My Story: The Sacred Return
For most of my life, even breathing felt like something I hadn’t quite earned.
I grew up in 1990s China, in a time of sweeping transformation — my country crossing from one world into another almost overnight.
I went from stealing candy from a basket in my grandma’s dirt-floored countryside home, to watching my dad paint my bedroom in the brand-new city apartment my parents had just bought.
A couple of years later, they sat me down and asked who I wanted to live with after their divorce.
That marked the beginning of a hell that would take me thirty years to escape.
Actually, the hell started long before that. Apart from that joyous moment watching my dad paint my room, all I could remember was fighting, screaming, and the sound of things being smashed in every corner of a home that was crumbling as it was being built — and the ever-increasing terror that began to roar inside me.
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In 1990s China, divorce carried such stigma that children from divorced families automatically became “bad influences.”
At school, I lost all my friends overnight. Kids fled from me like I was contagious. I was teased, bullied, ostracized every day.
At home, I became the trash can — the emotional dump site for a severely traumatized mother who had no understanding of her own wounds and no resources to heal. Her inner turmoil created a maddening oscillation: extreme affection one moment, cruel verbal and emotional abuse the next. Daily, she instilled deep hatred toward my dad in me, pushing me relentlessly — at the cost of everything that brought me joy — so that I could become wildly successful. The only proof she could offer my dad and society that she was a good mother.
I have few memories of my dad. He was gone for most of my life after the divorce. In the beginning, he would still pick me up after school — or rather, he would forget about me and show up half drunk on his scooter around seven or eight at night, after I’d been waiting and starving for hours at the school gate. Over the years, the resentment I’d been taught to feel toward him — cultivated out of loyalty to my mom — made any real relationship between us impossible. Though the truth is, he was never interested in one to begin with. Through criticism and dismissal, he made it clear: I was too much, and somehow, never enough.
When I turned to my cousins — the closest thing to siblings I had — I met ridicule and contempt. When I sought comfort from my grandparents and relatives, I was met with cold shoulders and blank faces, as if my existence was merely tolerated. Any compassion or warmth was just a fantasy.
Day by day, I was unconsciously shaped into an anxious, hypervigilant, dissociated young adult carrying a mountain of shame and self-hatred. Years of my childhood vanished from my memory.
Looking back, that was probably the only way a six-year-old could survive and grow into a semi-functioning human being.
The Long Way Outward
When I was old enough, I left.
From one city to another, one country to another — studying, traveling, working — until I sold everything and set out on a journey with no end date.
For many years, I traveled the world alone. I set foot on untouched land in Africa. Hitchhiked through the Balkans. Ventured into deep Amazonian jungles. I had countless life-changing experiences and met incredible people from all walks of life.
Eventually, I settled in Mexico and started building what looked, from the outside, like ultimate freedom.
In many ways, it was.
But deep down, the discomfort of being in my own skin was tearing me apart whenever night fell.
By then, I’d already been trying to heal for years. Self-help books, meditation, multiple therapists using different methods, every alternative healing modality I could find.
Some helped a little. None lifted the dark cloud that kept returning.
One day — somewhere between countries, between versions of myself — I stumbled across the concept of Complex PTSD: a mental health condition arising from chronic, long-term, and repeated trauma — often in childhood or situations where escape is impossible — resulting in severe emotional dysregulation, a shattered sense of self-worth, and profound difficulties in relating to others and to oneself.
I sat with that for a long time.
It was the most precise description of my life I’d ever encountered. Not a diagnosis that reduced me — but a map that finally showed me where I was.
I learned that CPTSD doesn’t heal through sheer willpower, positivity, prescription drugs, or “forgiving and forgetting.” It heals through multi-dimensional work: understanding how your patterns formed, processing emotions that have been held for years, regulating your nervous system, unlearning survival behaviors that no longer serve you, and slowly reclaiming meaning and self-compassion.
Much of this work you can do on your own. But here’s what I’d been missing: the deepest healing — the rebuilding of trust, the repair of attachment wounds, the experience of being truly seen and accepted — can only happen in relationship. With someone who offers compassionate, consistent presence, until slowly, you begin to offer it to yourself.
But where could I find someone like that?
Most people — friends, family — don’t have enough understanding of CPTSD to know what survivors truly need. They jump straight into problem-solving or fixing, which despite good intentions, often makes things worse.
And therapists trained to truly hold CPTSD — who have done their own deep healing work — are rare. Especially when CPTSD isn’t even acknowledged in most countries.
Most therapists I worked with were either perfectly professional but emotionally distant in a way that deepened my shame, or genuinely compassionate but still navigating their own healing — unable to hold space without their wounds showing up alongside mine.
For a long time, I was the only one there for myself. Which mostly meant I wasn’t really there at all.
I was merely surviving — through distraction of all kinds, through dissociation when the pain got too loud. I tried everything to self-regulate. Yoga. Meditation. Breathwork. Movement. Energy work. But no amount of self-regulation can replace co-regulation.
And when I turned to others — reaching for the connection I'd been starved of — the same dynamics played out again and again — in friendships, in relationships — as if I were cast in the same role in a play I never agreed to. Each repetition leaving new bruises on old wounds. And underneath all of it, a loneliness that defied logic: I could be surrounded by people, laughing, present, and still feel utterly, completely alone. Not lonely for company. Lonely in a way that seemed to come from somewhere unreachable.
CPTSD is, at its core, a relational wound. It can only truly begin to heal in relationship.
But humans, as I’d been programmed to believe since childhood, are dangerous and unpredictable. So I felt eternally stuck — caught between yearning for healthy connection and fearing the very thing I needed most.
And here’s the thing: as I write this and as you read it, we both know intellectually what’s happening. But the body keeps the score. Reprogramming that takes tremendous work.
Coming Home — The Real Kind
The deep work began when I left Mexico and turned inward.
The outer journey had taken me as far as it could. It was time for something harder and quieter.
I spent the next two years away from crowds, mostly alone, sitting with whatever arose and learning to be there for myself.
Eventually, I returned to China — the place where it all began.
It was only then, through numerous attempts to rebuild a relationship with both of my parents, that I was finally able to see the whole picture. My dad carried strong narcissistic traits — wounds passed down from his own childhood. My mom was a CPTSD survivor herself, and surviving was all she had ever been able to do. Without psychoeducation or support, and shaped by the coping mechanisms so widely accepted in Chinese culture — suppression, distraction, endurance — neither of them was ever aware of their own trauma. And so, without knowing it, they passed it on to me.
After decades of struggling and merely surviving myself, somehow, I found my way out of the cycle.
That understanding brought something I hadn’t expected: acceptance. A slow, tender reconciliation with the country and the family that shaped me — and with the woman I’d become within it.
Despite my deep desire to help my parents, I made the decision to focus on myself. Because no matter how much I want to feel at home with my family, what I want more is to come home to myself.
So, slowly, I created a nourishing space near the mountains in Hangzhou, China — a place I can call home, for now. I began building gentle but deep connections with a few precious people, treasures I’d found along my healing path. They became the reparative relationships that had been missing my entire life.
It’s a tender process. I’m still in it. But this time, I feel hope. And peace.
When I look back now, I often tear up — sometimes from grief, but more often from awe.
I see her — that younger version of me — and I witness how hard she tried. How many times she asked for help and was turned away. How many times she got back up with no one watching. How she kept reaching for connection even when connection kept failing her. How she fell so deep she wanted to stop existing — and somehow, somehow, found her way back up.
That’s not weakness. That’s one of the most extraordinary things a human being can do.
Part of healing is finally seeing yourself clearly — all of it — and feeling proud not despite the struggle, but because of it.
Why I’m Here
If you’re still reading, you might recognize something in this journey. The exhaustion of trying so hard for so long. The loneliness of a struggle no one else can see. The part of you that keeps going even when you can’t explain why.
I see that part of you. And I know how much it matters.
The most precious gift from this journey has been a fierce, quiet desire to be the consistent, supportive presence that was missing in my life — for others still walking this path.
So I'm here now, not as a 'healed' expert telling you what to do, but as someone who has lived it from the inside — walking beside you through the glimmers and the hard days, a compassionate witness to your own unfolding.
I see you, dear one.
And I'm glad you are here.