“The wound is where the light enters.” ~ Rumi
I grew up in a council house in the 1970s, in a world where children were seen but not heard.
They kicked us out in the morning and told us to come back when the street lights came on. On the surface it seemed normal. But what happened behind closed doors was not normal at all.
There were no words for it then, but I always felt different.
People thought I was shy. And I was. But it was more than that. Being among people was an overwhelming feeling, like I was constantly on the edge, searching for something I couldn’t name. I didn’t feel safe, even when nothing obvious was wrong.
My parents divorced when I was six years old.
My mom left and started a new life with my sister. I stayed there with my father. I didn’t understand the whole picture at the time – just that everything had changed overnight.
Before he left, my father told me that if I went with him, he would kill himself.
I believed him.
As a child, you don’t question these things. You take them for truth. And so I stayed, carrying a weight that no child should carry—the belief that someone’s life depended on me.
Looking back, that’s when the fear really took hold.
My father was deeply hurt by the breakup. He drank a lot and did not work for a long time. At the time, I didn’t understand his pain – only how it manifested itself.
Anger.
I became the place where this anger landed.
He was waiting for me for a few days when I got home from school. If I was even a few minutes late, they would hit me. It wasn’t a one-time incident. It became a pattern. Something I learned to anticipate, even if I didn’t know what I was doing wrong.
You start living differently when you grow up like this.
Always alert. Always be careful. Always try to fix it.
And somehow you always feel like you don’t.
My father was not a bad man. I can see it now. But he wasn’t able to be the father I needed him to be. There was no warmth, no comfort, no sense of security.
I couldn’t sit in the living room.
Most days I stayed in my bedroom with nothing to do but look out the window and imagine another life. I built whole worlds in my head to escape what I was in.
I had friends, but I was always an outsider. I couldn’t go out as often as they did. I was slowly falling behind.
At night, the fear came in a way I didn’t understand. I wet the bed until I was twelve. I was ashamed without knowing why.
I already felt something… bad.
I found my first escape when I was eleven or twelve years old.
Butane.
I stole lighter refills from a local store. The shopkeeper left a small window open behind the register and I reached in and grabbed them. I sprayed it on my sweater and inhaled.
For the first time I was able to leave my head.
It didn’t stop there. Glue. Petrol. Then, by the time I was fourteen, cannabis and amphetamines.
It wasn’t about getting high. Not really.
It was about not feeling what I felt.
This became my life for the next twenty-five years.
Getting out of my head wasn’t just something I did, it was something I needed. Materials became a daily habit and eventually took over everything.
I lost friends. I lost my way. I lost my sense of who I was.
But strangely, I also found something that had never been there before.
Debt.
The people I was with became my world. In this chaos, I felt understood. There were no expectations. There is no pressure to be anything other than what I was.
For the first time, I didn’t feel strange.
And that made it even harder to leave.
Because how can you walk away from the only place you’ve ever felt accepted?
Then, at the end of the eighties, something changed again.
Ecstasy has arrived.
And with that came something that I had never really experienced before – what I felt was love, connection, openness. For the first time I felt close to people. I felt part of something.
In other ways, it was overwhelming.
Beautiful. Strong. Addictive.
I didn’t want it to end.
But it wasn’t real—not in the way I needed it to be. It was a chemically created version of something I had been searching for all my life.
And once you have felt this, even artificially, it is difficult to return to the void.
So I stayed.
For years.
It took a long time for something to change.
There wasn’t a single moment that changed everything. It was slower than that. Small. It’s almost imperceptible at first.
But somewhere along the way, I began to realize that the life I was living wasn’t the only option.
Maybe… just maybe… there was something else.
And more importantly, I ignored it.
Life has been trying to show me a different path for a long time. But I wasn’t ready to listen.
As soon as I did, things started to change.
I started to change.
Walking away from this world was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Not only because of the materials, but because I had to face everything that I had tried to avoid for years.
The fear. The loneliness. The feeling that I don’t belong anywhere.
And the truth is that along the way I hurt those who cared about me.
This is what I had to sit with.
But I don’t regret it like I once did.
I carry understanding.
Because something unexpected happened when I stopped running.
I began to understand myself.
I began to see that I was not broken.
I simply adapted to an environment that did not feel safe.
The anxiety, the withdrawal, the need to escape—it all made sense when viewed through this lens.
My body was trying to protect me the whole time.
This realization changed everything.
Because when you stop seeing yourself as the problem, you can finally start working with yourself instead of against yourself.
Now, at the age of fifty-six, my life does not look like it did then.
I live on the other side of the world. I have a family that I never thought I would have. I built something meaningful out of experiences that I thought had destroyed me.
But more importantly, I feel something I didn’t think was possible.
The feeling of security in myself.
That doesn’t mean life is perfect. It isn’t.
There are still hard days. There are still moments when old patterns try to creep in.
But now I understand where they are coming from.
And that changes how I react.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this:
What appears to be “brokenness” is often an adaptation.
The things we condemn ourselves for—anxiety, coping mechanisms, ways of escaping—often started as ways of survival.
And survival is nothing to be ashamed of.
This must be understood.
My story is a success story – but not because everything turned out perfectly.
Success, because now I can see the way out.
And if you’re in a place where you feel you don’t have one, I want you to know:
There is.
Your life can improve if you start to empathize with yourself and even take small steps towards change.
And when you do, something starts to change.
You start moving.
You’re starting to heal.
And eventually you start building a life that feels like your own.
About Matt Little
Matt Little is the founder of Pesona Jiwa, a private wellness retreat in Bali that focuses on healing the nervous system and trauma recovery. After decades of overcoming addiction and emotional struggles, she now supports others in reconnecting with their sense of safety and self. More information: pesonajiwa.com/nervous-system-regulation/ or find more at pesonajiwa.com/
