Today I (Patricia) want to share something personal that touched me deeply and helped another piece of my inner puzzle fall into place.
(Trigger note: this message includes themes around family dynamics and addiction.)
Yesterday I had a conversation with my mother, and she told me something about my father that I never knew. I haven't had contact with him since I was five, and when I finally met him again years later, it was only for a brief moment before he passed away.
Still, it always felt as if invisible threads were shaping my life — even without his physical presence.
My mother told me that my father struggled with a gambling addiction and that our family had been declared bankrupt when I was a child. We were still living in the United States at the time. Soon after, we moved to the Netherlands without him.
When she told me this… something old inside me stirred.
It hurt — and at the same time, it brought clarity.
Because I recognized the pattern.
In my own life, I kept choosing partners who carried their own forms of addiction — sometimes obvious, sometimes hiding behind behaviour or emotional distance. And I kept following them into their shadow until I simply couldn’t anymore.
Until something in me said:
“This stops here. With me.”
It took years of falling, returning to the same patterns, climbing out again, learning, forgetting, remembering — and then finding the strength to break the cycle.
For a long time, I believed I was the black sheep of the family.
The one who felt too much.
The one who struggled.
The one who couldn’t fit into the expected mould.
But this week something opened in me.
A softer truth emerged:
I am not the black sheep.
I am the white sheep.
The one who brings light to places where generations carried shadow.
The one who feels what others couldn’t.
The one who breaks patterns by daring to see, to feel, and to stop repeating what was never mine to hold.
This realisation softened something deep in me — as if an old part of my heart finally exhaled.
Maybe you recognize this too…
That sense of being “different,” when in reality, you are the one making healing possible.
And maybe…
you are the white sheep too. |
Patricia and Robert van Kooten 
