Something underneath is driving the life you can't quite reach.Most of us spent our childhoods adapting to rooms we did not choose. The strategies we built — vigilance, usefulness, withdrawal, performance — kept us alive. Decades later, those same adaptations may be running the life that has stopped feeling like ours.
You have probably tried to address it. You have read the books, attended the courses, perhaps even completed therapy. And still, the anxiety, the exhausted relationships, the flatness that success has not touched, the question that won't quite leave:
is there a person underneath all this?Broken Childhood traces the long aftermath of childhood trauma and the possibility of genuine repair. Drawing on more than thirty years of clinical practice and his own story, consultant psychotherapist Jimi Katsis maps a clear five-stage path:
- Recognition — seeing the trauma for what it is, including the kinds that did not look like trauma at the time
- Understanding — tracing how childhood experience shaped the beliefs, behaviours, and patterns of your adult life
- Acceptance — meeting reality without minimising, justifying, or trying to outthink it
- Healing — actively engaging with the work of repair, not waiting for it to happen to you
- Resilience — reclaiming the narrative, rebuilding a life that is no longer defined by what happened
This is not a programme of seven steps to becoming someone new. It is not a promise that everything will finally make sense if you just heal your inner child harder. It is a serious, hopeful guide for adults who have spent too much of their lives running on adaptations that began before they had words.
This book is for you if: you suspect that the life you are running is not entirely yours; you have functioned brilliantly while feeling hollow; you have read about trauma without feeling it described
your particular form of survival; you are ready to look at the architecture beneath the performance.
Drawing on EMDR, Schema Therapy, IFS, DBT, and Somatic Experiencing — the modalities Jimi Katsis has used across three decades of clinical work — this book is a path back to the life that has been waiting underneath.
