My childhood was not ideal. Actually, it was far from ideal… it was screwed up. That is what you can easily expect if someone does not know himself at the age of forty-five.
From early childhood detached, observing how to behave best to deserve attention – at least attention, once love failed. I do not remember much until the age of fourteen, when I started high school, spending most of the time outside with my friends; that is when my memory becomes somehow coherent. Before that, there are a few pictures, mostly not pleasant ones, rather traumatizing.
Despite distressing events – as children in my position tend to be, always looking for appreciation – I too remember I was rather admired and liked by schoolmates and friends. I was (and to this day unfortunately am) well-mannered, empathic, observant, always trying for the best reaction, simply perfectly trained to analyze the situation and provide the best computed output. Though I was stuttering and tripping over my own legs, miraculously, no one ever laughed at me. The most beautiful girl in the class even wrote me a Valentine’s letter in sixth grade. No one ever picked up on my stuttering, except my father.
Childhood
As far back in my childhood as I can remember (which in my case doesn’t say much), my father’s alcoholism was keeping a well-established enervating pattern: his regular, evening drunken return, the verbal abuse directed at my mother, and the role of my brother and me in calming her after he passed out (that could take hours). He was flawless in his below-the-belt provocations, which led to exhausting, ill-tempered conflicts marked by his cultivated sadistic touch. All of this was aimed at hurting as deeply as possible. As he was a physical education teacher, muscular, the “conflicts” were rather one-sided. Nervous anticipation was the norm: children asking mum when he would come home (the later, the worse it would be), waiting for his return and the looming fight that would follow.
Over time, his mind-absent behavior degraded into unpredictable, psychopathological manifestations of anger and aggression, including an intensifying expression of physical domination over my mother. She, a product of a naive, high-class family upbringing, was ill-equipped to process these dynamics, unable to recognize aggression, alcohol, or obscenity as a pathology, allowing his unconstrained behavior to escalate to monstrous proportions.
Although my mum was an enormously good-hearted, loving person, perhaps her dread and rather blind priority to keep the family together (a social norm at that time) translated into a pervasive lack of security and peace, and consequently even a lack of perceived love – which, from early childhood on, established detachment as the primary way of navigating my whole life. To cope, I developed a mechanism of exaggerated altruism, seeking external validation as an escape from internal pain.
A deep need to be liked by everyone in every situation taught me to skillfully navigate social dynamics to achieve a degree of seemingly natural popularity necessary for my emotional survival.
Internally, this created a displacement and suppression of what could not be fought – a mirror of the same external survival mechanism. The tension from suppressed experiences and memories was slowly shifting to exist only within nightmares. Simultaneously, a foundational feeling of not being good enough was constantly reinforced by the powerlessness in protecting my mother – a task that is definitely not a child’s responsibility.
While childhood adaptation was inevitable, the unestablished sense of safety fundamentally compromised the ability to process adversity in later life. This resulted in a deep and persistent perception of insecurity, a fundamental lack of trust, and a core trauma of abandonment and loneliness. The entire relationship sphere was deformed by a disbelief in the permanence of others and the possibility of being loved. The perception of myself, relationships, and the world was fatally impacted, resulting in malignant self-reliance.
Relationships
When I was nineteen, my mother was forced to leave – driven by a constant escalation of my father’s aggression and an actual fear for her life. With her departure came a significant release of tension, both external, since my father’s hostility was mainly targeted towards her, and internal. That allowed a slow turn inward.
In the wake of my mother’s departure, a distortion of the relational sphere was slowly revealing itself. A subconscious fear of loss entangled with a comparable fear of attachment: a core conflict where both intimacy and loneliness were equally distressing. Being close to another person felt like a threat, while longing for connection persisted. Loneliness perfectly prevented the possibility of being abandoned. Attachment, on the other hand, carried the risk, bringing a perpetual expectation of abandonment. My attitude was shaped by distrust, with an imprinted tendency to abandon anyone and anything I had formed an attachment to, or was about to.
At the age of twenty-four, I entered a significant relationship, establishing a strong attachment rooted in a profound need for love and a home. Its end two years later returned all the insecurity and pain from childhood, unraveling in uncontrollable ways. Suppressed trauma was unblocked, inducing a severe depression, where the future seemed almost nonexistent, nothing held interest, and life itself felt repellent – leaving a deep uncertainty about my sense of self and my place in society. Paralyzed to the point of being unable to get out of bed and perform basic self-care, I visited a psychiatrist, followed by medical treatment, and finally psychotherapy aimed at reopening old wounds and reclaiming the situations that had been unbearable for a child’s psyche and remained unprocessed.
The subsequent reconciliation was followed by a three-year period of my slow, subtle stabilization, only for the final breakup to bring the pain back into focus. This time much more acute and overwhelming, yet at least with a pivotal insight that my suffering was directly linked to a disrupted childhood and pathological attachments rooted in a deep longing for home, peace, and love. Not yet equipped to process this new insight, I simply admitted that my life would be closely entangled with the pain (sounds so tragic).
Humanitarian Aid
At the age of twenty-nine, the internal turmoil of my life naturally unfolded into a high-stress humanitarian environment, where I found escape, fulfillment, and meaning, while avoiding relational pain. Here, a future pattern was established: intense workaholic output, followed by depletion during less demanding days. And meanwhile, beneath the surface, the mental cost began to accumulate completely unprocessed.
Two years into aid work, my beloved mother’s death was already being processed by a detached, simple, almost methodical reasoning: “God knows what He is doing.” Not a bad approach at all, yet at that time, it was unfortunately merely a blatant bypass. Effective in general, but in this context only adding another layer of unprocessed grief, another trauma with no outlet, no ability to mourn – except in dreams. Meanwhile, exhausting humanitarian work paradoxically became my sole source of peace, despite involving regular exposure to traumatizing events. The relentless output led to a state of chronic fatigue, with the body quietly keeping its own score. One afternoon, a tightness took hold in the chest and… it never left. This suffocating pressure became a permanent resident in my chest for the next fourteen years (i.e., until today), and got its name a full decade later – anxiety.
Another layer of psychosomatic manifestation of chronic stress appeared during a mission in India, where my daily bread included the unnerving task of persuading parents not to let their little daughters die (usually of hunger). One morning, before a highly stressful talk with a father convinced that his daughter should die, a tense constriction of my insides occurred and… stayed. (Daughter survived.) At that time, I described it as being “a puma filled with adrenaline in a straitjacket”. Only years later was this feeling recognized as linked to a state of childhood hypervigilance during the anticipation of my father’s return. This constant, paralyzing tension soon brought me to an inherited line of coping: a morning shot of alcohol to dull it.
My system tipped on a stifling mission in Kenya: exhaustion and sleep deprivation so extreme they started to cause hallucinations. It was the point when I realized the running had to stop, that I had to begin working on myself, to get to know myself. It was the first real acknowledgment of my own role in the patterns, a turn inward that would require another decade to fully unfold.
Medicine
Being already thirty-four, now fully aware that the running had to stop, I traded one form of sustained intensity for another – a six-year academic sentence to obtain a medical degree. While still overviewing projects in India and Kenya, finalizing my doctorate and lecturing at the university. The demands were layered onto a previously depleted system, the pressure intensifying into whole days studying, leading to stress-induced heart arrhythmia. Driven by an inherent and urgent perfectionism, a predictable pattern continued: a period of rigorous study for exams, followed by regular physical collapse, illnesses, hypersomnia. The body’s reserves were single-use – spend them, and then break down. After two years of study, I really needed a break. And the best-chosen method for relaxation was – a deployment to Iraq.
Inevitably, the psychological costs deepened further. The exhausting year in Iraq, combined with a breakup on the very day of my return, triggered a persistent state of depersonalization alongside an absence of emotions: a late realization of an inability to cry even in heartbreaking pain. Upon returning to medical studies, the physical symptoms worsened – fatigue, insomnia, worsened cardiac extrasystoles. All of it culminating in the profound frustration of everything slipping out of my hands to the point of collapse into self-pity, a feeling of being completely useless in utter blackness. All the core insecurities were in the spotlight: the instability of my lifestyle, finances, and my entire value system.
The final push to graduate was executed in pure inertia, with a zombie-mind, detached from all emotions and outcomes, for the pressure itself had become paralyzing. At the time of graduation, I felt no accomplishment, merely a slight relief, as emerging from those six years of severe isolation in a book bubble was quite disorienting.
Pre-collapse
And no, the period after graduation was, again, not the right time for recovery. It was time for the final three-year push, marked by two burnouts, that would end in a total neurological and somatic collapse.
Immediately after graduation, a mission to Uganda was professionally frustrating, personally destabilizing, leading to the first serious crisis: high anxiety with panic attacks, and increasing use of alcohol just to keep going. A profound, existential loneliness began to surface, born from countless life experiences and the realization there was, at bottom, no one to share with – a life of constant greetings and constant farewells.
The solution, as always, was a new deployment. This time to war-torn Ukraine, where the initial fulfillment of relentless sixteen-hour workdays inevitably led to severe burnout and significant cognitive dysfunction. The chronic fatigue was now extreme, triggering regular, unexpected panic attacks, bursts of anger, and moments of forgetting basic facts (like how to speed up a car while driving, or why everyone in the restaurant was Caucasian).
In the middle of the Ukrainian winter, another blow landed, unrecognized at that time. My beloved godmother, who was my foundational emotional support, essentially my second mother, died. Amid the high work inertia, the loss was internalized and unprocessed, tipping the entire system over the edge.
Completely burned out, I spent the months after returning home in a state of collapse: mostly sleeping, and socially isolated, while in the unfolding anxiety every extra input was a stressor. When a psychiatrist diagnosed severe burnout, anxiolytics brought a feeling of unknown relief, something unbelievable – the first real quiet from anxiety in over a decade.
Feeling miraculously reconciled – against the strong objections of both my psychiatrist and psychotherapist – I immediately took another deployment.
First Iraq, then directly back to Ukraine. But the system’s capacity was gone. Even though the work hours in Ukraine were strictly regulated, a severe neurological breakdown was inevitable. At work I held myself together pretty well, though fatigue, anxiety, insomnia, exhaustion-driven hallucinations, debilitating fear of sleep because of nightmares – all leading to a cycle of sleepless nights and half-dead days. Consciousness blurred to the point where I could not tell when I was sleeping or awake (which caused some issues during meetings); my physical capacity was reduced to almost nothing.
The final input into this fragile system – the ultimate pressure point – was an unexpected breakup after returning home. It awakened the deep childhood trauma of abandonment and pushed a body with no reserves left into a total collapse.
Collapse
And so, it finally happened. On the 7th of July 2024, an event that landed on a system whose capacity was already gone caused a complete shutdown. When I had depression seventeen years earlier, it was a single major feeling. When I had burnout and anxiety two years earlier, it was more complex, but still somehow manageable. Now it was a major feeling of anxiety, stress, deep sadness (not really depression, as my mind was quite clear), burnout, fatigue, complex trauma, and a shattered heart. A cocktail from hell. I was paralyzed, yet burning.
It was a strange, paradoxical state to be in. On one hand, a raw emotional overwhelm, nailing the puma to bed; on the other, a detached observer locked deep inside. The mind tried to manage the situation with a clean, clinical assessment, noting the engulfing feeling of being completely decimated. The initial attempt to control the narrative was by framing the event as an external variable to be somehow accepted: “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away.” Simple. Accept and move forward. Unfortunately, in this turmoil, it was again just a useless, disengaged bypass.
Meanwhile, my inner observer identified three main interlocking feelings. First, the long-standing anxiety in the chest, tied to the belief that I have to be the best, or I have no value. Second, an emptiness born of burnout, making it impossible to get out of bed (resembling depression). And third, a deep, suffocating abandonment – early identified as the potential grey eminence behind the others. All three led to a clear therapeutic goal – finding freedom, where my worth of existence is not determined by others.
During intense psychotherapy (well, yes, I took it with perfectionism), another insight surfaced: codependency, which had already echoed earlier in life, easily linked directly to early childhood trauma, detachment, and shifting the weight of my life onto others. Thus, the therapeutic goal was clarified: to heal the abandoned inner child.
Even with paralysis and an honest goal to heal, I was already distorted to such a degree that I was not able to acknowledge being far past the point where I could simply heal and move on. Or to move on while healing. And unbelievably, that was still what I was anticipating. Extreme internal turmoil, suffering, suffocating, paralyzed all day, in what I believe was close to hell, only to make the final zombie-like move in the evenings – going to the city center, sitting in a café, working a bit (yes, I was still working), reading a book and pretending – all while being literally shot out into space. I went so far as to attend two three-day music festivals to promote humanitarian aid (which I now see was traumatizing).
For all that, an honest effort to heal persisted: trying to name things, confronting childhood trauma, embracing my inner child, allowing space for sadness, reframing the last relationship as an illusion (though this approach rather brought shame), praying a lot. But the internal state remained highly volatile: each step forward was followed by five steps back.
At the end of July, the inevitable search for a frame to contain the collapse began, which involved medication – balancing the need for relief with a deep fear of losing control. A perplexing daily rhythm emerged: nights and mornings of complete peace were consistently disrupted around midday by a sudden paralyzing orchestra of all negative emotions. The chaos was framed in bigger chaos, until I reached a conclusion with a sense of weary recognition: I had probably utterly collapsed.
It was the first, faint acknowledgment that the trajectory of sustained over-exertion had finally led to the failure of a lifelong defensive structure – a house of cards I had protected for forty-four years and no longer had the strength for.
I must add that, perhaps for the first time in my life, I deeply accepted someone’s idea when my recognition was met with an anchoring message from my brother: the framing of the collapse not as a personal failing, but as the logical outcome of immense hardship. With partial relief, my previously active, combative stance was fading away, and I noted: “The sword lying in the limp hand of the fallen one.” (Pathetic, but visually correct.)
From this surrender, the foundational insight at the beginning of August was absolute: I need to get deep into myself. I was never really with myself, for myself. A psychiatric consultation followed, where the conclusion was clear – I have such an internal overload that I need to put a full stop and be alone with myself. The specific recommendation was for a two-month period of being completely alone. No mobile phone, no internet, no people, no books, no movies, just me with myself, to be able to penetrate my own depths. In fact, the only final directive, while the psychiatrist looked seriously into my eyes, was: “You will do nothing.” The commitment was decisive – a retreat from all activities and all online and offline contact for the next few weeks was announced. Well... already a year has passed.