The Woman I Had to Find: Healing What Was Never Mine to Carry

1 In 3 women globally have experienced physical and/or sexual violence in their lifetime.
(Source: WHO, 2021)


Many carry this trauma silently.

My book (in the making) gives voice to the healing that’s possible.

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Prologue (first draft)

I deeply know it. It’s time.

Even in my darkest and lowest days, verbal expression has always been my strong suit. Putting my deepest emotions into words helps me make external sense of my internal turmoil. After my marriage to André—a sociopath, master manipulator, and emotional abuser—I remember saying out loud, “I should write a book.” But I never went beyond that one sentence. Until now.

It’s time to let my writing do the talking and share my journey that’s as traumatic as it is beautiful. It’s time to speak out publicly about what so many of us carry in silence. It’s time to talk about intergenerational trauma and how it can be the unconscious yet determining factor in your life’s journey. It’s time to explore how unhealed trauma gets passed down from one generation to the next. Shaping the life choices we make, how we love, and what we believe about ourselves. This book is about how we can break a cycle of trauma that didn’t start with us—and how it holds the promise to end with us. My story is your story. And it deserves to be told.

The Disconnect

“Just be yourself,” they say. It sounds simple enough. But when you’re a survivor of abuse, being yourself can feel like the hardest thing you’ll ever do.

Abuse—whether emotional, physical, or sexual—has a way of distorting your self-image. A survival strategy—is what it teaches you. To others you may seem fine; you put on a brave face, a facade, and hide your pain. On the inside you tell yourself things like: "It's your own fault", "You asked for it", "You should have walked away", "It wasn't that bad"... You tell yourself these things long enough, and you start to believe they're true. But they're not. Sometimes the truth is simply too painful to take in all at once. Only when you feel safe, you can slowly let go of your trauma—one small step at a time.

Coming back from those untruths you told yourself—and home to yourself—is a journey that may take decades. For me, that journey began in my early twenties. My first husband—a sociopath who, unbeknownst to me at the time, was living a secret life with another woman (and a dog)—had left me in emotional shambles just six to twelve months prior, or so I believe. I say “I believe” because of course, I knew he had left, but by then I’d lost all sense of time.

I was slowly, cautiously, learning to trust myself and my intuition again when I found this little piano bar in Amsterdam. Tucked into one of the narrow cobblestone side streets near the Leidseplein. The grand piano took up nearly a third of the room and was surrounded by old, worn bar stools. One of those stools became “mine”—every Sunday night. Without needing to talk to anyone, I felt safe there. Like I belonged.

Singer-songwriter Frank Affolter—brother of Heddy Lester, a well-known Dutch singer—played for a devoted crowd of music lovers. I still can’t hear “Piano Man” without finding myself back in that moment, letting Frank’s voice warm my broken spirit. Billy Joel would have loved what he heard.

That piano bar became my anchor — the thing I looked forward to all week. My lifeline. The one place I could press pause on the painful reality that was my life. A place where I could start reconnecting with myself again.

Little did I know, but the place that felt like a new beginning, turned out to be my darkest night.

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