As for many of us, love and hardship stood side by side in what I grew up in, and some patterns were passed down long before I could choose them. My childhood held love and care, but also depression, addiction, and psychological abuse — and the strategies I developed to get through daily life were helpful then, even as they have caused a great deal of suffering later on.

For many years my life ran along parallel tracks. A good education and a relatively successful career. A Master's degree in language technology from Uppsala University, student life and good friends. But alcohol and drugs were often present on the weekends, and until my early thirties I belonged to the inner circle of a football-related subculture marked by loyalty and belonging. That brotherhood became the family I never had growing up, and I was willing to pay a high price to belong. In the end I chose to walk away — but by then it had already taken its toll and left serious consequences. In a later chapter I built my own business as an IT consultant — with audit assignments in the public sector and several development teams that I started and successfully led. But intoxication and drug use remained part of my lifestyle, and I often wondered why I couldn't stop — why not even becoming a parent got me to break the pattern: the unhealthy behaviours and the ongoing betrayal of myself and those closest to me. I was a mystery to myself, a riddle I stood before with no answers.
What was wrong with me, and who could help me?

So who am I, really? And what were the answers to those questions?

For a long time I fumbled for tools, and for an understanding of why I felt and acted the way I did. I carried a longing for a mentor — someone outside myself who could guide me and dissolve what felt so confusing, complex, and painful. I tried ordinary talk therapy and CBT, and explored other therapeutic approaches and less conventional methods — but without reaching any lasting results. The mystery remained, and I often felt helpless and without answers.

The answers I had sought for so long finally began to take shape when I found NARM. In therapy and my own work I slowly, and in relationship, began to explore how what I carried with me from my early years shapes my experience of reality here and now — and to meet and transform my old survival strategies: shutdown, difficulties in close relationships, the feeling that life "just happens to me" and of standing on the sidelines. Most clearly in my Connection style: checking out and dissociating, intellectualising, keeping up a surface speed — active on the outside but without real contact or grounding. And in my Trust style: controlling situations, at times seeing people more as "objects" than as real persons, wanting the upper hand; feeling better than others — while in fact I was carrying an at least equally large misunderstanding: that I was worthless and broken.

As I catch sight of those patterns and let go of the old identifications and the images of who I should be, I discover more and more of who I actually am. Daring to hope, to feel deeply, and to come into contact with my heart. Understanding that I have the right to exist even when I say no. Building a more robust sense of who I am — and meeting what was there all along: that everything is, in fact, okay. That I am okay, and always have been. The destination was there from the start — "coming home" is simply peeling away what was laid on top. And there the old questions begin to find their answers — not as a final verdict, but as an exploration still under way: that there was never anything wrong with me, and that the one I was looking for, to be helped and guided, is myself. My calling is to break the line of the generational trauma that runs through my family.

It is from this lived experience that I meet you.