Part 1 of 3: The 7-Year-Old Boy and the Missing User Manual for His Mind & Body

Every single product we purchase comes with a manual. From a cheap pair of wireless earphones to the most expensive luxury car, you receive a booklet explaining exactly how the machine works, what the warning lights mean, and how to fix it when it glitches.

In fact, the more valuable the item we purchase, the more we expect—indeed, demand—that it comes with instructions. If you buy a flawless diamond, you expect a manual detailing exactly how to care for it, how to store it safely, and how to clean it. We would be completely outraged if a jeweller or car dealer looked at us and said, "Sorry, there is no manual that comes with this diamond or this luxury vehicle."

Yet, we enter the world with the most valuable, complex, and sophisticated masterpiece in the entire universe—our human mind and body—and we are handed absolutely nothing by our parents or our education system. We are expected to navigate our entire lives without a single page of instructions, and what is worse is, we are not even outraged!

I do not recall ever having this conversation with my parents. I often wonder if there was ever a tradition in human history where a mandatory conversation was passed down through the ages, sounding something like this:

Father: "Hassan, my son, come here. I want to speak with you today about something very important." I skip into the living room, excited, intrigued, and curious about what my father is going to tell me. I sit down next to him and huddle up close. He puts his arm around me. I can feel his warmth, his energy, and his heartbeat.

Father: "My son, how old are you?"

Hassan: "I really enjoyed my birthday yesterday, Dad. Thank you for making it a special and memorable day for me. I am 7 years old."

Father: "Listen very carefully, my son. What is your favourite toy?"

Hassan: "I have an electric toy car. It is in my favourite colour, orange. I love playing with it."

Father: "When I got the car for you, do you remember what came along with the package?"

Hassan: "No, Dad... Ah, I remember now! There was a manual that explained how to put the batteries in, how to switch on the engine, and how to use the remote control."

Father: "Imagine the car came without a manual. What would you have done?"

Hassan: "I would have tried to put things together using my imagination and seeing what fit! I would have asked you to help me, too. I think I would have figured it out in the end, but it might have taken a little while."

Father: "My son, I want you to know that the most complex, sophisticated, and mysterious masterpiece in the whole universe is our human mind and body. And I have not received a single page of a User Manual from my father, neither did he from his father, and so on! Over my lifetime, I have been putting together a Human User Manual: How to make our unconscious conscious, direct our life, and create our fate. It contains enough to give you a solid foundation and a blueprint for your life. I want you to have it, read it, and learn from it. I want you to refer back to it at different stages of your life—as a teenager, a young adult, and later. There will be insights that make no sense now, but they will make sense to you when you reach the right milestone. I want you to ask me anything you do not understand."

Hassan: "Thank you so much, Dad. What is the unconscious? I have never heard that before. What is fate?"

Do we need a User Manual: For Our Mind & Body

If only I received that talk at seven years old.

Instead, 1991 was the exact year my world shattered. At seven years old, I lived through the horrors of the Somali Civil War before moving to the UK in 1993. I was handed one of life's most volatile experiences, developing childhood trauma as a result of my brain and body being exposed to the most extreme conditions.

For three decades, I carried a heavy heart and a constant, invisible feeling that something was fundamentally "wrong with me." Unbeknownst to me, I was living with Complex PTSD (CPTSD). Because I did not have a manual that explained to me that my nervous system was traumatised, I spent decades trying to "fix" myself using the wrong tools. I read endless self-help books, trying to learn how to unlock my potential. Every path turned into a dead end, leaving me feeling completely lost.

The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung said:

"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."

When I heard this for the first time, I remember feeling:

'''Aha' What is this damn unconscious that is directing my life without my knowledge or consent?''

Because my childhood trauma was left unprocessed, I realised that it was creating my life. It was directing my choices, my deep feelings of worthlessness, and my intense emotional anxiety from the shadows—and I spent thirty years calling it my "fate." I have decided, enough is enough. I asked myself, ‘How many more years can I afford to lose?’ 

How to build a solid foundation: For Our Mind & Body

This is the exact reason why we need to build a User Manual for Our Mind & Body.

Think of it this way: every car on earth shares the exact same core essentials. They all have an engine, a steering wheel, a chassis, and tyres. What differs is the type of car—the style, the engine size, the colour, and the layout.

We human beings are exactly the same. Our User Manuals share universal, biological foundations. We all have a nervous system, an emotional right brain, a logical left brain, and a survival and thriving instinct, and a disregulation and normal regulation model.

This is a massive win for us. Because our core foundations are the same, we do not have to figure this out alone. We can help each other identify, build, and correctly assemble our internal blueprints.

But a vital word of warning: who we get our information from matters.

When building our manual, we must be incredibly selective and picky about who we choose as our role models and guides. If we are not careful, we can end up laying down foundations built on poor construction or cheap materials that flatter to deceive.

These cheap materials—like toxic positivity, unvetted self-help trends, or surface-level but popular ideas like 'Fake it till you make it' —look beautiful on the outside. But after years of hard work building with these fake blocks, when a real storm hits, the foundation cracks because it has always lacked substance.

Would you build your house with 'Fake bricks' to show people that you have 'a house'. If your answer is no, why would 'fake it (confidence/self-esteem/healing etc) till you make it'. This idea I adopted, like many people, and in the end I watched my foundations crumple, time and time again.

I realised most self-help tools were bandages that covered the wound, so I did not see it anymore, but the wound remained unhealed throughout. I needed a trauma surgeon who operated on my trauma and helped me to heal fully, enabling me to move on and live and enjoy my life. I was lucky that I have found: Dr Bessel van der Kolk, Oprah Winfrey, Dr Bruce Perry, and Stephanie Foo. They operated on me, and gave me the map I needed to help put together my user manual for my mind and body. 

Tomorrow, in Part 2, I am taking you inside a raw community meeting where I uncover why recovery and healing often feels like an exhausting, impossible pipe dream—and the visual war strategy I use to help others completely break that loop.