Healing the wound

“Am I good enough?” 

This question has plagued me for a long while now. I feel like I’ve spent pretty much my entire adult life trying to heal the wound that lies behind this question. A wound that I have come to realise may not have been the right one all along, but I’ll come to that later on in the newsletter. While I’ve done a lot of the work on worthiness over the past few years, these past few weeks, this question of “am I good enough?” has come back to haunt me in a big way! It didn’t come on its own, though; it came back wrapped in spiraling anxiety. It wasn’t pretty. It was scary. While all of this was going on, I decided not to write about it or any other wounds until my mental health was in a good place again and until I’d figured out what the actual f*ck was going on.

The start of the year started pretty rockily for me. I had zero motivation, was lethargic, and quiet work-wise, I’m talking whispers type of quiet. I think the renewed uncertainty and impending COV-ID anniversary approaching made people restrict their spending money. With a few clients delaying payments, I started to freak out a little bit. Instantly my thoughts spiraled out of control; what if I can’t pay my bills? What if I get kicked out of my flat and end up in the streets of a country I don’t know? That’s a lot of what’s ifs! Now any rational brain, you’d say all sorts of things, but I was in the full-blown fight, flight, freeze mode. I was struggling to sleep, my chest always felt heavy, and I was feeling on edge. All this was happening in the background to a chain of events that blew my emotional world up. 

The first was unexpected. I was doing my Mental Health First Aid course when we got to day two, and the facilitators said, “please be aware today’s module on suicide is triggering.” I didn’t think anything of it, but I was full-blown crying the minute we started. Having suffered from suicidal ideation for most of my life, this was all too familiar, but I wondered why I was getting so emotional to something that felt like such a distant memory and yet so present. I struggled to stay engaged, turned off my camera, and just listened in. It was a bit of an out-of-body experience in which they were using case studies and talking about people with suicidal thoughts when I was in the room, and I was one of those people. I instantly texted my therapist to be on the safe side, and she perfectly summarised what I was feeling:

“You had re-engaged with the person you were and the place you were in when you were having these thoughts, and all the feelings of sadness, loneliness, and unworthiness came back at that moment.”

The second was at the start of February; my friend Millie asked for volunteers who wanted to try Hakomi, a somatic therapy. Never one to turn down a self-development opportunity, I was first in line. I joined her on Zoom a few days later for the session. It was fascinating. One of the final exercises was to look at an object nearby. I had a little green and red plant on my dinner table come desk. When I was asked how it felt, I replied “overwhelmed and uncomfortable” when questioned further; I replied, “I just don’t like receiving.” This wasn’t new information; it was in fact with Millie that I had realised just how difficult even a simple thing such as receive a compliment was for me a few years back when I attended one of her speaking workshop. Here it was back around full circle, the feeling of unworthiness to receive only this time wedged in a much deeper place.

The third event was on a call with my business coach Leigh, and after the usual preamble of how business was going and what I’d been up to, I said, “I’m the only one getting in my way.” I’d hired my business coach to help me up-level, but I never thought this was the breakthrough in the form of a mini break down. I felt like my chest had been cut open, that the wound was well and truly open and that someone had dumped a bucket of sea salt on it. It stung like hell. I canceled the rest of my day, crawled under the covers, and cried pretty much the rest of the day. The next few weeks, the weight of the world was sitting on my chest. I’d unearthed this tremendous insight, and it wasn’t pleasant.

“The insight wasn’t that I couldn’t receive. It was the insight behind the insight. That I felt like I wasn’t good enough or worthy to receive.”

Lastly, the grand climax of all the shit-stirring. Not one to get stuck in my funk, I tried everything, and I mean everything under the sun. Bubble baths, sleeping, meditation, breathing exercises, dancing, I pulled on all the tools I had, but I was getting nowhere. Then one night, when my heart felt like the walls were closing in and just as I was about to doze off, I jolted up from the bed, hand on my chest, and gasped for air as if I was suffocating; I had had a panic attack. In that split second, the fear hit me, and after the worry, the wonders. If I die, will anyone know? Do I have enough time to pick up the phone and call someone? The irony of it all is that earlier in the day I'd done a LinkedIn Live on anxiety.

It wasn’t until a conversation over a writing session with my friend, Sharon, that she said, “stop doing, stop trying to fix it.” Over a few guided zoom calls with her, I leaned into the anxiety and felt it. At that moment, I realised it was what I was running away from, feeling it. I wondered where why I was so scared of feeling, afraid of opening the floodgates and letting it overwhelm me. Sure it was uncomfortable, but I didn’t die, and eventually, the anxiety started dissolving from my chest, just like that. Sharon went onto do one of the From Trauma to Triumph, LinkedIn Live sessions with me where we talked about how we live in a society that feels the need to fix things and that actually all I needed to do was sit with it and know that my body was capable of bringing me back into presence and calm.

After recovering from the anxiety, I set out to find the answer of where this feeling of not good enough was coming from, especially when I’d done so much work on it. I got in touch with my friend Georgia, an astrologer in Berlin that I’d done some work on the wounded healer. I explained to her all of the above and told her that I felt like I’d healed my not-good-enough story, so why was it rearing its head again? She replied in the unlikeliest of ways, “the wound you need to heal isn’t your Mother’s wound; it’s your Father’s wound.” I instantly replied, “He’s never been in my life; what would I have to heal?” Then it hit me, grief, loss, abandonment. I’d spent my whole life pretending that I was completely unaffected by not having a father, and now that I’d acknowledged it, it was time to start healing. 

So I did what I do best; I wrote about it, and I thought I’d share with you my thoughts. There is no perfect ending with a nice bow on it for this newsletter. This is where I’m at, on this new road of healing. I’m used to writing about what has already been healed and processed, so this is different, hopefully, a good different. Enjoy x 

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What is a loss when you haven’t known what it is to have that person in your life? Is it truly a loss? I never considered not having a father present in my life something I’d lost, as I’d not known what it was like to have a father in the first place. I went around dismissing people’s awkwardness when they asked me about him, and I replied, “I don’t have a father.” Even writing that sounds strange. No one can not have a father; it’s how we come into this world. I’d bat away the question with such quick wit, and now as I reflect, I realise it was a way to deflect. Deflect the grief of something that was missing, something as important as the air I breathe, the love I didn’t receive. A scale tipped sideways unbalanced. I think deep down I know that I was protecting myself from the pain of that loss. I noticed it most on fathers day back in primary school, when all my friends would be creating glittery, colourful cards to give to their Dads. I noticed it in the way my friends Dad's interacted with their daughters, in the way they stared adoringly at their girl. I noticed it when my mind meandered to the thought of marriage and who would walk me down the aisle. I noticed it when I would see my brother unconditionally love this daughter who happened to look identical to me at that same age. Every time I felt like someone had stolen a moment of joy, love, care. Every year I lost more and more of those moments, and I wondered how many years I’ve tried to save myself from the gaping hole that has always been in me. I’ve cried very few times for the father I never had, and I wonder if I start now, will I ever stop? I wonder how much anger I might have been subconsciously sending towards my mother and how many tears I’ve shed for her when they might have been for him all along. I wonder what even happened? I wonder how much of who I am I’m yet to discover because there’s this giant piece of the puzzle missing. Can I be me? Can I be truly authentic without a clue about an entire half of who I am? A glass half empty, half full in a human form. I’ve recently been thinking about where I want to live next, two places instantly came to mind Colombia and Morocco. I am pulled by my roots and swept into the messiness of branches that long to hold me. I can feel my ancestors whispering in the wind in my journey to go and find them. I guess that’s the quest I’m on. The quest to find me, the quest to put the pieces of the puzzle together and to collect the parts of me that have been missing. I long for the day that I can see the full picture rather than stare at the holes that lie empty and yet surrounded. To bring some sense and narrative to the blackouts in my story, like a drunken night out I’d rather forget. I wonder if all those nights drinking away my pain was actually just a coping mechanism for the loss and grief I didn’t know I was suffering. All this time, I thought that my feeling of not good enough came from my mother. That one time where she was in a fit of rage and pretended to open the yellow pages as she said, “I’m going to find you a new mum, I can’t deal with you anymore.” What if for all this time I was healing the wrong wound, the wrong story? It feels obvious that my attention would have gone towards what was present but what if it was what was absent? What was missing was what was wounding me?

With love and care,

#AuthenticAlex

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Hi there, I'm Alex if we haven't met before, nice to meet you and thank you for taking the time out to read my newsletter. If you enjoyed it you can hit subscribed to be notified and if you liked it, feel free to like, share or add a comment (I like hearing from you). If you want to connect with me in other ways, you can find me on Instagram here or you can also sign up to my Authentic Alex newsletter that covers topics such as purpose, presence and storytelling. If you're looking for a coach, feel free to get in touch.

About Alex: At the age of 24 Alex found herself employed as the Head of Training and Development for a Foreign Exchange Company in The City. After experiencing her very own quarter-life crisis, she decided to leave the corporate world and create her own definition of success. On the day she left that job she wrote a post that went viral on LinkedIn.

Since then she’s been named LinkedIn Top Voice UK twice for her mental health and personal growth content and has become an official LinkedIn Learning Instructor. She's also the co-founder of #LinkedInLocal, a global movement creating communities in over 100 countries and 1,000 cities.

She’s best known for blogging under the hashtag #AuhtenticAlex where she smashes one stigma at a time and writes about her therapy journey with the aim of inspiring others to transform their traumas into triumphs.

She now helps individuals and businesses grow their presence on LinkedIn, find their sense of purpose, awaken their creativity and tell their stories. You can find out more about her and the brand here: www.fromtraumatotriumph.co.