Having always worked in a corporate, vey target driven environment, it had never crossed my mind that I would ever work in the way that I do now.
It all started in my early twenties, when I was so severely anxious that I was having panic attacks daily for weeks on end.
I had been to the doctors a few times, been given antidepressants and yet I was off work and started to feel that I couldn’t even go to the local shops without having a horrible panic attack.
I felt so lost, confused and overwhelmed and so I eventually went to the doctor and begged them to put me in hospital.
This was then the beginning of my one month stay on hospital.
I was very heavily medicated, encouraged to exercise, talk about my goals for the future – which at the time seemed impossible – and then when I was released a month later.
I was still as confused as before, just calmer – because lets face it, who wouldn’t be when heavily sedated?
I remember so clearly stepping out of those doors on my way home thinking, how on earth do I start to get my life back?
I really thought that this was now me for the rest of my life, trying to manage my anxiety and depression diagnosis and picking up the pieces of the last few months where I felt everything around me had been lost.
Would I even work again? Will I be able to have children? Will my partner give up and leave me? The list was endless and to say I felt like a massive failure was a huge understatement.
I researched myself what I may now need to get better and it all seemed to point to the fact that I needed therapy but I just saw this as another sign of weakness and failure and was so resistant to it.
I then realised, through my extensive research, that in order to train as a psychotherapist, it would require me to also be in personal therapy for the 4 year duration of my course. This felt like my way in.
The way I could get help but rather than admit defeat, I would say I was training as a psychotherapist as that just felt so much more palatable at the time for me.
I now see that this way of thinking was also a big part of why I was so anxious in the first place.
Fast forward a number of years and I was a trained psychotherapist.
I had a much better level of personal awareness and understanding and for the most part I was managing OK.
However, I still lived in fear of my severe anxiety returning and every couple of years I would have an acute episode where I would be off work and back at the doctors.
By this time I had a completely different perspective, thankfully, about therapy being a weakness and so I explored lots of other avenues that I always thought would be the answer to my prayers.
I tried everything.
I even trained in lots of other areas, some training in hypnotherapy, CBT, DBT, NLP, you name, I either tried it, or trained in it, and sometimes both!
I still found myself living in fear of my anxiety and would still burnout every couple of years. Each time was never as bad as the last but it still felt frustrating and unfair and would stop me living my life how I wanted to.
I then came across something called the 3 principles by Sydney Banks.
These principles are a wonderful description of what it means to be a human being, how we work.
I am not sure why, or what it was exactly but when I started to explore it, I became hooked.
I started to see where I had kept myself stuck for so many years and how my desire to control and constantly strive for perfection had meant that I was a huge over thinker, lacking in compassion and love for myself.
The more I saw this, the better I felt, and over time my fear of anxiety disappeared and as if by magic the less I feared it, the less it showed up.
I realised how I had massively over complicated by mental health over the years and in trying to badly to fix myself, I was keeping myself stuff and in overwhelm.
I now feel so fortunate that I am able to coach so many others to increase their own understanding and awareness of what it means to be human, see their resilience and capability for themselves and as a result access their innate wellbeing much more easily, falling back in love with life.
We are never broken, our diagnosis or experience of mental health is always an indication of where we are at in that moment, not who we are.
