One of the things that I think qualifies me to help others, is that I’ve struggled more than anyone I know.
In the past I’ve been diagnosed with depression, anxiety, complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) and more. I used to think I was pretty broken, that is until I fully healed. So what helped me go from struggling through life, to loving life?
Well to start with, I had years of counselling and therapy. I often found it helpful to talk about myself and my struggles, and usually felt very validated, but it got to the point where I got tired of talking about my problems. I wanted to be free and happy.
Writing this, I recall one counsellor who told me that I shouldn’t be able to be as happy as I already am, given the trauma I’d been through, and I should lower my expectations about recovery.
So I trained as a CBT therapist and learnt some tools and techniques to try to act differently to feel better and think more positively about my life and circumstance.
I was personally disappointed at the impact CBT had on myself, my clients, and my students’ clients, and so I started looking for new approaches. I studied ACT, CFT, Mindfulness, tried EMDR. All of these approaches were part of my journey and I would say I got something from each of them. I especially found EMDR helpful for overcoming trauma, but here’s the main thing…
I found they all helped me go from struggling, to functioning.
And I didn’t just want to function through life, I wanted to be really happy and love my life. As the cliche goes – I didn’t want to just survive, I wanted to thrive.
It was when I came across a course in transformative coaching that everything shifted for me. I started learning that I wasn’t broken, I just thought I was.
I studied somatic therapy alongside my coaching training as I learned how to get in touch with the parts of me that were creating the pain and the struggle, and I learnt to let them go.
All my emotions started to calm down, my hypervigilance went, and I started having less negative thoughts. Life started getting immensely easier and pure happiness started to become a regular occurrence, (which was very strange to begin with!).
I found things like mindfulness helpful, but I went far beyond any formal mindfulness training to embody being fully present to life so that I can feel all my feelings fully, without the traumatic thoughts that used to accompany it.
After I healed, the main thing I wanted to do was to enjoy my life as much as I could. The only other thing I felt pulled to do was to help others be happy and be free from their pasts too. So I wrote a book. I called it A Clear Mind: The Less Is More Mindset To Wellbeing And Performance.
After I overcame my struggles with my wellbeing, I got interested in performance coaching, (which is essentially how to get the best out of life). So I wrote a whole chapter on performance too, which you’ll find at the end of the book.
I’ve put as much as I can into A Clear Mind as I could to help you let go of what no longer serves you and drop into presence and happiness with ease.
I think you’ll like it, so if you want to check it out, you can purchase a copy here.
