“Life isn’t as easy for everyone as it is for you!!”
These words landed like a knife in my chest, twisting where my heart already ached. They came from a fellow student just after I’d been awarded an internship in the United States — one of the most coveted opportunities in our business management program at the Limburg Catholic University College in Belgium. A dream for many of us. She had wanted it too.
She saw my achievement. She didn’t see my life.
The day my world came into focus
I’d been at the top of my class since grade 4 — but only because in grade 3, someone finally discovered I struggled with high myopia and astigmatism. Many thought I was slow, clumsy and dumb. My grade 3 teacher shoved me to a back corner of the room, suggesting my mother send me to a “domestic sciences” school to learn cooking and ironing instead of algebra.
Thankfully, my mother, despite her own illness, took me to get my eyes checked.
Glasses opened an entire universe. I began to excel, devour books, soak up facts, and chase A’s — partly out of genuine joy, but mostly because I had learned early: if I made mistakes, was slow, or clumsy, I would be ridiculed, humiliated, or put in the corner. The hurt and anger that I swallowed down to get buried in my body — and never wanted to feel again — drove me to work relentlessly, so I’d never have to feel that again. On the outside, I became “the smart one.” On the inside, I became “the girl who couldn’t afford mistakes.”
When envy meets survival programming
Back to 21. Yes, my fellow student was very jealous because I had won this incredible opportunity instead of her.
And yet — there was a grain of truth I had to own.
I was a perfectionist. I worked insanely hard to make my life look effortless and avoid mistakes at all costs. To others, it looked like ambition — wanting to be the best. In reality, it was fear: a fear so deeply buried in my body that I didn’t even register it anymore.
Gathering knowledge and focusing on research became a sneaky way my survival system felt a sense of control and protected me from the messy feelings I had buried in my body. Learning was safe. Facts were safe.
Only years later, through deep emotional repression work — specifically KI Emotional Repression Inquiry — did I uncover this survival programming locked into the tight contractions of my body.
Knowledge isn’t the problem. But the survival system — some may call it ego — will use anything to protect us from feeling what’s buried. Even facts and research can become armor against emotion.
How do you know this might be happening to you? If you’re suffering, notice what happens next: do your thoughts spiral into upset, anxiety, shutdown, or despair — and is your reflex to gather more information, compile evidence, or analyze everything?
Without tools to unravel the unconscious drivers held in your body, it’s hard to tell whether what you’re feeling is stored trauma or true clarity, especially when the mind insists you’re being wronged. That’s where skilful emotional repression inquiry comes in — helping you discern the difference and see how the disconnection in your life mirrors the disconnection from the emotions you once had to bury.
The untold story behind the internship
While I joined classes with my fellow students — many recovering from nights of partying — I wasn’t partying much. I was fighting two legal battles.
The first a civil divorce from my first husband, who struggled with depression and addiction at the same time that I struggled with PTSD. We had met in pain, and while leaving wasn’t easy, it was necessary.
The second a criminal case for the rape I had been a victim of three years earlier. This period of my life is still a haze. The trauma deepened my PTSD, though at the time I didn’t have the language for it.
Whilst I had been successful at making life look easy, I was holding it together through control — knowledge, work, discipline, and an iron will — because if I stopped, even for a second, the darkness of worthlessness felt like it would swallow me whole.
Inherited rules and invisible chains
Without realizing it, I was living by covert family rules passed down for generations: hide your vulnerability, work hard, and you’ll be safe. And in a way, it worked — I got the validation I desired, and I avoided the punishment or humiliation I feared.
So was my classmate right? Was my life easy?
Absolutely not. But I had perfected the art of making it look easy.
The turning point
That internship in the US was a pivot point. Traveling alone across the Atlantic at 21 fueled me with a profound sense of determination to pave my own path, no matter what. It felt powerful, masking the powerlessness I was so familiar with. Still, the outdated survival programming didn’t vanish as the hurt and anger that was stored in my body in pockets of frozen fear remained unaddressed. I kept working myself to exhaustion, unconsciously seeking validation from my parents, and avoiding mistakes and punishment — until my body finally said enough about 15 years ago.
For years before that, dissociation had been my superpower — a survival mechanism that allowed me to build an extraordinary career and have amazing experiences while blocking out fear. But that numbness came at a cost: it also shut down my ability to relax, feel joy, ease, and playfulness. That numbness protected the hurt I’d buried since childhood, which I wasn’t able to feel and express at the time for fear of humiliation and further hurt.
Unpacking this dissociation mechanism with Emotional Repression Inquiry helped thaw the frozen fear. And dissolving these contractions of frozen fear and layers of buried anger and hurt revealed something surprising: playfulness, trust, and love had been there all along!
What I see in my clients — and in you
Mentoring clients to unravel their repression mechanisms is not just my work — it’s my calling. Emotional repression doesn’t only show up as anxiety, depression, or negative self-talk. It often hides behind achievement, behind a clutch on facts, behind intellectualizing our experiences.
It’s easy to spot obvious self-criticism. But it takes deeper awareness to see when knowledge, confidence, or “success” are masks—shields we use to avoid feeling. And once you somatically experience the entire mechanism and uncover the deeper gain beneath it, everything shifts. That’s where true transformation begins. When the armor is made fully conscious and you meet what’s been waiting underneath, you don’t just change your life — you reclaim yourself.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
