Title - Experience, Strength & Hope
What informs my Coaching & Writing
I began to realize I was being forced into shutting down. The harder I fought against it, the more exhausting it became. I wondered if it had always been like this. As pressure mounted and responsibilities to myself and others grew, I was challenged to consider what I was doing any of it for.
My needs and my well-being had always come last to the needs of others and the demands of my work. I was unable to shut off the incessant voice in my head that worked tirelessly, solving one problem after the next for clients, family members and colleagues. Did I lose myself in this or was I hiding, I wondered?
Prior to getting sober for what will, one day at a time, be the last time, I achieved a split second of ‘knowing’. It began with knowing that I needed to get sober if I wanted to move away from the desperation, fear and hopelessness I felt. This meant a longer life. A longer life meant dramatic changes. I needed to be healthy. I wanted to be happy. I seemed to receive the prophetic knowledge that I was going to have to accept the loss of everything that I had been. My brain attached to material possessions, places and things. My home, my security, my city, my friends. I had already accepted that I could and must change. How could I let go of everything I had? Wat on earth would my life look like then? Who would I be?
In my soul, the deal was already done. This was the price of sobriety. I accepted my first spiritual awakening and set about making plans for my future. Starting with a second trip to rehab.
I had no idea that this moment was only the beginning of the bigger journey. That walking out of rehab and straight into AA were the baby steps in a much greater scheme of things. Even completing the work, maintaining my recovery and turning my life upside down, were mere strolls in the park compared to the challenges that came my way in the ensuing five years.
I remember staring out of my window, overlooking the street I had lived on for fourteen years and with conviction, asking the Universe for a favor.
“Don’t make it too easy for me, Universe” I said out loud. “If you make it too easy, how will I know it’s really me doing it?”
The Universe listened and delivered. Nothing was easy. Paradoxically, though at times I have never felt more powerful or resourceful. I found out what I was made of. I made difficult decisions, failed. Learnt hard lessons and picked myself up time and time again. Knowing that it was all leading away from those desperate times and to something that would be my very own wonderful plot twist that I could not see coming.
I write about what I know. Addiction and Recovery. The most useful and effective I have ever been, that gives me the most immense satisfaction happens in anonymous rooms and in the privacy of Zoom calls. My experience, strength and hope has more value than I could have imagined. How then can I bring this to the rest of the world to help more people?
It was only once my novel was complete that my problem resolved itself in my mind. I had become so disillusioned with being unheard. My beliefs, my work, my voice belittled and undervalued, yet my writing never had.
Suddenly, people were reading and connecting. Something I had loved passionately as a kid that had become tainted and corrupted by journals being violated by boyfriends and parents, work e-mails and presentations, crafted with such care and attention leaving no room for misunderstanding that led nowhere, now felt like exactly the thing I should be doing.
I write like no one will read it and not minding if they do. Of course, I have an audience in mind that I want to speak to but if my writing and my message is not for them, they can move on, no harm done. I am of course, thrilled beyond words when my prose is well received.
This time, the only thing I am selling is experience, strength and hope. That feels like home to me.
I loved Stephen King and Tolkein as a kid. The themes of good vs. evil fascinating me. How the characters were set in motion to do battle against an often-faceless force of maleficence. How they eventually triumphed through immeasurable losses. Finding the tricksters and the charlatans in their midst. Hiding in plain sight, operating with insidious malintent.
I escaped into the fiction with no real awareness of how this plays out in our daily lives.
Until last year. Where the characters from my story and my past rose up like Sauron’s army and threatened to destroy everything I had worked so hard for.
I observed how generational trauma played out in the lives of those around me and how the causes and conditions, so obvious to someone like me and yet ignored, minimized and buried, were wreaking havoc in families and now were dragging me in to their cult like mentality. I include mine in that.
The creation of narcissism and pathological personality disorders is plain to see for anyone who has the information and the patience to follow the history, through to the present and dare to predict future outcomes. It plays out the same way every time. I have only recently learnt how to get out of the way of the patterns and chaos they create. I put myself in harms way to get to the truth. It was a dangerous mission and not one I realized I was on to begin with. Once I knew, I stayed to get what I needed before I ran for the hills.
And so, The Patterns & Chaos of UNTREATED Minds was born. You come for my reality, my soul and my spirit, I will protect myself. Then I will protect others. That is also part of my programming. This time, instead of protecting the abusers from themselves, I get to protect others from themselves and their abusers.
Knowledge and experience are power – when it is applied in the right way. Acts of Service are my love language.
I live a life based on the application of spiritual principles. That is how I stay sober and remain useful to myself and others in recovery. They are as follows: Acceptance, Hope, Faith, Courage, Honesty, Patience, Humility, Willingness, Brotherly/ Sisterly Love, Integrity, Self-Discipline and Service.
These principles are represented by me within my Coaching and also imparted through example and osmosis. I don’t refer to them. I live by them. They permeate everything I do.
I studied all the research and literature I could get my hands on for my Masters Thesis on the application of Workplace Spirituality. I wanted to see what the peer reviewed perspective was on spiritual principles, Self-Determination Theory (Autonomy, Competence and Relatedness – a theory of personality and motivation that underlie growth and development) and Workplace Spirituality and how they might be an effective counter to the pending Global mental health crisis of anxiety and depression. Positive Psychology is concerned with human flourishing.
I needed to know if what I had experienced could be useful to everyone who was suffering at work. And if what I had discovered in a Spiritual program could be leveraged. I will share that on this blog at some point. If that sounds like something you would like to read, let me know in the comments. (Technical science warning - its 8,000 words!)
Does any of this sound interesting to you? Stick around because next time, due to multiple requests, I am going to share with you in BLOGS #3,4 and 5, how I wrote my novel in less than a month.
Peace & Love,
Elizabeth & Jonnie
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