Ana Große Halbuer

The search for a place of belonging, somewhere we can arrive as who we truly are, is one of the most fundamentally human things there is. And when we look honestly at the world, it becomes clear: although this ought to be a birthright, for many people it has been a privilege, not a given. The longing for connection, for rest and repair, for genuine self-expression, for the needs that underlie all of this, remains – in most cases, at least partially unfulfilled.

In human development, these outer places of welcoming safety, found in relationship and care, translate into inner ones: into felt experiences of security, of belonging, of being at home in oneself.

But what does “home” mean when that safety was not consistently there when it was needed most? I hear from people who have carried, across a lifetime, the quiet sense of never quite having arrived within themselves. Moving through life under a kind of sustained effort, searching for peace not as an abstract ideal, but as a real capacity to pause, to be in contact with themselves and with the world they live in.

After more than twenty years of working with people in therapeutic and consultative contexts with complex trauma histories, chronic illness, deep-rooted patterns that were once very intelligent strategies I notice: however different the stories and biographies, they tend to converge on this same original search. The search for a way home.

This first blog post carries the title Coming Home and it is also the name of the space I am building here: a place to think together about the complexity of psyche, soma and trauma.

We are born searching

We arrive in the world as social beings. With an unconditional, biologically anchored longing for contact and connection and this is not merely a metaphor, but grounded in the very neurobiology of what it means to be human. Attachment is survival. To be seen and received is not a “nice to have” for a child; it is a plain existential necessity and it forms the basis for what we come to believe about ourselves. Who we are today, what we assume about ourselves and our place in the world, is shaped profoundly in these early moments.

And then life happens.

In most cases, even in loving, caring families , there are moments when this connection is frustrated, or not met at all. And that alone carries no pathological weight. But a child who does not experience emotional or physical care consistently does the only thing available to it: it takes it personally. Prioritising the connection to its attachment figure is not a choice it is pure, human necessity.

In our earliest years, there is not yet a developed sense of self. The concept of who we are only emerges over time, through the experience of our relationships. And so the experienced absence, emotional or existential, becomes an inner wound.Because it is safer for a small person to take the deficit personally, to hold themselves responsible, than to consciously experience being existentially dependent on someone who cannot meet them.

If the person I need is not available, and I am not receiving what I clearly need in order to be okay – then it must be something about me. What must I do differently? Who must I be, so that things get better?

Young people do not yet have the neurobiological capacity to bridge this conflict on their own. They believe that what they are experiencing is an expression of what they are. And so many of us learn, early on, how relationship becomes good enough — safe enough — and what we need to do to make it so. We enter into quiet agreements. Performance-based arrangements. With others. And above all: with ourselves.

The cost of these agreements

These early survival strategies are highly intelligent, functionally relational and they come at a significant cost. That cost often only becomes visible in adulthood, long after the original experiences have passed, while the once-useful patterns continue to run. Whoever learned to keep their own needs small, or not to perceive them at all,  in order to secure connection, gradually loses access to themselves. Many people encounter intense frustration, a sense of futility, a kind of indecisiveness or uncertainty when it comes to their own wants even though what is missing is neither weakness nor uncertainty.

I often hear: I don’t know who I am. I know what I don’t want. But what I actually want – that’s much harder to reach. A sentence I heard some years ago describes this sense of estrangement very precisely: “You function. You give. You are present for others. And at the same time a little bit of a stranger to yourself.”

When we reach these tender points in working through our personal histories, something often becomes visible for the first time: how deeply these strategies were concepts we once needed in order to navigate an earlier world in order to become approximately safe within it.

The way back
When we begin to question the early assumptions we formed about ourselves shaped above all through the mirroring, or the absence of mirroring, of others and to revise them in light of what we actually need today, something new becomes possible: real choice and agency.

Integrating these perspectives allows for a gradual completing of the often fragmented sense of self and of the possibility of finding a place in this world that is both safe and free, connected and fully one’s own. Not through memory and understanding alone. But through the embodied experience of our natural wanting, our searching, and our wish to occupy and shape a genuinely personal space in this world.

The body remembers and it heals
The integration of the body is something I hold with particular care and it was my own path into trauma therapy. In my work, I kept encountering the striking relationship between traumatic experience, especially early and chronic, and the emergence of autoimmune conditions, chronic inflammatory processes and functional disorders.

As I moved deeper into psychotraumatology, it became clear: this is not coincidence. And above all, it is not the imagination of those affected, who were very well able to identify clear connections between their autoimmune histories and psychological, emotional or existential overwhelm. I was speechless about this for a long time and today I am, above all, resolutely angry about how long we as a society and a healthcare system have failed to name these structural connections, leaving those affected entirely on their own.

Research in psychoneuroimmunology and functional medicine has been showing this with increasing clarity for more than a decade: sustained activation of the stress system in response to unprocessed traumatic experience, raises inflammatory markers, burdens the immune system, and over time contributes to physical illness.

The body speaks. It often speaks loudly when it can no longer be heard any other way.
Coming Home therefore explicitly includes the body: as the central site of experience, processing and integration. The question “How do you experience this in your body?” is not, for me, a therapeutic technique. It is a sincere invitation back to one’s own authority and to one’s own knowing of oneself.

Coming Home as invitation
I do not understand this coming home as a hyped-up goal to be achieved through great discipline and effort nor as a summit that opens only to those who have worked on themselves sufficiently.

What I want to offer in my work is a remembering of our birthright.

Of what we arrive with, in our humanity. And we all know, or at least sense, for whom this right has not yet been fulfilled. Looking at this world, it is painful to acknowledge. And yet: we are, at the root, born well. With the longing for connection, and with ourselves as a possible site of safety in this life.

The permission to have one’s own concerns in the encounter with others without fearing that what matters to us will thereby be endangered is part of this journey. To meet frustration and love with steadiness. To learn to distinguish. Because the self, in encounter with the other, does not require giving itself away, abandoning or betraying itself.

I hear from people how a kind of quiet aliveness arrives when one stops resisting one’s own existence. When the energy that was needed, year after year, to be someone else, to meet expectations, to pre-emptively avoid the pain of loss, no longer has to be renegotiated daily. When genuine choice begins to emerge. Perhaps that is where we find something we can, in our shared humanity, come back to together.

This permission to simply be is at the heart of what I mean by this invitation: the permission to inhabit the life one once longed for. To be and to become the person one has always, at the core, been and still wishes to become. Connected to oneself. Alive. At home ?

What you’ll find here
In this blog and in the workshops I offer, both in hybrid formats and across Europe, I will continue to think through these themes, deepen them, and make them concretely accessible. Trauma integration and inner development. The connection between body and psyche. Psychosomatics not as a buzzword, but as the perspective of an embodied experience and reality.

I bring with me what I have learned across more than twenty years of work. And I invite you to accompany yourself on your own way.

Warmly, Ana