I could not save him. But his story changed the course of my life.
Trigger Warning
This essay contains discussions of severe childhood trauma, child abuse, domestic violence, emotional abuse, alcoholism, addiction, suicidal ideation, suicide, intergenerational trauma, self-destruction, PTSD, shame, grief, and trauma-related nervous system responses. It also includes descriptions of child endangerment, physical violence toward children, and the psychological impact of prolonged abuse.
While graphic details have intentionally been limited in places to reduce unnecessary distress, the emotional themes explored throughout this piece may still be deeply activating for trauma survivors and sensitive readers.
Please read gently and take care of yourself as you move through this essay. You are welcome to pause, skip sections, ground yourself, or return later if needed.
If you are currently struggling with overwhelming emotions, trauma symptoms, or thoughts of self-harm, please consider reaching out to a trusted support person or qualified mental health professional for support.
You deserve care, safety, and support, too.
Introduction
There is a wound in this world that changed me forever.
Not the kind born from monsters lurking in dark corners, teeth bared and obvious violence. Those horrors are easy to name. Easy to spot. Easy to condemn. Humanity has always known what to call a wolf with blood on its jaws.
Oh no, the wound that haunts me most is far quieter than that.
It is the devastation left behind when supposedly good people do nothing. When they stand motionless at the edge of suffering. When children cry, and nobody comes. When pain is minimised into silence. When cruelty is excused. When loneliness becomes so chronic, it settles into a person’s bones like a winter cold.
When the victim is blamed as the perpetrator.
That is where hope begins to die.
As a trauma survivor, counsellor, and student of Psychology, I learned painfully early that the world is not divided neatly into good and evil, heroes and villains, light and darkness. Human beings are far more complicated than stories like to admit. We are capable of extraordinary tenderness and extraordinary destruction — sometimes within the very same breath.
But I also learned something else.
Every human being carries the capacity to become a light in someone else’s darkness. A hand reaching back toward the drowning. A voice that says: I see you. I believe you. You deserved better than this.
And for as long as that possibility exists, hope survives.
We really can be brilliant.
But far too often, hope is strangled long before adulthood ever arrives. Sometimes, before a child even learns who they are. Sometimes, before they ever learn what safety feels like. Sometimes, while they wait for love and acceptance that never comes.
Then life — precious, vibrant, breathtaking life — begins to curdle into something unrecognisable. Colours fade. Joy becomes suspicious. Love becomes frightening. The nervous system transforms into a smoke alarm that never stops screaming. Survival replaces living.
And the tragedy of trauma is not only that people suffer.
It is that so many suffer invisibly, while the world keeps turning as though nothing sacred is being lost.
Don’t believe me?
Then I want you to think carefully for a moment.
Think about the angry man who cannot go a single day without lashing out at the people who love him most. The woman who apologises for taking up space before she even speaks. The child who flinches when adults raise their voices. The teenager who jokes about wanting to disappear. The friend who insists they are “fine” while their exhaustion hangs from them like soaking wet clothes.
Look closely enough, and you will begin to notice something terrifying: trauma is everywhere.
Not always screaming.
Not always bruised.
Not always bleeding.
Not always obvious.
Sometimes trauma looks like rage sharp as a razor.
Sometimes it looks like silence heavy as a mountain.
Sometimes it looks like tears shining like diamonds.
Sometimes it looks like perfectionism, hyper-independence, addiction, numbness, people-pleasing, self-destruction, emotional withdrawal, or the inability to believe anyone could genuinely love you without eventually causing harm.
And sometimes, the deepest wounds are carried by people who have become so skilled at hiding their suffering that even they no longer recognise it.
It’s true – normal is a myth.
I know this because one traumatised man changed the course of my life forever.
He was the victim of brutal childhood abuse so severe it hollowed him out from the inside, leaving behind a man constantly at war with the world, with other people, and most painfully, with himself.
Emotionally abandoned in a way so quiet, so socially acceptable, that nobody recognised the damage until it had already rooted itself deep within him like rot spreading beneath floorboards.
Somewhere in the wreckage he left behind, I recovered myself – and The Blooming Practice was born.
Monsters Sometimes Call Themselves Fathers
Gottlieb wasn’t a man like any other. On paper, he was the kind of person the world instinctively admires.
Extraordinarily gifted. Disciplined. Brilliant.
He could draw impossible emotion from a violin, coaxing sorrow and beauty from polished wood and trembling strings as though music itself had chosen him as its mouthpiece. He was a national judo champion — precise, controlled, lethal in a way that looked almost graceful. And his mind… His mind moved like intricate clockwork. As a mechanical engineer, he could dismantle complex systems in hours and rebuild them stronger, cleaner, and more efficient than before.
Since childhood, he had been described with the kinds of words adults love to pin to wounded children who have learned how dangerous inconvenience can be.
Well-behaved.
Polite.
Respectful.
Quietly mature for his age.
He was curious, articulate, and deeply observant. The kind of man you could lose entire evenings talking to beneath warm restaurant lights while untouched coffee grew cold between your hands. He remembered small details. Asked thoughtful questions. Laughed at the right moments. Held doors open. Helped strangers carry heavy boxes without being asked.
On the surface, he seemed like a good man.
The sort of man people trusted instinctively. The sort of man nobody would ever look at and think: there is something deeply wrong here.
But trauma is rarely that simple.
Because from the very beginning, Gottlieb had learned a brutal truth children should never have to learn: survival often depends on performance.
So, he became exceptional at it.
Every smile was measured carefully, like an actor hitting familiar marks beneath stage lights. Every conversation was monitored. Every facial expression was controlled with military precision. He studied other people constantly — their reactions, tone shifts, body language, moods — the way hunted animals study the edge of a forest for movement.
To outsiders, he appeared calm. Grounded. Intelligent.
But beneath that polished exterior lived a nervous system that had never truly understood safety.
The real Gottlieb — the one hidden behind the mask — was a man perpetually at war with himself.
When nobody else was around, the performance collapsed. The charming composure drained from him like colour bleeding from old photographs. Silence became unbearable. Restlessness crawled beneath his skin like static electricity. Some nights he paced the house for hours, unable to settle, unable to exhale deeply enough to convince his body that danger had passed. Other nights, he disappeared inward entirely, sitting motionless in dimly lit rooms while shadows stretched across the walls around him.
There was an anger inside him that frightened even him sometimes. Not loud, explosive rage — though that existed too — but something colder. Older. A fury compacted so tightly over years of childhood suffering that it had become almost geological in its weight.
And beneath that anger was something even more devastating: shame.
The kind of shame abused children carry into adulthood when they grow up believing pain is proof of defectiveness. The kind that whispers:
You are difficult to love.
You are too damaged to keep.
If people saw the real you, they would leave.
Therefore, Gottlieb became a masterpiece of high-functioning trauma.
The world saw accomplishment.
It did not see hypervigilance.
The world saw discipline.
It did not see terror disguised as control.
The world saw independence.
It did not see a man who had learned, very early in life, that needing other people was dangerous.
People praised his resilience without ever noticing that resilience was slowly consuming him alive.
But the reality of Gottlieb’s existence was something else entirely.
Like so many abused children, Gottlieb committed no crime beyond being born into the wrong family.
The day his parents brought him home from the hospital, he lay in his crib crying — tiny lungs filling the room with the helpless sounds every newborn makes when they are hungry, frightened, uncomfortable, or simply longing for warmth.
There were a thousand different choices his father could have made in that moment.
He could have picked him up.
Fed him.
Rocked him gently against his chest.
Changed his diaper.
Sung softly to him beneath the dim glow of a bedside lamp.
Or even simply walked away and allowed the crying to fade on its own.
Instead, his father brought down his fist and broke the newborn baby’s nose.
That was how Gottlieb entered the world: not welcomed, but punished for having needs.
And this was only the beginning…
To spare trauma survivors reading this essay unnecessary distress, I will not describe in detail the full extent of what Gottlieb endured beneath his father’s roof. Some horrors do not need graphic retelling to be understood. The nervous system understands terror long before language ever catches up to it.
But if you asked me whether I believe real monsters exist, I would answer yes without hesitation.
And if you asked me why, I would tell you about Gottlieb’s father.
He was not merely a cruel man. Cruelty alone feels too small a word for people who turn homes into war zones. He was a soul-devouring force of destruction — a man so consumed by his own darkness that he poisoned the emotional atmosphere around him like smoke filling a house room by room. Fear followed him everywhere. Tension hardened in the air when he entered. People learned to shrink themselves in his presence the way flowers curl inward beneath frost. He was an explosion of violence waiting to happen, unable to stop.
Children raised in loving homes learn that the world can be safe.
Gottlieb learned that safety was temporary, fragile, and always seconds away from being shattered.
He grew up like a soldier trapped behind enemy lines, his body perpetually braced for detonation. Every slammed door became a warning shot. Every shift in tone carried danger hidden beneath it. Every footstep in the hallway demanded immediate emotional calculation:
Is he angry?
Is he drunk?
Am I safe today?
What version of him is coming through that door?
His nervous system never rested. It simply adapted to survive.
And perhaps one of the cruellest tragedies of all was that Gottlieb did not lose only one parent to abuse — he lost both.
His father consumed all emotional oxygen within the household. Gottlieb’s mother, herself trapped beneath years of fear, coercion, and psychological destruction, retreated inward to survive. His father resented her showing warmth, affection, or attention to anyone besides himself, punishing both her and the children whenever love was diverted away from him.
So, Gottlieb grew up emotionally starving in a house filled with people.
To protect his two younger siblings, he often stepped deliberately into the line of fire, drawing his father’s rage toward himself the way lightning rods attract storms. He became the scapegoat child — the one blamed, targeted, sacrificed so others might suffer slightly less.
Even as a boy entering adolescence, Gottlieb was forced into responsibilities no child should ever carry. Night after night, while other children slept safely in warm beds, he rode his bicycle through dark streets to the local pub to collect his father after another night of drinking.
The image still haunts me.
A child — still too young to properly see over the dashboard — struggling to drive a grown man home while terror and exhaustion sat beside him like unwanted passengers. The smell of alcohol thick in the car. The road stretching endlessly ahead beneath the yellow blur of streetlights. Small hands gripping the steering wheel while childhood disappeared mile by mile into the dark.
And because addiction rarely wishes to suffer alone, his father dragged Gottlieb into alcoholism with him.
He forced his son to drink beside him, pouring alcohol into a child already desperate for scraps of connection. And God help him… Gottlieb accepted it.
Because abused children are often willing to endure unimaginable pain for even the illusion of love.
A shared drink.
A rare moment without screaming.
A slurred laugh mistaken for affection.
A brief feeling of belonging before the darkness returned.
Children are biologically wired to seek attachment from their parents — even dangerous parents. Especially dangerous parents.
Then, it should surprise nobody that by the time Gottlieb finished high school, he was already an alcoholic himself.
Trauma has a devastating way of reproducing itself when suffering becomes the emotional language a child grows up speaking fluently.
You may wonder where Gottlieb’s mother was in all of this.
The answer is both simple and heartbreaking.
She was surviving, too.
Years spent living beside a man like Gottlieb’s father had hollowed her out emotionally, teaching her silence the way repeated storms teach animals to hide underground. Financial dependence trapped her further. She could not leave until her youngest child was nearly finished with school and she had finally secured enough independence to support herself.
People often ask why victims stay in abusive environments.
What they rarely understand is that prolonged terror changes people. It erodes confidence. Distorts reality. Exhausts the nervous system until survival itself consumes every ounce of available energy.
By then, people are no longer asking: How do I build a happy life?
They are asking: How do I survive until tomorrow?
For decades, Gottlieb existed like a ghost: unable to live, unable to die.
Later, as an adult, Gottlieb met a young woman who felt almost unreal to him.
She was intelligent, vibrant, compassionate — the sort of person who carried warmth into rooms without even trying. There was a steadiness to her kindness, a softness that did not feel weak but quietly resilient, like candlelight continuing to burn through a storm. She listened when people spoke. She noticed things others overlooked. She laughed easily. Loved deeply.
To someone raised in violence, she must have seemed like sunlight after a lifetime spent underground.
And Gottlieb fell for her with the terrifying intensity of a starving man finally being offered food.
But trauma has a cruel way of poisoning even the gentlest forms of love.
Because alongside his longing came fear — immense, suffocating fear.
What if she eventually saw what he saw when he looked in the mirror?
What if she realised he was fundamentally unlovable?
What if, beneath all the accomplishments and charm and intelligence, she discovered the same weak, pathetic, selfish failure his father had spent years convincing him he was? What if she, too, came to believe that there was something rotten buried deep inside him? Something beyond saving?
The closer she became to him, the more terrified he grew of losing her.
And so, like many trauma survivors who have learned that authenticity is dangerous, Gottlieb did what he had always done best: he performed.
He married her wearing the carefully constructed mask the world had come to admire — the brilliant engineer, the disciplined athlete, the thoughtful conversationalist, the capable and composed man who appeared so effortlessly put together.
But masks become difficult to maintain in the intimacy of marriage.
Eventually, cracks began to appear.
After the wedding, his wife slowly began to understand the true extent of the devastation his childhood had carved into him. She saw how quickly his nervous system shifted into defensiveness. How ordinary disagreements felt life-threatening to him. How shame consumed him whole. How tenderness sometimes made him recoil instead of relax.
And still, she loved him.
Perhaps she was the first person in his life to love him consistently, stubbornly, and without conditions attached to it.
She believed there was more to him than the violence he had survived. More than the damage. More than the rage and fear twisting beneath his skin. She fought for him fiercely, refusing to surrender him to the darkness that had raised him. She held onto the possibility of the man he could become and the life they might one day build together.
And for a while, hope flickered.
Time passed, and together they had two children — first a daughter, then a son.
From the very first moment Gottlieb held them in his arms, he loved them with a force that nearly split him open.
He stared at their tiny fingers, their sleepy eyes, their impossibly soft faces, and could not reconcile their existence with the things he believed about himself. How could someone as ruined as him help create something so beautiful? So innocent? So unbearably precious?
The love he felt for his children collided violently against the self-hatred he had carried since childhood, and somewhere inside him, those opposing realities began tearing him apart.
Because trauma does not disappear simply because someone becomes a parent.
Unhealed pain follows people into marriages. Into homes. Into the spaces where children laugh and sleep and trust.
And Gottlieb’s nervous system had never learned what safe love looked like.
His father had taught him that love came tangled together with fear, humiliation, control, pain, and unpredictability. Affection could become violence without warning. Warmth could vanish instantly. Vulnerability was dangerous. Power belonged to whoever could inflict the most fear.
That was the emotional language he had been raised inside.
So when stress mounted, when shame consumed him, when he felt weak or afraid or out of control, he began repeating the only blueprint his childhood had ever handed him.
Like it does in far too many families, the abused slowly became the abuser.
Not because he did not love his children.
But because love alone is not always enough to overcome unhealed trauma.
And so the very children he adored became targets for the pain he did not know how to carry.
He lashed out verbally, tearing into them with words sharp enough to leave wounds no eye could see. The same kinds of wounds his father had once carved into him. He insulted them. Shamed them. Crushed them beneath emotional storms they were far too young to understand.
And sometimes the violence became physical.
His touches left bruises. He pinched them hard enough to hurt. Even his affection became distorted by the damage living inside him. His hugs were crushing, suffocating things — arms wrapped too tightly around tiny bodies until they struggled to breathe, love and fear fused together so completely he no longer understood where one ended and the other began.
Because long ago, Gottlieb had learned a devastating lesson from his father: love hurts.
Gottlieb’s wife did everything she could to protect their children from the storm living inside their father.
Especially when alcohol entered the equation.
To Gottlieb, alcohol was not simply a substance. It was anaesthetic. Oblivion. Temporary silence. A chemical attempt to cauterise emotional wounds that had spent decades bleeding beneath the surface of his life. Every drink dulled the screaming inside him for a little while. Every bottle blurred the memories he refused to face.
But trauma buried alive does not disappear.
It ferments in darkness.
And over time, the alcohol that once numbed him began hollowing him out from the inside like acid slowly eating through metal. His thoughts became darker. His moods more volatile. Shame metastasised through him like an untreated infection.
The little boy still trapped inside his nervous system — terrified, beaten, emotionally starving — began clawing harder and harder for escape.
When sober, Gottlieb often managed to keep the worst parts of himself restrained beneath layers of tension and rigid self-control. His wife’s presence acted as a kind of boundary he feared crossing completely. He respected her enough — and perhaps feared losing her enough — that some fragment of restraint still existed while she stood between him and the children.
But when she wasn’t there, the mask slipped more easily.
Then the rage came.
Not loud at first. Not always. Sometimes it arrived quietly, like pressure building beneath the earth before an earthquake tears everything apart. You could feel it simmering beneath the surface of him — hot, unstable, searching for release.
And tragically, he began using the very same psychological weapons his father had once used against him.
Gaslighting. Humiliation. Emotional manipulation. Shaming. Fear.
The cycle had completed itself.
The abused child who once trembled beneath violence had become the frightened, unstable man inflicting it.
And then, one day, he went too far.
Far too far.
His wife walked in on him strangling their six-year-old daughter during a drunken rage.
Even now, writing those words feels unbearable.
A tiny child.
Small lungs gasping for air.
Terrified little hands trying desperately to pry away the fingers of the person who was supposed to protect her.
Unable to understand what she had done wrong to bring on this terrible punishment…
The next morning, her body was covered in bruises dark enough that Gottlieb refused to let her attend school. He would not allow his wife to go to work either, terrified somebody would see what he had done. The violence could no longer be hidden behind carefully crafted excuses and forced smiles. It had left visible fingerprints now.
And afterwards came the collapse.
The apologies.
The sobbing remorse.
The desperate promises spilling from him in frantic waves:
I’ll never do it again.
I’m sorry.
I’ll stop drinking.
I’ll be better.
I’ll be the husband and father you deserve.
And perhaps the most heartbreaking part of all is that some part of him probably meant it.
Because abusers are not always devoid of remorse. Sometimes they are drowning in it. Sometimes they hate themselves for the harm they cause while still remaining utterly incapable of stopping. Trauma and addiction had twisted themselves around Gottlieb’s nervous system so tightly that by then he no longer seemed able to distinguish where his pain ended and other people’s began.
But it was too late.
For the first time, his wife fully understood the terrifying reality standing in front of her.
If she stayed, her children might not survive emotionally. Perhaps not even physically.
And worse still — she began to realise her children were already starting to mirror him. The fear. The hypervigilance. The emotional wounds. The fragile nervous systems shaped by walking on eggshells around an unpredictable parent.
She still loved her husband.
God, she loved him.
She still saw the frightened, wounded little boy hidden somewhere beneath the alcoholism, rage, and destruction. She still mourned the man he could have become if somebody had protected him properly as a child. She still wished, with all the aching desperation of a mother trying to hold her family together, that her children could grow up inside a whole and loving home.
But slowly, devastatingly, reality settled over her like cold ash after a fire.
That future was never coming.
Throughout their marriage, she had fought for him tirelessly. Rehab. Therapy. Encouragement. Compassion. Hope. She tried over and over again to lead him toward healing.
But Gottlieb was terrified of his own mind.
Terrified of memory.
Terrified of silence.
Terrified of what would happen if he stopped running long enough to feel the full weight of his suffering. Thinking about his childhood threatened to unleash emotions so enormous, so unbearable, that alcohol felt safer than honesty. Numbness felt safer than healing. Oblivion felt safer than remembering.
So, he drank instead.
Again and again and again.
Until the alcohol became less of a coping mechanism and more of a slow suicide unfolding in increments.
Eventually, forced to choose between her husband and her children, Gottlieb’s wife made the only choice a good mother could make.
She chose her children.
One week later, beneath the pale silver light of a full moon, she quietly packed luggage into her car while the house slept. She carried her children — still drowsy and confused — into the back seat, wrapping blankets around their small bodies as night air curled cold around them.
Then she fled.
And with that, the last fragile thread tethering Gottlieb to tenderness snapped.
Soon after, the marriage ended in divorce.
The only source of genuine warmth, stability, and unconditional love Gottlieb had ever truly known disappeared from his life completely.
After that, his decline accelerated brutally.
He drank harder. Sank deeper. Lost more of himself with every passing month.
At first, his young son still cried for him, longing for his father to come home. Children, after all, are heartbreakingly loyal to the people they love. His daughter was older, more disillusioned, trapped in the unbearable conflict of simultaneously yearning for her father and fearing him.
But trauma has consequences that echo across generations.
As the children grew older, both began developing their own struggles with mental health — mirrors reflecting pieces of Gottlieb’s own damaged childhood back at him. Anxiety. Fear. Insomnia. Emotional wounds. Hypervigilance. Pain inherited like an unwanted family heirloom.
Eventually, even his son pulled away.
And by then, Gottlieb was barely recognisable as the man he once was.
He could no longer hold down a job. The brilliance that once made him extraordinary had dimmed beneath layers of addiction, shame, and self-destruction. He pushed away everyone who tried to care for him, lashing out wildly like a mortally wounded animal cornered by its own terror. Loving him became unbearably costly.
And perhaps the cruellest tragedy of all is that Gottlieb ultimately fulfilled the very prophecy his father had planted inside him as a child.
He believed himself impossible to love.
So eventually, he made certain nobody could.
Toward the end of his life, Gottlieb had nothing left.
No family.
No stability.
No sense of self.
Only the unbearable company of his own self-loathing.
Shame consumed him. Resentment poisoned him. Hatred hollowed him out until there seemed to be almost nothing human remaining beneath it except exhaustion and pain. The trauma that had once entered his life as violence from another man had finally finished consuming him from the inside.
An acquaintance eventually allowed him to sleep in a barn on a farm for a few nights.
A barn.
This once brilliant violinist.
This gifted engineer.
This little boy who had entered the world crying for comfort instead of violence.
By then, Gottlieb had already made his final decision.
Using the last money he had left, he bought alcohol — liquid courage for the terrible thing he intended to do. He drank every last drop. Then, drowning in bitterness, grief, rage, and despair, he wrote a final letter cursing the world and everyone in it for abandoning him, failing him, and leaving him alone with suffering he could no longer endure.
And then, finally, unable to imagine any future beyond more pain, Gottlieb hanged himself.
Another innocent child entered the world needing tenderness and left it carrying terror instead. Another human life slowly devoured by wounds nobody stopped. Another fragile flicker of hope extinguished before it ever truly had the chance to burn brightly.
Let me be clear: I will never excuse what Gottlieb became.
There is no acceptable justification for inflicting suffering upon another human being except in the defence of life itself. Pain does not grant moral permission to spread more pain. Trauma may explain behaviour, but explanation and absolution are not the same thing. The terror he inflicted upon his wife and children was real. The bruises were real. The fear was real. The damage was real.
No amount of suffering can make abuse righteous.
Losing control does not make cruelty harmless. Self-loathing does not make violence tragic but rather dangerous. Hurting because you are hurt is still hurting. It is still wrong. It is still abuse.
And yet…
When I think about Gottlieb, I cannot help but grieve.
Not only for the man he became, but for the little boy he once was.
For all that brilliance.
All that tenderness buried beneath terror.
All that possibility.
All that life.
Gone.
Sometimes I think about the newborn infant lying in that crib crying for comfort, unaware that the world he had entered would teach him fear long before it ever taught him safety. I think about the child who learned to monitor footsteps instead of playing freely. The teenager driving his drunken father home through dark streets while other children slept peacefully in warm beds. The young man who fell in love so desperately because he had spent his entire life emotionally starving.
And I wonder what might have happened if somebody — anybody — had intervened soon enough.
What if somebody had protected him?
What if somebody had taught him that love and pain were not the same thing?
What if somebody had looked beneath the mask and recognised the terrified child still trapped underneath it?
Because Gottlieb truly was the kind of man who could have changed the world.
He had that kind of mind. That kind of depth. That kind of intensity. Had his gifts been nurtured instead of brutalised, I genuinely believe he could have left the world brighter than he found it. He had music inside him. Intelligence. Compassion. Curiosity. Potential so enormous it almost hurts to think about now.
But trauma consumed him before he ever learned how to wield those gifts safely.
And the tragedy of abuse is that it rarely destroys only one life.
It spreads.
Like fire moving through dry forest.
Like poisoned water flowing downstream.
Like darkness leaking beneath a locked door and quietly filling every room in the house.
Gottlieb’s suffering touched everyone around him — his wife, his children, his siblings, his mother. Entire lives bent beneath the gravitational pull of one man’s unhealed trauma and another man’s cruelty before him.
Sometimes I find myself wondering how many people saw the cracks in Gottlieb long before everything finally collapsed.
How many adults noticed the fear in his eyes as a child and looked away? How many teachers dismissed him as difficult, needy, troublesome, disruptive? How many people sensed something deeply incongruent about him — that strange tension trauma survivors often carry beneath their skin — and simply distanced themselves instead of asking why?
How many times did he reach outward only to find nobody truly willing to see him?
And then my thoughts widen beyond Gottlieb himself.
How many adult survivors of childhood abuse are walking among us right now, silently fighting to keep their pain from swallowing them whole?
How many people are one unbearable moment away from collapse while still showing up to work, smiling politely, answering emails, and pretending they are fine?
How many children are lying awake tonight in homes that do not feel safe?
How many people have mistaken survival adaptations for moral failure?
How many abused children are growing into wounded adults who will either spend their lives fighting against the darkness planted inside them — or eventually surrender to it?
And how many exhausted, bleeding, desperate human beings are quietly giving up on themselves because suffering has convinced them they are beyond saving?
These questions haunt me.
And probably will forever…
The Mother Who Changed Her Children’s Destinies
But despite everything, I truly believe Gottlieb’s children were among the lucky ones.
Because their mother broke the cycle.
And God, what an act of courage that was.
She chose to stand between her children and destruction even though it shattered her own heart in the process. She chose reality over denial. Protection over fantasy. She carried them out of the fire while flames still licked at her heels.
That kind of love changes destinies.
She fought for her children with a fierceness so profound that it became a kind of shelter around them. Even when they struggled. Even when trauma left scars inside them too. Even when they inherited fear, shame, hypervigilance, and pain that never should have belonged to them in the first place.
She made sure they never doubted they were worthy of love.
Never doubted they mattered.
Never doubted that what happened to them was wrong.
And that matters more than most people realise.
Because one safe person — one loving, emotionally present, determined person — can interrupt generations of suffering. One person can become the bridge between survival and healing. One person can look at wounded children and say:
This pain ends here.
She became their lifeline when they were drowning. Their lighthouse when the world inside them became storm-dark and violent. She sacrificed pieces of herself so her children might someday have the chance to grow into whole human beings instead of merely surviving the way their father had.
Not everyone is fortunate enough to have someone like that.
Not every child gets rescued before the darkness reaches them too deeply.
And that needs to change.
As a trauma survivor myself, I understand something that many people fortunate enough to grow up in safe, loving homes often struggle to comprehend.
I understand the seductive pull of darkness.
I understand how easy it can become to surrender to pain instead of fighting it. How tempting it is to stop struggling, to stop hoping, to stop clawing toward the light when suffering has exhausted you for years. I understand how trauma can slowly convince a person that bitterness is safer than vulnerability, that numbness is safer than love, that self-destruction is easier than healing.
And if I am being painfully honest, there are times when it frightens me how easily I could have become someone like Gottlieb.
Not in identical ways, perhaps — trauma shapes each survivor differently — but in the sense that I recognise the same war. The same exhaustion. The same dangerous temptation to let pain calcify into identity.
Because surviving trauma is not a singular act of courage.
It is a lifelong decision made over and over and over again.
A decision to remain soft in a world that rewarded your hardness.
A decision not to become cruel simply because cruelty shaped you.
A decision to keep reaching toward love after learning firsthand how deeply human beings can wound one another.
And when I think about what it truly means to resist that darkness, my mind always returns to Gottlieb’s wife.
Because to me, she is the real hero of this story.
Not famous.
Not wealthy.
Not powerful in the way the world usually measures power.
Just an ordinary human being walking quietly through this world carrying extraordinary courage inside her.
And yet, in her own deeply human way, she changed the course of history.
Perhaps not world history in the grand, dramatic sense taught in textbooks. But she changed the world that mattered most: the small universe living inside her children. And because of that, the ripple effects of her choices will continue outward for generations she will never even live to meet.
That is the true power of breaking cycles.
People often imagine heroism as something loud and cinematic — battles won, crowds cheering, statues erected in memory. But I think some of the greatest acts of heroism happen quietly behind closed doors where nobody applauds.
A mother packing her children into a car beneath moonlight and driving away from violence.
A woman choosing temporary heartbreak over allowing trauma to devour another generation.
A parent holding their wounded children through panic attacks, nightmares, shame, and grief while teaching them:
What happened to you was not love.
You deserved better.
The cycle ends here.
That is heroism too.
And I admire her more than I can adequately put into words.
Because despite everything she endured — the fear, the heartbreak, the disappointment, the grief of loving someone she could not save — she still chose love over despair. Not weak, passive love. Fierce love. Protective love. The kind of love willing to stand between children and destruction even when it costs everything.
She became the interruption in a generational pattern of suffering.
Where violence taught fear, she taught safety.
Where shame taught self-hatred, she taught worthiness.
Where trauma taught survival, she fought to give her children the chance to truly live.
And when I think about the kind of person I want to become — both personally and professionally — I realise it is people like her I want to resemble most.
I want to be that steady hand reaching into darkness.
That voice reminding wounded people they are not beyond saving.
That world-altering, life-changing, soul-saving force that helps victims become survivors… and survivors become warriors.
Because Gottlieb’s story holds many painful lessons, but perhaps one of the hardest to accept is this:
Not everyone wants to be saved.
Or perhaps more accurately — not everyone is able to tolerate what healing requires.
I could not save Gottlieb.
By the time he took his own life, I was only nineteen years old, still studying accounting, still years away from making the leap toward psychology, counselling, and trauma recovery work. At that point, I lacked the knowledge, experience, and professional understanding I have now.
But truthfully? Even if I had possessed all of it back then, I still do not think I could have saved him.
Because healing cannot be forced upon someone who is terrified of their own pain.
And Gottlieb was terrified.
Terrified of memory.
Terrified of grief.
Terrified of shame.
Terrified of the unbearable emotional weight waiting for him beneath decades of suppression and alcohol.
To heal, he would have needed to stop running long enough to finally face the devastated child still trapped inside him. And for some survivors, that feels less like healing and more like standing at the edge of an abyss threatening to swallow them whole.
Even the woman who loved him most — the woman who fought for him longer and harder than anyone else ever had — could not convince him to accept help.
And that reality still breaks my heart…
The Story Is Not Over Yet…
Yet, despite everything I have written here — despite the devastation trauma can leave behind, despite the lives it fractures and the generations it stains with grief — I need you to understand something profoundly important: trauma survivors are not doomed.
Wounded does not mean ruined.
Trauma changes people, yes. Sometimes dramatically. It reshapes nervous systems, distorts self-perception, and teaches human beings to survive worlds they never should have had to endure in the first place. But survival adaptations are not life sentences. The brain can change. The body can learn safety again. The heart can rediscover softness after years spent wrapped in armour.
Healing is possible.
Not easy. Not linear. Not quick. But possible.
Real trauma recovery often begins very quietly. Not with dramatic breakthroughs or inspirational speeches, but with tiny rebellions against despair. A survivor tells the truth about what happened to them for the first time. They attend counselling or therapy even though every instinct screams at them to run. They learn to sit with emotions they once drowned in addiction, rage, perfectionism, dissociation, or self-destruction. They begin noticing the difference between danger and discomfort. They practise apologising without collapsing into shame. They learn that rest is not laziness. That boundaries are not cruelty. That needing other people is not weakness.
And perhaps most painfully of all, they begin grieving.
Because healing requires mourning not only what happened to you, but also what should have happened and never did. The childhood you deserved. The safety you needed. The tenderness you should have been protected with. Trauma recovery asks survivors to stand in the ruins of what hurt them and slowly, tremblingly, begin building something new anyway.
It is exhausting work. Sacred work. Terrifying work.
There are days when healing feels less like blooming and more like crawling through broken glass toward a version of yourself you cannot yet fully imagine. There are moments when survivors will want to give up because the darkness feels older and stronger than they are. Sometimes recovery means learning how to live without the coping mechanisms that once kept you alive. Sometimes it means facing memories your mind buried for years, simply so you could survive them. Sometimes it means recognising the ways trauma taught you to hurt yourself and others — and deciding, with unbearable honesty, that the cycle stops with you.
But this is where post-traumatic growth begins.
Not in pretending trauma was beautiful. Not in claiming suffering “happens for a reason.” But in the extraordinary human ability to create meaning, wisdom, compassion, and connection from the ashes of devastation.
I have seen trauma survivors become some of the gentlest, most emotionally intelligent, deeply compassionate people imaginable precisely because they understand suffering so intimately. I have watched people who once believed themselves fundamentally unlovable slowly learn to build safe relationships. I have seen survivors reclaim their voices after lifetimes spent shrinking themselves for other people’s comfort. I have watched human beings who were taught only fear slowly teach themselves how to live with softness, boundaries, dignity, and hope.
And perhaps that is why I created The Blooming Practice.
Because somewhere beneath all my grief over people like Gottlieb is one stubborn, unrelenting belief:
As long as a person is still breathing, there remains the possibility that the story is not over yet.
What Will You Do With What Happened to You?
We do not always get to choose what happens to us.
Sometimes life descends without warning like a storm tearing through a forest in the dead of night, uprooting everything we thought would keep us safe. Trauma survivors understand this intimately. We know what it feels like to have safety stolen before we were old enough to defend it. We know what it feels like to inherit pain we never asked for.
And despite what many people still believe, trauma is not simply a matter of “choosing better reactions.”
The brain and nervous system do not function that way.
A traumatised nervous system reacts before conscious thought even has time to arrive. Hypervigilance, panic, dissociation, shutdown, rage, people-pleasing, emotional numbing — these are not moral failures. They are survival responses wired into the body through repetition, fear, and experience. A frightened nervous system is not sitting calmly at a table making logical decisions. It is trying to survive what it perceives as danger.
But eventually — slowly, painfully, imperfectly — there comes a moment when a survivor reaches a crossroads.
A moment where suffering no longer asks only:
What happened to you?
But also:
What will you choose to do with what happened to you?
And that is where trauma recovery begins.
One of my favourite quotes was written by psychiatrist, neurologist, Holocaust survivor, and concentration camp prisoner Viktor Frankl:
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Frankl did not write those words from the comfort of a peaceful life untouched by suffering. He wrote them after surviving Nazi concentration camps where human beings were stripped of nearly everything imaginable — their homes, families, dignity, freedom, safety, identities, and often even their names. He witnessed starvation, brutality, grief, terror, and death on a scale almost impossible for most of us to truly comprehend.
And yet, standing in the ruins of unimaginable human cruelty, Frankl arrived at a radical conclusion: even when everything else is stolen, there remains a small, sacred space within the human spirit where choice can still survive.
Not always immediately.
Not perfectly.
Not without struggle.
But eventually.
As a trauma survivor, I carry those words with me constantly.
Every single day, I remind myself:
In this moment, I have a choice.
Maybe not about what happened to me.
Maybe not about the nervous system responses trauma carved into me.
Maybe not about the fear, grief, anger, shame, or memories that sometimes rise uninvited from the depths.
But I do have a choice about what I nurture.
I have a choice about whether I surrender fully to bitterness or continue fighting for softness. Whether I allow suffering to make me cruel or allow it to deepen my compassion. Whether I spend my life reproducing pain or interrupting it.
That is how I survive.
Not by pretending darkness does not exist.
Not by denying the scars trauma leaves behind.
But by refusing to let suffering make all of my choices for me.
That refusal became the foundation of The Blooming Practice.
Because at the heart of trauma recovery lies one breathtakingly powerful truth: survivors are not powerless forever.
Trauma may shape us, but it does not have to become our final form.
And that does not mean healing is easy. Sometimes choosing differently feels almost unbearably difficult. Sometimes the healthier response feels unnatural, terrifying, even physically uncomfortable because trauma conditioned the body to expect danger. Sometimes survivors must fight against patterns wired into them since childhood.
But every time a survivor pauses before repeating a cycle…
Every time they choose honesty over violence…
Boundaries over self-abandonment…
Compassion over cruelty…
Healing over numbness…
Something extraordinary happens.
The cycle weakens.
Another one of Frankl’s most famous quotes says this:
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
I think trauma recovery is, in many ways, the lifelong work of reclaiming that space.
Because trauma compresses it.
Trauma turns reactions into reflexes. Pain into instinct. Fear into automaticity. The nervous system learns to fire so quickly that survivors often feel trapped inside patterns they never consciously chose.
But healing slowly widens the space again.
The space between fear and reaction.
Between anger and violence.
Between shame and self-destruction.
Between pain and the decision to pass that pain onward.
And within that space lives freedom.
Not perfect freedom.
Not freedom from grief or memory or scars.
But freedom to become something more than what hurt you.
That is why I became a counsellor.
Because I have seen what happens when trauma remains unaddressed, festering silently across generations like an untreated wound. I have seen what happens when suffering consumes people whole. But I have also seen the extraordinary resilience of human beings willing to fight for themselves despite everything they have endured.
The Blooming Practice exists because I believe survivors deserve spaces that remind them of their agency, dignity, humanity, and capacity for growth.
Not because healing erases pain.
Not because trauma magically transforms into something beautiful.
But because even after devastation, human beings are still capable of choosing what kind of person they will become next.
And sometimes, that choice changes not only one life — but generations afterward.
The Truth Behind the Wildflowers
The motto of The Blooming Practice is simple: Bloom where you are planted.
At first glance, it sounds gentle. Hopeful, even. Like something embroidered onto a pillow resting on a cottage window sill beside dried lavender and warm candlelight.
But for trauma survivors, those words carry a far heavier meaning.
Because trauma survivors are so often planted in places never meant for human flourishing.
Some are planted in homes where love must be earned through silence, perfection, obedience, or self-erasure. Some are planted in violence. In neglect. In chaos. In addiction. In loneliness so profound it feels like slowly freezing to death from the inside out. Some are planted in environments where tenderness is mocked, boundaries are punished, and fear becomes as ordinary as breathing.
And still, somehow, they survive.
That is what I think people fail to understand about trauma survivors: many of them learned how to grow in impossible conditions.
Like wildflowers forcing themselves through cracks in concrete.
Like trees twisting toward sunlight in forests darkened by fire.
Like stubborn green shoots emerging from scorched earth while smoke still hangs in the air.
Trauma survivors adapt because they must. Children especially. The human nervous system is astonishing in its determination to survive. A traumatised child will mould themselves into whatever shape feels safest. They will become hypervigilant, quiet, useful, funny, invisible, high-achieving, emotionally numb, endlessly accommodating, fiercely independent — anything necessary to reduce danger and increase connection.
But survival is not the same thing as blooming.
Many survivors spend years believing their adaptations are their identity. They mistake hypervigilance for personality. Anxiety for responsibility. Emotional suppression for maturity. Self-abandonment for kindness. They become so accustomed to surviving harsh emotional winters that safety itself begins to feel unfamiliar. Even joy can feel suspicious after enough suffering.
So when I say bloom where you are planted, I do not mean: “Stay where you are hurting and simply think positively.”
I do not mean: “Trauma makes people stronger.”
Or: “Everything happens for a reason.”
I mean something far more defiant than that.
I mean that even if life planted you in darkness, you are still allowed to reach for light.
Even if you were raised in fear, you are still capable of learning safety.
Even if trauma convinced you that you are broken, unlovable, difficult, or doomed, your nervous system is not beyond healing. Your story is not finished simply because suffering entered it early.
Blooming, for trauma survivors, is often quiet and deeply unglamorous.
Sometimes, blooming looks like finally sleeping through the night without nightmares. Sometimes it looks like leaving an abusive relationship. Sometimes it is learning to say “no” without drowning in guilt afterwards. Sometimes it is crying for the first time in years because your nervous system finally feels safe enough to soften. Sometimes it is choosing not to repeat the harm done to you, even when every wound inside you begs for surrender.
Sometimes, blooming is simply staying alive long enough to discover that your pain was never proof that you were incapable of being loved.
And perhaps the most beautiful thing about healing is that trauma survivors often become extraordinary gardens after surviving devastation.
Not because suffering itself is beautiful — it is not.
But because survivors who fight for themselves often develop immense emotional depth, empathy, resilience, sensitivity, wisdom, and compassion. They understand grief intimately. They notice loneliness in other people quickly. They become fiercely protective of gentleness because they know exactly what its absence can do to a human being.
I think that is why I created The Blooming Practice.
Because I wanted to create the kind of space trauma survivors rarely encounter in this world: one rooted not in shame, fear, or harshness, but in safety, compassion, honesty, and hope. A place that acknowledges the reality of trauma without reducing people to it. A place that says:
Yes, what happened to you mattered.
Yes, your wounds are real.
And yes, healing is still possible.
To bloom where you are planted is not to deny the darkness of the soil you came from.
It is to refuse to let darkness be the only thing you grow.
Breaking the Cycle Forever
There are some people who leave fingerprints on your life long after they are gone.
Not because they saved you.
Because you could not save them.
Gottlieb was one of those people for me.
For years after his death, his story haunted me like smoke lingering after a fire long since extinguished. Not only because of the tragedy of what he became, but because of the unbearable grief of what he could have been. A brilliant mind. A frightened little boy. A wounded man. A father. A human being slowly consumed by pain nobody managed to stop in time.
I became unable to look away.
And the deeper I looked into trauma, the more I began to realise something terrifying and profoundly important: trauma is not simply something people remember.
It is something they carry.
In their bodies.
Their relationships.
Their fears.
Their nervous systems.
Their reflexes.
Their silences.
Some people enter your life like warning signs.
Not warnings about them.
Warnings about what untreated pain can do to a human being. Warnings about what happens when suffering festers in darkness for too long. Warnings about what happens when wounded children grow into wounded adults with no tools, no support, and no safe place to put their grief.
I think part of me became a counsellor because grief needed somewhere to go.
I could not change what happened to Gottlieb. I could not undo the violence that shaped him. I could not save him from the darkness that eventually swallowed him whole.
But I became determined to understand why suffering reproduces itself — and how to interrupt it before another child becomes another tragedy.
Because some cycles continue simply because nobody interrupts them.
And I think healing begins the moment someone finally does.
The moment someone says:
No more.
This pain ends here.
I will not hand this suffering to the next generation.
That is the heart of The Blooming Practice.
Not perfection.
Not pretending trauma does not exist.
Not toxic positivity wrapped in pretty language.
But the stubborn belief that even after devastation, healing remains possible.
Forests still grow after fire.
Not immediately.
Not perfectly.
But slowly, stubbornly, life returns.
Tender green shoots emerge from blackened earth. Wildflowers bloom where ash once settled. Roots buried deep beneath the soil hold on long enough for spring to come back.
Trauma survivors are often like that too.
And if you are reading this carrying wounds nobody took seriously…
If you learned survival before safety…
If you are exhausted from holding yourself together while the world mistakes your functioning for healing…
If you are fighting every day not to surrender to bitterness, numbness, self-destruction, or despair…
I hope this space reminds you of something deeply important: your story is not over yet.
As long as you are alive, there remains the possibility of choosing differently. Of healing. Of reclaiming yourself. Of becoming something more than what hurt you.
And perhaps that is what blooming truly is.
Not becoming untouched by suffering.
But refusing to let suffering be the only thing that grows inside you.
What Do You Believe?
If this essay resonated with you, I would genuinely love to hear from you.
Leave a comment below and share your thoughts, reflections, or experiences. And if you know someone who never managed to overcome their trauma — someone whose pain consumed them long before their life ended — leave a ❤️ in the comments for them.
Let this become a small space where grief is witnessed instead of carried alone.
And if you are struggling with trauma, emotional overwhelm, nervous system dysregulation, shame, grief, or the exhausting weight of survival, please know that you do not have to navigate it alone.
My work as a Specialist Wellness Counsellor through The Blooming Practice is rooted in trauma-sensitive, compassionate support for survivors who want to fight for themselves and begin reclaiming their lives.
If you would like support, you can click the link below to book an online counselling session with me.
Because even after fire, healing is still possible.
Sending you love and light, Marelize.
Join the Blooming Tribe!
If this essay resonated with you, I would love to invite you to subscribe to The Blooming Practice — a gentle space where we explore trauma recovery, emotional healing, nervous system regulation, mindfulness, post-traumatic growth, and the quiet courage it takes to keep blooming after difficult seasons.
Every week on Thursday, I share thoughtful essays, reflections, psychoeducation, guided support, and trauma-sensitive encouragement for survivors learning how to reclaim safety, softness, and hope again.
And if you know someone who might need these words — someone carrying grief quietly, fighting invisible battles, or trying to break painful cycles — please consider sharing this article with them. Sometimes one compassionate reminder that they are not alone can change the course of an entire day… or even an entire life.
Finally, if you are feeling overwhelmed, emotionally exhausted, stuck in survival mode, or simply longing for a safe, gentle, encouraging space to process what you have been carrying, I want you to know you do not have to navigate it alone.
Through The Blooming Practice, I offer trauma-sensitive online counselling support rooted in compassion, emotional safety, nervous system awareness, and hope. If you feel ready to take that next step toward healing, growth, and reclaiming yourself, you are warmly welcome to book an online counselling session with me.
Because even after the hardest winters, healing is still possible.
If this resonated with you, I’d love to stay connected.
Follow along for gentle reflections, trauma-sensitive mental health content, mindfulness practices, nervous system healing tools, guided meditations, and reminders that healing does not have to happen harshly to be real. Come find me online on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Join this growing garden of support, softness, and growth!
You deserve spaces that help you breathe a little easier.
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