If you’d asked me where A Positive Start began when I first started this work, I would’ve confidently said:
“It began because of the domestic violence.”
At the time, that felt true.
It felt obvious.
The dramatic moment. The crisis. The breaking point.
The event that almost ended my life.
But what I discovered as the journey unfolded — as I tracked my recovery with genuine curiosity, compassion, and a willingness to see beyond the obvious — was that the real beginning wasn’t the trauma I believed had “created” the problem.
That moment was only a symptom.
An eruption at the end of a long, invisible fault line.
The real story had begun decades earlier, buried in belief systems I didn’t know I held, shaped by nervous system responses I didn’t yet understand, and woven through patterns I thought were “just who I was.”
What I thought was the beginning was actually the middle.
And that realisation changed everything — including the birth of A Positive Start CIC.
Learning to Track the Journey Instead of the Events
When I first began to look back, I did what many trauma survivors do:
I focused on the “big” events.
The obvious pain.
The memories we circle around because they feel like the milestones that broke us.
But recovery has a way of peeling back layers we didn’t expect.
I began to notice themes.
Patterns.
Internal reactions that didn’t match my external reality.
Moments when I “collapsed” inside while appearing fully functional on the outside.
For the first time, I started to track my nervous system, not just my emotions or thoughts.
And what I uncovered was something I had lived with for so long that I didn’t even know it had a name.
Dorsal vagal collapse.
A dark, heavy, numb place.
Not dramatic.
Not chaotic.
Just a quiet, hollow emptiness.
A sense of peering into the abyss from the inside.
And here’s the truth I wrestled with:
I had lived in that state for most of my life without realising it.
I didn’t know what ventral vagal safety truly felt like.
I had moments of peace — but they were fleeting, usually happening when I was engrossed in an activity that pulled me above water just long enough to breathe before I sank back down again.
Ventral was not a home.
It was a holiday I didn’t know how to book twice.
From dorsal, ventral didn’t just feel far away — it felt unimaginable.
Something I watched other people experience like an observer through glass.
Something I deeply wanted but couldn’t comprehend for myself.
And that sentence — “I can’t imagine that for me” — became the turning point.
Because it wasn’t just me.
Recognising the Same Patterns in Others
When I worked with people the DWP labelled “the farthest from the labour market,” I recognised the same gaze I carried for so many years:
that sense of ventral being “for other people.”
They weren’t failing.
They weren’t unwilling.
They weren’t stuck because they lacked ambition.
What they lacked was a self-belief system that recognised possibility.
Their nervous systems had been shaped by experiences long before adulthood — experiences that conditioned them to expect shame, failure, disappointment, and rejection.
And here’s the thing trauma teaches you:
If you believe something deeply enough, the nervous system will make it feel like truth.
Even if it isn’t.
This is why you can desperately want a better life — but your actions still pull you back into familiar patterns.
Not because you’re broken.
Not because you’re incapable.
But because your mind is trying to protect you by keeping you in what feels predictable.
I saw myself in them.
They saw themselves in me.
And that’s when I realised:
The journey didn’t start at the trauma.
It started with the beliefs we learned about ourselves long before the trauma ever happened.
Belief Systems Are Formed Before We Have Words
For most of us, our story doesn’t start with the first major trauma.
It starts with the first moment our nervous system learned that the world wasn’t safe.
My earliest memory of trauma is from around two and a half years old.
I accidentally overdosed — helping myself to what I believed were sweeties, not knowing the danger.
My stomach was pumped.
I lived, physically.
But something else shifted that day.
I share this not for drama, but for clarity:
this is where neuroception began for me —my body’s subconscious scanning for danger, long before logic or reasoning had developed.
What stayed with me wasn’t the medical event.
It was the energy in the room.
The panic.
The anger.
The fear disguised as blame.
The sudden shift from innocence to “you could die,”
“you are silly,”
“you are stupid,”
“you can’t be trusted.”
Children don’t hear words — they absorb meaning.
And the meaning I absorbed was this:
I am the problem.
I cause distress.
I disappoint people.
My parents weren’t cruel. They were terrified.
They were ‘authoritarian’ – from the ‘children should be seen and not heard’ era, and dysregulated by their own experiences. I was their first born, I didn’t come with instructions – and they were terrified.
But their dysregulation became the foundation of my self-belief.
And once that foundation is laid, life builds upon it — until it becomes a house you don’t realise you’re living in.
The body keeps the score long before the mind keeps the memories.
As I continued tracing the threads further back, I began to realise that my body had been trying to warn me for years — long before I understood the language it was speaking.
At age nine, I had a tumour removed from my appendix.
At the time, this was treated purely as a medical event, but when I look back now through a trauma-informed lens, I can see it as another sign of a nervous system living in constant survival mode. My body had been running on adrenaline for so long that it was no longer functioning from a place of safety; it was reacting, protecting, bracing — even at an age when I should have been carefree.
Through my teens and into adulthood, the physical symptoms increased.
I experienced vasovagal syncope, fainting episodes that struck suddenly as though my vagus nerve simply overloaded and shut down. At the time, no one connected it to stress or dysregulation. But now I understand exactly what was happening:
My vagus nerve was signalling overwhelm.
My body was saying, “This is too much.”
Alongside this came migraines, IBS, digestive issues, and a deep sense that my body was fighting quiet battles I couldn’t interpret. These weren’t random medical problems — they were somatic messages, the body expressing what my conscious mind had never been allowed to feel or articulate.
And now, after the work I’ve done to reconnect and regulate, something remarkable has happened:
Those symptoms are gone.
No fainting.
No IBS.
No migraines.
Not because life suddenly became easy, but because I finally learned to listen to my body with understanding instead of fear. Once I found language for my experiences — dorsal collapse, hypervigilance, nervous system overload — the physical expressions of that stress no longer needed to shout for my attention.
My body had been keeping the story long before I did.
I just didn’t yet know how to read it.
As these symptoms appeared throughout my childhood and teenage years — the fainting, migraines, IBS, shutdowns, and overwhelm — they were real. They felt real. Anxiety and panic live in both the mind and the body, and when you don’t understand why they’re happening, you reach for the only support available:
You go to the system designed to help you.
But here is where so many of us become lost.
We seek professional advice, hoping for clarity or connection, but instead we are often given labels, diagnoses, and medication without anyone asking the most important question:
“What happened underneath this?”
No one explained the nervous system.
No one recognised trauma.
No one connected fainting episodes, stress physiology, or chronic shutdown with emotional overwhelm.
No one explored belief systems or developmental neuroception.
So the journey ends there — not because we heal, but because the system stops looking.
We become suspended in our own suffering, frozen in place, medicated rather than understood. And when your underlying belief is already “I am the problem,” it is painfully easy to accept the labels placed upon you.
And then the next chapter unfolds almost predictably:
You become too unwell to work.
You go on sickness benefits or unemployment.
You struggle with daily functioning.
You collapse further because the system does not soothe — it often shames.
Society reflects the same beliefs we already carry:
“Scrounger.”
“Lazy.”
“A drain.”
These words echo the beliefs that took root in childhood — the ones already living inside the body.
And dorsal collapse becomes the trapdoor.
It pulls you deeper:
into hopelessness,
into guilt,
into shutdown,
into the place where you feel you don’t belong anywhere — not in work, not in community, not even in your own skin.
The very systems meant to support us often reinforce the deepest shame we already hold.
Not because people are unworthy of support —
but because their suffering is misunderstood at the level of the nervous system, not the behaviour.
And without that understanding, people aren’t supported back into life —
they’re pushed further out of it.
Survival Mode Becomes a Personality When It Lasts Too Long
From an early age, my nervous system was shaped around:
- hypervigilance
- shame
- internal collapse
- overthinking
- self-blame
- low self-worth
- fawning
- acceptance of less
Not because I chose it — but because my survival system chose it for me.
By the time domestic violence entered my life, it didn’t create my lack of self-worth.
It reinforced what I already believed about myself.
That’s the painful truth many survivors eventually realise:
the trauma didn’t invent the beliefs — it confirmed them.
Even when we say we want better, we often behave in ways that contradict that desire — not out of weakness or lack of willpower, but because incongruence is a nervous system response, not a moral failing.
You cannot build a life that contradicts what your nervous system believes about your worth.
And this is why understanding the patterns matters.
Because once you see the patterns, you can finally change them.
And once you change them, the life you build begins to change too.
The Turning Point: Tracking My Own Recovery
The real breakthrough wasn’t an event — it was a shift in how I saw myself.
I stopped asking:
“Why did that happen?”
and began asking:
“What was I believing about myself at the time it happened?”
This single shift changed everything.
Because when you start tracking your internal state rather than the external events, you begin to see how your life has been shaped not by what happened to you, but by what you believed those events meant.
I realised I had spent decades:
- abandoning myself
- normalising collapse
- confusing familiarity with comfort
- confusing chaos with normality
- confusing survival with living
And once I understood that, the journey toward ventral — toward safety, connection, groundedness — finally became possible.
How This Led to the Birth of A Positive Start CIC
A Positive Start CIC wasn’t created at the moment of crisis.
It was created as I slowly pieced together my recovery and understood the real roots of trauma:
the beliefs beneath the surface,
the nervous system states that shape identity,
and the quiet patterns that dictate the lives of people labelled as “hard to reach.”
APS didn’t begin because of domestic violence.
It began because I finally understood the trajectory from:
- early childhood dysregulation
- to survival mode
- to low self-worth
- to unhealthy relationships
- to collapse
- to hopelessness
- to the feeling of being “too far gone”
And I knew — not intellectually, but viscerally —that others were living the exact same journey.
As I healed, I didn’t just want to help people “cope.”I wanted to help them understand.
Because healing doesn’t begin with motivation. It begins with meaning.
And people cannot change their lives until they understand the story beneath the story.
That became the heartbeat of APS.
Not surface change.
Not behaviour management.
Not “fixing people.”
But helping people reconnect with the part of themselves that trauma disconnected them from.
Connection.
Safety.
Regulation.
Awareness.
Understanding.
Self-compassion.
Belief.
Ventral.
This is at the heart of our collaborations — working with people who understand the importance of emotional literacy and emotional safety.
The Deeper Message: We Have to Go Back to Go Forward
People often misunderstand this.
Going back is not about reliving trauma.
It’s not about revisiting painful memories to punish ourselves with them.
It’s about understanding
how the journey unfolded
and why the nervous system shaped itself the way it did.
When you understand where your beliefs came from, you’re no longer controlled by them.
When you understand why you disconnect, you can learn to reconnect.
When you understand why safety feels dangerous, you can slowly rewire what “safe” means.
When you understand why you collapse, you can begin to rise.
Healing isn’t about changing your past.
It’s about changing the meaning your nervous system attached to it.
Because anything is only ever true because you believe it.
And what you believe about yourself is the foundation of everything you build.
Why This Matters for Community Mental Health
The people I support today aren’t broken, resistant, or “hard to reach.”
They’re carrying belief systems shaped in childhood, reinforced by trauma, and never challenged with compassion.
Many of them have lived their whole lives in dorsal collapse.
Many don’t recognise ventral as an option.
Many don’t believe hope is for them.
But I am living proof that:
- survival mode is not a personality
- collapse is not a destiny
- belief systems can be rewritten
- nervous systems can be retrained
- safety can be learned
- connection can be restored
- a life worth living can be rebuilt
This is the heart of A Positive Start CIC.
Not perfection.
Not quick fixes.
But a journey from dark to light — one belief at a time.
The Journey Continues
If I could go back and speak to the version of me who thought domestic violence was the beginning of the story, I would tell her:
“You began your healing long before you realised you needed it.
And the part of you that survived the earliest trauma is the same part that will lead you home.”
A Positive Start CIC was not born from pain.
It was born from understanding.
From tracking.
From curiosity.
From learning to see myself clearly for the first time.
And from the realisation that community mental health must honour the whole journey — not just the parts people can see.
The journey didn’t begin at crisis.
It began with belief.
And belief — rewired through compassion, connection, and safety — is where every new journey begins.