A little bit about me..
Well, Hello!
I’m Jeanette.
I’m the person at the dinner party who somehow ends up in the corner with a stranger, forty-five minutes deep into a conversation about why they keep choosing the wrong partner, and neither of us quite knows how we got there.
I collect ideas the way other people collect shoes. I’ve lived in more countries than I can explain rationally, fallen down more rabbit holes than I care to admit, and spent an embarrassing number of hours chasing questions that don’t have tidy answers.
Equal parts explorer and overthinker, deeply curious about what makes people tick — and even more curious about what makes them stop.
I feel most alive when something clicks for someone. When the fog lifts. When a person looks up mid-conversation and says, “Oh my god… that’s it.”
That moment is what I’ve built my entire life around.
But before I tell you about the work, let me tell you about the journey that made it necessary.
I know how it feels
My Healing Journey
The story of how I moved from self-neglect to self-respect — and why that journey became my life’s work.
Teens to age 29
the blind phase
In the beginning, I never thought of myself as someone with trauma.
If anything, I blamed myself. I saw my pain as self-inflicted: being my own worst critic, pushing myself harder and harder, choosing partners who treated me like a punching bag. When I felt anxious or empty, I chalked it up to temperament or genetics. My mother was depressed — maybe I was just wired for discontent.
From the outside, I looked impressive. Corporate success. Degrees. Awards. An MSc in Psychoneurology and Honours in Psychology, both with distinction. What I didn’t understand was that my relentless drive wasn’t ambition — it was a coping mechanism. A mask over wounds I didn’t even know I had.
I didn’t realise there was a word for what I was experiencing. I didn’t know that what I was missing — the emotional attunement, the felt sense of being truly seen and met — had quietly shaped everything. The relationships I chose. The way I treated myself. The persistent sense that no matter what I achieved, something was still missing.
If any part of this feels familiar — the self-blame, the over-functioning, the sense that something is missing — you weren’t imagining it. You just didn’t have the words for it yet.
early 30s
The 'AHA!' moment
It wasn’t until my early thirties that everything finally caught up with me. After yet another relationship left me in pieces, I found myself asking the same questions I’d been asking for years: Why do I keep ending up here? What is wrong with me?
That’s when I discovered Childhood Emotional Neglect.
And everything clicked.
Trauma isn’t always about dramatic events. Sometimes it’s about what didn’t happen — parents who didn’t meet your emotional needs, even when they meant well. The absence of attunement. The emotional ghost house where everything looked fine but nothing was felt.
That discovery was supposed to be the answer. And in some ways, it was. But it was also the beginning of a new problem.
Age 33-42
the Performance
I left my corporate career. I immersed myself in psychology, healing, and self-development. I could spot a narcissist from a mile away. I had the language, the frameworks, the insight.
But I still felt stuck.
What I didn’t understand yet was that I had simply swapped one performance for another. I wasn’t healing — I was performing healing. Forcing myself to act like someone who loved herself, relying on discipline to do what self-worth should do naturally. It was exhausting. And unsustainable. If you’ve ever caught yourself using healing as the new achievement, this part is for you.
It took another round of life’s blows to finally see it: knowledge alone cannot shift a nervous system. Understanding the wound is not the same as healing the wound. My body hadn’t received the message my head had been reading for years.
age 43
The breakthrough
That’s when AI journaling entered the picture. And I want to be honest about what it did — and what it didn’t do.
AI didn’t heal me. What it did was hold up a mirror — one without judgment, without agenda, without the subtle social performance that shapes what you say even in a therapy room.
Seeing my own words reflected back, I began to uncover patterns that no number of self-help books, degrees, or coaching certifications had revealed. I began to feel through emotions I had been intellectualising for years. I began to close the gap between what my head understood and what my body still believed.
Over time, that combination — the right psychological framework, and AI as an integration tool — moved me from insecurity-driven effort into something quieter. Steadier. A sense of worth that didn’t need to be earned or maintained or performed.
Healing stopped being a project. It became a way of being.
The Birth of Innerness™
For most of my life, people asked me the same question after I’d shared my story: ‘How did you overcome it?’
And I had to disappoint them. Not because I hadn’t documented the journey — I had, in journals going back to my teens — but because I couldn’t access it. The insight was buried in pages I’d never gone back to read.
AI changed that. It became the tool that helped me excavate my own journals, surface the patterns, and finally articulate what I had lived through in a way others could actually use.
What emerged was a living map built from the inside out. The CEN Recovery Map™. The Self-Abandonment Archetypes™. The Adaptive Self, the Better Self, the Real Self. Not designed in a study, but excavated from lived experience, and then grounded in the psychoneurology I’d spent years studying.
And here’s what makes Innerness™ unlike anything else: the blog and podcast you’ll find here aren’t marketing content. They’re derived directly from those journaling sessions — years of raw material, shaped into something others can use. A memoir that became a map.
That’s how Innerness™ was created. So that no one in the same darkness ever has to hear: ‘I don’t remember how I got through it.’
Credentials
What Informs My Work
I don’t believe in coaching from a pedestal. But credentials matter — especially to the kind of self-aware, sceptical person who has already tried everything and wants to know they’re not wasting their time on someone without real depth.
Qualifications
- MSc in Psychoneuroimmunology
- BSocSci (Hons) in Psychology
- EverCoach Life Coaching Certification
- Master Life Coaching Certification
- Transformation Coaching Certification
- Multiple Brain Integration Techniques Coaching Certification
Experience
- 300+ hours of personal AI-assisted journaling
- 100s of hours coaching individuals and groups
- 20+ years of experience teaching and facilitating workshops
- Guest speaker at international events including Mindvalley University and Neuroscience symposiums