Emotional abuse

Grieving a parent who is still alive

When a parent is emotionally immature, abusive, or neglectful, it can be incredibly painful and confusing for the adult child. These patterns often make it difficult—sometimes even impossible—to maintain a healthy or meaningful relationship with that parent. The adult child may find themselves caught between loyalty and self-preservation, longing for love or validation while also needing to protect their emotional wellbeing.

Over time, repeated invalidation, manipulation, or emotional absence can erode trust, leaving the adult child to grieve the parent they never truly had—not because the parent is gone, but because the relationship cannot meet the basic needs of safety, respect, or mutual care.

Setting boundaries or choosing distance in these cases is not a sign of failure or selfishness—it’s often an act of deep inner strength, rooted in a desire to heal, grow, and break cycles of emotional harm.

If you relate to the above, then my newest video below might be just the right thing for you!

Love Athina

Relational trauma survivors-What is their biggest regret?

When you have grown up in a dysfunctional family home, with parents who weren’t able to meet you emotional needs and teach you healthy skills in relating to others, you will notice in adulthood that it takes you awhile to figure out how to heal.

In order to start healing you must first acknowledge that you actually had relational trauma. Some people unfortunately never become aware of this trauma and how it affects them and others find out very late in life.

The earlier you become aware, the better!

My new video talks about one of the biggest regrets I have heard my clients share with me about their healing journey.

Can you relate?

Watch the video to find out!

Love Athina

How do you tell a friend about your childhood trauma?

Talking about childhood trauma can feel overwhelming, especially when opening up to a friend for the first time. How do we explore sharing our story in a way that feels safe and empowering, while also setting boundaries and managing expectations? How do we prepare ourselves for possibly being let down and invalidated by the person we tell?

Talking about something so difficult will never come easy to us, because safety was compromised in our childhood. Sharing the full range of our emotions, wasn’t acceptable and we may have been punished or invalidated a lot. That is why this feels scary and trust doesn’t come easy to us.

The first step to consider, could be to assess our friendship so far with the person we want to tell. Test the waters, so to speak.

Do we feel safe in their presence and can we truly be ourselves with this person?

Does this person listen to us empathetically?

Will we feel relieved by telling a (safe) friend about our trauma?

What will we do if they don’t respond in a validating way? Have there been any instances in the past where they may have invalidated us?

These are all good questions we can ask ourselves.

A safe person or ‘friend’ is one that listens and validates our experience, by saying something like ‘I am sorry to hear you went through that’.

In the above video, I talk about this tricky topic in a little more detail, so please watch it or share it if you think it will help someone.

Love Athina

Do you self-silence?

Self-silencing is much more common that people think.

Feeling too afraid to express your true thoughts, desires, and emotions often stems from childhood experiences in environments where self-expression didn’t feel safe. This behavior is frequently shaped by generational patterns passed down unconsciously, where parents, influenced by their own upbringing and unresolved trauma, lacked the tools to create a space for open and secure communication.

If you recognize that you have a tendency to self-silence, it’s essential to take proactive steps toward building healthier habits and learning to express yourself more openly and authentically.

Watch my video below, to gain more clarity on self-silencing.

Love Athina

Creating safety – Living with CPTSD

When you grew up in a home with dysfunction, chaos and unpredictable emotional outbursts, your mind and body is constantly thrown into a state of emotional dysregulation. Home didn’t feel safe, so you also didn’t feel safe. When unpredictable and unfair demands were placed on you as a child, this will have caused long term problems with hyper vigilance, low self-worth, shame, anxiety and depression. CPTSD will be the end result of growing up with emotionally immature and/or toxic parents.

As an adult, you will struggle with certain very basic every day things. Normal changes that are very much a part of life, may feel huge for someone with CPTSD. A sudden change in plans, a packed train, an illness or a delayed flight can all create immense anxiety in someone with a history of trauma.

When you live with CPTSD, over-preparing and knowing the details of things in advance, can ease your anxiety and help you feel more comfortable.

Creating safety as much as possible, helps trauma survivors feel better.

Creating regular routines and predictable outcomes can also be very helpful.

It is of course impossible to control everything in your environment, but being prepared can very much help.

When things don’t go as planned, having a back-up plan can create a safety net. Having certain objects with you that provide comfort, can also be extremely helpful.

What is your experience with this? I would love to know in the comments below!

Love Athina

Self Sabotage-A result of childhood narcissistic abuse

Self-sabotage isn’t something we are necessarily aware of yet it can create havoc in our lives and it can stop us from reaching our full potential.

When we have grown up in an environment where there was constant chaos and drama and where our parents shamed us and criticised the majority of the time, it will feel more familiar to us to continue this dynamic in adulthood. We may lead equally chaotic lives with dysfunctional relationships and poor choices.

If we were constantly given the message that we weren’t smart enough, strong enough, attractive enough and in more general terms good enough, then this becomes our internalised voice and it pops up every time we try and take a step forward in our careers, relationships and day to day life.

Even if this internalised voice is negative and not true, it has been our mind’s companion for as far back as we remember. We took on this identity and it is harder to change it when it is all we have known.

If you can relate to this topic, then please watch the video to find out more.

I offer one to one coaching to those of you who struggle with this, so please feel free to get in touch by emailing me at: courageisallyouneed@gmail.com

Love Athina

The ignoring narcissistic mother

There are many different types of narcissistic mothers and some show a combination of behaviours. You may notice one mother who is overbearing and controlling and another who is extremely self-centred and ignoring towards her child. Some mothers can actually flip between overbearing and ignoring.

In this video, I explore the narcissistic mother who ignores her children. Being ignored by a mother feels very painful to the child. These ignoring behaviours create deep emotional gaps in a child’s life that can go undetected for years.

Watch the video to find out more and feel free to check out more of my content on my Youtube channel.

Love Athina

Narcissistic mother & passive/enabling father

Growing up with a narcissistic mother is very painful and isolating. If you are lucky enough to at least have an empathetic father, that alone can help you feel a little less alone. What happens however when your father is really loving and caring towards you but unfortunately fails at the part where he has to protect you from your mother’s abuse? When he isn’t strong enough to stand up to his wife’s demands, he also lets you down and enables your mother’s abuse.

It is especially tough when he tells you in private that he knows your mum is a difficult person but still doesn’t protect you from her hurtful actions. This still leaves you feeling hopeless as you don’t truly have your father on your side.

If this is you, then watch my most recent video below.

Love Athina

Echoism – A result of narcissistic abuse

Have you heard of echoism? Echoism isn’t commonly talked about but is very real and a lot of individuals who have suffered narcissistic abuse in childhood actually live with it.

Echoism is very common with individuals who live with Avoidant Personality Disorder or who have many avoidant traits. Echoists find it extremely uncomfortable being the centre of attention.

Watch the video to find out more.

Love Athina

The only way to face your trauma is to work through it

Facing your trauma in the initial stages of awareness, may feel incredibly uncomfortable and daunting. Even admitting to yourself that you suffered abuse or trauma in your childhood, can feel very scary and soul crushing at first.

If you do reach that point however, please know that you are doing the right thing no matter how uncomfortable.

The only way to heal emotional pain is by acknowledging it, feeling it and grieving it.

There may be people out there that make big promises of how to heal quickly and offer quick fixes for alleviating your suffering, but please know that these quick fixes never work. They may provide temporary relief but they don’t holistically address the deeper parts of your psyche that need nurturing.

I am telling you this because I have been there myself. I have tried short term treatments and they don’t work in the long run. My healing journey from childhood trauma started at the tender age of 16 and I am now 41. I am still working on my healing and will continue to do so.

To change dysfunctional behaviours such as people-pleasing, avoidance, dissociation, toxic shame and inner critic attacks we must put in consistent effort daily for months, even years.

Dysfunctional behaviours that we learnt in our childhood to survive the abuse, need a long time to ‘undo’!

The only way to improve your emotional wellbeing is by peeling away each painful layer gently, acknowledging it and pouring self-compassion and love into it.

What are your thoughts?

Love Athina