Sylwia Kuchenna

28/12/2025

I want you to hear this slowly.

When you say no —
and someone keeps pushing, negotiating, sighing, or guilt-tripping you —
it was never about the cheesecake.

It becomes about access.
About control.
About whether your nervous system is allowed to choose safety over approval.

Many of us were taught, quietly and repeatedly, that love had to be earned by being: • agreeable
• accommodating
• easy
• grateful

So when you finally set a boundary, your body may shake.
Your chest may tighten.
Guilt may rush in and whisper, “You’re selfish. You’re mean. You’re ungrateful.”

That voice isn’t intuition.
It’s memory.

It’s your inner child remembering a time when saying no meant: withdrawal of love
emotional distance
or punishment.

So if boundaries feel hard, confusing, or painful —
nothing is wrong with you.

Your nervous system learned what it needed to survive.

Healing doesn’t mean becoming cold.
It means becoming clear.

Healthy people adjust when you set limits.
Unhealthy people escalate.

And while that can be painful to see, it is also deeply informative.

You don’t lose love by setting boundaries.
You lose the illusion that you had to abandon yourself to keep it.

If this post touched something tender inside you,
I created two spaces to support you:

✨ My FREE Boundary-Setting Masterclass
— where I teach you how to say no without guilt, freezing, or over-explaining

✨ My Inner Child Masterclass
— where we gently heal the part of you that learned love must be earned through self-abandonment

You don’t need to become someone else to be worthy of respect.
You simply need permission to choose yourself.

Both links are waiting for you —
link in bio 🤍

With care,
your therapist,
Sylwia

24/12/2025

As this year comes to an end, I want to invite you to pause — not to evaluate yourself, not to judge how much you healed, achieved, or changed, but to witness what you lived through.

So many people carry quiet survival stories into the end of the year. Things that were never meant to be carried alone. Losses that didn’t have space to be grieved. Moments where you had to choose endurance over ease, protection over authenticity.

If you’re feeling tired, heavy, emotional, or strangely numb right now, there is nothing wrong with you. End-of-year reflections often activate the nervous system — especially when you’ve lived through stress, trauma, or prolonged uncertainty.

Healing is not linear. It doesn’t follow calendars or deadlines. Your nervous system learns safety slowly, through repetition, patience, and compassion — not pressure.

Before stepping into 2026, allow yourself to acknowledge what you survived, how you adapted, and how much strength it took just to keep going. Even coping strategies you’re not proud of were attempts to protect yourself when resources were limited.

You don’t need to enter the new year “fixed.”
You don’t need a better version of yourself.
You don’t need to leave parts of you behind.

You are allowed to move forward while still healing.
You are allowed to rest without guilt.
You are allowed to choose gentleness over self-improvement.

If no one has told you this yet — I’m glad you’re here. Your pace is valid. Your story matters.

With care,
your therapist, Sylwia

22/12/2025

For many people pleasers and perfectionists, Christmas isn’t just a holiday — it’s a relational stress test.

Family gatherings, expectations, traditions, and unspoken rules can activate old survival strategies:
being agreeable to avoid conflict,
over-preparing to prevent criticism,
monitoring everyone’s mood,
suppressing your own needs to keep harmony.

As a psychotherapist, I see how often this is mislabelled as “holiday stress,” when in reality it’s a nervous system response shaped by earlier experiences. For many, safety was learned through being useful, easy, or exceptional — especially in emotionally unpredictable environments.

This is why the pressure to “have a good time” can feel suffocating.
Joy becomes another task.
Rest feels undeserved.
Boundaries bring guilt.

If you notice fatigue, emotional numbness, irritability, or the urge to withdraw after social events, these are not signs that you’re failing the holidays. They’re signs that your system is working hard to protect you.

Healing doesn’t mean forcing yourself to enjoy Christmas.
It means noticing when old patterns are running the show — and gently offering yourself more choice.

You are allowed to participate differently.
You are allowed to disappoint expectations.
You are allowed to be human this season.

Less performance.
More safety.

With love
Sylwia 🤍


🎉

06/12/2025

No one really warns you about this part of healing…

You leave the toxic environment.
You walk away from the relationship that drained you.
You change jobs.
You step into a space that finally feels safe.
And you exhale — maybe for the first time in years.

And then suddenly… your body starts “acting up.”

Migraines.
Stomach issues.
Shaking.
Crying out of nowhere.
Heart palpitations.
Deep exhaustion.
Emotions you didn’t even know you were still holding.

And it feels confusing.
It feels frustrating.
It feels unfair.

You keep thinking:
“Why now? Why when everything is finally better?”

But this is exactly what happens when the nervous system comes out of survival mode.
This is trauma releasing.
This is your body recognizing, maybe for the first time in years:
“I’m safe now. I can finally let go.”

Healing isn’t peaceful at the beginning.
It’s messy.
Physical.
Overwhelming.
It’s your system thawing after years of holding everything together.

Because your body is a walking encyclopedia of your lived experiences.
It holds every moment you survived,
every emotion you pushed aside,
every fear you couldn’t process,
every alarm your mind had to ignore just to keep functioning.

Your mind forgets —
but your body remembers.

Your body reacts first.
Your body protects you before you even understand what’s happening.
It carries the memories your conscious mind didn’t have the safety or capacity to deal with.
It stores everything you had to freeze while you were in survival mode.

And when your life finally becomes quiet enough, gentle enough, safe enough…
your body finally starts to release what it held for so long.

Not because you’re breaking down.
Not because something is wrong.
But because you are healing.

Your body is catching up to the safety your mind has already found.
This is what recovery actually looks like.
This is what it means for the nervous system to complete what it couldn’t finish before.

You’re not going backwards.
You’re not getting worse.
You’re finally becoming free.

Your therapist,
Sylwia 🤍

28/11/2025

The Real Importance of Christmas: A Psychotherapist’s Reflection

As a psychotherapist and traumatologist, I’m reminded every year that the deepest meaning of Christmas has very little to do with perfection—perfect plans, perfect gifts, perfect families, or perfect feelings.
Instead, this season gently invites us back to what the nervous system needs most: connection, safety, compassion, and presence.

Christmas at its core is not about the noise of obligation, but the quiet moments of being with the people we love— truly being with them.
Time spent with loved ones regulates us. The simple acts of sharing a meal, listening, laughing, or even sitting in comfortable silence can soften the tension we’ve carried all year. These are the moments when our hearts remember how to rest.

It’s also a season that calls us toward respect and gratitude. Respect for each person’s story, their boundaries, their humanity. Gratitude for the relationships that hold us, challenge us, or help us grow. Gratitude doesn’t erase the difficulties many feel this time of year, but it can create a gentle space where healing becomes possible.

And at the center of it all is peace in the heart—not the forced “be cheerful” kind, but the authentic, slow-growing peace that comes from acceptance.
Acceptance of who we are right now.
Acceptance of what was, and what wasn’t.
Acceptance of the small but meaningful joys available in the present moment.

So this Christmas, if you find yourself overwhelmed by expectations, return to the essentials:

✨ Presence over perfection
✨ Connection over consumption
✨ Compassion over criticism
✨ Peace over pressure

May this season give you the gift of grounding, the comfort of meaningful relationships, and the courage to welcome peace into the places that need it most.

With love,
Sylwia 🤍

14/11/2025

In psychodynamic work, we often say that the unconscious speaks through action more than intention. The way a patient pays for therapy is not about financial etiquette — it is a live expression of their inner world unfolding in the therapeutic relationship.

Money carries emotional weight. It represents dependence, separation, care, autonomy, guilt, longing, anger, and attachment. When a patient reaches for cash, forgets to bring it, overpays, apologises, hesitates, or becomes irritated, they are not simply performing a transaction. They are expressing something about:

how they experience being held or not held

how safe they feel in needing someone

how they manage closeness and distance

what they learned about giving and receiving in childhood

how they negotiate boundaries and expectations

what they fear, long for, or defend against in intimacy

In this way, payment becomes a microcosm of the patient’s relational patterns. It is never about judgment. There is no “right” or “wrong” way of paying. Instead, each pattern becomes material — a moment rich with information about how the patient relates to others, to themselves, and to the therapeutic space.

When a therapist explores these subtle behaviours with the patient, something important can happen:
awareness deepens, repeated relational cycles become visible, and the possibility for new experience emerges.

Even the smallest rituals — handing over money, asking for change, forgetting the wallet, or hesitating at the door — can reveal profound emotional truths.

Nothing in therapy is just a coincidence.
Everything that happens in the room becomes part of the meaningful dialogue — even the moment of payment.

— your therapist, Sylwia

09/11/2025

The video shows a contrast between the question “How can you tell if someone has a personality disorder?” and the comment section full of aggression, contempt, and mockery.

From a therapeutic perspective, such behavior may reveal certain dysfunctional personality traits that, if persistent and intense, make life difficult and can appear in various personality disorders.

💬 Comments of this kind suggest a low level of empathy and problems with impulse control.
Psychologically, they can indicate:

defensive mechanisms (attack instead of reflection),

projection (attributing one’s own weaknesses to others),

or so-called social hostility, typical for narcissistic or antisocial personality structures.

😐 Comments like those shown in the video may reveal:

low empathy,

problems with emotional control,

projection and defensive mechanisms,

and a tendency to devalue others to maintain one’s own sense of worth.

However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that those who write such comments have a personality disorder. Although, it also shows how the internet encourages the expression of unprocessed emotions and dysfunctional traits.

Here are types of these comments:

“People like this are pathetic.”

“What nonsense — only idiots believe that.”

“You must have serious problems if you think like that.”

“What a joke, people will believe anything these days.”

“Another example of how soft society has become.”

“This is just laughable — get a grip.”

“Everyone else is so toxic and manipulative.”

“People today are all narcissists, not me.”

👩‍🎓From a psychotherapeutic perspective, such comments often:

✔️act as a defense mechanism against internal discomfort or shame,

✔️show low frustration tolerance and poor emotional regulation,

✔️reflect projection (blaming or criticizing others for traits one dislikes in oneself),

✔️and serve to restore a fragile sense of self-worth through putting others down.

They do not automatically indicate a personality disorder, but they do reveal unprocessed emotions, lack of empathy, and difficulty with reflective thinking — meaning, difficulty pausing to understand one’s own motives or the emotions of others.

Your therapist,
Sylwia

02/11/2025

✨ Feeling like something is missing, even when life looks “fine”? ✨

You may be highly capable, successful, and managing responsibilities with ease — yet inside, there’s a quiet ache, emotional overwhelm, or a sense of disconnection that you can’t quite shake.

I’m a psychotherapist, traumatologist, author, and lecturer with over 8 years of experience, and I work with people who want to not just survive, but truly understand themselves, heal, and reconnect with life.

Through psychodynamic therapy, we explore not only your emotions but the root causes and meaning behind your experiences. Together, we uncover the hidden stories and unconscious patterns that shape how you feel, think, and relate.

💭 You may recognize some of this in yourself:

Feeling a persistent inner emptiness or quiet grief

Waves of emotion that feel overwhelming — or numbness and detachment

Struggling with relationships or emotional closeness

Carrying past wounds from childhood or developmental trauma

Therapy is a safe space to process, understand, and transform these experiences. It’s about discovering the deeper truth of who you are, rebuilding resilience, and learning to feel fully alive again.

💌 If this resonates with you, I can help. I offer one-to-one psychotherapy online and in person.

📞 Call: 087 342 6977
📧 Email: psychotherapykuchenna@gmail.com
🌐 Visit: www.psychotherapykuchenna.com

Take the first step — you don’t have to navigate this alone.

Your therapist,
Sylwia 🤍

01/11/2025

Behaviours of an Avoidant Attachment Style

You want love… but you also want space.
You crave connection… but the moment it gets too close — you pull away. 🫶
Sounds familiar? You might be moving through life with an avoidant attachment style.

Avoidant attachment isn’t about not caring — it’s about protecting yourself.
When closeness once felt unsafe, distance becomes comfort.
You learned early that it’s safer not to rely on anyone — so now, as an adult, intimacy can feel overwhelming or “too much.” 💔

Here are some subtle everyday signs:
✨ you avoid deep emotional talks
✨ you feel more comfortable alone than with others
✨ you minimize your needs or emotions
✨ you pull away when someone gets too close
✨ you focus on work or independence to feel in control
✨ you dismiss affection or compliments
✨ you fear being “too dependent” on anyone

Underneath it all? A tender part of you that simply fears being hurt again.
You’re not cold. You’re guarded.
And those walls once kept you safe — but now, they might be keeping love out. 💛

Healing starts when you realise it’s okay to need people — and that closeness doesn’t mean losing yourself.

— Your therapist, Sylwia 🕊️

16/10/2025

16/10/2025

How Healing Rewrites the Story Trauma Once Told

Complex trauma doesn’t just live in the mind — it lives in the body, the nervous system, and the spaces between moments.
It shapes how we breathe, love, rest, and relate to the world.

For many of us, it began early.
We learned to stay small to feel safe.
We learned to read a room before we ever learned to read ourselves.
We learned that love might hurt, that silence might mean danger, and that safety was something we had to earn.

These lessons became survival — brilliant, adaptive, and deeply human.
But as adults, those same patterns can leave us feeling lost, numb, or disconnected from the life we long for.

Healing from complex trauma isn’t linear, and it’s not about erasing the past.
It’s about slowly teaching the body that safety is possible.
It’s about meeting the parts of us that learned to protect — and helping them rest.
It’s about remembering that we are not broken… we adapted.

✨ Before Healing, Trauma Might Look Like:
• Doubting yourself and your worth.
• Feeling on edge, waiting for something bad to happen.
• Struggling to feel or express emotions.
• Avoiding closeness, fearing you’ll be hurt again.
• Pleasing others at the cost of your own peace.
• Living with a harsh inner critic.
• Feeling disconnected from who you are.
• Being hijacked by triggers or emotional flashbacks.
• Losing hope that life could feel different.
• Feeling unsafe in your own body.

💛 With Healing, It Can Begin to Feel Like:
• Trusting your inner voice again.
• Feeling calm in moments that once felt threatening.
• Allowing yourself to feel joy, sadness, and love fully.
• Building relationships rooted in trust and mutual care.
• Saying “no” without guilt and “yes” without fear.
• Offering yourself compassion instead of criticism.
• Living from authenticity rather than survival.
• Soothing yourself with presence instead of punishment.
Seeing hope as something that lives inside you.
• Feeling grounded — finally at home in your own body

Healing is not a destination.
It’s the slow, sacred process of remembering your wholeness — piece by piece, breath by breath.
It’s learning that safety doesn’t mean perfection; it means belonging

02/10/2025

🌸 7 Behaviors of a Parentified Daughter 🌸

When a child is forced to step into the role of a parent — emotionally or practically — it leaves lasting marks that often show up in adulthood. If you were a parentified daughter, you may recognize yourself in these patterns:

1️⃣ Over-responsibility & perfectionism 🧾
You feel you must hold everything together, often taking on too much and pushing yourself toward burnout.

2️⃣ Difficulty setting boundaries 🚧
“No” feels unsafe. You put others’ needs first, even when it costs you your own well-being.

3️⃣ Caretaker role in relationships 🤝
You naturally become the rescuer, fixer, or emotional anchor for others — sometimes at the expense of being cared for yourself.

4️⃣ Suppressed or confused identity 🌪️
Because your childhood was sacrificed for adult responsibilities, you may struggle to know who you truly are or what you want.

5️⃣ Hidden resentment & emotional struggles 💔
You may carry anger, sadness, or emptiness deep inside, while feeling undeserving of care or support.

6️⃣ Being extremely hard on yourself 🪞
You are very demanding of yourself, struggle to forgive mistakes, and hold yourself to impossibly high standards.

7️⃣ Need for control & predictability 📅
Chaos and unpredictability make you anxious — you feel safest when things are structured, planned, and under control.

✨ If this resonates with you, please know: these patterns are not your fault. They were survival strategies. And healing is possible. 🌱

💌 With compassion,
Sylwia, your therapist

📲 Follow me for more insights on healing & self-growth.
💾 Save this post to revisit when you need it.
📤 Share it with someone who might need these words.
💬 Tell me in the comments: Which of these resonates with you the most?