16 Mar Why Healing My Wounds Was Essential to Me Learning To Thrive

Let me be vulnerable and express where all this came from for me. You’re right, I read the text books, Hollis, Gillette and Moore, Boothroyd, Bly and many others. I reached for Rod Boothroyd’s book Warrior, Magician, Lover, King updated for the 21st century in desperation when my marriage and family life began to implode around me and I found myself and my unresolved issues at the centre of the unfolding drama I had caused.

It was hard to live in the bed I’d made, but I had to take responsibility for my irresponsible life. 

I never set out to live an irresponsible life, in fact quite the opposite, at 17 I left home full of hopes and dreams, met the beautiful girl who would become my wife and within two years was married to her. A year later I had my first child and at 21 years old I was the father of two children and had been married two years. 

When I told my wife after two weeks of knowing her that I was going to marry her, I had never been more serious about anything in my life. When temporarily we were separated because we ended up homeless and I had to return to the north to live with my mother and her mother came to take her back to London I cried on my bed like I have never wept before, or since. 

Earl Nightingale encourages us in the strangest secret to answer the question; ‘what do we want?’ At that moment in my life I knew with every fibre of my being what I wanted. I wanted this woman, and I wanted us to go off into the distance and live happily ever after. 

However, what I had not taken into consideration was my immaturity, my unresolved childhood wounds. The programming from my childhood which had snares and traps embedded for which I was ill prepared. For example scripture verses that my parents lived by like, ‘raise up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it’, predestining me at the age of 18 to find myself in church prepared once more to surrender my hard won sovereignty to an egregor (thought form) to become my lord and saviour ensuring rather than continuing to ask as Earl exhorted us ‘what do I want?’ to begin asking ‘what does god want?’ 

And just as my mother had enveigled my sovereignty at 4 years old with her gospel narration and leading me in the sinners prayer making of me an obedient and compliant child, church now had an obedient and compliant disciple whose time, energy and money they could exploit for whatever endeavours they considered worthy whether these endeavours held anything beneficial to me or my emerging family or not.

I don’t blame my mother, or the church. Stephen Covey states; ‘blame causes depression’ how are we supposed to take responsibility or do anything about a situation if our energy is being expended pointing fingers. But needless to say all this created for me huge life lessons. And in the moment I reached for Rod Boothroyd’s book the chickens had come home to roost.  

My life that I had lived in the 1st half felt like one of those toy cars you wind up on the side then set loose on the carpet and it keeps going as long as possible till it runs out of spring or hits a skirting board. My internal springs had run out and I’d hit a wall and the only thing left was for me to look within. 

The wall I had hit was the end of survival living. I had strove with everything within me to provide for my wife and my family at one point walking for 22 miles a day to and from work to make sure I paid the bills and for many years enduring a 2 and a ½ hour commute which began and ended with a 45 minute walk through a dark country road to make sure we kept a roof over our heads. 

On the way home I’d ramble through the supermarkets picking up food from the reduced section and loading up my work bag and filling my hands with several carrier bags to fill our fridge and cook for my wife and children upon my return. 

Throughout all this I had neglected to address just how Hungry, Angry, Lonely and Tired I had become. Therefore I didn’t HALT as the acronym encourages despite the presence of these unaddressed symptoms until The Universe Themselves would let me continue no more. 

I had developed addictions to anaesthetise my pain, and as a result was living dishonestly, till my wife confronted me and as the truth spilt out everything I held dear and had fought for with my limited resources and lack of understanding was compromised and the threat of losing it all became an ever present reality. 

In doing the work to overcome my addictions and in confronting the unconfronted within my life I had to address the wounds accrued in a guilt laden family environment where both my parents had become christians on account of the guilt of their past. This shaped how they parented and communicated many unspoken messages which I internalised and responded to in order to survive my upbringing.

My issue was the patterns I’d formed continued into adulthood and until they were interrupted by a huge rupture which threatened everything I held dear would have continued unchecked characterising how I showed up and ensuring the life of survival mode living was the only life I thought possible for me. When in fact with the healing of these wounds I now can state I am starting to understand what it means to truly thrive.