From Survival to Voice: The Journey Behind NAAvoices

If you met me at work, you would see a primary care nurse getting on with the job. The clinic lists. The assessments. The routine pressures of general practice. You might notice that I take safeguarding seriously, that I ask different questions, that I pay attention when something doesn’t quite fit.

What you would not see is the path that brought me here, or why I rebuilt my entire life, and this website, from scratch.

This is that story.

The Name on This Page

I first wrote this story as Laura Prince.

The pseudonym was protection — but it was also honesty about where I was when I started writing. The early pages were not produced from clarity; they were produced from inside the storm. I was still raw, still in active legal proceedings, still finding language for things I had no framework for. Laura Prince gave me a place to put words on the page when my own name could not yet hold them.

I have since unpublished my first memoir, Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt. It was written in a season of trauma, before I had the channel or the capacity to properly articulate what I was processing. It was true — but it was raw.

One day it will become part of a trilogy. When that trilogy arrives, it will not be a record of trauma. It will be a record of the healing that so many people walk through in silence — the slow, unspectacular work of coming back to yourself, over time.

And it will arrive in my own name.

I am no longer writing under Laura Prince. She was the name that held the words while I was still inside what had happened to me. Amy Royle is the name that will tell the story of what came after — the integration, the rebuilding, the return to a self that is no longer hiding. The trilogy has earned that name. So have I.

This site is the same decision. NAAvoices is not memoir — it is advocacy, clinical reflection, and survivor work in real time, and it belongs to my own name from the start.

My name is Amy.

I am here under my own name now because the work has changed, and so have I. The healing has happened, and is still happening. My children have walked through every part of this with me, and they have come through their own years alongside mine. They have learned, as I have, that their lives matter. They have learned to speak the truth. They know their mum will do everything in her power to protect them — and they are proud of what I have built.

My daughter’s story is her own. Even at her age, her voice and her strength are extraordinary. Her name, like the names of her brothers, will be shielded until she is old enough to choose what she wants to do with it. Throughout the books, the blogs, and any future publication, my children appear under names they have chosen for themselves. They know they are written about. The choice of name is theirs.

Their privacy is not silence. Their privacy is consent.

So I sign this in my own name — and I leave theirs for them.

The Question That Sent Me Back to University

By the time everything fell apart, I had already earned my BSc (Hons) in Nursing, completed multiple master’s-level modules, and gained advanced diplomas across general practice. Years of primary care experience, a foundation in acute medicine, and several years in mental health and child and adolescent services sat behind me.

None of it protected me.

After years of coercive control and abuse, I left. What followed was worse than I had imagined. The abuse continued through the very services meant to protect us, then through the family court — where professionals looked the other way, and systems I had trusted were turned into weapons.

I found myself asking a question I could not let go of:

How can a human being choose to inflict that level of pain on the people closest to them — and remain unmoved by it? How does deceit come so easily, as though truth were meaningless? How can someone act with deliberate cruelty and still rest at night?

It was not an abstract interest in psychology. I was living with the aftermath of it. I needed to understand coercive control, psychopathy, and intentional harm because I needed to understand what kind of mind can cause that level of damage and still perform “normality” for professionals.

That question sent me back to university.

I self-funded a Postgraduate Certificate in Neuroscience and Psychology of Mental Health, completing it quietly alongside my job in primary care. Few colleagues even knew I was studying. It was not about promotion or another title — it was about survival and understanding.

The reality is blunt: no amount of academic theory will ever make intentional cruelty make sense in human terms.

But the course did something else important. It gave me language, evidence, and a framework for what I had lived through — trauma, attachment, adverse childhood experiences, personality structure, chronic stress, and the way the brain adapts in order to survive.

I am qualified in mental health, but my day-to-day employed role remains in primary care, with different clinical priorities. The mental-health training sits behind the scenes. It informs how I think, how I listen, and how I have built this work — but I am not employed as a specialist mental-health clinician, and that distinction matters.

What also matters is what came next.

The PGCert became a foundation. From there, my focus shifted from personal survival to a commitment to serve others standing where I once stood. That commitment led to further specialised training:

• Certified Trauma Healing Practitioner
• Certified Narcissist Recovery Practitioner
• Certified Neurodiversity Coach

All through CMA- and IPHM-accredited providers.

These qualifications are not credentials for their own sake. They represent a deliberate effort to turn lived experience and academic knowledge into structured, ethical, evidence-informed tools — so this work can extend beyond personal narrative into something practical for the people who need it.

ADHD, Masking, and the Shape of “Resilience”

At 34, I was finally diagnosed with ADHD. I had suspected it for years, but I had never prioritised it. I was too busy coping.

Suddenly, a lot made sense:

• The ability to hyperfocus through chaos
• The drive to fix complex problems that were not, technically, mine to fix
• The tendency to keep going long after most people would stop — until I crashed

ADHD had quietly shaped both my career success and my personal vulnerability. It helped me advocate, absorb information quickly, and think laterally about systems. It also meant I masked distress and over-functioned for far too long, calling it resilience while my nervous system burned out beneath it.

The combination of primary care nursing, postgraduate mental-health training, ADHD, and lived experience of abuse and institutional failure produced a particular kind of clarity. I could see the patterns. I could name the dynamics. I could track exactly how systems were failing — not only for me, but for my children.

The Day the Music Told the Truth

There was a point where the clinical knowledge, the qualifications, and the I’m fine façade all came apart.

One night, I sat in a chair and listened to “I Am Not OK” on repeat for an hour.

I was not writing. I was not coping. I was rocking, dissociating, and trying to keep my brain from breaking under the weight of what had happened — and what was still happening through the courts and the institutional response.

Two months later, in September 2024, I was diagnosed with PTSD.

The label did not shock me. It simply caught up with reality. Hypervigilance, flashbacks, sensory overload, the constant scanning for threat — textbook trauma, layered on chronic stress and unresolved safeguarding failures.

At that point, writing stopped being a hobby. It became survival.

When Your Children Show You the Cost

Some memories do not fade, no matter how much time passes.

I will never forget the day my eldest son cut his wrists.

I will never forget my middle child hiding at the bottom of the stairs, convinced his stepdad had come back.

Their fear was a mirror. It reflected my own internal state — the same dread, the same hyperawareness, the same sense that danger could reappear at any moment.

These were not isolated incidents. They were symptoms of living in prolonged fear and then being failed by the very systems meant to protect us.

Those moments changed the trajectory of my life. They moved advocacy from something I did around my job to something that sits at the centre of who I am.

The Courtroom Where My Voice Did Not Count

Leaving an abuser should mark the beginning of safety.

Instead, I watched the family court become another arena for control.

My ex played the system. Professionals stayed silent. I was never properly heard. Evidence that should have mattered was omitted from the narrative. At one point, the court even accepted the names of individuals presented as “police officers” — individuals who were not, in fact, officers at all.

One person stood up and did his job: a police officer who tried to act with integrity. He paid a heavy price for it. His own investigating officer eventually became my point of contact, and her humanity ruffled the wrong feathers in the process. That told me everything I needed to know about where the priorities really sat.

I was left with a clear message: you can be a nurse, a mother, and a credible witness, and still be silenced the moment your truth threatens the wrong reputation.

That level of institutional betrayal changes a person.

The Moment Nurse Against Abuse Was Born

The night after court, I was not okay.

My daughter was upset that evening because she was not “the best” at something. I had been trying to explain that everyone is good at different things — and she looked at me and said:

“You are the best at looking after people.”

When the systems around us refused to protect us, that one sentence became my compass. If I could not make institutions listen to me, I could at least build a space where others would not feel the same erasure — a space where they would not be left without a map.

During a period of severe mental decline, triggered by further police leaks and ongoing court proceedings, I realised something uncomfortable but undeniable: if I kept trying to be heard in spaces designed not to listen, I was going to break.

So I did the only thing that made sense to my ADHD brain, my nurse brain, and my traumatised brain all at once.

I built something new.

Nurse Against Abuse did not start as a brand. It started as a survival mechanism.

It began with a nurse who had no idea how to build a website, documenting everything in real time. It was raw — a rolling account of disclosure failures, safeguarding concerns, and procedural anomalies as they accumulated.

Over time, informed by my postgraduate mental-health training and my ongoing experience, it evolved. I rebuilt the blog. I turned loose posts into structured tools, timelines, and resources.

Now, two years on, it is evolving again — into NAAvoices: a space built not only from my story, but for every voice that deserves to be heard.

From Troubled Minds to Empowered Voices

From Troubled Minds to Empowered Voices was never a branding exercise. It grew out of my own journey — traumatised, feeling voiceless, unable to find the words I so desperately needed.

Traditional trauma therapies do not fit everyone living with PTSD. For me, speaking was impossible.

Out of that silence, I developed a technique. It became a journal for myself first, then a tool for others who also struggled to speak but longed for help.

The journals are available to purchase, but the honest truth is that I give away and donate far more than I ever sell.

What began as a personal survival tool has grown into the From Troubled Minds to Empowered Voices Collection — a four-book series of low-barrier, expressive resources for adults and children:

• Book 1 — Brainstorming Therapy and Expressive Techniques. A workbook-style guide for adults who need a way in when words are not yet possible. You do not need to be good at writing. You do not need artistic skill. You do not need the right words. You simply need a starting point.
• Book 2 — Gabby’s Guide to Brainstorming Fun: Nurturing Young Minds for Joy and Growth. A children’s journal of vibrant colouring pages, writing prompts and imaginative brainstorming activities, co-authored with my daughter, who appears under the name she chose for herself: Gabby.
• Book 3 — Gabby’s Guide to Brainstorming Fun: Helping Billy and Kids with Busy Brains. A story-led journal for neurodivergent children, in which Gabby helps her friend Billy navigate ADHD and Autism with kindness and creativity. Big feelings do not have to stay big forever.
• Book 4 – Brainstorming Therapy and Expressive Techniques, enhanced Art therapy Version. A workbook-style guide for adults who need a way in when words are not yet possible. You do not need to be good at writing. You do not need artistic skill. You do not need the right words. You simply need a starting point.

Gabby chose her name. She knows her work is in print. She is proud of it. That, in itself, is the difference between writing about a child and writing with one.

Not Broken

Not Broken: A Nurse’s Guide to Understanding Loss, Trauma, Symptoms and Rebuilding Life is a different kind of book.

It is not a memoir. It is not a workbook. It is the clinical companion to everything else I have written — a practical, evidence-informed guide for anyone trying to understand what is happening in their mind and body after bereavement, trauma, abuse, chronic stress, anxiety or depression, and what support might actually help.

Inside it, I bring together what I know as a Specialist Nurse Practitioner with postgraduate study in the neuroscience and psychology of mental health, what the current evidence shows, and what I have learned from living through it myself. It explains trauma, grief, depression, anxiety and nervous-system responses in plain language. It walks readers through the UK therapy landscape — EMDR, trauma-focused CBT, DBT, ACT, schema therapy, somatic and creative therapies, group support — and is honest about complementary and alternative approaches for people who cannot access NHS therapies quickly, are not yet ready for them, or need something alongside.

It also gives readers practical things: tools for sleep, grounding, movement, journalling, music, nutrition and nervous-system regulation; guidance on navigating the NHS, finding a therapist, asking the right questions, advocating for yourself; crisis planning; and a UK support directory.

It is not false reassurance. It is the book I wish someone had handed me at the beginning.

The story of why I had to write it sits in a separate piece on this site: Finding the Stars: Why Not Broken Had to Be Written.

Work as Sanctuary

Through all of this, work remained constant.

I love primary care. I love my patients and my work family. Though it is a workplace, it has always been the place I turn to when I am struggling.

A CAMHS worker asked me this week whether I had support in place, given that my children are still recovering from the abuse they endured. My answer was simple: I have work.

There, I could just be myself. Not a victim. Not only the parent of traumatised children. Just someone able to give others the care they deserve.

My therapy has been the ability to serve others. Work was where I could still be me.

• Work became my sanctuary when home was no longer safe.
• My mental-health qualification provides the theoretical foundation for what I share here.
• My lived experience ensures none of it drifts into abstract theory.

Together, those threads underpin everything on this site — the blogs, the survivor tools, the professional resources, and the insistence that people deserve to be heard, believed, and properly safeguarded.

Why This Story Is Here

This page exists for one reason: context.

When you read my work on coercive control, family court, ADHD, PTSD, child safeguarding, or institutional failure, I want you to know the perspective it is written from:

• A clinician with lived experience and the qualifications to support that knowledge
• A mother whose children have lived through domestic abuse and systemic failure
• A survivor who has seen what happens when institutions protect themselves instead of the vulnerable

I am not neutral.

I am informed.

And I am still here.

If you are reading this because you are trying to make sense of your own situation — as a survivor, a parent, a professional, or all three at once — hear this clearly:

You are not overreacting.

You are not weak.

You are not the problem.

And you no longer have to walk through this without language, without tools, or without a voice.