Hi, I’m Sarah, and I’m extremely happy to say that I’m one of the luckiest women I know.

I get to do work I love. I live in a beautiful part of the world, surrounded by kind people. I’m mother to two of the most wonderful humans on the planet. And, somehow, I’m married to my extremely hot best friend and soulmate.

I feel safe. Seen. Heard. Understood.
Most days, I’m content in my own skin, grateful for the emotional and physical health I’ve worked so hard to rebuild.

But life wasn’t always this way.

What I Carried (And What I Hid)

I am twelve years old, sat on a long wooden bench in human biology class.
Boys on one side. Girls on the other. Nervous laughter rippling through the room.

The teacher asks us to turn to the black and white line drawings of the male and female reproductive systems. As he begins describing sexual intercourse, the colour drains from my face. I feel nauseous. My stomach drops. In that moment, I realise what the teacher is describing was what my stepfather is doing to me.

In that moment I realise just how different I am from everyone else in the class, that what is going on in our house is never to be spoken about. I feel disgusted, ashamed, confused, and scared. My throat closes, my jaw clenches shut and I swallow everything.

And no one could ever know.

Five years later, aged 17, sat on the bottom step of the open plan, wooden staircase in our living room.

I am looking up at my mother’s furious face. Standing over me, hissing in a fierce, hushed whisper: ‘’Well, you’ve got what you want, you can have him’’. ‘’Don’t go mum’’ I want to scream, ‘’please don’t leave me’’, the words crash around inside my head, but I make no sound. My jaw clamps shut. My throat closes. I lower my gaze, tears in my eyes, swallow the pain, the shame, and say nothing.

I watch her walk away, taking my brothers with her.

It is 1987. I am a student nurse. We are all sitting in the classroom in our white nurses’ uniforms, proudly wearing our white cardboard hats with the now-three orange stripes to indicate our lofty status as third-year students. We are listening to a Child Protection lecture given by the hospital’s Paediatric consultant.

As the lecture draws to a close, his eyes settle on me as, accusingly, he states that according to national statistics, at least two of us in the room will have been sexually abused by now, probably by someone we know.

In the silence that follows my cheeks burn with all-consuming humiliation and shame. I feel as if I have a flashing beacon on my head, ‘’yes’’ the voice in my head screams, ‘’it’s me, now what?’’. I said nothing. I was back in biology class. My jaw clamps shut, my throat closes, and my mind leaves the room.

The Day Everything Changed

It’s 10^th January 1994, I lie propped up in a maternity ward bed, having just had an emergency caesarean section, holding the most precious creature in the entire universe, in my arms, at that moment, as I look into the eyes of my beautiful daughter, feeling the warmth of her tiny perfect body pressed to my breast and feeling the enormity of the indescribable love I feel for her, I have a precious glimpse into the future, of what eventually would be my truth.  

 In that fleeting moment I suddenly experienced what it felt like to feel enough, to feel proud of myself, to feel like the cleverest creature on the planet! Miraculously I had grown this precious gift inside of the body I hated, the body that had caused me so much shame and pain, I realised, could actually do something that I could appreciate it for. In that instant I vowed that what had happened to me was never going to happen to her. No one was going to hurt my child.

My fierce determination to protect grew stronger with the birth of my exquisitely perfect son nineteen months later. As he and his sister grew so did my resolve to speak up for myself, to be heard, and to no longer swallow my feelings in order to keep the peace in my dysfunctional marriage.

But I still had a long way to go.

Learning to Ask for Help

After weeks of thinking about it, only to chicken out at the last minute numerous times, I finally plucked up the courage to go to my GP and ask for help. He referred me for counselling.

A month later, as I walked into the overly warm, cramped therapy room at the local psychiatric hospital to meet my therapist, my heart sank, Danielle was Daniel. I had been given a male therapist to share my darkest, deepest secrets about sexual abuse with. This wasn’t going to be easy.  

Daniel did his best, although he admitted that he had no experience in helping people heal after sexual abuse. The sessions consisted of endless discussions about the abuse and how it made me feel. Leaving the clinic, I would invariably feel worse than when I had arrived. It seemed to take me all week to stuff all my disturbing, unmanageable feelings back into the box that they had been dragged out of during the hour we were together.

As I closed the door behind me for the last time, feeling exhausted and extremely relieved that the therapy was over, I decided that the only way to deal with my childhood was to box it back up and file it in the farthest depths of my mind, never to be revisited. Therapy, I resolved, sucked. I would sort myself out.

The Mask of High Functioning

For a decade, I threw myself into motherhood and work.
I got promoted. Left the marriage.
Started a side hustle.
Read every self-help book I could find.
Dated. Left. Distrusted. Kept my walls high.

To everyone else, I looked like I was thriving.

Inside, I was exhausted.
Haunted by nightmares. Jaw locked. Back aching.
Unable to rest. Unsure where to turn.
As long as I kept moving, I thought, we’d be okay.

And we were.

Finding My Way Back to Myself

In 2004, I moved to southern Spain with my children.
It was an adventure, and, if I’m honest, an escape.

But the restlessness didn’t leave.
I devoured every healing modality I could find: Law of Attraction, energy work, Reiki, crystals, mindfulness.
All helpful. None complete. Nothing got to the root of the problems I was struggling with.

Ten years later, I signed up for a hypnotherapy course.

I didn’t expect it to change my life.
But it did.

Week by week, as I practised with my classmates, I met parts of myself I’d never known how to reach.
The inner children.
The outdated beliefs.
The subconscious patterns keeping me locked in survival.

For the first time, something deep inside began to shift.
I wasn’t talking about my pain.
I was releasing it.

That course gave me more than a qualification.
It gave me a calling.

The Scam That Shattered My Illusions

In August 2023, I discovered I’d been scammed.

It wasn’t just a financial loss. It was a slow, calculated betrayal by someone who mirrored me, studied me, and preyed on my trust.
Months of manipulation by someone I believed was helping me build something meaningful, and then used every opening to exploit the most vulnerable parts of me.

He took my entire nursing pension lump sum, along with money I was coerced into borrowing.
Over £110,000. Gone.

But that wasn’t the real wound.

What unravelled in the aftermath was far deeper.
Because for the first time in decades, I couldn’t cope.
I couldn’t ‘handle it.’ I couldn’t override the pain with logic or silence.
The armour I’d built through years of survival crumbled.

I collapsed, emotionally and physically.

For three days, I wandered my home in a dissociated fog.
Vacant. Rocking. Panicked. Staring into space.
His voice in my head. The manipulation on loop.
And then, the inner critic:

“You’re so stupid. So naïve. How could you fall for it?”
“You’ve ruined everything. You’re a failure.”

But underneath the shame, something older stirred.
Something that had never fully healed.

This wasn’t just about the scam.
It was about childhood.
About helplessness, secrecy, and survival.

The scammer had groomed me in the same way my stepfather had.
And I hadn’t seen it, not until I was in pieces.
Not until there was nothing left but truth.

On day three, I lay on the floor and realised:
I didn’t feel like the capable woman I had become.
I felt like the child I used to be, silenced, ashamed, and unseen.

And in that moment, I made a choice.
I couldn’t undo what had been done.
But I could do what I’d never been able to do as a child:

I could speak.
I could ask for help.
I could share the shame instead of swallowing it whole.

I reached out. I told my family. I told my clients. I told the truth.
And I booked an EMDR session with someone I trusted.

What happened next was life-changing.

The session unlocked a memory I didn’t know I had.
A day when my stepfather orchestrated a plan to keep me off school, to have uninterrupted access to me.
He coached me to lie. To fake illness. To be convincing.
And I did exactly what he asked.

Because I was ‘a good girl’.
And I wanted him to be pleased.

That day, the abuse escalated. I didn’t tell.
Because I believed it was my fault.

He had taught me it was.
That he couldn’t control himself. That I was the cause.

The EMDR showed me the programme that moment turned on:

“You are shameful.”
“You’re not worthy of love.”
“You are rotten to the core.”

That belief, that I was the bad one, had quietly shaped my entire adult life.

The scam enabled me to heal this deepest of wounds.

Because when children are harmed by those meant to protect them, their nervous system does something extraordinary:
It makes the caregiver right and the child wrong.

We absorb the blame so we can stay connected to the people we depend on.
Even if it means carrying shame that was never ours to begin with.

That was me.
And until the scam, I couldn’t see it.

It stripped me of money.
It stripped me of illusions.
It dismantled survival patterns I didn’t even know were still running.

But in their place, it gave me something I didn’t know I was still seeking.

Liberation.
Truth.
And the final thread of a story I no longer need to carry alone.

That EMDR session was so powerful, I knew I had to train in it.
I wanted to offer this level of transformation to the women I work with, gently, precisely, and with deep safety.

And now, I’ve shared this story publicly, in one of the UK’s most widely read newspapers.
I no longer carry the shame.
Because I believe in truth.
And because I want every woman who’s ever felt fooled, used, or deeply hurt by someone they trusted to know:

It’s not your fault.
And it’s never too late to come home to yourself.

Why I Created the FREEDOM Programme

The more I healed, the clearer it became:
Women like me, high-functioning, self-aware, emotionally intelligent women who’d buried the past, needed something different.

Not simply talking about the pain, but a gentle, effective way to rewire the subconscious survival programmes that have been driving you for decades.

My FREEDOM Programme is a 12-week, one-to-one journey that combines trauma-informed hypnotherapy, EMDR coaching, and nervous system work to help women come home to themselves.

So that they can release the trauma stored it their bodies, and finally find peace.
Safely. Gradually. Powerfully.

I hope my story helps you feel less alone.
I hope it shows you what’s possible, even if the path feels far away right now.

With love,
Sarah x