My Story.....
When you fall over and cut yourself, you know what you need to do. You clean the wound and if you need to, you put a plaster on it. The process is there, we all know it and we all trust in it. I never knew how to heal my mind or even how to look after it.
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I was always very confident as a child, but it was easy to be. I was in that protective parental bubble. By my early twenties it soon became obvious to me that I wasn’t sure who I was on my own. I was never really in tune with my own mind, my own thoughts and feelings.
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I became very influenced, very easily and within a year had dropped out of university. I was in full on self-destruction mode and the only way to do that was to go on the missing list. I ended up sofa surfing and had a strong, unhealthy relationship with all things toxic. All I focused on was anger for not measuring up to someone else’s expectations. I never stopped to think about my own. I was too angry.
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When I had my son, it did calm down for a while but eventually developed into a post-natal ball of mess. I had a lack of financial stability, emotional maturity and an ‘I just don’t care’ attitude. I thought I had no place in the world.
I just wasn’t important enough.
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I was so out of control that I was at the ‘lost cause’ point but I started to realise that I wasn’t the woman or the mother I wanted to be, and that part hurt.....
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I accepted that I was always going to be that way, and this just was who I was.
So, every bad decision wasn’t a surprise because I was already a failure.
I knew it, my family knew it, my friends knew it.
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" I was at that 'lost cause' point..."
I tried to ‘fix’ myself with superficial tools, new job, change of location but none of that worked if I didn’t have the right mindset.
I ended up in this crazy spiral of self-sabotage, almost like a punishment to myself for not being the person I ought to be, whoever that was.
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It’s so strange how my mind became the thing that was hurting me the most.
I was as horrible to myself as anyone else. I was literally my own worst enemy
I remember waking up with a lump in my throat and a weight on my shoulders before I had even gotten out of bed. It was like a gravitational pull and took every piece of strength to get anything done.
Every task felt like I was walking into the wind.
"Spiral of self-sabotage..."
The over complicating of situations that they call ‘catastrophic thoughts’ dominated my daily life. Everything became so much more exaggerated in my mind than what was out there in reality.
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This for me, very quickly led to insecurity, low self-esteem and a genuine belief that I just wasn’t worthy. I cried, I drank, I cried some more and occasionally, mixed a pill in there. I didn’t have any belief in myself whatsoever, except to party, that I was good at.
One morning, I was in my car at the lights, it had already been a bad morning, no sleep, groggy from the sleeping pills and I couldn’t get organised.
I was so late dropping my son to school so once I did and returned to the car, I suddenly broke down in tears and wept.
I was so worried about everything that I was now exhausted in mind, body and soul. That day made me seek medical help. I saw a doctor and he said, “Young lady, I believe you suffer from General Anxiety Disorder”. The lightbulb moment had happened.
When I look back, I didn’t realise how far I had already come at that point.
I was stable financially and playing a better role as a mother, that was all through sheer strength.
What I needed to sort out now were my own demons. Nothing would be great until they were dealt with.
I spent a long time working on myself.
There were tears, a lot of tears and a huge amount of anger. The hardest one of all was acceptance.
I finally started to really look in the mirror to see who that woman was behind the façade.
I shut myself away and took a course in Toyah. Who was she and how did she become this way?
GAD is something you live with, its part of you. Me and my mind are not two separate people, we are as one so why was I talking as if we were two separate entities. I had expensive cream to look after my skin because it’s MY skin, in the same way MY mind is mine to care for, so let’s start there.
I needed to shine a light internally and investigate my emotions.
How did they get there?
Why did they stay?
What were the repercussions, good or bad?
What language did I use whilst referring to myself?
What language did others use when talking to me?
Then how did I form my beliefs.
YES, I had this diagnosed condition,
YES, I was outspoken and
YES, I am an extrovert,
BUT I had serious low self-esteem and no inner confidence at all.
I had to sort this out though, I didn’t have a choice, my life was going nowhere and all I was doing now was projecting this misery on my beautiful baby boy.
I had to learn about my own strength of character and trust in it.
Soon, bit by bit, there were small wins.
I was moving slowly but you know what, I was always moving forward.
It took a long time to reverse 10 years’ worth of pain, but those more positive words and phrases did start to come into play. I would now start to play a more positive role in my own life.
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"Exhausted in mind, body and soul."
"My own strength of character..."
Here we are years later, and I now feel free. I wake up and that heavy heart has gone, the self-doubt isn’t there nor is that lack of confidence or belief in my ability…. it’s all evaporated.
Sure, they creep in occasionally, but I can recognise it and sort it out.
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Now that is an amazing place to be in. When my mind goes off and starts its foolishness, I drag it back into line. Always a work in progress.
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My new way of thinking opened up avenues at work and in my personal life. I got married and was blessed with two more beautiful children.
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I have been able to study an learn the beauty of NLP and how it takes you from where you are now to where you want to be. I use NLP on myself daily and continue to benefit from it. I even have my own coach as we are all a work in progress.
For the first time ever, I have started my own business without too much doubt. I’ve just gone for it because I no longer have all those limiting beliefs or those anxious thoughts taking up all my time and energy.
It is now my mission to help and empower women that feel the way I felt. I want to build up their confidence and unleash that inner power, so they finally believe in themselves, their ability and their beautiful uniqueness.
I will give them the tools to move forward and gain the life of fulfilment they have always wanted.
