Cement shoulders. Shut down emotionally. Go-to strategies: denial, minimizing and numbing. In a perpetual state of fight/flight/freeze from Developmental Trauma and later PTSD. Feeling unseen and unloved. Fast forward 25 years. I see and love myself. I am authentic and connect deeply. My body is relaxed and a known space. Trauma largely healed and resolved. I am mostly free of reactivity and I have skills to work with thought (words, images) and sensation. I know from experience I can be with whatever arises. I feel, at 64, that I am finally an emotionally mature adult.