Finding the Light That Never Left: What Suzanne Roberts Taught Me About Healing

Remembering the Self Beneath the Hurt

There are conversations that stay in your bones long after the recording stops. My time with Suzanne Roberts was one of them. She grew up in a home that felt polished from the outside and unsafe within. And the moment that shattered her childhood was also the moment she discovered something she would spend decades trying to trust.

Suzanne survived childhood sexual abuse at the age of five. Instead of retreating fully into fear, she dissociated into what she describes as a field of light. Something holy. Something she felt but did not yet understand. Her trauma did not erase her spirit. It revealed a different way back to it.

Talking with her reminded me that healing is not about pretending the past did not happen. It is about finding the truest part of ourselves and letting it speak a little louder than the pain.

The Moment That Split Her Childhood

Suzanne told me about the day everything changed. She was five years old, living in a beautiful house filled with tension no one was allowed to name. When the abuse occurred, the people around her looked away. The silence that followed was almost as damaging as the moment itself.

What stood out most was not the event, but what happened in her mind. She said she felt “bathed by mercy, grace, and love.” At first, that experience confused her. She thought it must be another part of the trauma. Something strange her brain did to survive.

It took years for her to understand it as something else. Something steady. Something that had always been there.

Listening to her describe that discovery felt like watching someone locate the compass they had been carrying in their pocket all along.

How She Reclaimed What Was Already Hers

As Suzanne grew older, she followed that feeling. She studied physics and metaphysics. She spent a lot of time outside. She moved her body through long bike rides and hours in nature because it was the only place she felt enough space to breathe.

She told me a story about lying on a hillside in California, determined to understand what she had felt at five years old. She stayed there long enough to feel a warmth rise in her body. A hum. A pulse. A reminder that her soul was not something she had lost. It was something she had never been separated from.

This moment was not a miracle in the dramatic sense. It was quiet. Simple. Internal. And it changed everything.

Suzanne devoted the next decades of her life to understanding how people disconnect from themselves and how they eventually find their way home. Her leadership work, her writing, and her coaching all come from that place. Not a theory. A lived truth.

What Suzanne Taught Me About My Own Story

Throughout our conversation, I kept thinking about my own childhood. I lost my mom when I was eight. No one talked about grief the way they do now. I did what so many kids do. I tried to be perfect. I folded myself into who I thought I needed to be to keep the rest of my world from falling apart.

Talking with Suzanne reminded me that the tenderness we try to bury usually finds its way back. Sometimes through therapy. Sometimes through relationships. Sometimes through the body. Sometimes through moments we cannot explain.

Her story also reminded me of something I forget more often than I like to admit. We are not defined by what harmed us. We are shaped by the ways we rise. By the ways we keep choosing ourselves. By the ways we keep listening to the small voice in us that has not given up.

Healing Is Not a Return. It Is a Reconnection.

Suzanne’s story is not about outrunning trauma. It is about learning to hear something better than the old narrative. Something that tells the truth about who you really are.

She often says that her work is not about fixing people. It is about reconnecting them to the part of themselves that was never broken in the first place.

I think most of us need that reminder.

Healing is not a backward path. It is a forward movement into a deeper version of ourselves.

If Suzanne’s story resonates with you, I hope you give the episode a listen. And if something in it stirs up your own story, I hope you let yourself sit with that. You might find that the light you have been searching for has been inside you all along.