What if the deepest grief of your life doesn’t arrive when the trauma happens—but decades later, when survival is no longer required?

In this episode, Learning the Hardest Path to Walk Leads Straight Back to Me, I share a rarely spoken stage of healing: the grief that surfaced at forty-three, more than twenty years after the original trauma. Not as sadness or despair, but as the collapse of identity, meaning, and every narrative I had used to survive.

I speak openly about grieving what never was—the childhood that couldn’t form safely, the parents who couldn’t show up, and the hope that one day connection or understanding would arrive and make it all make sense. We explore how trauma narratives aren’t erased by insight, but written over, waiting for safety to be felt in the body.

This episode challenges familiar ideas like “everything happens for a reason,” examines responsibility without shame, and names the dark night of the soul as the dismantling of survival identity rather than pathology.

This is a conversation about the hardest path to walk—letting go of meaning, external repair, and familiar suffering—and how that path leads back to self, not as an idea or destination, but as presence.