My 20’s and early 30’s were a serious struggle with mental illness, a deep struggle with who I was and a struggle with my life and the decisions I had made.
As a result this thing called “mental illness” completely took over my life and caused high levels of stress, worry and pain for everyone I loved.
For 12 years I felt utterly helpless. I didn’t want to live, I was scared and I felt so completely alone.
Why did I struggle so deeply? Because I believed there was something so wrong with me that I didn’t deserve to live, neither did I deserve the people in my life.
So I did everything possible to ensure I really didn’t deserve my life and pushed it all away.
Through my behaviours, thoughts and beliefs aka anxiety, depression and the behaviours of bipolar I did a bloody great job of feeling like I was undeserving!
I had no idea I could change the way I was being, I was told I had an illness and I would have for life.
Back then there wasn’t the awareness that exists now in mental health – the reality that you could change how you behave, think and feel (or at least these options weren’t presented to me by the people or professionals who were trying to help.)
It seems crazy now when positive thinking is all people talk about, after all it was only two decades ago that was I was so unwell!
In the end, I decided to help myself. Luckily, there were people talking about things in a different way, from a completely different perspective and 12 years on I have read most books in this genre! It’s called spiritual self development.
24 years on and fortunately things have changed, and with the rise of social media there is far more awareness. Attitudes and understandings are different.
Yet even with this level of awareness people still feel helpless, and unable to change their experiences.
Why?
Because when we struggle we lose this insight, we believe we have to seek externally for the answer and effectively we give our power away and ignore our innate awareness and knowing, believing there must be something wrong with us.
But – there there was nothing wrong with me and from my extensive experience over the part 6 years as a Counsellor or therapist (whatever you want to label it as), I’ve also seen this is the same for every single one of my clients.
Even though there are hundreds of pills, therapies, potions and approaches which claim to help us ‘fix’, ‘mend’, ‘heal’ and make us feel ‘better’ and ‘change our mindset’ – there is really never anything wrong with us to fix or mend.
It’s all just an experience we’re being sold and that we choose as part of this human journey.
And for me the simple answer is…
YOU just need to:
Love YOU
Appreciate YOU
Respect YOU
Trust YOU
You simply need to awaken and realise the truth of who you really are beyond the controls of the mind and it’s beliefs.
In the end that’s all I began to do and it was from practising SELF LOVE that enabled all the illness to fall away. Once it did I no longer needed medication or specialist mental health care or ‘professional’ help.
With some guidance and support I began to embody the person who looked after myself, loved, trusted and respected myself enough to start loving and enjoying my life and healing my relationships with loved ones…
That person was ME!
I know that we all have the ability to do the same.
But again it’s a choice.
You get to choose to continue seeking externally for everything you need, or start realising that everything you need you already are…
The simple choice is to start choosing YOU.
All the love, joy and inner peace you seek has been there the whole time.
Please share with anyone who might benefit from hearing this ?❤️
#selfloveawareness
