I spent a whole day in Westminster in London at an annual conference talking about getting FAT. By this I mean, opening up to feeling, taking aligned action, and talking vulnerably.
Here are the lessons that I learned...
When you feel, act, and speak in alignment, you are authentic and have integrity: You are whole. Let me explain...
Connecting with your inner child
How do you learn to love your Self, connect with your inner child and reparent your Self?
The key is to stop living from a place of fear and self-doubt. Why do we do this? It’s because we are all living from a place of dysfunctional childhoods. Did you have a perfect childhood with just the right amount of unconditional love? Do you even know if you did? I thought that I had, but my childhood was far, far from perfect.
Our abandonment issues are deep rooted. We keep a coffin lid closed on our shame. Our journey to recovery is a journey into Self-love.
We need to reparent ourselves. Who is your inner parent? Our loving parent is our Higher Power, the Universe, Jesus, Buddha, or whoever you want them to be.
The solution is to become your own loving parent - be there for your Self with love:
1. Perform daily acts of love towards your Self. For example - Mirror work - ask you inner child daily how she or he is every morning.
2. Share everything that you are anxious about - this strengthens your own voice. Say it instead of ruminating on it.
3. ‘The Power of Now’ by Eckhart Tolle. Ask your self “Am I now in this moment”? Do I overproject the anxiety onto my future? (Depression is for the past). Just say to your Self “I am overprojecting.”
4. Realise that your thinking is a block to your joy. Let go of it and be full of joy.
5. Be vulnerable.
6. Take time and be patient. Trust the process. Trust your Higher Power. Trust your Higher Self.
The only person who can look after you is you. We develop significant survival skills during our dysfunctional childhood that do not serve us as adults. You have to share vulnerably and communicate with fellow travellers. If you are in a challenging period lean into your recovery. It’s ok to get angry. Anger is as positive emotion – it’s just that you weren’t allowed to express it as a child.
Your real life critical parent tried to ‘help’ you by tearing you apart. Replace your inner critic or critical parent with your loving inner parent.
You are allowed to make mistakes. You are only human, like the rest of us.
I need to have compassion for my mother. I found out after her recent funeral that her father used to chase her round the kitchen in order to hit her. It’s no surprise that her one of her suicide attempts in front of me as a child was in the kitchen and that’s where all her marital rows occurred. Her job was in the kitchen as she taught cookery. That was what she offered in the 1970’s when she arrived in England. But she never felt enough.
My mother’s own fear-based outer critic crushed my soul by telling me what I was to be. I lived her unlived life. Like her, and like you and everyone else, I was addicted to external validation, in order to numb my emotional pain.
When we start our process of recovery, we don’t know who we are. When I had my first therapy session four years ago, when asked who I was without reference to anything on my CV, I replied "There is no me." My therapist replied with a smile "Yes, there is. You just don't know him yet, but you will."
Embrace your lack of control. Realise that as an adult that you are not going to get told off, and that it doesn't matter if you are. We are not here to judge or be judged.
Connecting with your inner children
This includes your young inner child and the teenager.: All of the versions of you before you became an adult. Your inner adult (your soul) can connect with them via music or writing or other creative pursuits and art. I like writing to music.
Other people gave us our childhood trauma and PTSD, and now other people (via the ACA (Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional families) fellowship) are helping us to heal. We all belong to ACA.
We play the victim when we want control and are stuck in ego. Remember that you can always walk away from crazy, without any guilt.
Be in tune with the wisdom of your inner children. They were made whole and complete. Ask them what they want to do. Contact them daily. Ask them how they are feeling. As them what they need. They didn’t get love when they were growing up. Take them to the park for a walk. Give them time to walk, talk, write, create and play. They will be a safe nuclear energy source for you. That’s all they want to do right now - they want to play. That’s it. My inner family is my loving parent and my inner children (including your shadow.) There lies your wholeness.
The ACA literature is inspired and insightful. These books are the cream of the insights. Is it as up to date psychotherapeutically as it can be. I have found more solace here than during any of my therapy. For how can anyone who doesn't believe in the soul help heal a spiritual dis-ease? I have found that, fortunately, the best psychotherapists take a holistic approach that incorporates spiritual principles.
We reconnect with our inner child. The disconnect started very early due to shame.
Recovery is the process of stopping feeling sh*t ALL the time. M. Scott Peck wrote in ‘The Road Less Travelled’ - that all mental disorder is the result of trying to avoid pain. Peck believed that ALL mental suffering is the result of avoiding our problems, quoting the legend and spiritual Master who was Carl Jung. It really may be that simple. Peck wrote that “This tendency to avoid problems and the emotional suffering inherent in them is the primary basis of all human mental illness. Since most of us have this tendency to a greater or lesser degree, most of us are mentally ill to a greater or lesser degree, lacking complete mental health. Just look at the scale of the pandemic of mental illness in the world today. Some of us will go to quite extraordinary lengths to avoid our problems and the suffering they cause, proceeding far afield from all that is clearly good and sensible in order to try to find an easy way out, building the most elaborate fantasies in which to live, sometimes to the total exclusion of reality. In the succinctly elegant words of Carl Jung, 'Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.'"
Our fear is of what other people think about us. My opinion of me is a reflection of what you think of me. That’s why we become people pleasers. Therefore we wear masks. We lose our authenticity. We pretend to meet expectations. The masks and the degree to which we wear them are a measure of the shame behind them. Recovery is a process of gradually taking off our masks.
Confidence is not "They will like me." Confidence is "I'll be fine if they don't."
The way to get round shame is to talk about it. This is why I have set up my VOICE group for men. You are very welcome to join. Simply email me (see my email address below). You are only as sick as your secrets. You have to feel like you are in a safe space - at home, in the park, at meetings etc. The masks are how we disconnected with our inner child. The more you talk about the things that you were ashamed of, and therefore removing the masks, the more you connect with your inner child. Guilt is easy - it’s what you do. Just say sorry. Shame is who you are. If I can’t get rid of the shame I will be fuc*ed up. Masks are deadly.
Shame for me is key, seeing myself and mother's suicide attempts in front of me and saying she would leave us as we didn't make her happy and that I had to be a doctor for her to be proud of me. It was all her stuff. None of it was me.
To feel less sh*t we have to feel more sh*t first. Recovery is hard at first. Our Higher Power tells us that we are forgiven and asks 'Who are we to judge ourselves?' We are all innocent children of God.
When we are not well we want the floor to swallow us up when we have been vulnerable. Yet vulnerability is the key to unlocking shame.
Learning to love your Self
The spiritual material for Self love is feeling, action and BEing. The language of your body is feeling. High performance occurs when you marry up your feeling and intuitively inspired action. The more we feel the more vivid our palette of life. Grief is loss of self. Grief is the flipside of love. We grieve together in ACA. We don’t drown in our own blood.
BEing marries up with its opposite, dissociation. We need to be fully present. Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, said that the space between the incident and the reaction is freedom. Become an actor not a reactor: A witness, not a suspect in the mêlée. This is how we get through adversity. It’s through presence and BEing. Action is synergy between saying something and acting upon it. Both come from love and intuition.
We run to the end of the loss and grief to avoid feeling abandoned and try to put it behind us. That is dissociation. But we need to process and digest it! As we still feel it. I am not thinking about my mother at the moment but I am still grieving after her burial a couple of weeks ago.
Nina Simone said that “Freedom is a feeling”. Just love and be free.
Our parents are role models for not learning to love your Self. They could not give from an empty cup. We absorb how to not love your self from them.
You can’t feel loved by others including God until you love your Self. The benefit when you do is that you connect with your true Self: Your soul. You have to be brave to look at your Self with love as it transmutes dissociation to feelings and BEing.
I was a wonderful little boy who had a family that didn’t know how to love him. My mother told me that I was the reason that she was unhappy. Our families taught us to feel unlovable. I am not the problem! It had nothing to do with me. You need to remember that too.
Our attachment wound is a broken heart.
Our parents couldn’t love themselves.
You can have out loud conversations with your inner selves - your inner children - the toddler through to the teenager.
Face to face conferences are like taking a mask off.
Love your self. Feel your feelings. Face your fears. Take intuitive action based on your inner wisdom. Take your mask off.
In the ACA 'Big Red Book' it says that “We hate people who play the victim and beg to be rescued.” That is true.
12-step recovery groups deals with symptoms. As Dr. Gabor Maté wrote “It’s not why the addiction, it’s why the pain?” that subconsciously needs numbing. ACA targets the cause of your unconscious behaviour - your family and how they led to your unbearable emotional pain. As with so many things, the solution is to love your Self.
Other 12-step programmes are like trimming the weeds. ACA is like pulling up their roots. If it's hysterical, it's historical. The trauma comes from dysfunctional parenting, which is addressed in ACA by reparenting your self. ACA is a lasting solution. If you don’t work it out you act it out: The reverse is also true. Carl Jung said “Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes. Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become. You are what you do, not what you say you'll do.”
ACA welcomes and can provide an umbrella for all the other 12-step groups as they all essentially have the same origin - dysfunctional families leading to childhood trauma. Addiction is merely a symptom of that. Other people may become assholes instead.
ACA is home and where I am finding my authentic Self and being loved for who I am. Be love. In the lyrics of 'Imagine' by John Lennon, he sings of being a dreamer. In today's world, it is a dream that seems far from reality, but just imagine if the dream of love and peace could actually be a reality in your world.
'Imagine' by John Lennon
When you choose to abandon all prejudice and treat everyone with the same care and compassion, you are creating love and peace in your surrounding world. When you choose not to argue, retaliate, or carry around resentments, you are creating an inner world of love and peace that will become evident in your outer world. You may well be a dreamer, but you are a dreamer prepared to be and do all you can to turn that dream into a reality. To quote Lawrence of Arabia, "The dreamers of the day are dangerous, for they may act their dream with eyes open, to make it possible." Imagine all you can be, and then be all you imagine. Be thoughtful, be wise, be considerate, be loving, and be kind.
Generational family dysfunction
Breaking the cycle of intergenerational family dysfunction is very important. It's the hardest and most important thing that you will ever do. The dysfunction is no-one’s fault. We are all victims of victims of victims, ad infinitum. The problem is that we blame our selves, when it’s nothing that we have done and don’t need to feel shame. We are all suffering from mortal abandonment wounds inflicted by the people we trusted the most - our parents. Some people are rageaholics. My mother certainly was. When as a 7-year-old we are having to pull our parents back from suicide attempts in front of us it wounds us deeply. I never wanted to be a doctor. I lived the unlived life of my mother. We live in a house of horrors growing up. We are abandoned emotionally. There is no nurturing.
If you went back and fixed all the mistakes you ever made, you would erase yourself, and that's all I've ever needed to hear.
There is no diagnostic test for a broken heart.
Conclusion
We are all on a journey. We all need to surrender to it. When you allow your Self to feel, and act and speak in alignment with the Truth of who you are, then you are authentic, whole, and acting with integrity. Take off your mask, allow your Self to be vulnerable with the right people, use your voice, and speak and act in alignment with the Truth of who you are. Then you will feel whole and complete. You will not only heal, you will be unstoppable, have Real Personal Power and have a life of love, peace, joy, abundance, and infinite possibility. Change is coming: Everything in your life will begin to propel forward. You'll notice a shift from stagnation to flow, from lack to abundance, from confusion to clarity, from pain to peace. This is the turning point. All is well, in fact it is glorious.
Click here for the link to ACA UK:
Namaste.
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I am very pleased to meet you. Thank you for reading this far. I very much look forward to connecting with the highest version of you, to seeing your highest possibility, and to our conversations. Please do contact me via my website for a free connection call and a free experience of coaching.
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Olly Alexander Branford MBBS, MA(Cantab), PhD
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I have a Bachelor's degree in Natural Sciences from Trinity College, Cambridge; a Master's Degree in Philosophy from Trinity College, Cambridge; a PhD Doctorate in Scientific Research from University College London (UCL); a Medical Degree (MD/MBBS) from The Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine, London and have been a doctor and reconstructive trauma and cancer surgeon in London for 20 years. I have published over 50 peer reviewed scientific journal articles, have been an associate editor and frequent scientific faculty member, and am the author of several scientific books. I have been awarded my Diploma in Transformative Life Coaching in London, which has International Coaching Federation (ICF) Accreditation, as well as the UK Association for Coaching (AC), and the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC). I have been on my own transformative journey full time for four years and I am ready to be your guide to you finding out who you really are and how the world works.