“When life happens and you've been through a lot of challenges,
you have a choice to either become strong or become the victim.”

– Laiela Dorasamy

In this thought-provoking episode of The Incredible Machines Podcast, we sit down with Laeila Dorasamy, director of Ahavah Corporate Gifts, transformational coach, mental health advocate, and founder of The Healing Table.

From losing both parents and her sister and supporting her daughter through anorexia, Laeila survived hardships of all kinds. She brings insight through lived experience of family trauma, profound loss, and building a faith that doesn’t depend on life being easy.

Key Highlights from Episode 36

1. Belonging vs. Fitting In

Throughout her life, Laeila found that the more authentic she was, the more certain environments seemed to reject her. For years, she internalised this as something being wrong with her, but after encountering Brené Brown's The Gifts of Imperfection, she learned that belonging means you show up whole and are embraced despite your differences. She didn't need to shrink herself to become more acceptable, she was just in the wrong rooms.

Laeila applies this to workplace culture, noting that environments where everyone dresses the same, thinks the same, and functions like clockwork are often concealing something toxic, suppressing the very individuality that makes teams and communities thrive.

2. The Teenage Years & the Desperate Need to Be Wanted

In the aftermath of her parents' separation at 12 years old, she found herself in a relationship with someone who was, by her own reflection, entirely wrong for her. She connects this to what she sees in young women and girls around her. Laeila reflects on how girls, in particular, after parental separation, become acutely vulnerable to the first person who offers them a sense of being wanted.

"Be who you needed when you were younger,"

Laeila says, and she lives this principle by seeking out schools to remind young girls that their value is not located in another person's attention, but within themselves.

3. How Trauma Lives in the Body

Laeila speaks about how pain lives in the body, how it echoes through families, and how it can quietly reshape a person’s entire future. She reflects on her parents’ divorce and the long shadow it cast over her mother’s life. For her mother, depression progressed into early-onset dementia and Alzheimer’s.

From there, the episode expands into recent losses, including her sister’s death after a battle with cancer. Laeila’s provides perspective on learning to process sadness without becoming it.

“Strong people feel pain too.”

3. Anorexia and family healing

One of the most intimate sections of the conversation is Laeila’s account of supporting her daughter through anorexia. It's easy to assume it’s simply about eating, when in reality it’s a mental health disorder with one of the highest mortality rates. She describes the reality as the fear around food, frequent meltdowns, and the exhausting daily effort of trying to get calories into a body that’s resisting survival.

Anorexia is a disorder that’s not fought on a plate, but in the mind.

Then in a fortunate turn of events, Laeila describes the first time she heard her daughter laugh again: when cousins came to stay and brought lightness back into the home. Although clinical support matters, it was the emotional medicine of love expressed through presence that made the biggest difference.

In a world that keeps trying to treat mental health in isolation, this episode keeps circling back to a different truth: healing often accelerates when people feel held by others.

Advertising Campaign Spotlight: Dove's "The Cost of Beauty"

Laeila chose Dove’s The Cost of Beauty campaign. This campaign exposes how toxic beauty content and social media pressures shape young minds, normalising self-hatred in subtle, everyday ways.

Laeila’s insight is that body-image struggles don’t appear out of nowhere. They’re often built brick by brick through cultural obsession with thinness, parents modelling self-criticism, and algorithms reinforcing insecurities.

What We Can Learn from Laeila Dorasamy

• Belonging is not the same as fitting in. The most important relationships should be ones where you are embraced as you are.
• Grief is not something to be moved past quickly. It is something to be moved through and with honesty to yourself.
• Strength is not the absence of pain; it is the choices made in the presence of it.
• Healing can be done collectively, through the love and support you receive from those around you.

Watch the Full Episode

To experience this profoundly moving episode in full, watch Episode 36 on YouTube, or stream it on your favourite podcast platform.