sally_rusbridge

19/11/2025

I saw this the other day and it stopped me in my tracks, because for so many of us that isn’t a quote, it’s the beginning of our story.

We weren’t born with trust issues, we didn’t arrive in this world questioning love, anticipating abandonment,
or learning how to regulate emotions on our own.

We learned that slowly, quietly in the small, daily erosion of worth that comes from growing up under the weight of someone else’s unhealed pain.

For some children that looked like emotional unavailability, a dad who was physically in the house but emotionally out of reach, and others it was anger, addiction, infidelity, or volatility watching the man who was meant to protect us, hurt the woman who held everything together.

And the truth is these men loved us, just not in the way children understand love. Not consistently, not safely and not in a way that felt predictable or grounding.

Their love was scattered something we had to decode, earn, or piece together like a puzzle that never quite formed a picture.

We learned to read emotion like weather, scanning every room for signs of a storm before it hit. By the time we were adults, we were already experts in emotional labour.

We spent years interpreting their silences, absorbing the impact of their tempers, and cleaning up the emotional debris that was never ours to begin with.

Before we could even think about our own dreams,
we had to climb out from under their chaos. Before we could rise into our own potential, we had to sort through the shame and confusion that didn’t belong to us at all.

So no, we don’t have “daddy issues”. We have dads with unhealed trauma.

Men who were never taught to apologise, how to stay patient or how to father gently. Men who were taught providing was love, silence was strength and vulnerability was weakness.

And because they never did their emotional work, we ended up doing it for both of us.

We became the cycle breakers, the healers, the ones who had to understand “their” childhoods just to make sense of our own.

Without realising it, our fathers conditioned us to live from our masculine, to be capable, self reliant and endlessly resilient.

Continued in next post

31/10/2025

There’s a quiet strength in learning to moving forward not as who you were, but as who you’ve become.

The lessons, the heartbreaks, the grounding moments… they’ve shaped you in ways you might not even realise yet.

Life has softened some parts of you, strengthened others, and reminded you what really matters.

You don’t have to rush to what’s ahead.

Just allow life to meet you where you are, right here, in this version of you that’s earned every piece of who you now carry.

Be in your journey.

Let it unfold in its own rhythm. Because forward isn’t about going backward, it’s about growing with and into everything you’ve become.

08/10/2025

Have you ever noticed how sometimes the line between self-aware and self-absorbed gets blurry?

True self-awareness isn’t about constant self-analysis or making everything about you.
It’s about knowing how you show up — how your words, actions, and energy land with others.
It’s the ability to reflect without spiraling, to take responsibility without taking all the blame.

Support works the same way.
It’s not about always being the saviour, the rescuer, or the one who listens until you’re empty.

And it’s not about making your healing the centre of every conversation either.

Healthy support for yourself and others lives in that middle ground. Where empathy meets accountability. Where you can care deeply without controlling. Where you can share without oversharing.

And where you can say “I see you” without making it about your own reflection.

That’s self-awareness in action — the quiet balance between understanding yourself and still making room for others.

If you’re ready to strengthen that balance, that’s exactly what we work on together — building emotional intelligence, boundaries, and the kind of awareness that creates real connection.

05/10/2025