“But I had a good childhood…”
If you’ve ever found yourself saying this — and still felt anxious, stuck, disconnected, or exhausted — you’re not alone. I hear it often, from confused and unhappy clients who can’t figure out why they feel so bad.
Many of the people I work with can’t point to anything “bad enough” in their past. No obvious trauma. No abuse, violence, absent parents and so on.
Just a sense that something isn’t right. And that confusion can be almost as painful as the symptoms themselves, especially when everyone on the outside can’t understand why you’re struggling so much.
When Life Looks Fine — But Feels Hard
On the surface, everything might appear okay. You may have had:
Loving parents
Stability
Education and opportunity
A family that “did their best”
Yet inside, you might recognise some of these patterns:
A constant low-level anxiety, even when nothing is wrong
Feeling responsible for other people’s emotions
Struggling to relax, switch off, or enjoy what you’ve built
A harsh inner critic that never seems satisfied
Overthinking conversations, decisions, or relationships
A tendency to push yourself — then burn out
Feeling unseen or misunderstood, even by people close to you
A sense that you’re always “managing” yourself
Being the weird one, the one that doesn’t fit in…
None of this means you’re broken.
It means your nervous system learned to adapt early.
How These Patterns Begin
When we’re young, we’re constantly scanning our environment for clues. This is when we’re forming our beliefs about the people around us, ourselves and the world — our nervous system absorbs the information and adapts to it.
Maybe you learned that:
Being easy made life smoother
Achievement brought approval, affection, praise and love
Your feelings were inconvenient or overwhelming
You needed to stay strong, positive, or independent
Other people’s needs came first
Your system likely did exactly what it was meant to do. It adjusted.
Those adaptations may have helped you belong, succeed, or stay connected back then — but as an adult, they often show up as anxiety, self-doubt, people-pleasing, or emotional shutdown.
Not because anything is wrong with you, but because your system is still running old safety programmes.
“I Know This… So Why Can’t I Change It?”
Because you can’t think your way out of a nervous system response.
You can understand your patterns. You can talk about them. You can even see them happening in real time.
And still… your body reacts before your mind can intervene.
That’s because these responses aren’t conscious choices. They’re nervous system responses.
Insight alone doesn’t always reach that level.
How EFT Helps
EFT works directly with the nervous system, which is why it can be so effective when talk-based approaches may fail. EFT helps your system feel safe now.
Through gentle tapping and attuned language, we work with:
The anxiety that lives in the body
The pressure to perform or please
The inner tension that never quite switches off
The parts of you that learned to stay small, strong, or invisible
As the nervous system settles, those old patterns start to soften.
You don’t have to force confidence. You don’t have to override fear. You don’t have to “fix” yourself.
Change happens because your system no longer believes it’s under threat.
You Don’t Need a Trauma Story to Need Support
If you’ve ever minimised your struggles because “others had it worse,” if you’ve wondered why life feels harder than it should, if you’re tired of coping instead of living —
That’s enough.
You don’t need to justify your pain. You don’t need to explain why it’s there.
You just need a way to feel safer in yourself.
And that is something that, together, we can work with.