How Healing Childhood Trauma Changed Everything
In this interview, host Alexandra Niel speaks with therapist and trauma survivor Sarah Grace about her life story and how healing childhood trauma transformed her. Sarah recounts growing up in northern England, enduring sexual abuse by her stepfather from ages 4 to 18, and the lasting subconscious programs that led her to repeat unhealthy relationship patterns, people‑pleasing, and a massive financial scam that stole over £110,000 of her nursing pension. She explains how the scam mirrored the grooming dynamics of her childhood abuse, illustrating how unresolved trauma can surface in adulthood. Sarah describes the therapeutic work that helped her break these cycles, focusing on trauma‑informed approaches such as EMDR, hypnosis, and rapid subconscious re‑programming that avoid retraumatization. She outlines common signs of unresolved trauma—people‑pleasing, anxiety, depression, addiction, lack of boundaries—and how they manifest in mid‑life. Throughout, she emphasizes the importance of safe therapeutic spaces, taking responsibility for one’s story, and not giving up on love. The conversation ends with practical advice for listeners: seek trauma‑informed help, recognize patterns, and cultivate self‑compassion while maintaining supportive relationships.
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Hello, heroines! This is Alex. I have the pleasure today of bringing somebody that I met through a different group, Sarah Grace, and we kind of just hit it off, and I was really taken by the work that she does, and I thought it was super relevant for you in this group, so I wanted to bring her in. So Sarah, why don't we get started and tell us where you're from and what you do?
Oh, so the, um, where I'm from, uh, I am originally I'm from the north of England, hence the Geordie twang, but I live in southern Spain. My party line about when people, when people say, well, oh, what took you to Spain, is that I wanted to have an adventure. The truth is I ran away. I ran away after, I ran away from a difficult relationship, from a difficult relationship with my ex-husband and from a difficult relationship with my mum and a difficult relationship with my past. So I relocated to Spain 21 years ago, been here 21 years ago, and the, the, the lovely bit is I have finally— I'm on my fourth marriage. Always said I would never ever marry again, and unfortunately, I, I always thought the man that I met, he here would be the victim of my stubbornness, because this man is some sort of angel, uh, my soulmate, something. And I always thought, well, I'm never going to have the opportunity to marry him because I don't do that anymore. Uh, however, I have healed so much of my trauma that when he asked me, it was the easiest yes ever.
That's so nice because I hear you say that and I think about my boyfriend because we're always like, you know what, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And we've been together 13 years, we love what we have, and it's like, why ruin a perfectly good thing, right? So it's nice to hear that you got to the point where you're now like embracing you know, in a way, the institution versus being like, we are like, yeah, like this.
That said, we did kick back because we got married in COVID. We got married and we ran away to Gibraltar. I live in Spain now, and we ran away to Gibraltar in 2020 to get married there because nobody could come. It was just about us and our love. And thankfully, the universe meant uh, like orchestrated that my daughter, who I adore, and her fiancé, who is beautiful, were living in Spain at the time. So we ran away to Gibraltar, got married in COVID with a mask on, the whole caboodle. And she and he were the only people there. And it was the most— of all of my many weddings, it was the best, best, because it was just about us. It was just about the love. And it was what it really means to connect to somebody soul to soul as an independent woman, as an independent man, but coming together because we actually really love being together.
And it sounds like you guys coming together was like 1 1 3.
Oh, absolutely. At least 3.
Yes. Okay, good. Because that's, that's what it's supposed to be, right? We're supposed to get together because we enhance each other and we make each other's world and our world better, right? You don't want to be in a situation where it's like, yeah, contentious all the time.
And, and there are— I'll share a bit about my story, but the thing that really persuaded me that he was the man for, for me was how he never needed anything from me, and I never needed anything from him. We just made each other happy. And since then He's really— not that anybody has to prove themselves, but he has so proven himself. I was scammed last year in 2024, 3rd of August. I realized I'd been scammed, and this ties in with my story because, okay, we'll backtrack. I was, uh, I was sexually abused by my stepfather between the ages of 4 and 18. My mum left my real dad who doted on me, fell in love with my horrible stepfather, controlling, horrible man, and I— from the minute he was with her, he was abusing me. Fast-track back a little to the 3rd of August last year, I was scammed. I was scammed because the patterns of attachment, of people pleasing, of trusting, of looking up to that authoritative male figure without actually looking at the undercurrent were still there. I was groomed. I was groomed by him over 3 and a half months in exactly the same way that my stepfather groomed me. And my huge message to anybody listening is, if you don't heal your childhood trauma, even if you think, "Fuck it, I'm done, I don't want to think about it, I'm over that, I'm hyper— I'm independent." No, you're hyper-independent. "I am strong, I can deal with all this." that will get you into trouble. It did me all of my life. Even in this marriage with this wonderful man, I'm kind of the boss, and he accepts that. That's kind of the dynamic we've got. He provides the fun, I provide the security financially. And I didn't discuss anything to do with this investment I was making. I didn't discuss it with him. Hinted at it, didn't go into it with him, and the poor bugger, he couldn't ask me because that was the dynamic that Sarah knows what she's doing, she's strong, she's capable, she's savvy. I'm intelligent and I am, but I was taken for a complete ride by this what looked like an extremely legitimate company, and I did my due diligence, I did all the things you're supposed to do, I was checking out the wrong company because it was a cloned website and he had cloned himself. So everything I was checking wasn't him, wasn't the company. And Graham, his thing that upsets him now is, why didn't I say to you, Sarah, I knew you were being scammed. I just didn't realize to the extent. And the extent was my entire nursing pension. I borrowed money. I borrowed money from family. I borrowed money from banks to pay this person. I thought I was investing in a very legitimate, which, and again, aligned with my values, renewable energy company. I got all the documents. I got everything from them. It looked totally legitimate. And it was backed up by Zurich Insurance. And, you know, there was a— it was clever. But Graham had got the hint that something was wrong because he used to ring me at night, used to ring me in the evening when I was tired. The things that he would say to me, I used to listen, and it wasn't right, but I didn't have the confidence to say because I'm so capable. And survivors of childhood trauma create this persona of being so independent, so capable, so I've got this covered. And you know what, if the scam hadn't involved the astronomical amount of money that it involved, I'd probably have sorted it out and I wouldn't have learned the lessons that I needed to learn. So I was scammed out of, in, in English money, over £110,000, which was my entire nursing pension, uh, money I'd borrowed, all, all of this stuff. So We have both in this, we've grown together, and I realized, because I was completely and utterly devastated after the scam, I wasn't a little bit upset, I, I went, right, and if somebody had given me an off button, I'd have turned it. And for 3 days, I was in this completely dysregulated state where I couldn't even turn my laptop on. I hadn't got the cognitive ability and I work online, I help, you know, I'm a therapist, I, you know, sorted. Nope, couldn't do any of it, couldn't even turn my phone on, couldn't find my phone, didn't know where I was half the time. And he like walked around the house and watched me constantly and made sure I was okay because the guy had violated my personal space in that I had let him into my laptop, I'd let him into my phone. Exactly the same as I had let my stepfather into my body. Not that I had a choice, not that I had a choice the second time around. And I realized, I saw, thank goodness, on the third day I saw the, um, the mirroring between that first experience of being violated and being groomed and this second experience. And what it's done for me, I, I don't want pity. Yeah, I want people to be informed. And if anybody wants an incredibly powerful, um, Zoom session on how to spot a scammer, I will send it to them. Just ask me. Uh, we did one the other day with a friend of mine. What I want people to know is that these patterns repeat. When you have been divorced, you choose a different man in the same skin. Patterns repeat until we undo the subconscious program that is driving us to choose what we're choosing. And so this, this scam, it really was incredibly devastating. But I realized what I can— on the day 3 of being a zombie, I had a flash and I thought, oh my goodness, I feel like I'm a child again. And something in me went, you are, you're that 7-year-old again, and what he has done to you is what my stepfather did to me, but this time I'm an adult, this time I have resources, this time I can do something differently. And so I, I don't really recollect exactly what I thought, but I thought I know that the conclusion I came to was, I need, I need help. I need help here. These are subconscious programs that I can't deal with, and I'm a really skilled therapist, but I can't deal with my own shit. We can't. We need help. So I reached out to a colleague. We did an EMDR session on day 3, and I walked out of this room, looked at my husband, and he went, oh my God, you're back. 'Your eyes are alive.' And I was like, 'Right, yeah, let's get this sorted.' And because I was able to find the subconscious pattern that had been activated by the betrayal of this scammer, I was able to do something differently. And what it took me back to was it took me back to when I was 7 years old and my stepfather had got me to lie to my mum so that he could keep me off school with him and up the ante on what he did to me. And in that betrayal of me to my mum, like lying to mum, it made me absolutely embed the programs that I'm not worthy, I'm not lovable, I'm not enough, and I am a shameful being. And that scam cost me £110,000, but I freed myself from that program.
It was a hell of a therapy session.
The most expensive ever. My goodness.
What a gift.
Exactly. And you know what? We won't do the stuff till it gets bad enough. If it had been less, if it had been anything less, I'd have sorted it. But I couldn't. I was done. I was done. And it's been, to be honest, it has been the most— I'm, you know, a bit hard up, but it's actually been, for my being on this planet, as somebody who from the very depths of my heart needs to help people and help them heal their trauma, it's been mind-blowing and it's changed everything.
I can, I can see. And it's interesting because, you know, you often hear women saying, why do I keep dating the same losers?
Yes, right?
But that's because people go from relationship to real— and it's not women only, it's men and women go from one relationship to another hoping that the next relationship will fix whatever is going on when it's always an inside job. So I want to hear more about— tell— so you touched a little bit on, on your story. Tell us, tell us more about your story.
So from 4 to 18, I was sexually abused by my stepfather. He was a psychopathic tyrant, is the words I have now to describe him, and I loved him. He was, he was my dad, and he set me up to be played off against my mum. So what it— to validate what he was doing, I guess. And what it did was it created massive conflict between me and my mum. It set an imprint in my brain of the sort of man who felt familiar and comfortable and therefore safe, because that's how our brain works, was him. And I chose a husband with many of the traits that my stepfather had had. And in my nightmares, which is where the subconscious can come out, I would interchange my stepfather and my husband, and I couldn't differentiate. It was very messy in my dreams, nightmares, and they continued for years. They continued for years. They don't anymore. However, even after the scam, they haven't. But he absolutely fucked me up, basically. But I didn't let it show. I was strong, independent. I wasn't, you know, I just cracked on. I went off to be a nurse, um, at 18 years old. The way I got away was that this amazing woman, Beryl Hildreth, who I've never had the chance to thank really as a healed adult, said to me— she met me in town one day. I was in sixth form and she met me in town and she said 'If you don't leave him tonight, I'm going to tell the world what he's doing to you.' And those magic words meant I could save him by leaving him, and she gave me my freedom. So I escaped at 18, went off to be a nurse, uh, had a— I did the, uh, hyperachiever thing, uh, was very successful in nursing, was an accident and emergency nurse practitioner, did really well in my job, and squished it all down. On the other side of that, I know I got married early, had my children. He was an abusive man. In the little bit of time between meeting him and being free, sort of thing, I was incredibly promiscuous. And then when I left him, incredibly promiscuous, and I couldn't square that in me because it was like a, like a obsession, the chase to get the person, and that was power. It's only now, since in the last 8, 10 years since I've trained as a hypnotherapist and done loads of trauma therapy healing, that I've realized it was about the power. It was about taking the power back. It was about having control in a life that felt uncontrollable. I struggled with bulimia for a lot of years. Um, again, control, trying to control your own little world in a world which feels uncontrollable. So my story was, you know, fairly messed up for a long time, although on the outside everybody was like, oh, she's lovely, she's kind, she's, she's a great nurse, she's a great mum. They didn't know what was going on underneath.
Yeah, I want to go back a little bit to, uh, what you said about marriage, because you are in your fourth marriage. I'm curious, in the work that you did, did you do a little bit of work after each marriage, or did you go from marriage to marriage to marriage until you're like, wait a minute, something's not right, I gotta do some work? How did, how did that come about?
I was— this is the thing that's made it really hard to write my story because I am attempting, doing, I'm writing my story, The Thriving Overcomer of Incest, and it's tough because until the scam I never had that cathartic moment, and there has been at no point in my healing journey has there been a therapy or a person or anything that went boom and I saw the light. Never. And I think for most people that's how it happens. It's a peeling away of the layers over time. And after each relationship, I peeled back, peeled back more layers. And the last marriage, I mean, we had very frank conversations about— I don't do jealousy, and I was really open. And I— but he was a, he was a psychologist, and he he got in. And for me, it was kind of like the universe going, okay, you really want this relationship, let's give you— let's just tickle it a bit, let's see if you actually are healed. And I wasn't at that point. And that was about— that was 10 years ago, but it only lasted 2 years. So the amount of time that I put up with the shit was less over each amount of time. And I dove deeper and deeper and deeper. And finally, in 2020, when COVID happened and I had to do something different with my life and the way I was earning money and, and creating income, I realized, you know what, Sarah, it's time to step up. It's time to talk about the real you, the you that is scared to come out. She needs to come out. She needs to be vulnerable and open and, and share it. And since then, things have evolved. And I think for, for anybody who's been through a horrible divorce, it's like— something's happened to me recently, just in the last few weeks, where I found something out about my ex-husband, the father of my children. That is devastating and ties in with my story. I'm not going to go into any more detail, but the conflict that I'm feeling now is that— and I'm sure so many women feel this— the desire to protect our children yet be authentic. And it is an incredibly difficult juggling act. I'm navigating it there is help out there if, if I want it, but it's, it's like it's— I've got to process this. I have to feel where I'm at and, and you know what, trust my own inner wisdom because there comes a point on our healing journey where we don't need anybody else's advice. We need to come back into ourselves, into our truth and navigate it from there. And that's what's happening now.
Okay, so I, I wish you a good journey.
Um, in—
so repeating patterns is a sign of unresolved trauma?
Yes.
What, what else is a sign of unresolved trauma?
People pleasing. Okay, massive people pleasing. And I think a lot of the women that I work with find that they get to perimenopause, menopause, and suddenly they go, you know what, is this all there is to life? Because I am sick. I am sick of doing everything for everybody. And your kids grow up, and then suddenly you've got the in-laws and the parents and your friends and your work colleagues, and you, and you're the person who just goes, yeah, yeah, I'll do that, I'll do that, and yeah, you stay late, and you, and you just go, no. No, I'm fed up with this, but it's hard to find any help that will validate you, not judge you. And I believe so much of this is tied to childhood trauma because the way we survived— what people don't realize is there's a very, uh, fight, flight, and freeze are well-known survival mechanisms. Appease and fawn, they are devastating.
A piece and?
Fawn, like F-A-W-N.
Okay.
Talk a lot, talk a lot, talk a lot. So you get a lot of people who've been through trauma who talk and talk and talk about the trauma but don't do anything about it. They don't know where to go, or they just talk and talk and talk. It's kind of trying to self-regulate. The people pleasers amongst us, I mean, there's so many. I'm a recovering people pleaser. There's so many people pleasers, and it makes— on one level, it makes us really nice. But then there comes a point where in our midlife we go, I'm done with this. I— where's— where am I? Who? What?
What?
Me?
You know, I could not agree with you more. I think there's like something happens when you hit between 50 and 55 where there's a switch inside of you that gets flipped and you're like, screw this.
Yes.
Like, I no longer care what people think. I no longer, like, let them think or do whatever they want because I think we also realize that people are much too busy thinking about themselves than they are thinking about us, right? So I, like, I couldn't agree more with you. So you said patterns, people pleasing. What else?
Anxiety and depression. They— if you continue with the people pleasing, you, your nervous system will become completely overloaded and you'll shut down, and it'll— addiction, you, you, you'll reach for something to ease the pain. And because that's the only reason addicts are addicted to the thing they're addicted to, because we want relief from the pain. And who of us hasn't reached for too many gins when it's got tough? Who hasn't had a few more painkillers than they should have had? Because the pain of being you in your body and having to deal with everything you're dealing with just gets too much. So addiction, people pleasing, anxiety, depression, and that constant sense inside you that is really intangible, but that, oh, there's, there's got to be more. That kind of desperate emptiness, that bittersweet of the pain of life. And oh, that— there's no words really for it. It's a somatic feeling. It's a sensed feeling, but that there's got to be more to life than this.
I cannot tell you how many times I have said that in my life because I was just like, at the time I was working in corporate and corporate felt very heavy and it felt very, um, I don't know, it just started to not feel right. And I, the number of times that I said there's got to be more to life than this. Yeah.
And there is.
Yeah, no, yeah, totally, totally on board with that. Yeah.
But the thing is, we don't understand that those patterns that served us when we were a child that we're not even aware of— there's no guilt, no shame here, we don't know we're running them— but they come out in the anxiety, depression. People pleasing and lack of boundaries is a massive one because we keep saying yes and inside our body's going, no, I don't want and we get really resentful, and but we do it anyway, and then we stomp about and we get passive-aggressive, and that affects our relationships. That affects our relationships. And if we don't deal with the root cause, then we'll take it out on the person that— the people we actually love, and that's often our partner or our children. Yeah.
So when you work with women who come to you that are wanting to release whatever trauma is coursing through them. Um, tell us a little bit about what that looks like.
Yeah, so usually people come to me with quite like real life problems, like I'm arguing with my husband all the time, or I can't stand up to this bitch at work, but you know, I, I just find myself crumbling, or I can't put boundaries in place with my kids, you know, they're walking all over me, or the mother-in-law's, you know, making me do Christmas again. And it tends to be those things people come to me with because we don't tend to link up the dots, we don't join up the childhood trauma causing this. So it tends to be that. And what people do when people come to me, I think as soon as you meet me, you, you realize you're safe. That's the main thing. You're safe and you are in this space where I absolutely get you because I've lived some stuff. And you don't have to explain the ins and outs because I get it, and I can ask you questions and reflect back to you things that you're thinking in your head but you wouldn't say. So that elimination of all shame, because I've done things that, you know, I would never like to be played at my funeral, let us say. So the, the shame is huge when we've done what we had to do to survive. So there's that, oh my God, I've got to talk about that, then I've got to say that he did that, and then afterwards I did that, and I did that with him. So having safety— people come to me and they have safety, but the real work that we do once we've got that safety, once you've realized it's okay, I have a nervous system here that will help me regulate is I help you find the subconscious patterns that are no longer serving you. And it's very simple. I use hypnosis and EMDR, and we find the subconscious program that has served you so well for so many years, but now you've outgrown that survival pattern and it's, it's actually causing problems. So we don't need to dig into the past, we don't need to talk about it and talk about it. We go straight in like a ninja, find it, come out, reprogram.
That's what I do. And the beauty of that is it allows you to address it without reliving it.
Abs— so important.
Because I would assume— yeah, exactly. I would assume that having to talk about it at length—
yes, I did—
is, yeah, is reliving it.
Yeah, yeah, I went through traditional therapy. I think things have improved a bit, but there's still a lot of, uh, very non-trauma-informed therapists out there who think that by discussing what happened and understanding why it happened, it's going to stop the tooth from hurting.
It doesn't.
You need it out, you need the antibiotics. So that, that's the, that's the thing, and I think a lot of people are very frightened to come and— they know, like, we all know something happened. Not everybody, that's a fib. Most people know or have an inkling something happened that is deeply shameful and they don't want to talk about. When you realize you can deal with this stuff safely in a way that is not going to re-traumatize you, which is not going to take you back and have— make you have to live through that again, and it's not going to destroy everything you've built up so hard to create for yourself that you can go in and you can actually undo those programs relatively easy, relatively easily. Then it might involve a bit of tears because we've got to let the emotion out, it deserves to be honored, and but we can do that. And, and people really don't know that that's possible. They think that the only way is to damp everything down with antidepressants, and I'm not against antidepressants and anti-anxiety tablets because there's a place for them to get you point where you can do this work. But if you don't deal with that real root cause, it's— you're always going to be sitting on a nail.
Yeah, no, totally. Thank you for— thank you for sharing that. Um, so I think I have, like we say in French, held your leg long enough.
Yeah.
Any final words? Anything that you want to share that you feel is important for our heroines to hear that we haven't really touched on?
Yeah, yeah. Most importantly, don't give up on love. Don't give up on love. That makes me well up just saying that because I never thought I'd find it, and I found it in this glorious man. And it's not all roses and but we have a friendship that is unshakable. And to have somebody in your life that you know will always have your back, even if you just gave away £110,000 to a scammer, they will never question you as to why. They'll just go, I've got you, don't ever give up on it. But you can't have that until you heal your trauma. You cannot have it until you take responsibility for where you are now. If you're in that victim mode, which we've all been in— I've, you know, I was spectacularly for a lot of years— if you're in that mode of blaming everybody else and not taking responsibility, you're powerless. So stop it. Come back to where you can take responsibility, which is for: I couldn't change what happened before this, but I can absolutely change where the story goes from now, and do it in a way with a therapist who understands trauma, who understands where you've been, and who will take you as quickly and safely to where you need to be as is humanly possible, whilst honoring your story, whilst not judging you, and whilst holding you in absolute love.
I love it. Sarah, thank you so much for being here and sharing your story. I know it will be an inspiration to many.
