fierce. Inside, I was often completely disconnected from myself.

I turned inward to my own resources so early and so completely that asking for help felt like handing someone a weapon. I was called Ice Queen. Avoidant. A fighter. Ruthless. Fierce. I wore most of those like compliments. I could answer emails, make dinner, keep appointments, smile at the right moments and still feel like I was watching my own life through glass.

Sex was where it became impossible to ignore. I was attracted to my husband, but the thought of being intimate with him could make me deeply uncomfortable. For years, I had no language for it. I assumed something in my sexuality was broken. Rest didn’t land either. Not on holiday. Not when there was nothing left to solve. My body was equipment. I used it until it broke down and then wondered why it wasn't cooperating.

I had spent years trying to understand myself. Six years of psychotherapy. Hundreds of hours. I became very good at talking about my trauma. I had the language. I had the insight. I had the whole map. Someone could ask me what I wanted and I could go completely blank—and then explain to them, accurately, why I had gone blank. I understood myself intellectually. My body was still telling a different story: tense shoulders, sexual shutdown, exhaustion, an ache I couldn’t name.

Then I found somatic work. The first time I trembled in a session, it was small. My leg was twitching and I couldn’t stop it. I wept. Not because I had learned something new, but because for the first time I felt something I had spent years trying to understand. That was the beginning of a very different kind of work.

And then my life got very hard. My marriage ended. I blamed myself completely. I thought I must be the problem. That I should have done more therapy. That I should have tried harder. I couldn’t explain why I didn’t feel like fighting for the marriage in the ways he wanted me to. Underneath all of it was the flattest thought I had ever had: Of course this happened. I always knew it would. That was the first time my will didn’t save me. And my will was the only thing that ever had.

Around the same time, my oldest daughter turned seven. I looked at her across the kitchen and understood, in a way I never had before, the size of the child it happened to. And I understood something else: the things that had made me so capable had also kept me from being fully available—to myself, to other people, and to the kind of love I said I wanted.

So I stopped trying to fix myself through more information. I went back to being a student. I trained properly. I studied trauma, the body, intimacy, and the ways we protect ourselves. And I kept testing the work on myself. Not because I believe you have to be perfectly healed before you can love someone. Quite the opposite. I believe you can understand your patterns for years and still not know what to do when your body takes over.

That is the work I do now. I work with women who are exceptionally good at taking care of themselves. Women who run companies, raise children, hold everyone else together, and somehow still struggle to let someone show up for them. Women who want to be deeply loved but hate needing anyone. Women who can explain exactly why they pull away and still can't seem to stop doing it.

I am not here to convince you to trust people, become less ambitious, or hand your power over to someone else. I want something much more useful for you: the ability to know what is happening inside you when it actually matters and have more choice in what you do next.

Because I don't believe in teaching you something I haven't lived. Everything I ask of you, I’ve lived through myself first.