THE HOUSE I BUILT TO HIDE IN

On Reactions, Decisions, and the Long Walk Back to Yourself

I've been deeply reflecting on what our human journey actually looks like — and I mean really looks like, not the cleaned-up version we present to the world, not the narrative arc we've rehearsed enough times that we've started to believe it ourselves.

What would it look like if I could third-person my child self, my teenage self and my adult self, and sit all three of them down in a room? Not in a therapeutic circle with cushions and a bowl of grapes. I mean really sit them down, nose to nose, and have them tell each other who they think they are, what matters to them, what drives them. Because what I want to know — what I need to know — is this: at what point did I actually decide something for myself, and at what point did my various traumas quietly step in and decide for me?

That distinction, it turns out, is everything.

THE SHED

Even in my youngest state I can see very clearly that the things I was doing were a direct reaction to the dynamic I was born into. Not a decision. A reaction. There's a crucial difference and I'll come back to it, but first — let me take you to a garden.

My dad had a shed. A proper one. Full of the kind of tools that would make a health-and-safety officer weep openly into a clipboard — saws, chisels, hammers, and buckets. Not neatly stored, mind you. Just... chucked in. Nails of every size and variety thrown together in one communal bucket like some kind of hardware store anarchy. I remember looking for a specific nail as a child and repeatedly piercing my finger on the others as I searched. Which, if you're looking for a metaphor for early childhood, there it is, ready-made. You're looking for what you need, and you keep getting hurt in the process.

I was around seven years old when I built a house. Not a den. Not a cardboard box fort. A house. My dad was a carpenter who worked for a large construction firm, which meant the garden was essentially an unofficial building site — materials everywhere, wood stacked, odds and ends in every corner. I collected timber from the four corners of that garden and I got to work. I sawed. I nailed. I remember getting roofing felt on to the thing to keep it dry, which frankly, at seven, is a level of forward planning that most adults lack when booking a holiday. I made furniture — two benches, a table. I found a scrap of carpet and laid it over the ground.

I have no real idea how long it took. Days, I think. Several of them. The scrapes were impressive. I remember dragging the saw blade deep into my hand more than once, the particular shock of it. You know what didn't happen at any point during this multi-day construction project, clearly visible through the kitchen window?

Nothing. No one came out. No one said be careful. No one said, "Christ, what are you building?" No one said anything at all.

When I finished it — and I did finish it — I took a snack inside and sat in my little house. And it was the first time I can remember feeling safe.

Let that land for a second.

THE CARPET

I want to talk about the carpet because I think the carpet is the detail that cracks this story open.

We had no carpet in our house. None. Just linoleum — cold, hard, unforgiving, and in my memory the exact texture of the emotional landscape I was navigating daily. So when I found a scrap of carpet and chose to put it in my little house, I wasn't just laying flooring. I was, at seven years old, building something warm into a world that had none. I was insisting on softness when nothing around me offered any.

Now, I've sat across from enough people in thirty years of clinical work to know what some of you are thinking. You're thinking: but wasn't that empowering? Being left alone to create? Wasn't that independence?

And here's where I have to be straight with you, because that interpretation, while understandable, is the kind of thinking that lets everyone off the hook very conveniently.

No. It wasn't empowering. Or rather — it wasn't empowerment that drove it. Being completely ignored sent a much deeper message than any praise could have corrected. I have children. I know what it looks like to watch your seven-year-old in a garden. If I looked out of my kitchen window and saw my kid literally constructing a roofed, carpeted, furnished dwelling, I would have been through that door so fast I'd have left a person-shaped hole in it. Not to stop them. To stand beside them. To be gobsmacked. To say, "Who the hell are you and how are you doing this?"

That didn't happen. Not even close.

I didn't build that house because I wanted to. I didn't build it because it was a creative whim, a sunny Tuesday project. I built it because I was desperate, even at seven years old, to find shelter. From what was inside the actual house. From the toxic, often violent emotional weather of the people I'd been assigned to by the lottery of birth.

It was a reaction. Not a decision.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF SURVIVAL

Here's the thing about reactions versus decisions — and this is the part where I want you to really pay attention, because it changes everything about how you see yourself and the choices you think you've made.

When you grow up in an environment that is unsafe — emotionally, physically, psychologically — your nervous system doesn't wait for you to figure things out. It acts. It builds workarounds. It develops strategies. The seven-year-old who built a house in the garden wasn't displaying exceptional creativity. He was displaying exceptional survival intelligence. The creativity was real. But it was drafted into service by necessity, not by freedom.

Jordan Peterson talks about the way we all carry the weight of the past — not just our own past, but the evolutionary past encoded in our nervous systems. He's right about that. The ancient circuitry that scans for threat, for hierarchy, for safety — it doesn't know you're a grown adult with a mortgage and a reasonable wine collection. It knows what it learned. And what it learned, it learned early.

What my nervous system learned at seven was: the outside is safer than the inside. Literally and metaphorically. Build your own shelter. Don't ask for help — no one's coming. Make it warm yourself. Put carpet down even when the house has none. Be your own architect because no one else is interested in the blueprints.

And here's the brutal irony that will be intimately familiar to anyone who grew up this way: those survival strategies are extraordinarily effective at keeping you alive. They are often catastrophically bad at helping you live.

Because you take them with you. Every single one. Into adulthood, into relationships, into careers, into the quiet moments at 2am when you lie awake trying to understand why nothing ever feels quite enough, quite safe, quite real. You carry the house you built in that garden everywhere you go. And you keep adding rooms.

THE HOUSES WE KEEP BUILDING

Think about it in your own life. Think about the structures you've built — not literal ones. The emotional ones. The personas. The defences. The professional excellence that keeps everyone impressed and at a safe distance simultaneously. The compulsive caretaking that ensures everyone else is okay so you can stop noticing you're not. The humour that deflects. The distance that protects. The over-giving. The perfectionism. The relentless, exhausting, thankless drive to be needed, because if you're needed you have a reason to be here and no one's going to ask you to leave.

Anthony Bourdain — and I think about this man more than is probably healthy — was one of the great architects of persona. Brilliant, irreverent, generous, impossible. He built a self that the world absolutely loved, and he inhabited it with extraordinary conviction, and almost no one could see the places where the roofing felt was holding, barely, against the weather.

That's not a criticism. It's a recognition. Because those of us who survived difficult early lives often become remarkable people. Genuinely remarkable. The sensitivity that was forged in chaos becomes attunement. The vigilance becomes perceptiveness. The desperate need to understand what the hell is actually going on in the room becomes intelligence — emotional, professional, clinical. We are often the most interesting people in the room.

We are also, frequently, the most exhausted.

Because there is a profound and relentless cost to building houses you never planned to build. To being shaped by forces rather than choices. To walking through life executing strategies that were designed for a war zone, in conditions that are — or should be — comparatively peaceful. The nervous system doesn't know the war is over. Someone really should tell it.

WHEN THE DUVET CALLS

I want to be honest about something, because this piece isn't just an intellectual exercise — I'm writing it from inside it.

There are days — and if you're reading this, you know the ones — when the accumulated weight of carrying your history, doing the work, showing up for other people's pain while carefully managing your own, being the one who knows and sees and holds and reflects and helps and heals and functions, when all of that gets unbearably heavy. When tired doesn't cover it. When emotionally unmet feels like an understatement of such spectacular proportions you'd laugh if you had the energy.

When the duvet looks like a viable life plan.

Those are the days when the old reactions fire up again. The child who built the house in the garden is still in there, still scanning for threat, still wondering if anyone's watching through the kitchen window. Still piecing together something from whatever materials happen to be lying around, because that's what we do. That's what we've always done. React. Adapt. Build. Survive.

And yet.

And yet we keep walking. Not because we're superhuman — the whole superhuman narrative is exhausting and frankly one of the more insidious little lies we tell trauma survivors, as though suffering is only valid if it produces someone exceptional enough to justify it. We keep walking because somewhere, usually just below the exhaustion and the grief and the weight of everything we carry, there is something that is unambiguously, irreducibly ours.

Not a reaction. An actual self.

AUTHENTIC — NOT ASPIRATIONAL

This is where I want to be careful, because the word "authenticity" has been so thoroughly colonised by wellness culture that it has lost almost all of its nutritional value. Authenticity as it's currently sold is aspirational — become your best self, live your truth, find your purpose, put it on a linen tote bag.

That's not what I mean. Not even slightly.

The authenticity I'm talking about is not aspirational. It's archaeological. It's the slow, unglamorous, often uncomfortable process of excavating who you actually are from underneath the rubble of who you had to be. It is the difference between building another house and learning — finally, late, imperfectly — to live in one.

Because here's what I know, after thirty years of sitting with people in their deepest, most fractured places, and after however many years of sitting with my own: the self that was there before the adaptations is not broken. It was never broken. It was responding intelligently to a broken environment. Every reaction, every strategy, every house built in the rain — they were evidence of an extraordinary will to survive. Of a self that refused, even at seven, to simply disappear.

That self is still there. Underneath the exhaustion, beneath the competence, behind the humour and the insight and the clinical expertise and the particular weariness of someone who has spent their entire life understanding others and a fraction of that time being understood. It's there. A little battered, sometimes furious, occasionally prone to wanting the duvet, but fundamentally intact.

And this is the part that no one tells you clearly enough: that self — the authentic one, the original one, the one that scraped their hand on a saw and kept going because the alternative was going back inside — that self is the only reliable source of nourishment you have. Not the achievements. Not the approval. Not the professional identity or the careful management of everyone else's emotions. Not the version of you that performs adequately in the world.

The real one. The one that knows what carpet on the ground feels like when the whole house has none.

Jung spent the second half of his career writing about individuation — the process of becoming, genuinely and fully, yourself. Not a better version of someone else. Not a healed version of your wounded self. Yourself. The irreducible thing at the centre of all the noise. He didn't describe it as comfortable. He didn't describe it as quick. He described it as necessary. As the work. As the thing worth doing above all other things.

I think he was right. I think the seven-year-old who laid carpet on the ground of a shed he built with his own hands, who took a snack into his new home and felt — for the first time — safe, was not just surviving. He was, in the most literal sense possible, being himself. Making a world that reflected something real. Insisting on warmth. Refusing the cold floor.

That's not a trauma response. Well — it was, initially. But underneath it was something else. An assertion. A declaration, made in wood and roofing felt, that this is what I need, and I will make it, since no one else is going to.

Authenticity, real authenticity, is that same declaration made consciously. Made freely. Made not from desperation but from the deep, quiet knowledge of who you actually are and what you actually need. It is the decision, finally, after all the reactions — the decision to stop building shelter from whatever's lying around, and to choose instead to build a life from what is true.

It doesn't fix everything. It doesn't resolve the wiring or erase the history or make the heavy days any lighter. But it does something that nothing else does: it feeds you. At the level where the hunger actually lives.

So on the days when we're tired. Over-resourced. Emotionally running on fumes and the particular grim determination of people who know too much about why they function the way they do — on those days, the question isn't how do I feel better. The question is: where am I being real right now, and where am I just reacting?

Because in the answer to that question, if you can find it, is the only nourishment that actually lasts.

Not carpet on the ground of someone else's version of your life.

Your own floor. Warm. Chosen. Yours.

Jimi Katsis