Written by Novus DNA founder, Ella McCrystal

This is not another self-help book about fixing what is broken. You were never broken.

The book recognises that the mind and body adapt intelligently to threat. What are often labelled as symptoms are, in fact, signals.

At its core, the book is about coherence and authorship. It explores how identity is shaped through repeated states of stress, fear, and silencing, and how the nervous system can begin to confuse survival with selfhood. Rather than pushing change through willpower or relentless positivity, the reader is guided to slow down, observe, and restore regulation. Healing is framed as a perceptual shift, not a moral one.

Blending trauma-informed psychology, nervous system awareness, and reflective practices, the book supports reconnection with internal signals that were once ignored or overridden. It reframes self-blame, hyper-independence, people pleasing, dissociation, and self-harm as strategies that once kept the system alive.

When these strategies are met with understanding instead of judgement, they no longer need to lead.

Aligned with Novus principles, the book does not promise change through force. It invites restoration. It supports a return to what existed before adaptation hardened into identity.

The reader is guided to recognise where life is being lived from conditioned response rather than choice, and how perception shapes experience. As safety increases, clarity follows. As clarity returns, agency becomes possible again.

This book connects inner healing with real life. It speaks to relationships, self-trust, boundaries, purpose, and the ability to hold complexity without collapsing or controlling. It offers structure without rigidity, and truth without shame.

At its heart, the book reflects a central philosophy: when the system is no longer in danger, the self reorganises naturally. Healing is not about striving to become a better version of yourself. It is about allowing the body and mind to remember who you already are.

Part story, part guide, and part companion, the book traces a life shaped by severe childhood abuse and the quiet erosion of self-worth into one rebuilt through understanding, regulation, and truth. It weaves lived experience with psychological insight, showing how trauma lives in the nervous system and how healing begins when the body is allowed to feel safe.

Now a psychotherapist and trauma specialist, the author offers no platitudes and no motivational shortcuts. She offers perspective. The book explains how survival patterns form, why they persist, and how they can soften without force or denial. There is no bypassing here. Only integration.

This book is for those who are tired of carrying their past as proof of who they are. For those who want self-trust instead of self-correction. For those who are ready to stop surviving and begin living with coherence and agency.