Testing the Edges to Find Out Where You Stop and Someone Else Begins

Welcome to September

This year feels like it has absolutely flown by. Spring is in the air, and with it comes a renewed sense of vitality, energy, and momentum. At least, that's how it feels for me.

A lot has been happening behind the scenes, not only within my personal life, but also within A Centred Mind. Between the upcoming launch of Authentically You, the development of new coaching packages, and some exciting projects designed to support people at a much deeper and more transformative level, it feels like everything is slowly coming together.

But before we race toward the end of the year, I want to invite you into another layer of self-discovery.

Because this month, we're talking about something that took me years to understand:

How do you know where you end and someone else begins?

And perhaps even more importantly:

How do you learn to trust yourself enough to find out?

Learning To Survive

My childhood was unstable, to say the least.

There were moments where I felt safe and protected.

And there were many moments where anxiety, uncertainty, and fear became part of the backdrop of everyday life.

I never quite knew what version of a parent I was going to get.

I didn't know how intoxicated they might be. I didn't know whether they would have the emotional capacity to meet my needs. I didn't know whether anger, anxiety, depression, blame, or emotional volatility would be waiting on the other side of a conversation.

Like many children raised in unpredictable environments, I became incredibly skilled at adapting.

I learned to read a room.

I learned to read tone.

I learned to read facial expressions.

I learned to anticipate emotional weather before the storm arrived.

My sister and I became experts at navigating shifting moods, changing rules, and conflicting expectations between two very different households.

What I didn't learn was how to express my own needs.

Because in many ways, there was no room for them.

I quickly learned that speaking up often led to being dismissed, invalidated, blamed, or shut down.

So I stopped.

Or at least, I stopped expressing myself in healthy ways.

When Emotions Have Nowhere To Go

The emotions didn't disappear.

They simply found another outlet.

For me, they surfaced through risk-taking behaviour, poor choices, unhealthy relationships, anger, rebellion, and eventually using alcohol and substances as a way to

numb what I didn't know how to process.

I wasn't trying to be reckless.

I was trying to regulate.

I simply didn't have the tools.

I remember sitting in a psychologist's office as a teenager, desperately trying to

understand what was happening inside me.

The anxiety.

The overwhelm.

The emotional chaos.

The feeling that I was somehow different.

Yet many of those early signs were dismissed as normal teenage emotions.

And so I continued carrying emotions that felt too big to hold and nowhere safe to place them.

The Moment Everything Changed

Years later, after enough painful mirrors had shown up in my life, I reached a point where

I became exhausted by my own patterns.

I was tired of seeing the same themes repeat.

The same wounds.

The same relationship dynamics.

The same emotional reactions.

The same stories.

Eventually I had to face a difficult truth:

My emotional state no longer belonged to my parents.

It no longer belonged to my childhood.

It no longer belonged to the people who had hurt me.

It belonged to me.

And while that was confronting, it was also incredibly liberating.

Because if it belonged to me, then I had the power to change it.

Vulnerability Was The Next Lesson

What came next wasn't healing.

Not immediately.

What came next was vulnerability.

And vulnerability was far more uncomfortable than blame.

Because blame allows us to keep pointing outward.

Vulnerability asks us to look inward.

I had spent years becoming fiercely independent.

Self-sufficient.

Capable.

Strong.

I believed that needing people was a weakness.

I believed that showing emotion made me vulnerable in a way that wasn't safe.

I believed that if I could do everything myself, nobody could let me down.

The problem was that self-sufficiency had become armour.

And armour protects you from pain.

But it also protects you from connection.

The Deep Soul Retrieval

Some people call it being single. But for me it was soul retrieval.

The six years between relationships became a sacred season of remembering who I was

beneath the wounds, conditioning, and survival.

A season of learning who I was underneath the coping mechanisms.

Underneath the survival strategies.

Underneath the conditioning.

For the first time, I learned how to sit with my emotions instead of running from them.

I learned to ask:

What am I actually feeling?

What is this emotion trying to tell me?

Where have I felt this before?

And more often than not, I discovered that what I thought was about the present

moment was actually connected to something much older.

Something unresolved.

Something that had been waiting patiently to be acknowledged.

Forgiveness Changed Everything

One of the greatest gifts of this journey was understanding my parents differently.

Not excusing their behaviour.

Not dismissing the impact it had.

But understanding that they simply didn't have the tools themselves.

And somewhere in that understanding, forgiveness emerged.

The resentment I had carried for years started to soften.

The burden of constantly pointing the finger disappeared.

And my energy could finally return to where it belonged:

Myself.

I once came across a quote that said:

"You may not be responsible for your trauma, but you are responsible for your healing."

That sentence changed everything.

Testing The Edges

As I continued to heal, something else began to emerge.

Certainty.

Not certainty in the world.

Not certainty in other people.

Certainty in myself.

I learned that vulnerability isn't simply about expressing emotion.

It's about trusting yourself enough to remain present when emotion arises.

It's about knowing who you are.

What you value.

What you need.

What you stand for.

And then communicating that honestly.

Which brings me to this month's theme:

Testing the edges to find out where you stop and someone else begins.

Because this is where healing evolves.

At some point, growth stops being about understanding yourself in isolation.

It becomes about allowing another person close enough to witness who you truly are.

Close enough to challenge your fears.

Close enough to test your trust.

Close enough to show you where your boundaries end and connection begins.

Not through dependency.

Not through losing yourself.

But through learning how to remain fully yourself while letting someone else stand beside you.

Where Healing Leads

For many of us, healing begins by learning how to stand alone.

But eventually, healing asks something different of us.

It asks us to let ourselves be seen.

To trust.

To receive support.

To communicate.

To soften.

To allow someone else to meet us where our own capacity currently ends.

Not because we're weak.

But because we're human.

And perhaps that is one of the most beautiful parts of healing.

Realising that strength isn't found in never needing anyone.

It's found in knowing yourself deeply enough that you can safely let someone in.

And trusting that who you are remains intact when you do.

Until next month,

Phoebe x

A Centred Mind