Preface

There are moments in life that quietly divide everything into before and after. You don’t always recognize them when they arrive.

They come disguised as ordinary days. But something shifts—a loss, a betrayal, an unraveling—and the life you were living is no longer the one you’re left with.

This is a story of such a divide. Not just a single moment, but a cluster of them—colliding, cascading—until the life I’d spent years building was gone.

It’s a story about how love found me. How it transformed me. And how, when I lost that love, everything I believed about who I was—and how life worked—began to collapse.

But this isn’t just a story of love and loss. It’s a story of attachment: what it means to be seen, held, chosen… and what it means when those bonds are broken. When the person who once reached for you in the dark stops reaching altogether.

As a child, I knew emotional deprivation. I knew how to hide, how to adapt, how to disappear. But I didn’t know how to want. I didn’t know what it meant to be loved.

Then I met Celta. And then Lynn.

Through these women, I experienced something extraordinary: a love that saw me. A love that made me believe I belonged. I became a therapist. I built a life. I tasted joy, purpose, and secure attachment.

And then, in the summer of 2000, everything fell apart. My partner’s health failed. My clients turned on me. My career collapsed. And the emotional scaffolding that had kept me upright for years was suddenly gone.

This book is told in two parts.

Part I is about becoming—through love, through healing, through connection.

Part II is about breaking—through loss, through trauma, through grief.

This is not a tidy recovery story. It is a story of dissociation, endurance, and the long ache of Complex-PTSD. It’s about trying to navigate the wreckage of a once-stable life, and wondering if hope—once lost—can ever be trusted again.