I grew up in an environment shaped by emotional neglect, instability, abandonment, addiction, and relationships that didn’t feel safe. My story also includes sexual abuse.

Something I heard recently from Ruth Cohn stayed with me: sometimes trauma is the experience that “nothing happened to me.”

For me, that speaks to emotional neglect - the absence of what should have been there: the care, protection, emotional presence, and safety a child needs, but may not know how to name when they're missing.

As a teenager, I made myself one promise:

I will do what I can. I will not live the life my mother lived.

Years later, I realized I was doing exactly that.

I was in active addiction when a close friend told me he felt I had one foot outside our friendship. I couldn’t understand what he meant. I felt angry. I thought he was being needy.

Today, I understand what he was trying to tell me.

Addiction and deep connection can’t coexist in a relationship.

The dissociation that once protected me had become the very thing preventing me from being truly present in close relationships. Looking back, I can only imagine how painful it must have been for him... to keep reaching for someone who kept slipping away.

When our friendship ended, I went to therapy convinced he was “the problem”. I was still trying to make him responsible for what was happening between us.

Then my therapist said something I couldn’t unhear:

“If you continue like this, you will stay alone all your life.”

That was the moment I had nowhere left to hide.

For the first time, I saw my own part.

That was my rock bottom.

Soon after, I found the Twelve Steps - first OA, then ACA.

Recovery didn’t give me a new identity.

It gave me a way to understand the one I already had.

Slowly, I began to understand my patterns, my relationships, my nervous system, the beliefs I had built my life around, and the ways I had learned to protect myself.

I then found Friendly Circle Berlin, the community that would later become Recovery Reimagined, and discovered a world I didn’t know existed: emotional sobriety.

I wanted to give back what I had received, so I started as a volunteer video editor. That was when I met Patrick.

I later helped with the London Conference and then the Dublin Conference. Through working together, Patrick and I realized that we shared a vision: to create spaces where people could remain curious about what recovery might offer them, continue discovering themselves, and grow in ways that felt real and sustainable.

That vision became Recovery Reimagined.

Today, I co-direct and co-create it alongside Patrick.

I help shape our programs, our workshops, our online community, our brand, our voice, and the systems that help people feel genuinely connected, even across continents.