My Story
Hi, i'm Donna
INSERT AN OVERVIEW SENTENCE HERE
I spent most of my life becoming stronger.
What I didn't realise was that strength was never the thing I was missing.
I come from a lineage of women who could survive almost anything.
Women who carried the weight of entire families on their shoulders.
Women who endured heartbreak they never had the luxury of falling apart from.
Women who learned to suppress their needs, silence their desires, and abandon parts of themselves in order to survive.
Women who kept going, no matter the cost.
So I learned to keep going too.
The problem was that beneath all that strength lived a deeply sensitive little girl who felt everything.
I felt the tension in a room before anyone spoke.
I noticed what wasn't being said.
I absorbed the emotions of those around me.
I cared deeply.
Loved deeply.
Felt deeply.
And somewhere along the way, I learned that being that sensitive wasn't safe.
So I adapted.
I became capable.
Successful.
Responsible.
The woman everyone could rely on.
The woman who could handle anything.
And for a long time, that strategy worked.
I built a successful career.
Created a business I loved.
Became a mother to two incredible daughters.
Made bold decisions.
Carved my own path.
Looking back, every meaningful transformation in my life began the same way:
Trusting what I knew in my bones before I had evidence it would work.
Leaving behind a promising career path in Clinical Psychology to pursue what truly lit me up: Psychotherapy.
That trust also led me to motherhood when doctors told me it might never happen. Then birthing both my daughters at home, despite naysayers and fear.
And to leaving a full time position to start my own business because I knew that I nor my girls were meant for the 9-5 hustle.
And eventually, it led me to make the boldest move of all.
To walk away from a life that looked beautiful from the outside but behind closed doors was secretly destroying me.
From the outside, it looked like I had everything together.
But beneath the surface, I found myself trapped in patterns I couldn't seem to shift.
I was over-giving.
Over-functioning.
Trying harder.
Understanding more.
Holding on longer.
Accepting breadcrumbs and excuses while convincing myself I was simply being compassionate.
Despite years of professional training, personal growth, and self-awareness, I kept finding myself in the same painful place.
And eventually, something broke inside.
The kind of rupture there is no going back from.
I just knew. No fucking more.
No more tolerating dynamics that diminished me.
No more clinging to relationships where I felt emotionally hungry.
No more trying to “figure out” people or situations that were not interested in growing.
No more believing empty promises and excuses because the fantasy and hope were easier to swallow than the reality.
No more diluting my truth, my needs, and my standards to keep others comfortable.
I realised I had become more afraid of losing myself than losing the relationship
So I walked away.
What followed was the unraveling of everything I thought I knew.
There were days I didn't know how I would make it through.
Days where the grief felt so vast I thought it might swallow me whole.
Days where the fear of letting go of everything I had held dear, trusted, and known felt like it was crushing me from the inside out.
Days where I questioned everything so completely that I no longer knew what was real, what was true, or who I was beneath it all.
But giving up was never an option.
What followed would become one of the most profound initiations of my life.
Instead of trying to escape the pain, I learned how to descend into it.
To be with it.
To move with it.
To breathe with it.
To cry with it.
To shake with it.
To scream with it.
To dance with it.
To listen to it.
To create with it.
To allow it to reveal what had been hidden beneath it all along.
Layer by layer, I found myself face-to-face with the core wounds I had spent a lifetime trying to protect myself from.
The grief.
The abandonment.
The shame.
The fear.
The rage.
The parts of me that had learned to contort, perform, and disown myself in order to feel loved, safe, chosen, or enough.
But as I descended into the darkness, something unexpected happened.
I found the gold.
The liberation.
The fullness.
The expansiveness.
The aliveness.
The courage.
The power.
I found parts of myself I didn't even know existed.
The unfiltered me.
The undiluted me.
The fierce me.
The wild me.
The woman who could hold ALL of herself.
The darkness and the light.
The grief and the joy.
The rage and the tenderness.
The sensitive and the strong.
The woman who no longer needed to suppress, shrink, or leave herself in order to belong.
The woman who could be wildly expressed, deeply embodied, fiercely sovereign, and boundlessly happy regardless of her external circumstances.
This was the alchemy
Layer by layer, I found myself face-to-face with the core wounds I had spent a lifetime trying to protect myself from.
The grief.
The abandonment.
The shame.
The fear.
The rage.
The parts of me that had learned to contort, perform, and disown myself in order to feel loved, safe, chosen, or enough.
But as I descended into the darkness, something unexpected happened.
I found the gold.
The liberation.
The fullness.
The expansiveness.
The aliveness.
The courage.
The power.
I found parts of myself I didn't even know existed.
The unfiltered me.
The undiluted me.
The fierce me.
The wild me.
The woman who could hold ALL of herself.
The darkness and the light.
The grief and the joy.
The rage and the tenderness.
The sensitive and the strong.
The woman who no longer needed to suppress, shrink, or leave herself in order to belong.
The woman who could be wildly expressed, deeply embodied, fiercely sovereign, and boundlessly happy regardless of her external circumstances.
Heal. Transform. Embody. thrive
