Katherine van Heerden Psychology Practice

16/04/2026

05/04/2026

Sometimes one of the hardest truths to face is this:

Your parent may have loved you in the only way they knew how…
and still wounded you deeply.

That is the pain of generational trauma.

A child who grows up without emotional safety, softness, comfort, or healthy guidance does not simply “grow out” of that pain. If it is never acknowledged, never processed, and never healed, it can show up later in how they parent, how they communicate, how they handle emotions, and how they respond to the people who need them most.

This is how generational wounds get passed down.

Not because the pain was right.
Not because the damage was excusable.
But because unhealed people often struggle to give what they were never shown.

A father who was taught that crying makes him weak may grow into a man who shuts down emotionally.
A parent who was never comforted may struggle to comfort others.
A child who had to survive harshness may grow up thinking love must be hard, distant, or emotionally cold.

And then the next generation feels the impact.

This does not mean parents are not responsible for their choices. They are.
But it does mean that sometimes, when you look closely, you realize the wound did not start with them.

That realization can bring a very specific kind of grief.

Because sometimes you are not only grieving what happened to you.
You are also grieving the fact that your parent may have been wounded long before they ever wounded you.

And still, both things can be true:

You can understand their pain…
and still acknowledge your own.

You can have compassion for what shaped them…
and still be honest about what it cost you.

That is where real healing begins.
Not in denying your pain.
Not in excusing theirs.
But in telling the truth about both.

If this resonates with you, this is exactly the kind of healing work I explore in my books. I Didn’t Choose to Be Born and Chasing Love That Hurts. Link here: https://linktr.ee/traumatorecovery

04/04/2026

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02/04/2026

This is going to offend a lot of narcissistic people.

But it’s time you start admitting that you mistreated people and acted out of line, instead of being delusional and acting like you were the victim.

Because the truth is, not everything that went wrong in your life was someone else’s fault. Not every broken relationship was because you were “too good” or “too kind.” Sometimes, it was your words, your actions, your pride, your inability to take responsibility that pushed people away.

In reality, your actions put you in a position where you lost everything and everyone who genuinely cared for you. And instead of sitting with that truth, reflecting on it, and growing from it… you chose the easier route. You rewrote the story. You painted yourself as the victim. You avoided the discomfort that comes with self-awareness.

Then you go and surround yourself with cheerleaders—people who support your foolishness, agree with everything you say, and feed your ego—rather than seeking out those who are real enough to hold you accountable. The kind of people who will look you in the eye and tell you when you’re wrong. The kind of people who actually want to see you grow, not just stay comfortable.

Because growth is uncomfortable. Accountability is uncomfortable. But that discomfort is where real change begins.

Healing doesn’t come from attention.
It comes from accountability.

And that’s exactly what narcissists run from.

They run from the mirror.
They run from the truth.
They run from the hard conversations that force them to confront who they’ve been.

But until you stop running—until you sit with your mistakes, own them fully, and make a genuine effort to change—you’ll keep repeating the same cycles, losing the same kinds of people, and telling yourself the same comforting lies.

At some point, you have to decide: do you want to protect your ego, or do you want to actually grow?

02/04/2026

Unlocking the Cage: Finding the Child, Not the Label, in "Asperger’s Children"
As both a writer and a lifelong book reviewer, I spend my days chasing stories. I chase the arc of a character, the turn of a phrase, the quiet truth buried beneath a plot. But every so often, a book comes along that reverses the lens. It doesn’t ask me to observe a story; it asks me to feel a history. Edith Sheffer’s Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in N**i Vienna is one such book.

Now, I know what you might be thinking. A review that calls a book about N**i psychiatry “heart-warming” seems like a contradiction, maybe even a cruelty. But bear with me. Because the warmth of this book isn’t found in its historical facts; it’s found in the light it shines on our present. It’s found in the profound, liberating act of understanding.

Sheffer, a historian and the mother of a child on the autism spectrum, does something remarkable. She takes the cold, clinical legacy of Hans Asperger a name that has become a shorthand for a certain kind of “high-functioning” autism and shows us its true, chilling origins. She meticulously details how Asperger’s work wasn’t a benevolent outlier in N**i Germany, but rather a cog in the machinery of the Third Reich’s brutal eugenics program.

This could have been a dry, academic autopsy. Instead, it reads like a detective story, and the mystery at its heart is one that haunts every parent and every teacher: What does it mean to be a “worthy” child?

And this is where the book becomes not just essential, but deeply, painfully relatable.

As a writer, I spend my life crafting characters who are “complex.” We love complex characters. We praise novels for their morally grey areas and their nuanced, flawed protagonists. Sheffer shows us the horrifying real-world consequence of that impulse when applied to human beings. Hans Asperger was the ultimate architect of “nuance.” He created a hierarchy of autistic children, dividing them into those he deemed capable of “social integration” (the “little professors”) and those he consigned to the notorious Spiegelgrund clinic, where over 800 children were murdered.

Reading this, I felt a chill of recognition. How often do we, as a society, do this? How often do we subconsciously rank children in classrooms, in playgrounds, in families based on their ability to conform, to be “high-functioning,” to fit neatly into our established structures? We praise the child who can mask their struggles, who can make eye contact and sit still, while subtly deeming the child who cannot as somehow more “difficult,” more other.

The heart-warming part and I promise it’s there is not the history itself, but the clarity it provides.

Sheffer’s work is a key. It unlocks the cage of Asperger’s label, revealing it not as a natural category, but as a constructed one, born from a place of profound prejudice. In doing so, she liberates us from its lingering shadow. By showing us the past so vividly, she hands us the tools to dismantle it in the present.

For any parent who has ever sat in a specialist’s office, heart in their throat, hearing a list of their child’s “deficits,” this book is a balm. For any adult who has ever felt the exhaustion of “masking” to be palatable to the neurotypical world, this book is a mirror that finally reflects your struggle as valid, not as a personal failing. For any teacher who has looked at a classroom of diverse minds and felt the pressure to force them into a single mold, this book is a revolution.

Sheffer doesn’t just write history; she writes a love letter to her own child and to all children who exist outside the lines. She shows us that the true legacy of that dark era isn’t a diagnostic label, but a warning: the danger of valuing conformity over humanity.

I closed Asperger’s Children not with a sense of despair, but with a profound sense of hope. It is a deeply unsettling book, yes. But it is also a clarifying one. It strips away a century of clinical jargon and reveals the simple, beating heart at the center of it all: the imperative to see every child as whole, as worthy, not in spite of who they are, but because of it.

To read this book is to understand that the most radical, loving act we can perform is to refuse to sort children into categories of worth. To read it is to finally hear the unspoken question that has haunted the story of neurodiversity for a century and to find the courage to give a new answer.

If you are a parent, an educator, or simply a human being trying to understand how to love the people in your life more fully, read this book. It will break your heart. And then, with masterful care, it will help you put it back together, in a shape that is wiser, kinder, and more open than before.

29/03/2026

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DWY1AyUFWWu/?igsh=MXI0bHlqNnltYW93ZA==

28/03/2026

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DWWn6ooiNW2/?igsh=MWd5ZXdid2NwdHM2MQ==

22/03/2026

It’s a very thin line… and if we’re not careful, we spend our lives mistaking one for the other.

We tell ourselves we are choosing connection, choosing love, choosing belonging. But quietly, almost invisibly, we begin to edit ourselves. We soften certain truths, silence certain instincts, reshape parts of who we are so we can remain held, seen, accepted. Not because we are weak, but because we are human. Because somewhere deep within us, attachment feels like survival.

Gabor Maté points to something uncomfortable here: when authenticity and attachment collide, attachment almost always wins.

And it makes sense. Long before we had language for “being ourselves,” we had a nervous system wired for connection. As children, being accepted wasn’t just a desire, it was safety. So we learned, often without realizing it, that who we are can be negotiated… but connection cannot be lost.

That pattern doesn’t simply disappear with age. It follows us into friendships, relationships, workplaces, into every space where belonging feels like something we could lose. And so we keep choosing attachment, sometimes at the quiet expense of ourselves.

The danger is not in choosing connection. It’s in losing awareness of the cost.

Because over time, the distance between who you are and who you present can become so subtle you barely notice it. Until one day, you feel disconnected not from others, but from yourself. And you can’t quite explain why.

Authenticity, then, is not just about expression. It’s about courage. The courage to risk being seen as you are, even when it threatens the very connections you depend on. The courage to believe that real belonging does not require self-abandonment.

And maybe the work is not to reject attachment, but to gently renegotiate it. To build connections where your truth is not a liability. To stay, not by shrinking, but by standing fully in who you are.

Because the deepest kind of connection isn’t the one you secure by becoming what others need.
It’s the one that remains… when you stop editing yourself.

05/03/2026

28/02/2026

Many survivors did not walk into abusive relationships “naïve.” They walked in conditioned.

If you grew up in environments where dysfunction was normalised, where silence was rewarded, where sacrifice was expected, where love meant endurance, your nervous system learned that this was connection. Culture often reinforces this by romanticising suffering, loyalty without reciprocity, and staying no matter the cost. This happened to me

Abusers are skilled at identifying these patterns. They exploit existing beliefs about love, duty, family and tolerance. They do not create the conditioning from scratch. They build on what was already installed.

None of that removes their (the abusers)responsibility.

The abuse is still their choice. The exploitation is still intentional. The harm is still on them.

Understanding the foundation does not shift blame. It explains why leaving is complex and why survivors deserve compassion, not judgement.