About Path to SelfPower

My name is Hassan Aden. I am 43 years old, live in London, and wear many different hats. For nearly two decades, I worked in local government and struggled to fulfil my full potential, unknowingly hampered and held back by deep, underlying trauma.

Yet, beneath the surface of my daily life, I carried a heavy heart filled with a persistent feeling that there was something fundamentally "wrong with me." I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it shaped my entire world.

It wasn't until 2020, at 36 years old, that the truth finally clicked: I learned I was living with Complex PTSD (CPTSD). The roots of this trauma reached all the way back to when I was 7 years old and lived through the Somali Civil War of 1991, before moving to the UK in 1993. For three decades, unbeknown to me, CPTSD was quietly altering how I saw myself and how I related to others. It brought deep feelings of worthlessness, intense emotional swings, and a chronic, exhausting struggle to emotionally connect with my family, friends, and people, leaving me feeling unsafe in the world.

Reclaiming My Potential

The real shift began when I started my journey of healing from CPTSD. As I learned how to safely regulate my mind and shift from surviving to thriving, everything changed. That is when I experienced massive breakthroughs in both my personal life and my career. Armed with a newly regulated and thriving mindset, I stepped confidently into leadership in 2023.

Today, I work full-time as a leader in local government managing a fantastic team, and in June 2026, I also stepped into the role of Area Director for Toastmasters International—actively pursuing my deep passions for learning the art of leadership and public speaking. Guided by this newfound strength, I am thriving as a storyteller and expanding my creative horizon as an aspiring author and podcaster.

If you are reading this and feel that same heavy heart, nameless shadow, and feeling stuck I want you to hear this clearly: There is nothing wrong with you. What happened to you was wrong. You are experiencing a normal response to abnormal things that happened to you. What happened to you hides your power, the way clouds hide the sun. But the sun—like your power and light—never left you and is always there.

My Turning Point

Before I reached that understanding, I spent three decades searching for answers. I read countless self-help books, desperately hoping to find the spark that would start my healing. Every time I started a new self-help book or method, it felt like the right path—until, after a while, it turned into another dead end. Following so many false starts, a deep disillusionment set in. I gave up. I truly believed I was broken beyond repair.

Then, at age 38, the war in Ukraine broke out in 2022. Watching the television and listening to the radio triggered intense, overwhelming emotional flashbacks to my own experiences of the Somali Civil War at the age of 7 in 1991. It became so severe that I couldn't watch or listen to anything about the conflict without being completely triggered.

But then came the turning point.

I was listening to BBC Radio 4’s The World at One programme when the reporting journalist spoke with deep passion and compassion about the crisis. He said: "The children of Ukraine are the most affected by the horrors of war, and they have developed childhood trauma. We must save the children and ensure that every Ukrainian child affected by the war receives the therapy, counselling services, and support they need to heal. Otherwise, they will struggle in school and in living a normal life—they could become a lost generation."

Hearing those words triggered a massive "Aha" moment for me. I sat there and asked myself: Who came for me? How come no one made sure I got the therapy and counselling help I needed so desperately when I was a child? I asked my parents and everyone around me: Why was this allowed to happen to me, causing me and my peers to become a lost generation?

For the first time, the blame shifted away from myself. I realised I wasn't inherently broken; I was an unsupported survivor of childhood trauma.

Finding My Guides

I threw myself into research, reading and listening to every book, article, and podcast that I could find on the subject. I learned about my childhood trauma, faced my abandonment issues, and uncovered the generational trauma held in my body. With the assistance of my amazing guide and therapist, I began the journey of healing.There are many people—family, friends, and others included—who helped me in their own way. In particular, I am grateful to Dr Bessel van der Kolk, Oprah Winfrey, Dr Bruce Perry, Stephanie Foo, Dr Amir Levine, and psychologist Rachel Heller. Their books changed my life. They have been in my corner, willing me on and sharing the insights that I needed to win my battles and ultimately win the war. I will be forever grateful and indebted to them:

  1. The Body Keeps the Score by Dr Bessel van der Kolk: This was the first time I truly realised I had CPTSD and learned how trauma was limiting my life.
  2. What Happened to You? by Oprah Winfrey and Dr Bruce Perry: This helped me understand that I was asking myself the wrong question when I said, "What is wrong with me?" I was not broken; I had a disregulated brain and mindset. It was possible to learn how to regulate it once I understood that it was what happened to me that was wrong.
  3. What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo: This gave me hope that I could heal from CPTSD too. She treated her healing journey like a reporter on assignment—investigating a story and gathering information from all sources. Following her lead, I started therapy and kept a daily voice journal and written reflections each step of the way. This helped me shed light on my dysregulation, evaluate how it served me or didn't, gather the tools I needed to regulate my mind, and track my progress through the ups, downs, and everything in between.
  4. Attached by Dr Amir Levine and Rachel Heller: I learned about my attachment style. For the first time, I understood that the vital ingredient for developing a regulated, thriving brain is having a secure attachment style, and I learned how to cultivate it.

Turning My Pain Into Wisdom

There is a beautiful quote by Confucius: "We have two lives, and the second begins when we realise we only have one."My second life began the moment I chose to heal. Having lived for over three decades in deep, invisible pain, I made a promise to myself: I am going to turn my pain into wisdom and learn to thrive.

My motto is simple: 'This is personal for me. It is personal between me and trauma. It is a war. I have lost countless battles, got wounded many times, and have the scars, but I learned how to win, turned the tide, and won the war. I want to help you start winning your battles, and to turn the tide and win your war too.''

The purpose of the rest of my life is to help turn the tide for others. I want to rescue as many people as possible from trauma's clutches, helping them shift from merely knowing how to survive to truly learning how to thrive.

I started Path to SelfPower to share the hard-won wisdom from my own healing journey and the many guides, both past and present, who lifted me up with their wisdom. Here, I will share my story, full of my deep reflections, wisdom, breakthroughs, wrong turns, missteps, insights, novel ideas, and strategies.

By being completely honest about my journey, I want to help you save time, avoid unnecessary pain, and know with absolute certainty that trauma hides your power, the way clouds hide the sun. I want to help you change the way you look at things to enable the things you look at to change, and to find the Path to Your SelfPower.