What if your deepest trauma wasn’t something that happened to you—but something your soul chose as a key to unlock your highest expression—and to show you that you were never broken?
What if the very thing that felt like it was trying to silence you was designed to awaken you?
That question shifted something in me. Not as a theory or some bypassing spiritual fluff—but as a visceral truth I could feel resonating in my body.
And here’s what hit me: We are not here to escape pain. We are here to alchemize it—to pull light out of our darkest places in order to remember the truth we forgot on purpose.
The Illusion of Separation
Many spiritual texts—such as the Hermetic teachings, A Course in Miracles, the
(oo·paa·nuh· shaadz) Upanishads, and even metaphysical interpretations of the Bible—have taught us that when we arrive on Earth, we pass through a veil. We forget who we are. We forget our limitlessness. We forget the wholeness we came from. And in that forgetting, we pick up stories, beliefs, conditioning. We form identities to survive the illusion of separation.
This illusion is not just a metaphysical idea—it is a lived experience that begins at birth and deepens through trauma, rejection, and cultural programming. The separation becomes internalized: we separate from our intuition, from our body, from our voice, from our inner knowing. This is fragmentation.
Fragmentation occurs when parts of our identity are disowned, silenced, or split off in order to fit into the world around us. We become a collection of adaptive selves: the people-pleaser, the achiever, the caretaker, the perfectionist. These are not flaws. They are strategies. They are the brilliant responses of a being trying to survive disconnection from the truth.
But here’s the sacred paradox: it is in the fragmentation that the remembering begins.
The pain is the portal. The rupture is the roadmap. The very places where we feel most broken are often the exact coordinates of our awakening. As Carl Jung wrote, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
Remembering is not a one-time event—it is a spiral. We return again and again to the places we forgot ourselves, not to relive the pain, but to retrieve the power we left behind. And every time we do, a piece of the illusion dissolves. We reclaim another facet of who we truly are.
Our perception becomes shaped not by our Knowing-Self, but by the experiences that fragment us. And yet, it is in the fragmentation that the journey of remembering begins.
My Story: From Fragmentation to Knowing
My journey, like many others, began in trauma. There were years of abuse, silencing, and emotional control that taught me one devastating lesson early on—I am not safe to be me.
By age 12, I had internalized this belief so deeply that I attempted to take my own life. I remember swallowing a full bottle of Motrin. I believed, in that moment, it would be enough. Before I did, I said to myself, “I don’t fuckin matter anyways”. I was woken up, groggy on the couch, greeted by irritation from my father that I’d fallen asleep in the wrong place. That numbness—the sense that even disappearing wouldn’t be noticed—shaped me. It was another moment of deep fragmentation.
To continue to survive, I adapted. I split. I formed different “parts of me” to help me feel safe, seen, and in control of something in my life. I became who I believed I needed to be in order to feel loved and approved.
Those survival strategies stayed with me into my teenage years, and continued to create fragmented parts of me. At sixteen, I had an abortion—one my father insisted on. A few months later, I was pregnant again. I graduated high school seven months pregnant, had my son two months later, and walked down the aisle shortly after—with everything inside me screaming to run. But my father’s voice rang louder than my own.
I stayed in that marriage for ten years. We had two sons—my greatest gifts. But the marriage mirrored our unhealed pain. It was toxic, volatile, and abusive on both sides. We didn’t know how to love—we only knew how to survive in our pain. And I stayed as long as I did because I thought it was the right thing to do.
At the core of all these experiences were the same looping beliefs:
I don’t matter. I’m not good enough. I exist to be used.
And those beliefs didn’t just affect my relationships. They defined them. I chased validation through work performance, people-pleasing, sex, and efforts in productivity—because to me, worthiness was transactional.
Now, I look back at those versions of me—the ones born from fragmentation—not as broken, but as brilliant. I’m in awe of the younger me—how wise and instinctual she was in creating ways to avoid the pain that could have shattered me completely. Her responses weren’t flaws; they were genius strategies for survival in a world where simply existing felt unsafe. All the parts of me did what they had to do to keep me alive, to keep me moving, to keep me believing that maybe, one day, it would be different.
And yet… beneath all of it, something else within me remained steady through every one of those experiences—a quiet, unwavering part that was untouched by the chaos. I could feel it standing its ground, even when I had no words for it. No way to touch it. No way to understand it.
A truer part. The one who knew. The one who was waiting.
The one who would rise when I was finally ready.
A Deeper Awakening
Rage didn’t show up as a quiet whisper. It didn’t arrive gently or with permission. It kicked the door open—and demanded to be heard.
I had known rage before, but it had been softened by the years I spent with my late husband. He brought a peace into my life I hadn’t known before. Through him, I experienced unconditional love—both in how it felt to receive and how it looked to give. The thirteen years we shared created a safe container where deeper healing could finally begin to unfold.
Less than a year after he passed, I entered into a new relationship with a genuinely good man—someone who, like me, carries his own trauma and is committed to his healing. I honor him deeply for who he is and for what our relationship has revealed in me.
And that was rage.
At first, it confused me. I thought I had nurtured that part of me. But instead, rage began to rise—loud, unpredictably, overwhelmingly. I’d find myself yelling in moments where I didn’t feel heard, overwhelmed by emotions that didn’t quite make sense at the time. I cried often just to release the pressure building inside me.
For a long time, I resisted it. Rage felt too big, too messy, too unsafe. And every time I sat down with the intention to connect with it—to understand it, to integrate it—rage would disappear, like a part of me was running from my own fire.
So I began asking for clarity in my meditations. I asked for insight. I asked to know what this part of me was really trying to say.
Then one day, completely unplanned, I had a conversation with a coach I’d worked with before. Something about the timing, the safety of the space, and the intuitive way he spoke felt like a door unlocking. As he spoke, I felt my entire body go still, like a part of me had been waiting for someone to name what I couldn’t quite reach on my own. It was meant to be a simple check-in. But in the middle of our chat, almost intuitively, he said:
“The thing you want to understand is that the rage is actually you valuing yourself. But there was nobody committed to you enough that you could express that rage. So you turned it inward.”
That moment, cracked, me, open.
It felt heat rising from the deepest part of me, as if something ancient had finally been given permission to speak. I could finally feel her! Rage was no longer hiding; she had stepped forward, fully embodied, no longer willing to be ignored. She was right there, ready to speak without any anger. Rage had never been my enemy. She had been the one keeping watch, screaming beneath the surface, trying to wake me up from the lie that I had to earn love. Rage wasn’t destructive. She was directive.
So I journaled and asked her to speak. And she did:
“I matter!! I don’t need to be anything or do anything to be accepted, loved, and approved. I am all these things without activity. I simply Am. That is my birthright.”
That was the moment I met my Knowing-Self. Not the version of me trying to heal. Not the one still unsure. The one who already knows what’s up. The version of me that had never been broken, only buried.
Moment of Insight: The very thing that made me feel powerless became the frequency of my deepest power.
The Purpose of Distortion
This brings us back to perception. So much of our struggle comes from the disconnect between what our soul knows and what our human perception believes. And yet, this distortion is not a flaw. It’s the friction that activates our remembering.
My journey with trauma reshaped how I move through the world. It taught me how to be with what’s unresolved, how to listen between the lines, and how to sit with the parts of ourselves that feel unworthy or unseen. Not as an expert. Not as a fixer. But as someone who has walked the terrain and now walks with others through theirs. The space I hold isn’t shaped by shared experiences—it’s shaped by lived understanding.
This Is Your Invitation
If you’re reading this and feeling the stir inside, that’s your Knowing-Self responding. That part of you is in there. It may be buried, and it may be quiet, but that part has never left.
And if rage is present within you, I invite you to listen to it. Not as something to fix, but as something to learn from.
Ask that part of you:
– What is true for you?
– What do I need to remember?
– What truth are you trying to bring me back to?
Let it speak. Let it roar. Give it a voice.
Because on the other side of rage is remembrance.
And on the other side of remembrance is sovereign worth.
The kind that doesn’t ask, doesn’t beg, doesn’t perform.
It simply is.
You are not, and never were broken. You were encoded with everything you would need, to wake up at exactly the right time.