Healing the Whole ...

I have already confessed my anxiety to this blog. I suffer from what has recently been described as high-performing or high-functioning anxiety. The more I feel I am losing control of the world around me, the more anxious I am, the more desperately I struggle to regain control. Often I can't and so it can quickly become a spiral of helplessness dragging me down into a pit of despair. I used to spend days in this pit of despair. Often in bed unable to face the world. I wonder writing this how many meetings I have cancelled by email too petrified to lift the phone. I wonder how many people suspected the real reason behind my last minute change of plans. My business mind starts to calculate the money lost. The productivity hours wasted while I lay in bed mentally paralysed. I am managing it far better now. Five years of hard work on every aspect of my personal development. Physical. Mental. Emotional. I can't neglect any part of my whole else I will end up back in the pit. It...

I am very similar to a teenager. To know my mood, all you have to do is listen to the music I am playing. Linkin Park if I am angry. Lionel Richie if I am sad. 90s dance if I want to get motivated. Motown if I want to fall in love. When I lost my babies I couldn't listen to music. It was too painful. I didn't feel there was a song on this earth that could match my emotion. It wasn't a conscious descison though, much of my life after that was on auto-pilot, so it was in the car I first noticed it. I'd usually have my music blaring out loud singing along, but it was several months before I even turned on the radio. My grief felt so unique that no one could possibly understand it, let alone have written a song about it. I wrote poetry as my own outlet. It was about a year later when Eric Clapton's Tears in Heaven was played while I was with a group of friends. I knew the story but this time the song spoke to me totally differently. I had to leave the room as sobs wra...

My ex sent me a video today. He's an maintenance engineer in a vehicle manufacturing plant and the video is him with a sledgehammer bashing some equipment recorded in slow motion. 'Thought you would like this' goes the message. He thought I would like because he knows I like strong men. I was always extremely attracted to his muscular arms and legs. He's a kick boxer so that helped too! It's evolutionary. Like it or not, women are the weaker sex and when it comes to the bedroom I want a man that looks and feels strong enough to own me. But I also want a man who is emotionally strong. And here lies my problem. Because my ex, like myself, grew up being told that vulnerability is weakness. That the best form of defence is attack. Our parents did this to make us strong but instead they made us weak. Afraid to open our heart. Afraid to feel what we feel. Afraid to truly love anyone who could hurt us. It has taken me a lot of time and a lot of tears to get to this p...

What a day today has been! It started with my last relationship contacting me via text message. He has been trying to get back in touch and I have been ignoring him. I thought it was the right thing to do as he was angry and saying cruel things I knew he didn't mean. Today his anger reached boiling point. He would use the texts and photos I sent him during our relationship to 'ruin me'. Now he's being dramatic because nothing I have sent him has the power to do that. Shock people maybe. Ruin me - no. But I saw how bad his anger was. This man is not vindictive. Clearly I needed to manage this break-up better. Then I saw my ex-husband. We are in the middle of our divorce. Finalising the finances is hard. He believes we have it all settled. He expects me to follow the plan in his head. I don't want to. My priority is financial sustainability for my daughter and I for the future. It is not to keep him happy. Yet he needs to be managed too else this will spiral out o...

It's my favourite bit in the film Avatar. The blue-skinned native female sees Sam Worthington's character Jake Sully in his human form and looks deep his eyes. "I see you," she says in her native tongue, to which he responds the same. Nothing has changed between them. They are still in love. I cherish that idea. I think it's Buddhist. The concept that someone will recognise you no matter what form you take. That you have something quintessentially you that can be read and understood in your eyes. I have been searching for that man who sees me and loves me as I am for all my adult life. But the man I met, whom my heart won't let go, appears only to see my armour. My ability to appear powerful and fearless in my fight to make the world a better place. I want him to see the vulnerable girl full of fear who every day finds the strength to fight on anyway. But to him, she doesn't exist. He sees a warrior princess. I suppose I should feel flattered that m...

I always talk about the magpie. To me it's a sign of the person I want to be and the relationship I want. The magpie is both black and white. A beautiful juxtaposition of two worlds. Two polar opposites. Male and female. Heart and mind. And when you get two magpies together, two people who are able to inhabit both those opposite worlds, they mate for life. I want to find a magpie. Yet all I seem to meet are blackbirds! I try to be a magpie but inevitably sometimes I will be too black or too white and misjudge the situation and my response. Other people also find my duality difficult to deal with. I don't give the responses expected. I don't occupy the world they have me placed in. I spoke about my male friend recently who asked me for support with his ex-wife. He didn't like the response I gave him which was to love his ex-wife and put her needs first. To empathise with her pain. He accused me of not seeing his pain. But I felt I did. I wanted to help him because ...

My daughter came to me this morning and told me superheroes aren't real. That doesn't sound so bad but less than 9 months ago, before she started school, she wanted to be Batman when she grew up. Firstly she came home and told me she couldn't be Batman because she was a girl, which upset me a great deal. Now she tells me Batman and all his superhero friends aren't real because someone at school told her so. It broke my heart. In my 5 year old little girl I see perfection, innocence, sensitivity. I don't want her to change. I don't want the world to stop her being her. But I know it will shape her. It has to. It has shaped me. My job is to build her resilience with my love. I didn't have that growing up and have suffered from it. I was given pain at a young age but not the strategies to deal with it. My resilience has taken a long time to build. My inner core is still shaky and in need of constant support. I told her superheroes did exist. I said she ...

Yesterday I had an interesting experience running. I am training for a half marathon and I haven't been out for two weeks while I struggled with a chest cold. Feeling better but not having quite shaken off the cough, I headed out for a 10 mile run. I started too fast. Under 9 minute miles which was always going to be unsustainable for 10 miles even when I am in peak condition. Come mile 6 I had slowed right down to nearly 10 minute miles. By mile 7 I was walking. I kept telling myself to go steady but rushing at things too fast has always been my problem. I want to tackle everything at speed. And the important things never happen quickly. Like falling in love. I fell in love in August 2015 with a man who is still in my life. I fell hard and I fell fast. Too fast for him. By December 2015 he had let me go declaring that he could not love me in the way I wanted. I was bereft. I have spent the last 18 months pining for him. I feel like Prometheus. Chained to a rock having my l...

Having a child is the most selfish thing you can do. Raising a child is the most selfless. I thought a lot about becoming a parent. I had plenty of time to. I lost twins when I was 28, another baby at 29, and finally had my precious beautiful little girl when I was 31. I had medical intervention in 2011 in order to carry her. I spent a year thinking about whether I should or not. Thinking about why I wanted to be a mother so badly. My daughter likes to tell that story. She's the hero in it. The strongest baby who survived. Resilient even before she was born. When I was a child I was given pain to deal with but not the strategies to cope with pain. As a result, I still struggle to deal with difficult emotions. I have learnt as an adult that being sad is ok and it will pass. That it doesn't mean the world is ending. My daughter already knows that. And she is five. I firmly believe the most important part of my role as a parent is to build her resilience through love....

Recently I was approached by a friend for advice about his ex wife. He asked for my help and yet when I told him what I thought he fought it. Telling me that what I was telling him to do wasn't fair. My heart was firm. Love her. Care for her. Do what is best for her. She needs you to put her first. "I won't get it back", he says, "it's always me that has to flex." Yes. And it will be over and over and over again. Because that's what love is. It keeps no record of wrongs. He messaged me later to tell me what I had said felt like an attack. As if I was saying his relationship with his ex-wife and his children was transactional. I wanted to say that was because in parts it was. If his focus is the well-being of his children then loving their mother is just as much his responsibility as financially providing for them. The mental well-being of children is so dependent on the mental well-being of their parents. I speak from painful painful experience w...

I am frightened of a lot of things. I have got much worse as I have got older and especially since having my daughter. I am fearful not fearless. I cannot cope with hearing about bad things happening in the world. I don't watch the news and only read the local newspaper. I cannot watch the soaps or dramas. I can't bear to see how awful human beings can be to one another even in fiction. I am scared of anything that could bring harm. Heights is probably the big one that most affects my day to day. My daughter knows how frightened I am of everything. We make a joke out of it as she soars high on roller coasters with my Dad or my nieces and nephews and I stay a quivering wreck at the bottom waiting for her safe return. So last year when my friend asked me to loop the loop in a tiny plane over a local airfield, I was not keen. As well as fear, I suffer with motion sickness and have thrown up on planes, trains, automobiles, (and boats!) many times in my life. But it was for a char...

I struggle with my command of our oral language when it really matters. As an English Literature graduate I could write all day about my feelings, but when it comes to speaking about them I am reduced to drivel. What I say very often won't make sense even to me. I am not sure why this is but I could hazard a guess that it is because I never learnt to talk about my feelings when I was a child. I wrote a lot about them, mostly through stories, but I never shared them out loud. I think I was about 7 years old when I remember feeling sadness and immediately knowing I had to hide it. The times we lived in perhaps. Certainly now I encourage my daughter to talk to me about any and every emotion. Especially anger and sadness. The difficult ones. And through her, I am learning to talk about my feelings. Not in great outbursts which can often be too overwhelming for the poor recipient; but in little snippets here and there to different people. Trusted people. People whom I hope won'...

If someone were to ask me which of my skills I use most often I would say my ability to translate communication. And I don't mean from Japanese to English. I mean from operational to visionary. From technical to creative. Often from male to female. Always from mind to heart. I am on the Board of a regional organisation that controls a substantial devolved budget from Central Government. Those meetings are a constant process of translation for me and at first I wondered why I left them so exhausted. I have to translate the language of other Board Members back into my own, work out how I want to respond, and then translate my native tongue back into their language before I speak. All the while ensuring I keep listening and translating to others so I don't miss anything. As well as the fact the majority of the Board Members are male, it is also a translation from corporation to entrepreneur. From practical to creative. I am everything the rest of the Board is not. And that is bo...