We are all flawed

This blog is about two significant barriers that prevent us from maintaining a healthy emotional balance:

a) Believing ourselves to be different to other people (they're getting it right while we are repeatedly messing up)

b) Staying stuck in a mindset that is wrong, unhelpful and tethered to the past.

Everyone messes up. Everyone is a continual flawed organism, bumbling through life, making mistakes, doing things they regret, struggling to battle their inner chimp (the loud, primal part of our brain that is hell bent on defending our ego and stamping its foot a lot until it gets its way). We are all choosing to do things that are not good for us, subsequently returning to the path of righteousness, finding our way again, working out how to get it better next time. This is human. This is normal.

Understanding the above is to demonstrate self-compassion, love for yourself, recognition that you were not born with all the answers and you are not perfection personified.

So this is the first barrier, as mentioned above, that holds us back in life. Believing that other people are getting it right and we are failing.

I was supposed to be getting married next weekend. There was me, with the love of my life (so I thought); venue booked, invitations sent, dress being decided, bridesmaids and page boy selected. Following my cancer radiotherapy treatment in spring 2023, I was dumped. By text. I was devastated and it has taken months and months to move into a place of being ok with that, of not letting it eat away at me every day. Relationships break down, I'm human, I suffered and there was only time that would heal that deep and painful wound. I looked at other people and wondered why their relationships worked out and mine had not. I questioned the fabric of my soul. I was left with an emotional scar that I knew would never fully heal. I felt broken. I frequntly questioned whether the pain would ever disappear.

For a while, I attached the agony of that break-up to the second barrier mentioned above - I tied it to my history, hooking it to a string of relationship breakdowns: my divorce in my twenties, a couple of other longish terms relationships that had not worked out. I created a narrative from that, and it reinforced a sad, negative perspective of myself in which I was unloveable, damaged, too fucked up from all the self-destruction of my past to ever find someone with whom I could have a long, loving, fulfilling partnership.

It was all the ego. It was my ego telling me stories about what I should be, what I needed to be. That other people were getting it right when I was getting it wrong. That I could not be happy. That I was different.

I'm sharing this with you because I know how common it is for clients I speak with to believe that they are uniquely flawed - that what they are experiencing in life is abnormal and they cannot change, that they are stuck on a hamster wheel and this is who they are, what they deserve... they are unloveable, broken, destined for misery.

Let me share a big and important secret with you.

You're free.

You're loveable.

You are human.

You are normal.

You can learn to behave in a way that works for you.

You can let go of the shit that has been keeping you trapped.

You can be happy again.

I am not here to tell you I'm perfect. I'm here to tell you that I'm not, and neither are you, and nor is any of us on the planet. But when things happen that break us temporarily, and we tell ourselves all the unhelpful stories about the past and how this is just us, incapable of change and stuck like this forever, we are missing a simple and vital truth:

Letting go of the past is possible. Change is yours for the taking. It takes commitment to certain practices, granted. But it's there, just around the corner, and it looks like freedom.