English

After years of work-related stress and emotional instability, I sought psychiatric support and began confronting long-standing family issues that had shaped my life since childhood. This chapter traces the end of a career, the struggle with depression, and the first steps toward understanding, recovery, and building a new future.

I reflect on how a growing mismatch with corporate culture and long-standing family burdens trapped me, and how cognitive restructuring helped me release excessive responsibility, reshape my perspective, and begin living my own life with hope.

I describe how organisational restructuring and a shift in corporate culture led me to growing anxiety, exclusion from my responsibilities, workplace isolation, and emotional distress while working in a Japanese subsidiary of a European company.

I recount how communication with my manager gradually broke down, how my responsibilities were outsourced without explanation, and how a toxic workplace culture marked by silence and fear pushed me toward emotional collapse and eventual sick leave. Through my personal experience, I reflect on power imbalance, managerial dysfunction, and the psychological toll of working in a corporate environment where dialogue no longer exists.

When my partner told me, “You can leave the company now,” everything shifted. This chapter explores the breaking point, the trauma of past job loss, overwhelming responsibility and the lessons learned as I stepped away from a collapsing workplace.

A personal account of visiting a psychiatric clinic for the first time. I describe the fear before the appointment, the struggle to explain my symptoms, and how a psychiatrist’s words became the starting point for cognitive restructuring.

Through therapy, reflection, and putting emotions into words, I came to recognise family issues as the root of my difficulty in living. This chapter explores emotional release, cognitive restructuring, and the decision to accept the past and live my own life.

After stepping away from work, I learned the true value of rest. This chapter reflects on stress, physical recovery, cognitive change, and the words of others that quietly sustained me during a period of rest and reflection.

Reflecting on words from mentors and clinicians, I explore the idea that family and genetics shape us but do not determine our lives. This chapter considers courage, personal responsibility, and the possibility of choosing how to live again.

This chapter looks back on more than a decade of marriage marked by emotional exhaustion, conflict, and endurance. It describes living under constant strain, nearly choosing divorce, and how taking sick leave slowly created space for reflection. Through that distance, the author begins to understand both his partner’s wounds―shaped by family and faith―and his own limits, tracing how despair and a fragile hope coexisted for years.

This chapter looks back on everyday moments in a relationship where small social interactions repeatedly turned tense. Through encounters with neighbours, shop staff, money, work, and public spaces, it reflects on how a sense of being wronged, emotional distance from society, and distorted values gradually surfaced in daily life.

This chapter recounts years of living with constant tension, fear, and emotional erosion caused by a partner’s escalating anger. Through everyday episodes at home and in public, I reflect on how hostility, unpredictability, and silence slowly turned a place meant to feel safe into something else entirely ― and how it took time to recognise what was happening.

A reflective blog post exploring rest and mental health recovery, and a partner’s gradual awakening from psychological control. Set against a transformative journey to Tateshina in Japan, this chapter traces quiet inner change, shared reflection, and a pivotal moment that reshaped how two people chose to move forward with their lives.

In this chapter, I reflect on why I chose not to divorce, despite years of emotional strain. I write about love that endured hardship, the hope that things might change with time, and a quiet episode at city hall that stayed with me. This is a personal account of choosing to pause, reflect, and stay ― rather than walking away.

Meeting my partner’s parents for the first time, I sensed an unspoken pressure that would later reveal a deeper pattern of control, silence, and forced obedience. Through unsettling encounters, unchallenged aggression, spare keys, and blurred boundaries, this chapter explores how family dynamics and inherited authority shaped my partner’s fear, submission, and emotional pain ― and how these invisible structures quietly governed our lives.

This chapter explores how faith quietly shaped everyday life through family and community, and how inherited belief can become a form of control. Through personal encounters, reflections on upbringing, and the slow process of choosing distance, I write about what it means to reclaim one’s own will and begin living a life that is truly one’s own.