I Didn't Know Better — Why I Stayed Stuck Even While Doing the Work

For many years I was stuck in victimhood. Not because I did not know it was happening — but because I genuinely did not know any other way to be. I didn't know better. That is the simple, honest truth of it.

The years I stayed without knowing

For a long time, I lived inside a story I did not even recognise as a story. It simply felt like life. The patterns, the self-doubt, the heaviness — they were not something happening to me. They were just who I was. I had no language for victimhood, no awareness of trauma, no understanding that the way I felt was something I could actually change.

You cannot step out of a room you do not know you are standing in. And for years — I did not know.

The first crack of awareness

The shift began when I started my studies as a craniosacral therapist. I began that training because it helped me get out of pain after my knee surgery — and from there, I wanted to help others find that same relief. As part of the training, we worked on each other constantly, and there were many modules dedicated specifically to trauma work.

That is where I first became aware of my own trauma. 

What followed was years of continued training — not just by choice, but by requirement. To remain a recognised craniosacral therapist in the Swiss system, ongoing education was mandatory, year after year. Workshop after workshop. Training after training. Each one, whether I expected it or not, took me a little further into my own healing.

Why I kept stopping — the truth nobody tells you

This is the part of my story I think matters most. Because it is the part that is hardest to admit — and the part I believe almost everyone who has tried to heal will recognise immediately.

I would do the work. I would feel something shift. I would catch a glimpse of who I could be without the old story running my life. And then — without realising it — I would stop. I would drift back. The old pattern would reassert itself, quietly, like gravity.

Why? Because the misery, somehow, felt better than the alternative. Not better in the sense of pleasant — but better in the sense of known. Familiar. Safe in its own strange way. I wasn't aware at that time that I was a creator and that I could choose differently. It was on me to do it.

The decision that changed everything

Eventually, after years of this pattern — doing the work, feeling the shift, stopping, returning to the old story, doing the work again — I made a decision that changed the entire direction of how I wanted to help people.

I realised something fundamental: I could not fix anyone. I could not heal anyone. Only they could do that — from the inside out. We are so powerful. 

For years, in my practice, my clients carried a belief I had not yet learned to challenge: that only something outside of them could fix them. They came in wanting it simple.  Heal me now, I have tried everything.

But it doesn't work like that. And the longer I stayed inside that dynamic — being the one they came to for fixing — the more I realised it was actually disempowering for the very people I wanted to help and it didn't satisfy me any more, either. 

Because if I am the one who heals you, then your wellbeing depends on me. On my hands, my skill, my presence. And the moment I am not there — what then?

True healing cannot work that way. It has to come from inside the person. They have to be the one who does it — consciously, deliberately, day after day. My role is not to fix. My role is to motivate, to support, to walk alongside, to share everything I have learned through my own years of trauma and through every person I have ever treated in my practice.