I saw the dust from the car and knew they’d left me.
Three years old, standing in a dirt road in Morocco, watching the dust settle where my family’s car had been. My brother’s joke about leaving me behind suddenly felt like prophecy.
In that moment, a three-year-old mind made a decision that would shape the next thirty years of my life.
If they left me, they didn’t care. If they didn’t care, I was unimportant. If I was unimportant, why should I care about anything?
The act of “I don’t care” was born.
What I didn’t understand then was that I had just laid the foundation for a mental prison I would spend decades building, brick by brick, until it nearly destroyed me.
The Foundation: When Trauma Becomes Truth
Every prison needs a foundation. Mine was laid the day my mother died when I was three.
The feeling of abandonment was immediate and total. But abandonment itself wasn’t the prison. The meaning I created from that abandonment was.
Here’s what most people don’t understand about childhood trauma: it’s not the event that imprisons us, it’s the story we tell ourselves about what that event means.
My mother’s death became: “People leave.”
My father’s remarriage and our move to the Netherlands became: “I don’t belong.”
That moment with the car dust became: “I don’t matter.”
These weren’t just thoughts. They became the bedrock of my reality. The foundation upon which I would build everything else.
The Bricks: How Beliefs Become Barriers
Foundations are just the beginning. You need bricks to build walls.
My bricks came in the form of reinforcing experiences. Each one seemed to prove my foundational beliefs were true.
The bedwetting started because I was terrified of death. Every night, I was convinced that if I fell asleep, I wouldn’t wake up. The fear was so intense my body couldn’t hold it.
But the adults around me didn’t see a traumatized child processing death anxiety. They saw a problem to be solved, a nuisance to be managed.
Their treatment of my bedwetting became another brick: “You’re dirty. You’re stupid. You can’t even master basic bodily functions.”
Each harsh word, each expression of frustration, each moment of being made to feel ashamed was another brick in the wall I was building around myself.
The cruel irony? I was simultaneously excelling in ways that should have contradicted these beliefs.
I was smart and funny. I got the highest CITO score in my elementary school’s history. I was the first and only person in my family to complete VWO, the highest level of high school in the Netherlands.
But success couldn’t penetrate the prison I was building. Instead, it created a new kind of torture: imposter syndrome.
Every achievement felt like evidence that I was fooling everyone. Every success was just proof that I was a fraud who would eventually be found out.
The Mortar: How Language Locks Us In
Bricks need mortar to hold them together. In mental prisons, language is the mortar.
“I don’t care” became my mantra, my identity, my automatic response to everything.
Things that should have excited me didn’t. Things that bothered others barely registered. I had achieved the perfect emotional numbness.
This phrase wasn’t just something I said. It was the context from which I operated. It was the lens through which I saw everything.
The language we use doesn’t just describe our reality. It creates it. Every time I said “I don’t care,” I was reinforcing the walls of my prison.
And like any good prison, it was designed to be escape-proof.
The Maintenance: Why We Preserve Our Prisons
Here’s the part that seems impossible to understand from the outside: we actively maintain our mental prisons because they serve a purpose.
My “I don’t care” attitude wasn’t just protecting me from disappointment. It was protecting me from having to confront the possibility that I might actually matter.
Because if I mattered, then my mother’s death wasn’t about me being unworthy. It was just a tragedy that happened to someone worthy of love.
If I mattered, then I’d have to take responsibility for my life instead of hiding behind indifference.
If I mattered, then I’d have to risk caring about things that might not work out.
The prison felt safer than freedom.
This is why I sabotaged every success. After high school, instead of going to university, I chose door-to-door sales. I excelled at that too, becoming a sales manager with my own office at 19.
But when real success threatened to contradict my core belief that I didn’t matter, I unconsciously destroyed it.
I started coming in late. I stopped doing what I was supposed to do. I started doing what I wasn’t supposed to do. I became complacent and treated employees harshly.
I lost every salesperson and had to start from zero.
Even when I received news that I was about to be declared bankrupt, my exact words were: “I don’t care, it doesn’t matter.”
The same protective phrase that three-year-old created was still running my life thirty years later.
The Observation Point: From Prisoner to Architect
During my bankruptcy and subsequent divorce, I did deep work on myself. That’s when I had the breakthrough that changed everything.
I started to see the pattern. “I don’t care” wasn’t protecting me. It was controlling me.
It was the context I was always operating from, and it would never let me create anything that didn’t fit that context.
The moment I recognized this, something shifted. I began to dissociate from the process.
Instead of being trapped inside my thoughts, I started observing them. Like they weren’t mine. Like I was watching someone else think.
This observation created space. Space between me and my thoughts. Space between me and my automatic responses.
In that space, I discovered choice.
I wasn’t obligated to believe these thoughts or entertain them because they weren’t actually mine. They were constructs I had built.
The truth hit me like lightning: “I don’t care” was hiding “I don’t matter.” And “I don’t matter” was a total lie.
The Blueprint for Freedom
Once you see your mental prison as something you constructed, everything changes.
What you built, you can dismantle.
The whole structure was designed to protect you from something you thought was true. But it was never true. It was always a lie.
Your prison isn’t serving the purpose you thought it was. It’s keeping you locked up for nothing.
I’ve now guided over 3,000 people through this process in one-on-one sessions and group retreats in Marrakech, Bali, the Netherlands, and Dubai. Here’s what I’ve learned:
Once people get the insight, there’s no reason to stay imprisoned.
Yes, part of them wants to stay in the familiar. But that’s the inauthentic part they need to release.
The authentic self naturally wants freedom once it sees the truth.
How do you distinguish between your authentic voice and the inauthentic part that wants to stay safe in limitation?
Use emotion as your compass—but with an important caveat.
This emotional guidance system requires a moral compass. Some emotions that feel good can actually come from the inauthentic self, while some that feel uncomfortable can come from the authentic self.
If you feel good doing something immoral, that pleasure comes from your inauthentic self. If you feel guilt about that same action, that guilt is your authentic self speaking.
For me, the source of this objective moral compass is Allah.
Positive emotions like joy and gratitude that arise from moral, aligned actions come from your authentic self. Fear, guilt, and shame that arise from self-limiting beliefs come from the inauthentic part.
Your authentic self resonates with expansion, growth, and possibility—always within the framework of what is right and moral. Your inauthentic self resonates with either contraction and limitation, or with pleasure derived from actions that harm yourself or others.
The Message to Your Younger Self
If I could go back to that three-year-old standing in the dust, watching that car disappear, I would tell him:
“Don’t care whether anyone else cares. Allah cares and has a path for you that will help thousands of people. You will be a hero that saves lives.”
I always loved superheroes as a child. I just didn’t know people would see me as one.
Not the kind that flies or has super strength. The kind that helps people escape from prisons they didn’t even know they had built.
Your limiting beliefs aren’t truths. They’re constructs. They’re stories you created to make sense of experiences you couldn’t understand.
The foundation you laid in childhood doesn’t have to support the rest of your life. You can choose to build something entirely different.
You can choose to transmute and transform the context from which you operate.
You can choose to observe your thoughts instead of being controlled by them.
You can choose to recognize that the voice telling you that you don’t matter is lying.
You can choose to become the architect of your own freedom.
The prison you built can be dismantled. The walls that feel so solid are actually made of stories you can choose to stop believing.
The dust has settled. The car is long gone. But you’re still here.
And you matter more than you know.
