UNFROZEN UNBOUND — Now Available
Updated: Oct 11
It's official: UNFROZEN UNBOUND is now available as a paperback and ebook.
This book started as an art book, long before there were any words. Page by page, in a sketchbook, with paint, collage, fabric. The words came later. I needed the images first, to find my way back to my own voice.
What this book is about
UNFROZEN UNBOUND tells the story of a frozen response — and the long road back into feeling. In trauma research, this is called the freeze response: the body shuts down when fight or flight aren't possible. Feelings get sealed away, because they're too dangerous to feel.
In my case, that meant anger, frozen underneath sadness. For years I thought I was simply sad — until I understood what was actually buried beneath that sadness. Anger has a lot to do with self-determination — with the right to say no, to set boundaries, to be seen. That is exactly what gets taken from you when you are abused.
This book processes more than one wound. It moves through childhood adoption trauma, abuse by my father, two toxic marriages — and, most recently, a relationship with a covert narcissist that painfully showed me, once again, how old patterns can repeat themselves until you truly understand them.
Colour as the thread
The book follows a colour arc: White. Red. Gray. Black. Green. Each colour carries a chapter, each chapter a stop on the way from frozen back into feeling — until, by the end, the feelings are no longer tangled together, but separate. Nameable. Felt.
When the pattern repeats
Trust Me! told the story of a specific kind of betrayal — trust given, and broken, by someone skilled at making the breaking look like something else. Someone who could inflict harm while making me question whether harm had even happened at all. That's the particular cruelty of covert narcissistic abuse: it doesn't leave the kind of marks people easily recognise. It leaves confusion. Self-doubt. A slow erosion of your own reality, dressed up as love, or care, or "just how relationships are."
UNFROZEN UNBOUND picks up where Trust Me! left off. Because naming what happened once doesn't mean the pattern can't return. It did — in a different relationship, with a different face, but the same architecture: charm first, control disguised as care, and a slow freeze that crept back in before I even recognised it happening again.
What's different this time is that I recognised it faster. Not because the manipulation was any less skilled, but because Trust Me! had already given me language for it. That's part of why I write these books — not just to process, but to build the vocabulary that makes the next recognition faster, for me and for whoever reads them next.
If Trust Me! was about learning that something had been done to me, UNFROZEN UNBOUND is about what it takes to actually thaw out afterwards — anger included, especially anger, because anger is so often the first thing a narcissistic dynamic teaches you to distrust in yourself.
A continuation — and an example
And if you know my first art book, Wholeness — born out of my adoption trauma — you'll see how the arc stretches from there, through Trust Me!, to here.
But this book is more than my own story. It also serves as an example for my work with clients who have lost their voice through trauma and abuse — for how creative expression can open a way back when words alone aren't enough.
From frozenness to the field of freedom
UNFROZEN UNBOUND is not a manual and not a textbook on trauma. It is trauma, unfrozen — in paint, in colour, in words that finally found their way out.
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