From Surviving To Understanding: Story 8

“What employers often saw as inconsistency was actually someone fighting to keep going while carrying trauma, undiagnosed ADHD, and what I now believe are autistic traits.”

People See The Person You Become.

They rarely see the child who shaped you.

For most of my life, I believed I was lazy, oversensitive, disorganised, emotional and simply not good enough. I spent more than forty years believing I was broken, without ever understanding why.

This is the story of how I finally discovered I wasn’t broken at all.

I was born into an Army family in Lisburn, Northern Ireland. Before I was old enough to remember much, we’d moved to Germany, then York, before finally settling in Shrewsbury.

Home wasn’t physically abusive, but it was often unpredictable.

As a child, I learnt very early that emotions weren’t something we talked about.

They were something we survived.

I can see now that everyone in my family was doing the best they could with the understanding and resources they had at the time. Like many families, there were stresses and struggles that weren’t always spoken about.

Without realising it, I became hypervigilant.

I was always watching.

Always listening.

Always trying to judge what mood everyone was in.

My nervous system rarely felt completely at ease.

When I was eleven, everything changed.

My parents separated.

Most children never have to answer the question, “Which parent do you want to live with?”

I did.

At eleven years old, I had to choose between my mum and my dad.

No child should ever have to carry that responsibility.

I stayed with my dad and my sister.

While I stayed in Shrewsbury, my mum moved back to York.

From the age of twelve, I regularly travelled the 150-mile journey to see her on my own, changing trains at Manchester before arriving in York.

I often think about that little boy sitting alone on those trains.

He looked independent.

Inside, he was carrying confusion, grief and loneliness that he had absolutely no idea how to process.

What I remember most wasn’t the travelling itself.

It was missing my mum.

Every visit ended with another goodbye, and every journey home meant leaving her behind again.

At that age, I didn’t know how to explain the sadness I felt.

The journeys were long, lonely and sometimes daunting, but every mile was worth it because it meant I got to spend time with her.

It took me years to understand just how painful that period really was.

Nobody explained trauma.

Nobody taught me emotional regulation.

Nobody helped me understand why I felt so overwhelmed by life.

So I did what many children do.

I buried it.

School brought its own challenges.

I wore glasses from a young age and had a squint that caused double vision until surgery in my twenties. I had two webbed toes that I hid whenever swimming lessons came around because I was terrified of being laughed at.

When I was eleven, I also had one of my testicles removed because it hadn’t developed properly.

To everyone else, these were medical issues.

To me, they became evidence that there was something wrong with me.

I convinced myself no girl would ever love me.

To hide how insecure I felt, I became the class joker.

If people were laughing, maybe they wouldn’t notice how lonely I really was.

Football became my escape.

For ninety minutes, my mind became quiet.

It was one of the few places where I truly felt free.

Away from football, I constantly felt different.

My brain never stopped scanning.

I overthought everything.

I replayed conversations.

I forgot things.

I struggled to concentrate.

I didn’t realise I was masking almost every day.

I learnt to copy other people.

To smile when I felt overwhelmed.

To pretend I understood.

To hide how exhausted I really was.

That mask became so convincing that eventually I believed it myself.

I found gambling.

People often think gambling addiction is about money.

Mine wasn’t.

It was about escape.

For a few hours I didn’t have to think.

I didn’t have to feel.

I could forget the shame, the anxiety and the belief that I was never enough.

But gambling soon became another prison.

I lost wages.

Built debt.

Lied to people I loved.

Hid from the world.

The addiction wasn’t the cause of my pain.

It was the way I coped with pain I didn’t yet understand.

At eighteen, I entered a relationship that would last twenty-five years.

At the time, I believed this was simply what relationships were like. I spent years trying harder, loving harder and blaming myself whenever things went wrong. Looking back, I can see how living with uncertainty and repeated breaches of trust slowly chipped away at my confidence until I no longer knew who I was.

Without realising it, I was living permanently in survival mode.

When the relationship ended in 2021, it happened in a way that completely overwhelmed my nervous system.

One of the hardest moments came when my youngest daughter had to tell me that her mum wasn’t coming home.

No child should ever have to carry news like that.

As a father, knowing she had been placed in that position was heartbreaking.

Everything inside me collapsed.

I couldn’t think.

I couldn’t sleep.

I couldn’t eat properly.

I struggled to function.

Only years later did I understand that my nervous system had become trapped in fight, flight and freeze. I became consumed by trying to make sense of what had happened and by a desperate hope that somehow I could put my family back together.

During that time, I often chose to spend long periods away from the family home. It wasn’t because I wanted to be away from my daughters. Quite the opposite. I loved them too much to let them be caught in arguments and conflict wherever I could avoid it. Walking away often felt like the only way I knew to protect them from seeing or hearing things children should never have to witness.

It broke me inside.

Every moment I spent away from my girls hurt more than I can put into words, and that pain stayed with me for a very long time.

If there’s one thing I hope they always understand, it’s that they have never stopped being the centre of my world.

Every decision I made during that period, whether right or wrong, came from a place of loving them and wanting to protect them.

Before I had begun to process any of that, life brought more grief.

My best friend died from cancer after keeping his illness private until the very end.

A few years later, my sister died from breast cancer.

I hadn’t yet understood the trauma I was already carrying, yet life kept asking my nervous system to carry even more.

Looking at my CV, it would be easy to assume I lacked commitment.

I’ve worked in more than twenty jobs.

I’ve struggled with attendance.

I’ve experienced repeated burnout.

I’ve battled overwhelming fatigue for as long as I can remember.

What employers often saw as inconsistency was actually someone trying to keep going while carrying trauma, undiagnosed ADHD and what I now believe are autistic traits.

There were strengths too.

My brain sees patterns quickly.

I love numbers.

Mental maths often comes naturally.

But ask me to organise paperwork, remember instructions, prioritise tasks or write under pressure, and my mind often goes completely blank.

For years I thought that meant I wasn’t intelligent.

Now I understand executive functioning.

For most of my adult life, I couldn’t manage my finances independently.

Between ADHD, trauma and gambling addiction, budgeting felt impossible.

My dad, and later partners, helped manage my money because I simply couldn’t keep on top of it.

It’s only in recent years that I’ve fully appreciated how much my dad quietly carried for me. He wasn’t someone who spoke openly about emotions, but he showed his love through what he did. Whenever life fell apart, he was there. He helped me financially more times than I deserved and never asked for recognition. Looking back, I don’t think I’ve ever properly thanked him, and I honestly don’t know where my life would have ended up without him.

The shame I carried because of that was enormous.

Everything changed when I was diagnosed with ADHD.

For the first time in my life, I wasn’t asking, “What’s wrong with me?”

I was asking, “What happened to me – and how does my brain actually work?”

That single shift changed everything.

It didn’t erase the past, but it finally gave me a map to understand it.

Over the past two years, I’ve invested thousands of pounds in counselling and therapy.

I’ve learnt about trauma, attachment, masking, emotional regulation and the nervous system.

I’ve realised that many of the behaviours I hated in myself were survival responses.

My anger was often fear.

My withdrawal was overwhelm.

My forgetfulness wasn’t laziness.

My exhaustion wasn’t weakness.

My reactions weren’t because I was a bad person.

They were the responses of a nervous system that had spent decades trying to stay safe.

In 2023, I entered a relationship that became an important emotional turning point in my life. I won’t name her, because this part of my story isn’t about the relationship itself – it’s about what I learnt.

For the first time, someone reflected back parts of me I had never understood: my intensity, my sensitivity, my overwhelm, and the way my nervous system could shift suddenly when I felt unsafe or confused. At the time, I didn’t have the language for any of it. I didn’t understand trauma responses, attachment patterns or ADHD dysregulation.

The relationship ended in December 2024, and although the ending was painful, it became a catalyst for growth. It helped me look honestly at myself – not with shame, but with curiosity. It helped me realise how much of my behaviour over the years had been shaped by survival, not character.

I am grateful for that chapter.

Not because it lasted, but because it helped me begin the work of understanding myself.

Sometimes people come into your life not to stay, but to help you grow.

She was one of those people.

And today, I am in a relationship built on honesty, communication, safety and emotional understanding – something I can appreciate fully because of the work I’ve done since.

Today, I work hard every day to regulate rather than react.

Walking.

Breathwork.

Mindfulness.

Music.

Therapeutic support.

Learning to slow down.

Learning to notice what my body is telling me before it reaches crisis.

And now, after years of trying to manage everything alone, I’m about to begin ADHD medication – something I hope will support the work I’m already doing. I don’t expect it to fix everything, but I’m hopeful it will help me find more clarity, more balance and more consistency in my daily life.

Not to blame anyone.

Not to seek sympathy.

But because understanding changed my life.

Before I finish, there are three people I want to acknowledge.

To my dad, thank you. Thank you for always being there when I needed help, even when I made life difficult. You may not always have found it easy to say how you felt, but your actions spoke louder than words ever could. I will always be grateful for everything you did for me.

To my mum, thank you for every hug, every visit and every mile that brought us back together. It took me years to understand how much those years apart affected us both, and how much those journeys to York meant to me.

And to my daughters, I hope one day you read this and understand one thing above all else: you have always been loved more than words can ever describe. Every decision I made wasn’t perfect, but I never stopped trying to protect you, and I never stopped loving you. You have been my greatest reason to heal, to grow and to become a better man.

If sharing my story helps even one person feel less alone, encourages one parent to look beyond behaviour, or helps one child realise they are not broken, then every step of this journey will have meant something.

Because understanding changed my life.

And maybe, somewhere, it will help someone realise they were never broken in the first place.