Are you performing your worth? Trauma, Treatment-Resistant Depression & ECT with Simone Bowyer

What if the traits you think are your personality are actually things you learned to do to survive? Simone Bowyer is a writer and founder of The Light Within Collective, whose work explores what she calls the “language of survival,” the patterns we develop to feel safe, loved, worthy, and less likely to be abandoned. In this conversation, Simone and I talk about perfectionism, hyper-independence, control, and overachievement as survival adaptations rather than simply personality traits. She shares her experience with severe treatment-resistant depression, years of psychiatric treatment, and ultimately electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT, which she describes not as a cure, but as something that finally created enough space for her to consider life beyond the darkness. We also take the conversation into the workplace, exploring why we cannot simply leave our wounds at home, what human-centered leadership can look like, and why psychological safety matters when the person who appears to be your highest performer may actually have a nervous system that never learned it was safe to stop.