When most people think about healing from a toxic or abusive relationship, they focus on the big, visible scars, emotional trauma, broken boundaries, grief, and sometimes fear. But there’s a quieter, often invisible wound that many women carry long after they’ve walked away: the loss of self-trust.

It was about me...  That doesn’t mean I take the blame. Abuse is never the survivor’s fault.

There was a time in my life when I found myself living in a furnace room. No job. No kids. One friend - the owner of the furnace room and I am forever grateful for her kindness. Just me, four concrete walls, and the deafening silence of everything I’d lost—or so I thought. It wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t even safe, really. But what it was, in hindsight, was the beginning of something bigger than I could ever have imagined.

Have you ever had one of those days where you pause mid-tea sip and think, “What if I just started over?” Not a dramatic burn-it-all-down sort of start over (although that has its flair), but a curious, open-hearted, intentional life redesign — the kind where you get to be the architect, the artist, the dreamer, and the doer.

There’s a place many survivors of abuse know intimately, though it doesn’t always have a name. It comes after the leaving, after the chaos, after the immediate danger has passed. On paper, you’re free. But inside, you feel frozen. Exhausted. Lost. This place is called the void.

In today’s self-help and social media-saturated world, it's never been easier to find a name for every experience, reaction, and wound. Empath. Highly sensitive person. Trauma-bonded. Codependent. Victim of narcissistic abuse. Inner child. Attachment style. Love language. While these labels can offer comfort and clarity, there’s a fine line between using a label to understand yourself—and hiding behind one to avoid healing.