This article is a written version of my podcast episode. You can listen to it here. If you resonate with these words, send me a ♥️ and leave a comment, that means a lot to me.
Let's dive into this podcast with what I call “the origin story”. Today, we’re getting straight into the core, ladies. I’ll share a slice of my story, shedding light on how I arrived here, how it’s influenced and blocked me on my journey, and how self-awareness, therapy, self-healing have helped me let it be part of my past. I've promised you authenticity, a raw podcast where there's no hiding, no pretense. So, here's my story, unfiltered and real.
I'm Jessica, a 40-year-old married homeschooling mom of two, an online business owner, and a bearer of CPTSD (Complex Post Traumatic Syndrome), shaped by a series of challenging events in my early life.
While my experiences may not have seemed tragic externally - no war, no deaths - they've left deep scars, causing immense insecurity and difficulty building lasting connections.
I was the third child of a woman who didn't want to be a mother. And as she found out that she was pregnant with me, she tried having an abortion, which was impossible because the pregnancy was too advanced. And so she decided to have me adopted. During the pregnancy, she pretended that I didn't exist. And then she left me on the day I was born to the hands of the doctors and nurses at the hospital.
I was then adopted by a couple, my adoptive parents. My mother was a narcissist, and my parents separated when I was barely two years old, so I grew up exclusively with her. If you know a little bit about narcissist parents, it's very complex because when you're growing up with them, you cannot say they're evil or they're blatantly mistreating you. It's always very subtle and it's always under the mask of kindness and care so that everyone around us would see my mother as someone extremely good and kind and patient but they didn't know what was going on inside.
I don't believe that narcissists necessarily do it on purpose or I don't believe she did anyways. Maybe it's a bit naive of me still, but I don't believe she did anything on purpose. I think she didn't realize, she wasn't aware of the harm she could cause by trying to simply exist somehow.
Growing up without my father also played a huge role in how I grew up, how I looked at security or men. I grew up with a big trauma of abandonment and rejection and those two major fears, they hindered me in many aspects of my life. They’ve made me more distrustful, and it’s taken me a long, long time to finally be able to tell my story like this, just because for so long I was really disconnected from it.
So I would easily talk about the fact that I was adopted, for instance. It’s something that I've talked about extensively in public, about how being an adoptee has influenced my vision of languages and identity for instance. I've always been open to talk about the story, but also because I didn't feel the story It was very much intellectual. I was disconnected from it. I was disconnected from my body and my emotions that were living there.
And as I’ve learned and I teach since, as long as you're disconnected, you cannot really heal simply because your mind doesn't believe that there's anything to heal. For a long time, I’d kept nurturing the belief that my origin story didn't affect me, that I was stronger, that I was above that, that I was fine. Like the good kid that doesn’t want to complain.
So I reconnected to my body, I reconnected to my story and I started owning it. It came with first accepting and recognizing the impact of how my past impacted the way I acted with friends, the way I would commit or not commit to jobs, it impacted how vulnerable I would allow myself to be - not at all.
It also showed up in my business. Of course it did, business is the fastest growth catalyst that I know, right next to marriage imo. I became over-committed because in my entrepreneurship, I compensated my lack of self-worth by over-performing and over-delivering
I wanted to prove to myself and to the world that I'm capable, that I'm strong, that I can do it all on my own, that I'm disciplined. All of it was an attempt to prove to myself that I was legitimate, that I was doing something worthy with my life so I deserved to be alive, despite what my story had said about me.
Instead of seeing my business as something I do, it became something I am. I sacrificed a lot just to be able to continue building my business and being present with my clients and all of that. It's put me into debt, not only financially , but also energetically. And because of the wounds that I had not resolved, I had always a hard time to deal with criticism, to set boundaries, to get out of savior syndrome. I basically wanted to be everything to everyone and I wanted to do it all on my own. I took failure personally, for instance if a client didn’t do the work, I used to turn it against myself to confirm that despite doing my best, I'm not good enough.
That's the thing with unresolved trauma: every situation that could be interpreted as a confirmation of your core believes, will. So if you have a story of not-enoughness you're going to find a lot of evidence that you are indeed not enough. If you have a core story of rejection you're going to have many instances in your life where you will feel like you have been rejected. And in that moment, it seems very real even if it's actually mostly your perception. It’s rarely the intention of anyone to wake up one morning and to decide : “today I’m going to reject that person, it’s gonna be good.”
Beyond my desire to tell you my story, there’s a message here for everyone one of you. We all must take the measure of how our origin story impacts us in our business and in our relationships. How it hinders us subconsciously until we raise our own awareness. Until we can observe and understand which are the wounds and the beliefs and the thoughts that we may be repeating, the triggers that we encounter.
Once you’ve brought attention to that, learn to sit with it. Face it, feel it, process it. And then learn to free yourself from the shackles of our own limitations. A lot of the times, you already have the tools to do so. Maybe you’ve learned to regulate your nervous system, to bring healing to the different parts of your psyche, etc. but then it's a whole different game to actually apply them these tools in that very moment when you need it.
A part of it is also about accepting that as humans we do suffer. There's nothing abnormal about suffering, about pain. It’s intrinsic to our nature, and the sooner we accept and allow that, the sooner we can let pain be our teacher. To have more compassion and more understanding and more love for ourselves, for others, for the world. We are in this way all intimately connected.
My invitation for you today
Take a journal, take a pen, and start telling the story of your origin, the story of your wounds, the story of what has hurt you in life. And I realize this could take a while, a few pages, and maybe you don't have to do it all at once.
Open your journal and go through one episode and try to own the story. Not just to write it as a third person that is far from you, disconnected from you, but like it's your own story and feel the emotions connected to that. Bring it back to yourself sit with those emotions and then hold yourself like you would hold your own child.
You might want to do this alone, or with a therapist or with a trauma-informed coach. Remember that you’re always the expert of you. Just like when you practice yoga, you don’t want to hurt yourself, you always need to listen to your body and never force. It’s the same here : always take the steps that you feel you can take and just move forward little by little on this journey of self-healing.
So that your story becomes your strength, and you can keep on creating the full life & success you deserve.
I'm sending you love, power and light.
Jessica
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Thank you for joining me in this exploration. If you resonate with this story, share it with someone who might need it. Let's spread the whispers of inner power far and wide.