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So How Do You Heal?

How did you heal yourself was a question I had from a lovely listener. It’s not a quick and easy question to be fair but i’ll do my best ha!

I’ll probably give more of a focus on what I did wrong so you can learn from my mistakes and not have to do it the hard way like I did.

I suppose the journey started back in 2014 when things got really bad.

I don’t talk about this too much in public because it’s not just my story and I don’t think it’s fair so i’ll give you the cliff notes.

Essentially, LOTS of things went very wrong in a short space of time.

We lost our business, my husband had a pub/restaurant, lost our home and had to move in with my mother in law.

Then I flipped and rolled my car into a ditch.

Then I had knee surgery which didn’t go well so I was always in pain and pretty immobile.

I had been working with my husband in the business (he was my fiancee at the time) and then I'd gone back to my media job to do a maternity contract part time too so was commuting into London.

I decided I couldn’t do the 2.5 hour each way commute so I didn’t extend the contract and took a local job.

Things had been really difficult so I wasn’t in the best place mentally.

Then I got sacked after 3 weeks in this job...for being too negative. Whoops!

My ego, self esteem and hope were pretty much on the floor at this point.

On the same day I got sacked I went to the doctors about my pain in my knees and came out with antidepressants.

THEN I went home and basically stared at them, day drinking by myself, and wondered what had happened.

There’s a LOT lot more to each of the threads of this story but you get the gist.

It wasn’t quite the plan I had in mind for life at this point.

I felt like I'd given up on myself.

But it ended up being a major catalyst for change, and all of this is what got me here, so I can’t complain really!

Now, you’d think the story started here but the truth is that all of these things weren’t simply a ‘cause’ to how I was feeling.

They essentially amplified who I already was.

Not who I was at my core. We need to be clear about that. That’s what this work does, strip those layers of the onion that have been built up over time by your traumas, experiences and the judgements you make on yourself and other people about how and who you ‘should’ be.

This work gets you BACK to who you really are.

So it amplified this high functioning anxiety that I’d had my whole life. I remember it starting around age 11.

I was paranoid. Didn’t trust the world or other people, or myself.

I always thought people were out to hurt me.

I catastrophised EVERY little detail I possibly could.

I had incredibly low self worth, particularly around the way I looked.

My confidence was super low so I would drink for confidence and get myself in a pickle and not make the best decisions with boys.

I didn’t trust friends to not abandon me and would often wonder why they were friends with me in the first place.

I had so many protection mechanisms built around fear but I actually had no idea this was ruling my life.

A lot of this was masked because I was confident and high achieving in my career. But I didn’t really have any self awareness. I’d lie to myself on a daily basis.

So as much as I have the big traumatic year that led to me finally doing the work to heal. This unconscious programming had been dominating my life for as long as I could remember. And knowing what I know now, made the big traumatic stuff so much worse.

It all makes perfect sense to me now, but I really just felt like a victim of the world at the time.

So, there were lots of things I did ‘WRONG’ in my healing journey, which everybody does at the start because there’s certain knowledge about how we work as humans that you just won’t have, until you seek it.

So it took me a really long time.

And I beat myself up for that.

A lot.

I blamed myself, shamed myself. I had zero patience.

I either suppressed my emotions or they were wild and unruly. I had a complete lack of control.

Life felt like constant chaos. It felt like it was one thing after another after another.

One step forward, 3 steps back. I know WHY this happens now.

I held on to my victim mentality and didn’t take responsibility for my part in where I was.

All of this sounds super negative but without knowing a lot of the stuff I teach, how would you know another way to be?

Particularly when all the unconscious programming and beliefs that are driving your emotions and your behaviour are negative, without knowing how to be conscious, or even that you have to be, how would you NOT just reinforce that loop?

If you’re trying to make changes or heal some old wounds the biggest thing I want you to know is that you make sense. You’re not broken and you don’t need fixing.

You’re just missing some key information.

I was trying to go from zero to ‘fixed’ in 60 seconds flat. I wanted instant gratification.

It doesn’t work like that.

I sought out ‘quick fixes’ and fake promises because I was being led by instant gratification.

I felt like I was trying everything but nothing was working, which just triggered my shame and self judgement more.

It wasn’t until I decided I would strip it back. Instead of just absorbing information and not really knowing how to DO anything with it I decided I was going to just start small and find one thing every day that I could hold in my mind for that day.

So that’s what I did. One thing per day. So i’d find a question or a quote or something inspirational that I would kind of run my thoughts through as a filter for the day.

Then I started noticing the sorts of things that were working for me.

So it started with curiosity.

This is where my prompts for the Positive Pants Planner, my journaling for the non dear diary technique, came from.

I had no idea why they were working at the time.

I didn’t know most of them were positive psychology interventions.

I didn’t know about neuroplasticity, or trauma, or attachment theory or anything along those lines.

The things I did then I still do today because this is a journey without an official destination.

There isn’t a day where you think ‘oh yeay, i’m all fixed’ and totally enlightened.

You need to accept that you’re a human and human emotions are a very natural thing.

There is always another layer to uncover. Some in areas you never knew there was an issue!

The areas I'm working on at the moment are around eating and intimacy.

So I’m going through the same processes in those areas that I did with the others.

But the biggest difference is, there’s no shame, no judgement, I see it as a GOOD thing because there’s growth happening. I know exactly how to navigate it and it doesn’t feel like a negative thing at all.

I get excited when I find a negative pattern. I honestly do. Yes it may not be fun them being there, the work may not be pretty but I know how worth it it is, because I know what’s on the other side.

Healing is not linear.

But it also doesn’t need to take you as long as it did me. It doesn’t need to cost you as much as it did me!

I would jump from training to training, course to course but not really implement anything along the way. I’ve invested well over six figures into my own development.

Some have been better investments than others.

I would say that finding that person who you feel will really understand and ‘get’ you to help you on this journey is a MUCH quicker way to get you to where you want to be.

I kept trying to do it on my own, the biggest shifts came when I asked for help.

Asked for help, but also allowed myself to accept it. That’s a big distinction to make.

The more I did the things I felt the most resistant to, that felt hard, the more results I got.

Learning to regulate my own emotions probably took me the most time, because I didn’t understand I needed to or could. So that wouldn’t have come with a quick and easy google search. I’ll do an episode on why that’s so important for you next week.

I just didn’t have the information I needed to make lasting change, and didn’t know where to find it.

The biggest ‘mistake’ I think I made was not asking for help and blaming and shaming myself for things that were just not my fault.

That made perfect sense too!

The more you can understand how we tick as humans the better.

It’s a huge reason I launched my SOS! Success Over Stress course.

It’s the information we all should have been given in school.

The information that helps us learn how to be human in the most efficient way.

Why we may feel the things we feel and do the things we do without blaming or shaming ourselves. Without beating ourselves up.

That’s honestly half the battle. The stuff we internalise in the process can make it feel so much harder than it needs to.

Also not giving up too soon. Don’t jump from modality to modality and not allow any of it the time and consistency it takes to work.

Patience, commitment, consistency, curiosity, self compassion, communication and trust.

That’s what it takes.

And you’re more than capable!

Fx

So, How Do You Heal? 19:44 Share

The Positive Pants Podcast

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So, How Do You Heal?