Your First Visit

Walking through this door may be the hardest thing you’ve done in a long time.

It takes courage to step into an unfamiliar room.

It takes courage to sit among strangers and it takes courage to face the possibility that the way you learned to survive might no longer be the way you want to live.

For many people, that first step into a meeting is filled with a quiet storm: the racing heart, the shallow breath, the pull between wanting to leave and wanting to finally feel understood. It’s a feeling that sits in the chest like a weight. And if you feel it, you’re not alone.

Every person who eventually found their seat here has felt that same nervousness.

Every person has sat where you are sitting now and wondered, Do I belong?

Every person has held back words because they felt too heavy, too risky, too raw, or too soaked in shame to speak aloud.

And behind that silence sits an even more complicated truth:

How do we talk about the people we love?

They may be the ones who raised us.

Or the person we married.

Or the partners we’ve chosen again and again.

Or even the children we’ve tried our hardest to protect.

These are the people we still carry.

The people we defend, even at our own expense. The people we know may never understand why we’re sitting in a room like this.

It can feel like betrayal to even begin speaking the truth.

But here, we see things differently.

Naming what shaped us is not disloyalty.

It is not an attack. It is not a turning-away from those we love.

It is the first act of turning toward ourselves.

The beginning of honesty.

The beginning of freedom.

The beginning of healing.

Silence may have kept the peace in our families, but that same silence works against us. It carved out our fears. It shaped our patterns. It etched our pain into the very way we relate, respond and survive.