This is me on my 21st birthday at TGI Fridays.

Be careful what you eat. Don’t eat too much. You’ll get fat.

That was the voice in my head. It’s a voice I’ve heard for so long that I barely notice it’s there.

Menopause has turned up the volume. A little weight has gathered around my middle forming a pouch that seems determined to stay put. Summer has arrived and with it comes the annual ritual of trying on clothes and wondering if anything still feels comfortable. Some days I catch sight of myself in a shop window and immediately feel bigger than I did five minutes earlier.

The strange thing is that I’ve realised none of this is new. Menopause didn’t create my difficult relationship with my body. It simply brought it into sharper focus.

I went on my first diet when I was about twelve or thirteen.

My parents were often on diets. My dad had been bullied for being overweight when he was younger and with hindsight, I think he carried a lot of his own worries about appearance. Negative comments about weight weren’t unusual. Bodies were noticed, discussed or monitored.

I remember doing the Jane Fonda workout video with my mum in the living room. We were all on the Rosemary Conley diet. We ate salad sandwiches for lunch and checked labels for anything with less than 5g of fat. I find myself thinking about my mum’s body differently now. This was a body that had carried and given birth to four healthy babies. A body that had performed a miracle four times over. Yet somehow that wasn’t enough to earn it peace.

It was the 80s. That's simply how things were. An intense decade for "diet mania", dominated by extreme calorie restriction. At 16 I was already smoking. I’d walk to college and use my train fare to buy ten Silkcut. Diets were often fuelled by coffee, cigarettes, and fad methods rather than balanced nutritional science.

Food was woven into family life. If you ate your dinner, you got pudding. We had a sweetie drawer and, if you'd been good, you'd get chocolate or sweets. Birthday cakes marked celebrations. Biscuits appeared with cups of tea. Christmas meant treats. Food wasn’t just fuel. It was comfort, reward, celebration and togetherness.

Nobody was trying to create unhealthy habits. It was simply how many families were.

The contradiction was that while food was associated with love and pleasure, bodies were often being monitored at the same time.

Enjoy the pudding. Don’t get fat. Have a treat. Watch your weight.

It's only now that I realise how confusing those messages were. Food became associated with comfort and connection, while body size became associated with approval, attractiveness and belonging.

I don’t remember a dramatic moment when I suddenly became self-conscious. It feels more like a slow accumulation of messages.

Somewhere along the way, I learnt that my body was something that could be judged. I also learnt that I wasn’t quite the right kind of woman. My mum was petite, blonde and beautiful. My sister was glamorous. I became the Ginger One. The Flat-Chested One. The Angry One. The Show-Off.

Even writing those words now, I can hear how harsh they sound.

My dad used to tease me about my red hair. I don’t think he was trying to hurt me. I think he was carrying his own wounds and insecurities. Yet children don't hear intention; they absorb messages, and over time those messages become beliefs.

Recently, during a journaling session, I asked myself what I actually believed about my body. The answer arrived so quickly it took my breath away.

You’re ugly. You’re fat. You are flat-chested. You can’t get a boyfriend.

There it was. Not a concern or an insecurity—we all have those—but a verdict.

The thing is, life doesn’t really support that verdict.

I’ve had relationships. I’ve been loved. People have told me I’m attractive. Looking back at old photographs, I can see a woman who looks perfectly nice.

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The problem is that she didn’t think so. I can look at those photographs now and feel sad for her. She spent so much energy worrying that she wasn’t.

One photograph in particular stopped me in my tracks recently. I remember how much effort went into looking like that version of me. I remember believing that if I could just lose a bit more weight, improve a few things, somehow become more attractive, then I would finally feel okay about myself.

The irony is that I was only a size ten when I smoked twenty cigarettes a day. Not exactly a wellness strategy. Yet even then, I didn’t arrive at self-acceptance. The goalposts simply moved.

These past two years, I've been worrying about the changes menopause has brought to my body, but when I look back honestly, I don't remember ever feeling at home in it—or even sexy.

Not when I was younger, not when I was thinner, not when I was a size ten. Not even in photographs I can appreciate now.

For years I assumed confidence was waiting somewhere in the future. Just a few pounds away. Just beyond the next diet. Just on the other side of becoming more attractive. Yet every time I arrived somewhere I thought would make me feel better about myself, the feeling never lasted.

There was always something else to fix.

I also realised something I had never admitted out loud before. I don’t trust my judgement of my body. I can leave the house feeling perfectly happy with how I look and then catch sight of myself in a mirror or a shop window and suddenly feel huge.

It’s such a strange experience. The body hasn’t changed but my perception of it changes constantly. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve spent so many years looking for flaws that I no longer know how to see myself clearly.

As I sat with all of this, I decided to try something different. Instead of listening to the critic in my head, I asked my body what it wanted me to know.

Its response surprised me.

I had to put my pen down. My body wasn’t asking for a diet or demanding that I lose weight. It wasn’t criticising me. In fact, it sounded far kinder than the voice I’ve been listening to for most of my life.

When I was younger, one of the ways I stayed in my body was through dancing. I went to tap, ballet and modern classes every Saturday morning. I took exams and did shows. It was a big part of my life and I loved it. Maybe it’s time to enjoy being in my body again instead of scrutinising it every five minutes?

Or maybe it’s time to take a different view. Perhaps the problem isn’t that my body has changed. Bodies change. They are supposed to. My mum’s body changed after four pregnancies. Mine has changed through menopause. Every body tells the story of a life lived.

Perhaps the problem is that I’ve spent decades looking at my body rather than living in it. I’ve spent so much time assessing it, improving it, worrying about it and comparing it that I’ve forgotten what it feels like to simply inhabit it.

I don’t have a neat ending for today’s post. I haven’t suddenly fallen in love with my menopause belly. I still catch my reflection and sometimes wince. I still hear the old voices. What has changed is that I no longer assume those voices are telling me the truth. These days, I’m trying to listen to something else.

A quieter voice. The one that reminds me that this body has carried me through trauma, heartbreak, joy, friendship, creativity, healing and fifty-two years of being alive.

The one that keeps saying: Come back. You don’t live in your reflection. You live in me.

Love,

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Hello Lovely Wildheart,

Today I’m excited to share something very close to my heart. If you’ve ever felt abandoned, unseen, or struggled with healing those deep wounds from your past, I think you’ll find this video both comforting and illuminating. I guide you through the process of exploring your own healing path—chapter by chapter.

As an HSP I understand how our healing journey often unfolds in chapters, much like a storybook.

What to Expect

- A Gentle, Deep Dive: We revisit the past to understand your inner child’s deepest wounds, move into how those feelings shape your present, and then look forward with hope and action for your next chapter.

- Card Readings for Reflection: Using the beautiful Story Cards (by artist Kathy Nicholls), spirit animal cards, and my own inner child deck, I offer prompts and support for every step of the healing path.

- Practical Journal Prompts: You’re invited to journal along with the video, taking pauses to reflect and deepen your inner wisdom.

- Messages of Empowerment: Learn how to move out of “waiting” and “longing” into creating a vibrant, joyful new reality for yourself.

Catch the video below as part of your membership…

👉 To become a member

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Love,

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📚 This essay is part of my series Untangling Your Sensitive Self from Other People’s Stuff. You can read the full collection → here.

💬 If you’re reading and thinking, “This is me!” and you’d like support untangling your own situation, you can book a private session → here.

I left work on Friday feeling ashamed. Not because I had done anything wrong exactly, but because I had spoken… a lot.

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📚 This essay is part of my series Untangling Your Sensitive Self from Other People’s Stuff. You can read the full collection → here.

💬 If you’re reading and thinking, “This is me!” and you’d like support untangling your own situation, you can book a private session → here.

The brain that wouldn’t switch off

When I was little, my brain never shut up. Not in a bad way exactly. It was just busy. Relentlessly curious and always chewing on something. A question, a face, a scene I couldn’t stop replaying. While other kids drifted off peacefully to sleep after their bedtime stories, I was mentally re-editing conversations I’d had at school or wondering why someone’s voice changed mid-sentence. I was always on the case like a pint-sized Poirot in pyjamas.

Maybe I had ADHD…?!

Maybe that’s what happens when you’ve got a 29° Scorpio Moon. You’re born with a built-in magnifying glass and a gut that doesn’t stop whispering, “Something doesn’t feel right here.”

Maybe … I was traumatised.

Detective from a young age

It’s no surprise I ended up writing a murder mystery. (Well, technically a cosy, intuitive, trauma-tinted, sunflower-infused one, but still.) My main character Dolly has a big heart and a sharper intuition. She can sense what’s not being said. She follows her gut, cares too much, and she knows when someone’s lying, even if it’s to themselves.

Sound familiar?

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Hello Lovely Wildheart!

I hope you’re having a good week. Last weekend was my best friend’s birthday. We met up for coffee and a spot of shopping, followed by a visit to the cinema to see The Magic Faraway Tree. What an absolute treat! With a brilliant cast and a trip down memory lane, the film made me laugh and cry in equal measure. It also stirred something old in me that took me by surprise.

I loved those books as a child.

Not just casually, but in the way you return to something over and over again because it feels like somewhere you can go. That’s also why last week I started a book club at college to get students off their bloody phones. The film cleverly weaves in this same wisdom, as the family escape to the country to come away from tech, which had taken their youngest daughter, Fran’s voice away.

I can remember squeezing in one more chapter of Enid Blyton at bedtime or lounging in a beanbag on a rainy Sunday, completely immersed in their wonder and magic. From the different worlds to the slightly bonkers characters like Moonface, Silky, Dame Washalot, The Angry Pixie and The Saucepan Man, I was hooked. Those stories made the world make sense again. They were my comfort blanket.

The film was nostalgic, but as I sat there crunching on my nachos and sipping my Diet Coke, I started to notice these quiet echoes between that world and the one I created in my own book, Stuck Between Two Worlds.

In one scene, Ruby slides down a hollow tree trunk into The Wilderness. Enid Blyton wrote about the Slippery Slip, a magical slide inside the colossal trunk of the Faraway Tree. I didn’t realise that was what I was writing at the time. How could I have remembered? I was in my forties when I wrote my book and probably about eight when I first read hers. In just 30 days, my story poured out of me on a book writing course, but in truth it had been quietly percolating for years, waiting until I felt safe enough to let it surface.

There has to be a sense of safety if we’re going to tell the truth, and begin to heal.

On reflection, I must have read those wonderful books so many times that I internalised their magic. The different worlds, the presence of safe and natural spaces where I could be myself, became part of me. They helped me shape a rich inner world where I would retreat to whenever I needed. I hadn’t consciously made that connection before, but sitting in the cinema, it felt undeniable that I had carried that magic with me all along.

The film captured the beauty of the Enchanted Wood perfectly.

Watching those scenes, I recognised it instantly. It felt both familiar and magical at the same time. I leant across and whispered to my friend, “It’s just like where I walk Moe.”

When I got home, I looked it up and discovered that parts of it were indeed filmed in the Surrey Hills. It’s one of those landscapes that quietly takes your breath away, ancient trees, deep woodland, and rolling fields of lush green grass scattered with daisies that seem to stretch on forever.

This particular part of the Surrey Hills holds a special place in my heart. It’s where we scattered Moe’s ashes last October, after he crossed over the rainbow bridge. He was my constant, a four-legged friend who was always there when I needed him.

There’s a moment in the film where Fran goes into the wood to meet Silky, the fairy. She closes her eyes and says, “I believe in magic” three times, and the tree begins to shimmer as if it’s waking up to meet her. Tiny sparkles of golden light surround her, as though the whole forest is alive and responding.

I loved that moment. The idea that magic isn’t something you simply stumble across by accident, but something you allow yourself to believe in. Something that’s already there, quietly waiting to be noticed in everyday life, if you’re open to seeing it.

It reminded me of this card from my Smiley Thought Card deck that says, Life is magical and fun. I created these cards years ago when I was working with children. They were simple, colourful prompts to help them make sense of their feelings, to build confidence, and to find something steady to hold onto.

When I wrote my book, I didn’t consciously plan it, but those same cards became part of Ruby’s world too and part of her toolkit for navigating life. Looking at it now, it feels like the same thread running through everything. The stories I loved as a child, the work I went on to do, the world I created in my book. Different forms, but the same intention, to make space for something softer, kinder, and more hopeful to exist.

There’s a lovely moment in the film when the mum talks about the dreams she and the dad had when they met at university. That’s when the tears began to bubble up. I loved her gentle reminder to not give up on our dreams. It was like my body remembered something before my mind could catch up. It wasn’t just emotional, it was familiar. Something in me recognised it instantly.

It wasn’t only about dreams, although I’ve always had them and, somehow, I’ve never let them go. It was more about the idea of family, or perhaps more accurately, the version of family I longed for and believed in as a child.

That innocence is a tender thing. You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. You can be grateful for what you did have, whilst also grieving what should have been.

There were happy moments in my childhood. I was privileged in many ways, and I have beautiful memories of holidays and playful, carefree times with my sisters that I write about in my book. Those moments were real and full of life and laughter, but they were difficult to settle into because there was always a sense that something could shift, that the safety of those moments might not last.

Looking back, I can see how I learnt to experience those moments while also holding a quiet awareness that they might disappear. It meant that even the good things were hard to fully relax into, as if part of me was always preparing for the change that might follow. Waiting for the other shoe to drop.

And yet, what struck me most as I left the cinema was not just the grief, but the realisation that I never let go of the belief that something more was possible. Even as a child, I held onto the idea that there was another way of being, another kind of world that felt safer, kinder and more true.

I didn’t just believe in that world, I created it.

The Wilderness that Ruby visits in Stuck Between Two Worlds holds everything I needed but didn’t consistently have: emotional safety, understanding and a sense of belonging that made room for all parts of who I was.

What I’m only just beginning to understand is that I’m allowed to live inside that kind of magic in my own life as well. Not perfectly and not all the time, but more than I have been.

I’m very good at believing in other people, noticing their strengths and reflecting them back to them. I love helping them see what’s possible. Perhaps it’s time I turned some of that towards myself. That I allow for the possibility that I have something of value too. That there is something good and steady in me, even if my inner critic still pipes up from time to time with its familiar commentary. “Stop showing off… who do you think you are?!” Unfortunately, those old voices don’t disappear overnight.

There is still a part of me that wants to dismiss all of this as too much or too deep, but there is another part that knows this matters. It takes courage to keep your heart open when it would have been easier to close it. It takes courage to continue believing in possibility when you’ve had reasons not to.

I’m starting to see that not as something to question, but as something to honour.

Perhaps that’s what this film helped me remember.

I didn’t lose the magic I loved as a child. It didn’t disappear when life got more complicated or when I understood more about the world. It simply changed form.

It became the way I see people, the way I write, and the way I try to create safe spaces for others. It’s now slowly becoming something I’m allowed to live inside too.

Later that evening, I found a sweatshirt in my wardrobe with the word BELIEVE emblazoned across the front. I hadn’t worn it in ages. It felt like more than coincidence and I laid it out on my bed ready for college the next morning.

Before I went to bed, I felt more connected to my inner child than ever. I reflected on the stories we carry, and the ones we choose to share. Books shape us in ways, we don’t always realise at the time. Books give us language, they give us somewhere to go, and sometimes they give us back to ourselves.

Perhaps that’s reason enough to tell our own stories too.

Love

PS If this piece resonated, you can read the first two chapters of Stuck Between Two Worlds here.

One reader described it as “putting their childhood into words and giving language to something they’d never been able to express before.”

If you enjoyed this essay, you may also like:

📚 This essay is part of my series Untangling Your Sensitive Self from Other People’s Stuff. You can read the full collection → here.

💬 If you’re reading and thinking, “This is me!” and you’d like support untangling your own situation, you can book a private session → here.

At the beginning of Stuck Between Two Worlds, Ruby says,

“Lots of people think I’m older. I don’t blame them. I have a very wise head on these young shoulders.”

People often romanticise that kind of child. As adults, some people refer to themselves as empaths, or old souls. Apparently, we are the intuitive and gifted ones. Some of that can be true. I do think some children arrive with huge depth and unusual perception, but I also think what people call an empath is very often conditioning. It is what happens when a child grows up in a house where they have to read the room to feel safe.

That is a different thing entirely.

It looks like sensitivity from the outside, but on the inside it is vigilance.

It is listening out for footsteps, cupboard doors, sighs, a scrape of a chair, the shift in a voice and the sudden silence before somebody snaps. It is learning that there is no point just hearing the words because the real meaning is in the tone, the timing, the face and the atmosphere. You’re like an emotional weather reporter on the morning breakfast show. You become an expert in reading the sub text of the text, or what is unsaid because what is unsaid is usually the thing with the most power.

I don’t identify as an empath, I call these children Wildhearts

Not because they are dramatic or mystical for the sake of it, but because they feel everything. In the book, it’s described to Ruby like this:

“Wildhearts are deeply sensitive. Everything sticks like Velcro. The energy in the air and other people’s feelings.”

That line still feels true to me. These are the children who can walk into a room and sense what has happened before anybody says a word. For over a decade, I worked with hundreds of them.

These children pick up what is in the atmosphere

They know when something is off. They know when the smiling doesn’t match the mood. They know when the adults are pretending. It’s like they have a built in BS radar.

And because they know, they adapt.

That is the bit I think people miss. They see a child who is hyper-aware, caring, tuned in, maybe even a bit psychic, and they think what a gift. They don’t always see the cost. They don’t see the child whose own nervous system has become organised around somebody else’s moods. They don’t see the child who is parenting their parent without realising that is what they are doing.

When your mother is dysregulated, there is no such thing as simply being a child. Not really. There is too much to monitor, too much to anticipate and too much to get right.

Ruby describes her home as The Hologram House of Horrors. She says: “My head is full of information. I don’t know how I hold it all up there.”

She isn’t talking about school facts or times tables. She means all the invisible things she has to track in order to live in her family. The noises that mean her father is awake. The signs that her mother is sad or furious or needs her help. The jobs that need doing before they become a problem. She has to get it right. She anticipates the right tone, the right timing, the right way to put her plate in the dishwasher. She knows where every item in the house belongs. She knows all the rules, the spoken and the unspoken. She’s mastered the list of things she has to remember so the atmosphere doesn’t turn.

That is not childhood. That is unpaid emotional labour in a tiny body.

You can see why so many of these children grow up and are praised for being capable. They are so capable. They are organised and thoughtful and good in a crisis. They are responsible, often the ones people lean on, the ones who can be trusted, the ones who quietly make life easier for everybody else. What nobody sees is how tiring it is to build a self on top of constant vigilance.

You get very good at reading other people and very disconnected from yourself. You know what everyone else needs. You can sense a mood in seconds. You can tell from one look that something is brewing. Yet ask that same person what they want, what they feel, what they need, and very often there is a long pause.

That pause is the untangling.

When Ruby first starts to encounter Nettie, one of the first shifts is so simple and so huge:

“I felt lighter knowing that I wasn’t broken or bad. I was just me.”

For children who grow up being made wrong, that kind of relief is everything. I think that is partly why Ruby needed Nettie. She needed someone who didn’t want anything from her except the truth. Someone who was not overwhelmed by her feelings, not irritated by her questions, not threatened by her anger, not invested in making her wrong.

In the story, Nettie plays the role of the good enough mother1. She isn’t perfect nor does she try to be. She isn’t grand or all-powerful. We don’t really know what she is but in my mind when I wrote her, she was an elemental being.

Nettie is calm, kind, interested and emotionally steady. She sees Ruby clearly. She does not flatten her into a label, or make her perform in a role. She does not say, here we go again, you difficult child. She says, I see what is under this. I can feel what is really happening here. She stays.

At one point in the story, Ruby is soaked and shivering after swimming in the Selenite Caves with the beluga whales. She feels unprepared, out of place and dowdy. She’s worried she has got everything wrong and is furious with herself for not dressing better, not bringing a gift, not remembering the map, not somehow already knowing what she could not possibly have known. That relentless inner critic that always tells you off is such a familiar trauma state.

What’s lovely is that Nettie doesn’t join in. She doesn’t say yes, you should have thought ahead and make Ruby wrong. Instead, she says something much more healing. “I can’t possibly know how you feel. Only you know what it’s like to be in your body.”

Imagine hearing that as a child. Imagine an adult not telling you what you feel, not deciding for you, not dismissing your response, but trusting that your body has its own truth. What would that feel like for you?

Children who grow up around emotional volatility often have no one doing that for them. Their reality is constantly overridden.

• They are told what they meant

• They are told what their tone was

• They are told why they are upset

• They are told not to be ridiculous

• They are told not to be selfish, not to be so dramatic, not to answer back.

So when somebody finally says, I cannot possibly know how you feel, only you know that, it gives the child back to themselves.

That is the heart of my work, really. The untangling is not about becoming somebody else. It is about coming back into right relationship with your own mind, body and feelings after years of being trained away from them.

Nettie tells Ruby, “You don’t know what you don’t know.”

I love that because children in these families are so often punished for not knowing. They are expected to act like grown ups before their time. They are punished for not anticipating and not mind-reading correctly. They are punished for not managing the atmosphere better. They grow up scared of uncertainty. They overthink, overprepare and scan ahead. They try to avoid mistakes before mistakes have even happened.

In the Selenite Caves, Nettie keeps showing Ruby that she can survive not knowing (uncertainty). That she can do things without a plan. That she can get her plimsolls wet, lose the map, meet new people in the wrong outfit, feel afraid and still discover that everything went very, very right. That is such a different lesson from the ones many of us learned at home.

And then there is the line that brings a lump to my throat every time:

“You’re a good kid. Even without perfect plimsolls, the plans, the fancy clothes. Even when you forget things or you don’t know, you’re still a good kid.”

That is the mirror and the voice of the good enough mother. That is what so many sensitive adult children still ache to hear, because when you grow up in a family where one parent’s moods dictate the atmosphere and the other parent is absent (enabling or emotionally elsewhere), you become the child who tries to understand everybody. You become the bridge, the fixer, the translator.

You become the one who can see your mother’s pain and defend her in the same breath that you are hurt by her. You’re the one who understands your father works hard and is tired and avoids conflict and perhaps does not know how to meet you, yet you still feel the terrible ache of not being seen by him.

You become sensitive and nuanced because you have to be. There is no room for simple feelings. Love is mixed up with fear. Compassion is mixed up with anger. You see the good in people who are still causing damage. You understand too much, too soon.

That is why these children seem old. Not because they are magical little adults, but because they’ve had to carry too much complexity.

That being said, I do think there is something magical in them too. That is why the word Wildhearts feels right to me. They are not just traumatised children. They are children with enormous perception, deep integrity, fierce loyalty and a stubborn instinct for truth.

So many adults I meet now still call themselves empaths, and I understand why. It is the nearest language they have for a childhood spent feeling everything. But often when you look more closely, what they mean is this:

• I learnt early to track other people’s emotions because it was safer than being fully inside my own.

• I learnt to read faces before I learnt to trust my own feelings.

• I learnt that my body could tell me what kind of day it was from the sound of the front door.

• I learnt to be useful, kind, watchful, careful, easy to please.

• I learnt to parent the parent.

That is not a personality type, it’s adaptation.

So, the untangling begins when we stop calling ourselves too much or too sensitive or impossible to soothe, and start understanding what we were adapting to in the first place.

This is why I still feel protective of Ruby and maybe often hesitant to promote the book. Even though, since it was published in 2019, it has sold nearly 500 copies.

I hope all the Rubies who’ve read it feel the relief & validation it might bring.

Ruby tells the truth from inside the child’s world.

She does not write about trauma like a detached adult looking back with a clipboard. She lives it. She notices, she questions, she rages and she longs to be understood. She is brave, funny, exhausted and yet full of life. She can see what is wrong in the house without having the language yet for grief, enmeshment, emotional abuse, splitting, image management and all the rest of it. She just knows it doesn’t feel right.

That knowing is the beginning.

Perhaps that is the deeper point of my Substack essays too. Not just to say, this happened and it was painful, though both are true, but to say, if you grew up like this, there was never anything wrong with your perception. There was never anything wrong with your need to be met differently. There was never anything wrong with the part of you that questioned the script, the part that felt what everyone else was pretending not to feel, the part that became vigilant, capable, tired and wise beyond your years.

That child was not wrong, she was reading the room because she had to.

If this resonates, I’m sharing the opening chapter of Stuck Between Two Worlds below. It may speak to a part of you that has been trying to find words for this for a very long time.

And if you are untangling your sensitive self from other people’s stuff, this is exactly the emotional territory I explore in my writing.

You can read the whole series here.

Love

P.S. If you know a sensitive soul who would benefit from untangling an emotionally tense and fraught childhood, tap on the heart at the top or bottom of this essay and share it with them.

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You’re invited you to join me on a little creative adventure as I art journal— a lovely safe space to release some big old heavy feelings. Don’t worry I’ve processed them, so i…

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Dearest Wildheart,

How are you? I woke up exhausted this morning. I wasn’t just tired. I’d had a good night’s sleep but my whole body ached. I lay there for a moment trying to work out why. This week I’d decided to walk to college — it’s only 20 minutes from where I live.

By Thursday my feet were not happy. It wasn’t what my body wanted. So, in the spirit of listening to my body, I didn’t push through but instead, drove to work on Friday.

With my mind whirring—low level searching for answers, I got up and made a cup of tea. Then it was time. I wrapped myself in a blanket and sat down with my cards and journal. This is what I always come back to when something feels off. I pulled some cards and asked a simple question:

Where is my energy going?

I mean I’ve just had three weeks off from college!!! Yes, I was ill for a week with a chest infection, coughing up a lung while being told it was “just viral,” but still. I’d had time off. I shouldn’t feel like this.

“Should” is rarely helpful, is it?

Intuitively, I know the lungs are often connected to grief. Not the loud, obvious kind. The quieter kind that sits just under the surface and gets activated when you least expect it.

That’s not new for me.

I’ve spent most of my life with that familiar hum of grief in the background. My mum’s grief from her own childhood. The subtle longing of not being able to connect to my family in a way that felt safe and consistent.

As I scribbled in my journal, I was taken straight back to my dad, and those small pockets of time where I got him to myself, usually on a dance floor at a family wedding, where for a few minutes it felt like I had his full attention.

I sat with it. The tears didn’t come, but there was a lot of anger and frustration. I then started thinking about a student I’d met this week. She was taking care of both of her parents and her two younger siblings, whilst battling her own health struggles.

That released more anger and frustration. I found myself right back there. Big feelings from childhood where I was the one holding it all together. I mean, I didn’t know that at the time. I was just doing what the eldest does. I was just being helpful. Trying to do my best, whilst also trying to study and wrestle with an overwhelming amount of anxiety that didn’t allow for mistakes.

I couldn’t upset anybody or get it wrong. Couldn’t afford to. It wasn’t safe.

This pattern hasn’t disappeared. It’s showing up in my daily life, particularly in group settings and meetings. I notice my energy leans forward, as if I’m quietly reaching. That younger part of me that wants to be seen, included, connected… and that, over time, is exhausting.

We had a team meeting yesterday, reviewing the year. I’m the longest-standing member of the team (which was only created eight months ago!), so naturally I had the most to contribute. I shared my feedback, communicated my experience and asked questions.

And yet afterwards, my inner critic piped up.

Did I talk too much? Did I take up too much space? Should I have held back more?

I realise now that it wasn’t talking to much that was the problem but the energy that sits behind it. That subtle sense of needing to stay engaged, to keep the flow going, to not disappear from the room. The part of me that steps in when things feel a bit vague or unheld and quietly takes responsibility for keeping things moving.

That part of me is efficient and oh-so capable. It’s also drains the life out of me. She steps in when everything feels vague or unheld. She quietly picks up the responsibility to keep it all moving forward. I’ve carried that pattern since I was a little girl. I felt for my poor body (and my younger self) unconsciously holding everything in the room to keep myself and everybody else safe.

When I continued questioning and pulling cards, the answer was simple:

Come back to yourself.

Not by withdrawing or shutting down, but by softening that outward focus just enough to feel my own feet on the ground again. Instead of hovering in that space of “What else can I add?” I want to share my part, and then allow myself to settle back into my body.

Deep breaths.

I felt my shoulders drop as I wrote: I can be part of the room, without feeling responsible for holding it together.

There’s a huge relief in that. That realisation when I remember that I don’t have to earn my place in every interaction. That I can be seen without doing something extra to maintain it.

I don’t mean to be extra 😝☺️ —it’s my pattern. I can only heal it when I see it and bring it into my awareness. It’s often in small invisible ways that we give our energy away. Especially when we are highly sensitive and used to reading the room.

If you’ve ever worken up tired, maybe the question to ask isn’t, “Why am I so tired?” but “Where is my energy leaking?”

If this resonates, and you’re curious about what your own body might be trying to show you, I offer 1:1 energy readings where we explore exactly this together.

We look at where your energy is currently going, what’s draining it, and what your system actually needs to feel more steady, more supported, and more like yourself again.

👉 You can find more details [HERE]

For paid subscribers, I’ve shared the exact card spread I used this morning, along with journal prompts to help you explore this in your own way.

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Do you hold back your true feelings?

I’d noticed how I would pause before saying what I really thought. I’d hold everything in, too scared to say how I really felt. I’d smile and nod, insisting I’m fine, like that scene in Friends when Ross is making fajitas! 😬

Well, until I got home and could cry or journal. I’d hold it together like Emma Thompson in Love Actually, when she didn’t get that necklace. On the way I’d replay conversations with my steering wheel, trying to get them “right” so everybody was okay.

I prided myself on being kind and understanding. I’d let my best friend eat the last Jaffa Cake and say, “No honestly, I didn’t even want it.”

Yet still, I would ask myself: Is it me? I thought I was the problem. I mean I’d been told often enough that I was Too sensitive. Too much. Not clear enough. Not patient enough.

So I kept trying harder, but trying harder didn’t bring me any closer to what I actually wanted. It didn’t feel peaceful. It just made me more tired.

One day, confused, but with the determination of Bridget Jones giving up smoking on New Year’s Day 🙄 I took out my journal, made myself a cuppa and sat down to untangle my inner world. Not to fix it, but to see my patterns clearly. That usually gives me some relief and a bit of wiggle room to try a different way.

That’s how this started. I didn’t intend to share it, but it turned into a small eBook (or maybe an ezine). It’s 25 pages of handwritten notes, reflections, and moments where things started to shift.

It’s not polished. Not exactly. It’s me, in my (Primark) pyjamas untangling in real time. I’ve called it:

“Including myself… even when it feels wrong.”

It’s an honest look at self-abandonment, overgiving and what starts to happen when you stop leaving yourself out of your own life.

If you’re reading this and thinking oh… this is me kind of way…this is exactly where you begin. You don’t have to figure it all out first. You don’t have to be “ready” in the perfect, tidy way. You just have to be willing to sit with yourself, the way I did.

I’ll meet you there.

BUY EBOOK NOW!

Inside, the eBook you’ll explore:

• Why you keep putting other people’s needs ahead of your own.

• The hidden beliefs that drive people-pleasing, over giving, and self-abandonment.

• How childhood patterns can keep you stuck in waiting, proving, and trying harder.

• The difference between relationships that nourish you and those that drain you.

• How to trust your feelings, intuition, and inner wisdom.

• Ways to listen to your body’s signals instead of overriding them.

• Why being “too sensitive” may actually be a sign you’ve outgrown certain environments.

• Simple, everyday acts of self-respect that help you include yourself in your own life.

• How to create relationships, work, and choices that feel aligned, safe, and true to who you are.

• How to stop shrinking yourself, silencing yourself, or keeping the peace at your own expense.

• A clearer sense of what you want, what matters to you, and how you want to live.

• Gentle journal prompts and reflections to help you recognise your own patterns and begin making meaningful changes.

Most importantly, you’ll discover that including yourself isn’t selfish. It’s the foundation for living a life that finally includes you.

This ebook is a shift from “Where am I in my own life?” to “My needs, feelings, and voice belong here too.”

Without guilt.
Without shame.
Without making yourself wrong.

It’s not about becoming someone new.

It’s about coming home to yourself.

I’m always surprised to see how when I follow my writing with curiosity, the path unfolds organically. It started with me getting really honest about my life… then writing this eBook as it began to fall into place…and then learning how to actually include myself in my own life.

If you want to move through that same process, this is your next step:

👉 Wildheart Gentle Reset Bundle 🌼

Love,

PS. Want a peek inside the ebook? 👇It’s a short, illustrated self-reflection rather than a traditional long-form book.

If you’ve ever …

• Second-guessed your feelings
• Become unsettled in a relationship but couldn’t explain why
• Felt emotionally drained after being around certain people or environments
• Lost your voice trying to keep the peace
• Questioned whether you’re overreacting or being unkind

You’re in the right place.

I create emotionally safe, imaginative spaces where sensitive women can reconnect with themselves, their feelings, their creativity and their inner truth.

Many of us grew up feeling alone, emotionally unseen, or misunderstood. That may shape us, but it doesn’t have to define us. I want to help you meet the wounded parts of yourself with compassion, clarity, and care.

I explore healing in real time and name the dynamics that are often felt but rarely articulated. I use writing to explore why we’re drawn to who we’re drawn to, why we lose ourselves in love, and as a portal back to ourselves.

I write about untangling yourself from confusing emotional climates, rebuilding trust in your intuition, and recognising the patterns we inherit in love and family.

Writing is my nervous system care.

It’s how I clear the fog and come back to what’s true. Here, you’ll find essays, reflections, and prompts that gently uncover what’s been operating beneath the surface.

Here you’ll find excerpts from my books, memories from childhood, pages from my art journal, handwritten reflections, prompts, and journals I’ve created to help you find your own way back home.

Here’s what’s in my healing toolkit. I’ve written candidly about tricky topics such as family estrangement, self-love, and self-esteem. You’ll also find behind-the-scenes glimpses of my cosy mystery series, The Dolly Sunflower Mysteries —where relational insight meets storytelling.

Hello 👋 I’m Lisa. It’s lovely to meet you. I’m an Intuitive Writer, trauma survivor and cosy mystery author. Writing is how I come back to myself, and I hope my reflections, prompts, and essays help you do the same. I love to write daily using life experiences, and oracle cards as mirrors to reconnect with my own inner wisdom.

✨ Getting started:

If you’re new here, begin by scrolling through Notes for the latest posts, or start with these top favourites:

1. 🧶 Untangling Your Sensitive Self — an ever growing series of essays on energetic boundaries, self-doubt, and emotional clarity

2. ✍️ Journal in your Jammies — a workshop that will help you use writing as a way to hear yourself again

3. 📚 Digital Journals — beautiful pages for your reflection time. I love making these. You can print them off or upload them to digital note taking apps like GoodNotes and Notability for your tablet.

4. 🌻 The Dolly Sunflower Mysteries— As an indie author, I’m proud of this. Think: Bridget Jones meets Jessica Fletcher: a psychic school counsellor protagonist solves whodunnits with her dead Gladma Gladys, a sprinkle of romance and a cute Yorkie.

✨ Curious to explore more?

You might enjoy The Intuitive Writer’s Cafe, a members-only space with guided journaling, workshops, and curated tools. There are over 100 posts to explore here. So take your time and start with what feels written for you.

Oh, and feel free to message me in the chat if you have questions, want to say hi, or just want to share what’s on your mind. I love hearing from readers, and you’re always welcome here.

Love,

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Even when life is calm, or you finally have time to rest, there’s a part of you still bracing. You can’t focus on things you normally enjoy, you replay conversations over and over. You second guess yourself and you can’t quite relax, even when nothing is wrong. Your body feels heavy, tight… or even bloated for no obvious reason

That overthinking that keeps your mind in a loop feels like you’re trying to solve something. When really, you’re trying to feel safe. So your mind goes outwards.

Who said what. What they meant. What you should have done differently.

All the while, your body is quietly saying: 👉 come back

My eyes feel heavy, my body tense. My tummy is bloated because I’m clenched and holding on. I’m holding my breath, holding everything together, holding things that were never mine to carry.

And underneath that? I’m tired. Not just “need an early night” tired. I’m exhausted. I feel tired in a way that isn’t fixed by sleep.

Since starting my new job at the college, I’ve been sick every. single. term.

Of course, I blamed myself.

My sensitivity, my Victorian chimney sweep immunity, my hormones. Yes! It must be Perimenopause. Not really, because when I really stopped and listened, I discovered my body wasn’t failing me. It was trying to get my attention.

This working environment doesn’t feel safe to me. It’s loud, unpredictable, and it mirrors dynamics I grew up in. No wonder my system is on high alert.

Then last weekend, I went to the cottage. Quiet with a little birdsong, fresh air, a beautiful garden, large rooms with no pressure and no people ☺️ No piano being aggressively attacked at 8.30 in the morning (honestly… I deserve compensation at this point 😫).

This was the magic medicine I needed to come down from all the drama.

When we feel safe, the body relaxes. When we don’t, it holds.

The Universe does have a sense of humour though. I thought I’d finally have space to write, but instead I got a chest infection and ended up on the sofa watching a Hallmark romcom called The 27-Hour Day.

The main character, Lisa, Laura is scarily familiar. She’s a productivity coach who helps people optimise their lives, and then completely forgets how to live her own. When she’s forced to stop, she doesn’t know what to do with herself at first. The silence feels uncomfortable, but slowly, as the days tick by, she starts to hear herself again.

What she feels. What she wants. What actually matters.

I realised so many of us are like Laura. Trying to fix ourselves and get life right, whilst quietly feeling exhausted underneath it all.

So if your body has been feeling uncomfortable lately…

It might not just be what you ate, it might be what you’ve been holding. It might be a life, a role, or a dynamic that no longer fits who you are.

You don’t have to change everything overnight, but you do need to stop abandoning yourself.

✍️ The Sensitive Sleuth Burnout Recovery Journal

Inspired by Dolly Sunflower’s inner world, I created a journal to help us gently explore this. It’s your invitation to slow down, tune in, and explore what’s really going on under the surface.

Inside, you’ll find 40 prompts to help you come back into your body, release what you’re holding and hear your own voice again. You’ll also make sense of the exhaustion and discover the 10 deeper reasons peace is so hard to find.

You don’t need to have read the first Dolly Sunflower Mystery. You just need a quiet moment and a pen.

👉 Grab your journal inside the membership here

Subscribe now

✍️ Pages from inside my actual journal …

I downloaded the journal into Goodnotes on my iPad, and took out my Apple pencil. You can also just take the prompts and scribble in your paper journal if you prefer.

I didn’t expect what came out when I wrote this, but journaling clarified what I want and what I’m ready for quicker than hours of overthinking ever has!

🐣 Wishing you a wonderful Easter. See you next time.

Until then, take care of you.

Love

PS. There is currently 50% off annual membership to The Intuitive Writer’s Cafe. You’re always welcome to pop in to our cosy corner of the internet and enjoy all the beautiful content. If you’ve been craving something softer, slower, and more like you… you’ll feel right at home. Join our lovely gang! ☕️✍️✨🌻

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📚 This essay is part of my series Untangling Your Sensitive Self from Other People’s Stuff. You can read the full collection → here.

💬 If you’re reading and thinking, “This is me!” and you’d like support untangling your own situation, you can book a private session → here.

The other day a student said something to me that made my stomach tighten with recognition. She wasn’t crying or making a fuss. She just said something about her mum in that flat, tired way children do when what they are describing has become so normal to them, they don’t yet realise it isn’t meant to be.

And I thought, “Uh-oh. That sounds like my mum.”

Not every mum is the same and not every difficult childhood looks dramatic from the outside. It often doesn’t. This type of mum is usually excellent at keeping her chaos a secret behind closed doors. It’s familiar to me because I lived it.

There’s a particular feeling to growing up around a parent whose moods run the house, and if you know it, you know it.

This type of mum is usually proficient at painting herself as the victim of her children, and how terrible they are. She’s a master of disguise. Sweetness and light when it matters most, carefully crafting an image of motherhood that could make other women feel as if they are falling short.

It is hard to explain this kind of childhood to people who haven’t lived it because emotional and psychological abuse are often ambient. They are in the air and in the waiting. They are in the way your body learns to scan before your mind has even caught up. One day something is fine and the next day the exact same thing gets you into trouble.

Read more

Hello Lovely Wildheart,

It’s Mother’s Day tomorrow. Every year when it rolls around I notice something interesting. People assume it’s a universally happy day. The shops are full of flowers and cards that declare ‘Best Mum Ever’.

Yet when I speak to people privately, the truth is often very different.

Mother’s Day can be complicated.

Someone at work asked me recently what I do for Mother’s Day. Without really thinking I joked, “I celebrate raising myself.”

Then I added, “…and my three sisters.” Eldest daughter curse anyone?

Later that evening I realised that it wasn’t entirely a joke, because my mum raised herself too.

When Mother’s Day wasn’t simple

When I was younger there was one year that perfectly captured the strange emotional terrain of our family. My sister and I had plans the night before Mother’s Day. We stayed at a friend’s house.

My mum had actually said yes. She had given us permission to go. So we thought nothing of it. When we got home the next day, everything had exploded.

The lunch we had booked was cancelled. My mum stayed in bed all day. The presents we had bought her sat outside her bedroom door unopened for weeks, until she decided she was ready to speak to us again.

At the time it felt confusing and heavy. As if the emotional temperature of the entire house depended on whether we had performed motherhood correctly.

Seeing the story differently as an adult

As I’ve grown older, I see more layers to the story.

My mum lost her own mother when she was a little girl. She grew up without the kind of maternal blueprint most of us take for granted. The grief of that loss lived quietly underneath everything.

Not having a mother and then suddenly being expected to become one are two very different things.

Looking back, I can see that she carried enormous holes inside her. Holes created by grief, trauma and absence. Without realising it, she expected us to fill them.

Children are not built for that job.

Many of you tell me your own version of this story.

A mother who needed too much.
A mother who could not see them clearly.
A mother who loved them, yet left them tangled in guilt, responsibility or emotional confusion.

🎙️ I’ve spoken more openly about my relationship with my mum in this podcast episode.

You can love your mum and still tell the truth

Looking back now, I can see that most of us don’t hate our mums.

In fact, that’s often the very thing that makes these stories so hard to tell. We understand where she came from. We can see the grief, the trauma, the missing pieces in her own life. Sometimes we even feel disloyal for saying how it really was for us.

Yet telling the truth about our experience isn’t betrayal. It’s honesty. It’s the place we stop abandoning ourselves so that she feels okay. Those two things can exist at the same time. You can have compassion for your mum and still acknowledge that the dynamic between you left marks.

For many of us there were years of trying harder. Trying to be more patient, understanding and more accommodating. It’s exhausting and eventually you reach the painful realisation that the relationship cannot meet you in the space you were hoping for.

That doesn’t mean your experience isn’t valid. Not at all. You’re not bad, ungrateful or selfish for wanting a life of your own. You grew up inside a complicated dynamic.

It might be helpful to have a listen to this conversation where I explore celebrities who have had fractured or complicated relationships with their mothers. It turns out this story is far more common than we realise.

If the eldest daughter dynamic rings a bell, I’ve explored that more here. It’s something I see again and again in my work and it’s actually the curse Dolly is trying to break in my cosy mystery book.

If this stirred something in you

Mother’s Day can stir a lot of feelings. Sadness. Anger. Compassion. Confusion. Sometimes all of them in the same afternoon. You don’t have to read or listen to everything. Think of it as a little library. Start with whatever resonates most right now.

If this weekend brings up questions for you, or if you’ve been quietly carrying the weight of a complicated mother relationship for years, you don’t have to untangle it alone.

Book Your Session

I’ve opened up a small number of Clarity Sessions for anyone who would like a safe space to explore their story. This isn’t about blaming your mum. Most mothers are doing the best they can with the emotional tools they were given.

It’s about understanding what happened, how it shaped you, and gently reclaiming the parts of yourself that got lost in the dynamic. So many of you have discovered that once you begin untangling their relationship with your mum, other relationships in your life start to make more sense too.

Whether you celebrate Mother’s Day, ignore it entirely, or quietly celebrate the fact that you learned how to parent yourself along the way, I’m sending you a lot of kindness this weekend.

You deserved a safe place to grow. If you didn’t always get that, it’s not too late to start creating it now.

Love,

✨ Membership to The Intuitive Writer is a cosy community for sensitive souls who want to feel calmer, clearer, and more at ease in their own skin. As a cosy mystery author and a trauma survivor, I write here most weeks. There are over 100 posts to enjoy. Curious? 👉 [Explore the full membership here!]

Join the Intuitive Writer’s Cafe

I’ve gone back and forth for years about writing this. Every time I think I’ve said enough, something pulls me back. I hear a podcast, or there’s a situation at the college where I work. This week it was a conversation with an angry student who looked at me with that familiar mix of intensity, confusion, and quiet wisdom.

The education system appears to be overly driven by stats, processes, and policies, which means that subtle nuanced emotional labour gets lost. The people who feel that loss first are always the same ones.

The sensitive ones. The intuitive ones.

The ones who notice when something isn’t fair and can’t unsee it.

The children who arrived already awake

I spent over a decade working with children who felt tuned to a different frequency. Not better, just different. Some were deeply attuned to sound, colour, and energy. A few were sensitive to the sound of crystals. “Can you hear that Smiley?” they’d ask me whilst picking up a large celenite crystal from the bookshelf and holding it to my ear.

They called me the ‘Smiley Coach.’ None of it made me Smiley. If anything it made me more frustrated about the ways of the world.

Others would draw something only to later open a book and find the same image staring back at them. Coincidence maybe? Or pattern recognition at a level most adults have long forgotten.

Many of these children clocked the unfairness of school almost immediately. They struggled with rigid rules that made no sense. They were distressed when teachers shouted. They became dysregulated not just when they were treated unfairly, but when they saw it happening to others.

They were soothed by giving meaning to their inner worlds in ways that used symbols, colour and metaphors.

Friendships were often complicated. Social rules felt confusing or exhausting. And when these children lived with authoritarian parents, or parents who lacked empathy and hadn’t explored their own inner worlds, home could feel like foreign territory. They were punished for things they didn’t have language for. Misunderstood, they were often treated like problems rather than people.

Some people call these children Indigo kids. Others dismiss the term entirely. I’m not interested in labels for their own sake. I’m interested in patterns.

The Age of Aquarius as a backdrop, not a belief system

Astrologically speaking, the Age of Aquarius is associated with collective awakening, truth telling, and the dismantling of rigid hierarchies. You don’t need to believe in astrology to see this playing out.

Trauma is now discussed openly. Therapy language is mainstream. Younger generations question authority instead of automatically submitting to it. Emotional literacy is slowly replacing emotional suppression.

Children like the ones I worked with seem born into this shift. They don’t adapt easily to systems that prioritise compliance over curiosity, their nervous systems revolt.

When psychology explains part of the picture, but not all of it

Modern psychology does offer useful frameworks. Many of these children are diagnosed with ADHD, ADD, Autism, or a combination of acronyms depending on the decade.

Those diagnoses can be helpful, but they can also be limiting. The young person could feel as if there is something wrong with them in a non-human way. I have also seen them being weaponised to fund lifestyles and as a way to avoid parental responsibility.

At times, I worried that labels were being relied upon so heavily that deeper relational dynamics were left unexplored and in some cases, the relief of a diagnosis seemed to reduce curiosity about the emotional environment surrounding the child.

Highly Sensitive People, as described by psychologist Elaine Aron, process more: sounds, moods, energy, subtle patterns. This is neurological, not mystical.

Now place that kind of nervous system into an environment that lacks emotional safety, secure attachment, or basic understanding, of course trauma develops, hyper-vigilance shows up and the system labels the response as disordered rather than adaptive.

What I witnessed again and again was not pathology, but intelligence meeting constraint.

Intuition in these children often looked like advanced pattern recognition. Emotional attunement sharpened by necessity. Reading the room wasn’t a gift, it was survival.

The cycle breaker position

Many of these children grow into adults who become cycle breakers. They are the ones who question family norms. They are the first ones in their family to go to therapy. They refuse to carry silence forward because they feel the weight of generations pressing on their nervous systems.

It sounds spiritual. It’s also deeply practical.

You can see versions of this in public figures often associated with the Indigo archetype:

• Prince refusing to be owned by an industry.

• Oprah Winfrey naming abuse when silence was expected.

• Greta Thunberg refusing to play along with collective denial.

• Viola Davis speaking openly about poverty and trauma while succeeding inside elite systems.

None of these people were spared pain, but they transmuted it.

A moment that stayed with me

Years ago, during a visit to Salem, Massachusetts, I had this psychic reading. I was told I would work with crystal and Indigo children because of what I had learned from my own experiences. Not that I am special or a chosen one.

At the time, I took it lightly. Yes, I found it interesting and curious but at the time I was working for a large corporate marketing boilers, so I laughed and filed it away in the back of my mind.

Looking back now, it makes a kind of sense. Not in a destiny way. In a meaning-making way. We are often drawn to guide others through terrain we were forced to map ourselves.

Designing a school that could hold them

One exercise I used to do with these children was deceptively simple. I’d give them a blank sheet of A4 paper and a box of felt tip pens and ask them to design their own school.

What emerged was striking.

• Green open spaces

• Animals to care for

• Crystal gardens

• Teachers who didn’t shout

• No homework

• Learning through play, exploration, creativity, and curiosity

There was very little sitting still, almost no classrooms. So I ended up creating a whole podcast with one hundred episodes to show understanding to their plight.

They hated the traditional model. And honestly, so do I. It’s broken and they are trying to tell us in the only way they know how.

This is how I learn too. I can spend hours researching a topic that lights me up. That’s how I taught myself tarot. That’s how my intuition sharpened. Not through exams or rigid curricula, but through curiosity-led immersion.

Why this work matters, even quietly

I never wanted to change the education system. I still don’t. My God if our senior leadership team is anything to go by, I’d like to keep my job, thank you! What I wanted was to make sure the children in front of me felt seen, heard, and known. Without shame and without judgment.

I pulled on their strengths, their passions and their interests. I reflected back what I saw before the world explained to them they were too much or not enough.

Once, a woman approached me in TK Maxx and said she’d followed me on Facebook for years.
“You made me question the way I see my daughter,” she told me.
“It’s changed our lives.”

Finding your people

People like me often struggle in systems built on metrics and compliance. Not because we are incapable, but because our nervous systems revolt against environments that ignore humanity.

Some people are wired to notice what others overlook. When those people are supported, they soften systems simply by existing honestly within them.

If this resonates, you’re very welcome to join me here as a member of The Intuitive Writer’s Cafe

Or if you’d like to connect to your own inner guidance and march to the beat of your own drum, you can work with me here.

Love

PS Looking back, I can see how much my years working with sensitive young people shaped the stories I now tell. In Murder Most Mystic, healing doesn’t arrive through lectures or labels, but through safety, presence, and quiet understanding. Milo’s journey in particular carries echoes of the young people who taught me that voice returns when a nervous system finally feels safe.

If you’re drawn to stories where mystery meets emotional truth, you might enjoy spending time in Dolly’s world.

»Download the first chapter for FREE

BUY MURDER MOST MYSTIC TODAY!

I have a theory about burnout, dear Wildheart.

Have you noticed how many of us highly sensitive souls, empaths, and neuro-spicy folk are always “on”?

We’re scanning rooms. We read the undercurrents… maybe unknowingly. We track moods, micro facial expression and notice tiny shifts in energy. Some of us may even anticipate others’ needs without being asked. We carry emotional threads that were never formally handed to us, yet somehow became ours to manage.

Hypervigilance isn’t just a trauma response, a protective coping strategy that once kept us safe. It’s often rewarded, praised and relied upon.

It’s exhausting when you become the one who notices, the one who understands and the one who seems to cope. Over time, that constant alertness drains the nervous system. You are the one who carries. The body never fully stands down and rest doesn’t feel restful. Switching off feels unfamiliar or even unsafe. Sitting still can feel edgy rather than soothing.

Burnout, for sensitive people, is rarely about doing too much in a visible way. It’s about carrying too much that no one sees. All of these little things that we constantly do on autopilot is what I call emotional and energetic labour. It’s the quiet habit of being available, attuned, and responsible for more than your fair share.

Sometimes I get angry because of what it’s cost me to get through life on my own.

I can hear those familiar voices: “Stop feeling sorry for yourself! It wasn’t that bad! Move on!” Maybe it’s my inner critic. Maybe it’s voices from my past. Today, I’m listening to my own voice.

I have a right to be angry. Trauma and healing have taken a lot from me. I’m allowed to be p1ssed off about that. I’m not blaming anybody, I’m just sitting with my true feelings.

✨ 5 helpful resources for sensitive souls:

If this is landing close to home, I’ve written about it extensively. Below are five resources I’ve created to help you feel seen, start putting yourself first, and gently put some of the weight down.

1 - 🔎 The Burnout Recovery Journal

A beautiful journaling companion from the heroine of Murder Most Mystic for emotionally exhausted souls solving their own mysteries. You don’t have to read the book to benefit from all the wonderful insights and resources inside.

〰️ [Download the free journal here]

2 - 🧶 The Untangling Series

Untangling your sensitive self from other people’s stuff is a forever growing series that goes deeper into emotional labour and the invisible energetic pull that drains us when we get caught up in what’s going on around us.

〰️ [Read more here]

3 - 👩‍🎓 The Most Important Lesson for Over-Givers

A grounded reminder with audio walk and talk of what actually changes things when you’ve been giving from an empty cup for far too long.

〰️ [Read more here]

4 - 🛀 Why You Can’t Sit Still & Relax (and why slowing down can feel unsettling)

If rest makes you fidgety, restless, or oddly anxious, this essay will explain why.

〰️ [Read more here]

5 - 🦋 Mastering Energetic Boundaries Guide

Feeling emotionally drained after spending time with others? This guide explores energetic boundaries and energy hygiene for empaths and highly sensitive souls.

〰️ [Read more here]

You don’t need to read or do all of this at once

Choose what feels supportive. Let one piece find you. That’s usually how it works. Burnout doesn’t mean you’ve failed. It often means you’ve been quietly strong for a very long time.

Be kind with yourself. You’re allowed to rest without earning it.

If you need my help, (as doing the opposite of what you’ve always done can sometimes activate big, uncomfortable feelings) you can book a session here.

Have a lovely weekend and I’ll write again soon.

Love

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📚 This essay is part of my series Untangling Your Sensitive Self from Other People’s Stuff. You can read the full collection → here.

💬 If you’re reading and thinking, “This is me!” and you’d like support untangling your own situation, you can book a private session → here.

There’s a strange moment in healing where you suddenly see the gap between who you always were and who your environment told you were.

It can hit out of nowhere.

It says: “What if I wasn’t the problem?”

Followed by, “What if I wasn’t what they said I was.”

That gap can feel like both a relief and a grief. A relief, because something inside you finally exhales. A grief, because you realise nobody in your past saw you clearly enough to reflect your actual self back to you.

It’s hard carrying that kind of grief. It’s always there, just bubbling below the surface. Awareness brings it out into the open and tears dissolve it.

• You were the person who helped, noticed, cared, carried, organised, soothed and tried hard to meet impossible standards.

• You were sensitive in spaces that didn’t make room for sensitivity.

• You were expressive in environments that called any expression “rude.”

• You were emotionally attuned in places where emotions were either performed or suppressed, but never safely held.

No wonder you struggle with shame. No wonder you freeze when someone laughs at you or makes a joke that somehow doesn’t land as funny. Something in your body remembers how that went before.

You notice the pattern and your nervous system feels it. Your inner child sees the pattern and thinks, “Here we go again… I’ll try harder.”

Except you’re not that person anymore. You’re someone with depth, empathy, and insight. You’re someone colleagues and friends come to when they need to talk. You’re someone others quietly admire.

The people who matter already see you. You don’t need to beg anyone else to catch up.

Reclaiming your sensitivity

You feel deeply because you are wired to feel deeply. That’s not “intense.” That’s not “extra.” That’s emotional intelligence in its raw, unedited form. Some people can smell rain before it falls. You can feel emotional weather before anyone else.

Instead of treating that as a liability, reclaim it as the inner compass it’s always been. Whenever you feel something big, rather than saying “I’m overreacting,” try renaming the reaction. Call it information. Call it instinct. Call it your nervous system tapping you on the shoulder. That tiny shift pulls you out of the old scripts and into your adult self.

✨ If you need to talk to the younger part of you, here are some things for you to try:

👉 Read about how to connect to your inner child with this guided visualisation

🔑 Use these journal prompts to unlock your core desires. Figure out what you want (instead of saying I don’t know)

✍️ Download this digital journal written for your inner child

It’s the same with the labels you absorbed growing up.

Loud. Difficult. Too much. Rude. Ungrateful. Selfish.

Those weren’t reflections of who you were. They were reflections of what your environment couldn’t hold. They were projections from adults who felt deep shame. They wanted to pass it onto you, like a hot potato.

You get to rewrite them now.

• Loud becomes expressive.

• Difficult becomes discerning.

Read more

It’s Lisa here, coming to you from the peace and quiet of the cottage where I house sit. It’s respite from the damp soggy flat where I can’t open the windows as they have bu…

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If you are a regular subscriber, you’ll know that I’m recovering from childhood trauma, which is often called Complex PTSD (CPTSD). Therapist and author Pete Walker describes CPTSD as the emotional and physical fallout of repeated childhood trauma, particularly when there was no safe adult to turn to. It’s not one big event, but a thousand small ones: emotional neglect, criticism, chaos, walking on eggshells, or being made to feel invisible. Over time, those experiences shape how you see yourself, your relationships, and the world.

It’s been over twenty years since I first sat in a therapist’s chair. Since then, I’ve read more books than I can count, taken courses, done family constellations, therapy, yoga, kinesiology, healing sessions… you name it, I’ve probably tried it.

I’ve already shared my healing toolkit for sensitive souls, the practices that keep me steady and connected, but lately, I’ve realised something deeper. I’m not just healing what happened to me. I’m healing what happened to everyone who came before me.

When we start bringing that inner world into consciousness, we begin to break cycles that have been running the show for generations: addiction, neglect, abuse, emotional avoidance, all the quiet suffering that trickles down until someone finally says, it stops here.

Here’s what I’ve learned in twenty years of unlearning: if you want to recover from CPTSD, there are five things you must learn. Skip them, and you’ll keep “working on yourself” forever but never quite feel free.

1. Your nervous system runs the show.

If your body doesn’t feel safe, nothing works. You can’t logic your way out of survival mode. Healing starts in the body, not in the brain. Learn what calm actually feels like, not just what it looks like on paper. Find the tools that bring your system down from red alert. Things like breathing, grounding, movement, nature, pets, singing, a safe person.

This is where journaling and intuition come in. When you write from the body, not for performance or productivity, you reconnect with the parts of you that got silenced in survival mode. The act of writing slows your thoughts enough for your nervous system to catch up. It moves unprocessed emotion from the implicit (body memory) into the explicit (language), which is how the brain begins to rewire after trauma.

2. You can’t heal in the same emotional environment that broke you.

That might mean stepping back from family, ending a relationship, or simply refusing to play the old emotional caretaker role anymore. Safety isn’t a luxury. It’s medicine. Without it, your body can’t stop defending itself long enough to let love or change in. Boundaries aren’t selfish, they’re how you tell your nervous system: You’re safe with me now.

3. Self-blame feels like control, but it’s self-betrayal.

When everything felt chaotic, blaming yourself gave you a sense of order: If it’s my fault, I can fix it. It’s a trauma survival trick, a clever one, but it keeps you imprisoned. The truth is, the harm wasn’t your fault. Letting go of self-blame doesn’t mean letting go of accountability; it means refusing to keep punishing yourself for other people’s damage.

4. Emotional maturity is reparenting yourself daily.

CPTSD leaves gaps where there were years you spent surviving instead of growing. I talk more about how that feels in Why I feel like Drew Barrymore in Fifty First Dates. Healing fills those gaps by becoming the adult your younger self needed: steady, kind, no-nonsense, and safe. It’s learning to soothe yourself without self-abandoning, to rest without guilt, to speak truth without apology. It’s not glamorous work, but it’s how you build the emotional backbone of freedom.

5. Integration, not perfection, is the goal.

There’s no final exam in healing. You don’t become a “healed person.” You become an integrated one. Someone who can hold pain and joy in the same breath without collapsing. You stop asking, When will I be fixed? and start realising, I’m already whole, I’m just learning how to live like it.

Integration happens when you can stay present with your truth without needing to edit it. This is also where intuitive journaling becomes a lifelong ally and it gives your inner voice a safe place to land. Over time, you start recognising the difference between trauma thoughts and intuitive knowing. That’s the psychology of embodiment: you move from reactivity to response, from fragmentation to coherence.

If you want to start reconnecting with your intuition and make journaling part of your healing, here are some resources to help:

✨ Download your Unlock Your Magic Intuitive Journal – a beautiful guided space to explore your inner world.

🪶 Journal Your Jammies - a workshop which teaches art of free-fall journaling

💫 Masterclass: How to Unblock Your Intuition & Trust Your Inner Wisdom

🔮 Find out how you can work with me privately here.

✍️ Today’s journal prompts:

✨ Where in your life do you still confuse understanding your trauma with feeling safe from it?

✨ What would safety look like in your body, not just in your mind?

Love

PS. If you enjoyed this post, please click on the heart at the bottom or the top of this email. It helps others discover The Intuitive Writer and makes me happy!

The waiting room is how I describe an internal state of freeze. A place inside where nothing moves, where you wait to be allowed to exist, speak, or be seen. I see this now in my work with clients too. That feeling of waiting for something or someone to arrive. To rescue them. To finally make life move. It’s not weakness. It’s what happens when freeze becomes familiar and agency never felt fully safe.

Sometimes life feels stuck, frozen. Like we’re waiting for someone or something. Someone to give us permission to move forward. That waiting feeling can live quietly inside us for years, shaping our choices, our work, and even how we love.

This is my story of what it felt like to carry that stillness and what happened when I finally let myself step out of it.

For most of my life, I carried a quiet ache I couldn’t quite name. It showed up in work, in relationships, even in how visible I allowed myself to be. I told myself I was independent, building a business on my own terms, but somewhere underneath, I was still waiting.

What exactly was I waiting for?

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Whilst enjoying ’s Winter Writing Sanctuary, I noticed something new. After a manic December and four straight days of rest, I felt restless. Not tired. Not depleted. Rested… and then unsettled. As if my body was saying, “Now that you’ve stopped, can you hear me?” I could feel it deep in my bones.

As I mapped out my intentions for the next seven days of writing in the hush (the quiet spell between Christmas and New Year), I realised that I wanted to:

“Connect to parts of me that I am not listening to and meet parts of me that I have not yet known.”

Winter has always made sense to me. Bare trees. Cold hands, warm heart. The world outside quiet while the inside world grows louder. This season invites slowing down, staying in, and hunkering down with layers of jumpers, socks, blankets, and candlelight. It asks: can you listen to yourself?

Patience & solitude

One of the first prompts transported me back to school: an old wooden desk, a cold classroom, a younger me convinced I didn’t belong. Writing it out didn’t fix it or produce a breakthrough. What it did was quieter—it showed me how long I’ve endured without giving myself credit.

Another prompt which was just a single line from a poem, brought memories of waiting. Not for my mum, but for my dad. He came, eventually, just before he passed. I realised that enduring, waiting and longing all shaped how I navigate life. Writing gave me space to feel it safely. Being alone didn’t mean abandoned, it can also mean freedom. Being abandoned is when your feelings exceed the capacity of the people meant to hold them.

Becoming yourself

Later, we explored guided visualisations. A foggy landscape revealed my “writer self,” a symbol of resilience rising from uncertainty. I wrote without naming trauma, letting fragments of memory, confusion, and clarity surface naturally.

Writing this way reminded me that the body and the mind can perceive truth differently. The sanctuary offered space to move through feelings without judgment. Beauty and hope can exist alongside sadness and loss. They can both be true.

Winter writing isn’t about hibernating forever. It’s about letting the darkness do its quiet work before anything new asks to be born.

What colour is your voice?

Finally, we explored creativity through colour and intuition. Pulling the DREAMER oracle card reminded me to trust intuition, to notice the threads connecting imagination and daily practice. Colour became a compass for writing: soft blue, fierce red, mysterious indigo.

Your creative voice, like colour, emerges from listening to yourself consciously and unconsciously. Pause before writing today and ask, What colour feels like your voice? Let that colour guide your tone, energy, or intention, and notice what emerges.

I chose blue because for me that is the colour of our throat chakra and also of truth. In writing, I find my most true self.

Even the smallest act of showing up, the quiet ritual of journaling, pulling a card, noticing your inner world, opens doors you didn’t know existed. It’s a practice of trust, curiosity, and freedom.

Here’s a piece I wrote inspired by that colour and insight:

💙 True Blue

True blue. True to me. True to you.
Not forsaking all others,
But kind honesty
Where trust blooms.

Soft blue. Soft with me. Soft with you.
Gently speaking from our hearts,
Kind honesty
Where trust blooms.

Blue as the sky, blue as the sea,
Never-ending, peaceful—
Across space and time,
Invisible threads
Holding us together
And holding us apart,
Each in love.

💌 Gentle Invitation

I share this because Beth’s Winter Writing Sanctuary reminded me that simple, consistent acts of reflection, journaling, and writing shift everything. If reading this stirred something in you, I hold that kind of space for others too:

• To connect with parts of yourself you haven’t yet met.

• To give language to feelings, memories, and truths that have no words yet.

• To explore your inner life through writing, gently, without judgment.

• To find clarity, calm, and steadiness amid uncertainty.

• To reclaim your voice and confidence, one meaningful step at a time.

If you feel drawn to explore this with me, you can do so through my Substack membership, my digital journals, or in coaching sessions where we work together in a reflective, safe space.

Sometimes the best gift you can give yourself is permission to be seen and heard.

📌 [Become a member of The Intutive Writer on Substack]

📌 [Click HERE to explore the ways we can work together]

Love

PS. If this piece resonated with you, please tap the heart at the top or bottom so other sensitive souls can find it. Thank you.