Spotlight: Behind the Mirror by Bridget Budd
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Publication date: July 1st 2025
Genres: Contemporary, Women’s Fiction
Behind the Mirror is a powerful, character-driven novel about emotional healing, generational trauma, and the courage it takes to stop performing and start living your truth.
Sometimes, the hardest person to face is the one behind the mirror…
Julie Sloan was shaped by abandonment early in life—left behind by the people who were supposed to love her first. In the absence of emotional safety, she became what the world rewarded: high-achieving, self-sacrificing, and always performing. Through four marriages, she searched for stability while suppressing her deepest fears—that she was unworthy of lasting love, and too broken to be fully seen.
But when her fourth marriage nearly collapsed, something shifted. It wasn’t betrayal that broke her—it was the quiet realization that she had never truly lived for herself.
What followed was a reckoning: with her past, with the roles she had played to survive, and with the parts of herself she had long silenced.
Now, years later, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist named Laura wants to profile Julie’s nonprofit work—an organization devoted to helping women heal from emotional wounds. But what begins as a success story takes a deeper turn as Julie reveals the story behind the story—the one she’s never shared publicly. The one about how she abandoned herself first.
For readers drawn to novels about inner child work, identity, and spiritual awakening, this deeply personal journey will leave you both broken open and quietly restored.
Excerpt
“The Strategic Self”
Adapted from Chapter One of Behind the Mirror by Bridget Budd)
It’s fascinating to me how we all embody a strategic self and a true self.
The true self is your core essence—the part that holds your deepest values and desires. The strategic self does whatever it can to adapt. It’s the version of me who’d have shown up for this interview fifteen years ago, smiling, proclaiming I was happy, insisting everything in my life was perfect—so you would like me.
Finding balance between self-expression and the need for connection can be incredibly challenging for most people, myself included.
As children, we’re wired for attachment. Our survival depends on it. Our strategic self learns how to earn love, how to avoid rejection, how to keep the peace. It’s clever—a chameleon that keeps us safe. But over time, safety becomes a costume we forget we’re wearing.
The more you prioritize others’ approval, the more disconnected you become from your own truth. Eventually, you can’t tell what you actually want from what your strategic self wants you to want.
For most of my life, that’s who ran the show. The performer. The pleaser. The woman who could hold everything together while quietly falling apart.
What I didn’t realize then was that exhaustion doesn’t only come from doing too much—it comes from being too little of yourself.
And when you finally begin to listen beneath the noise, you discover the voice that’s been there all along, waiting patiently to be heard: your true self.
Intro blurb:
In this reflective passage, Julie begins to understand the hidden split that drives her burnout—the exhausting performance of earning love at the cost of authenticity.
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About the Author
Bridget Budd is the author of Behind the Mirror, a debut novel that blends literary storytelling with therapeutic insight.
After more than twenty-five years in corporate sales, she stepped away to explore the emotional patterns beneath her success—and the cost of always holding it together.
Her work lives at the intersection of fiction and healing, drawing from her background in trauma-informed coaching, somatics, and holistic health. Bridget writes and speaks about identity, self-worth, and the shift from performing to presence.
Often described as “fiction with emotional teeth,” her stories are crafted for deep feelers, recovering perfectionists, and anyone quietly exhausted from chasing “enough.”
She divides her time between Marco Island, Florida, and Marvin, North Carolina, with her husband and two opinionated dogs.
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