The Myth of “Fixing Yourself”
I first started trying to fix myself around my mid 30s. Prior to that young adult life was a heady yet innocent period of living life second to second, just letting myself pour forth and whatever the consequence be, they be!
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A bit before that, late 20s, I started writing, I thought of a book that I wanted to write - I have thought of a lot of books to write! This one was called The Road to Self Improvement. So, I guess I was starting to become a tad more aware. Of my behaviors, of my trauma, of my (what I now recognize as) acting out.
Skipping ahead though to my fixing period. Someone bought me The Road Less Travelled. I read the intro and had an epiphany. (I didn’t read more than that, so I guess the epiphany wasn’t that amazing). Said lightbulb moment? It was something to do with instant gratification. I recognized myself in that. Yes, I thought, I have that problem. I want it NOW. I want to stop this feeling NOW. I want to do this thing, have this thing, NOW, NOW, NOW.
And to hell with the consequences. Or, even: consequences, what are they? Oh, these - she thinks, the day after when it all comes crashing down. THESE consequences.
I have always been someone who needs to be whacked over the head with something 158 times before I get it; I guess you can say that I am an experiential learner. I need to embody something, to walk the walk, to knock on the door, to be IN it to understand it. And a few times, at least. And to overcome it? Well, 10X that. In fact, 100X it.
My journey with self improvement, self help, etc was always blended with self care. One day, I picked up someone’s (it may have been mine, I’m not sure) Spa Secrets for Body and Soul book made by the spa chain Champney’s. And I loved to sit in bed and read it: recipes for homemade teas, body scrubs, and methods for mindfulness. This was BRAND NEW INFORMATION (channeling Phoebe from Friends, it was probably around that era, too). And I loved it.
I soaked up that self care stuff, sometimes with a hangover - and realised THIS is what I want. I want fresh herbal tea, early nights, yoga, essential oils… to feel WELL, and not all over the place! I had the same kind of feeling about being WELL as I had about being DRUNK. That seems paradoxical, but really they are both about feeling good. I wanted that shit, all over me, always.
In other words I wanted to avoid feeling bad. To avoid feeling.
Realizing my patterns for being up and down all the time, I read that Stephen Fry was diagnosed with Cyclothymia - and it resonated, a lot. Ups and downs had always been a feature of my life. And so I began to look into it. I organized some CBT but it didn't resonate at all.
After many years of probably twice-weekly excessive binge drinking, often fun but sometimes with horrible consequences that did not in any way represent who I was at my core (does it ever, for anybody? Not special here!) I decided to look into options: first, a male counsellor that gave me the creeps. He showed me an emotions wheel and I couldn’t identify with any of them. WTF? I had always thought of myself as an emotionally intelligent person! Oh, shit, actually I can’t distinguish between anything other than: Happy… and Tired… or Sad. What does this mean?
Fast forward again, and I joined an alcohol free challenge group - the big one that focuses on exercise and day counts and the big aim being to give up beer for a year. So many people in the sober space started here, so kudos for them for being pioneers in the field of sober curiosity. I was amazed that there was an option other than AA. I joined around 2017, after a few years of trying and failing to moderate and even not drink at times. Not drink?! I know, crazy, right? Sounds so bat shit now, but then, even that recently, it was strange to not drink - unless you were and always had been teetotal or were an Alcoholic with a capital A. I didn't identify with either, I’d just always (pretty much) drank to excess. And then that, somehow, tied into my mental health ups and downs. I didn’t realise how much the two were intertwined. The need to not feel my feelings.
Honestly though, I never felt mad, sad, or bad enough to get proper help. Or to take it seriously enough to commit. But it was always there, this background feeling that I was broken and needed fixing.
I didn’t need to be fixed; I needed to be clearheaded, long enough to actually FEEL. And from there, to heal what needed attention, so I could actually make progress and fulfill my potential as a human!
My 30s were spent in a seesaw of ‘sober curiosity’ (or, let’s call the spade what it fucking is: I kept relapsing!). However, all was not lost: I cranked up my dial on understanding. And I never gave up. And THIS is a key factor here in my journey and why I, to this day, do not view myself harshly for taking quite so long as I have to arrive where I am at now. I grew so much, albeit two steps forward, five back, ten steps forward, two back - it was like a crazy dance that had me in a tizzy. Cognitive dissonance was my most frequent state. There are worse states to be in, sure. But CD is like a quiet form of torture, like raindrops quietly falling on one spot of your head, all the time. No one else’s, just yours. Everyone else says it’s sunny, but you can feel rain. You swear. AND you can feel sun. Which one to focus on. When both feel so true? Oh well, just ignore it, what will quiet this noise? I know! Wine! Anyone fancy a drink?
Being constantly torn in one direction, then another is so hard. Remember I said I looked into Cyclothymia (this is a milder form of Bipolar)? Well, I later started piecing together all the evidence and released I was neurodivergent rather than bipolar. Specifically I am now diagnosed ADHD and also I believe have traits of Autism (investigation pending on the latter). With this evidence, I can see in hindsight that what I though was CD - and, was, to some degree - was also probably AuDHD, which is like a constant tug of war in your noggin, all the time. Autism wants order, control, predictability. And ADHD craves spontaneity, impulsiveness, and is forgetful and reckless. Oh joy of joys to be in my brain! LOL!
So, back on track… I had two lovely beautiful babies in my early 30s and this naturally calmed me down - but Party Girl was still in there, bless her. I had yet to figure out the whole picture. In my late 30s I had my 3rd child. And, a delightful combo of sleep deprivation, perimenopause, suppressed trauma, and undiagnosed (at this stage) neurodivergence, combined to create a lovely cocktail of depression and extremely low self worth, resulting in suicidal ideation. I was misdiagnosed by a psychiatrist who spoke to me for 15 minutes, with major depressive disorder (MDD) and then, later, correctly, with ADHD (after my eldest was diagnosed, and the doctor said, mum, have you ever been assessed…?!). I was put on SSRIs for the misdiagnosed MDD - still on them to this day and would like to come off, but my brain has gotten so used to them it’s really hard to. The day will come, I’m sure, I am in no rush though.
I was still, in my early 40s, in ‘please fix me’ mode. My diagnosis of ADHD and the sheer depth of sadness I had reached, finally made me realise two things:
no one was coming to save me; I had to do this myself
it would have to become my priority in life because my kids needed me to be well
I started to deep dive into self-care. And I became obsessed. I realised it was not about baths and getting your nails done (both lovely and important in their own way). It was actually about having my own back. And that was hard, coming out of 40 years of people pleasing and not ever speaking up for myself. Well maybe I did, but only I was very drunk, and that never ended well.
I trained as a holistic coach, not originally to be a coach, but for my then self care community Mumfully, which no longer exists. I ended it before it really got going as it was lacking the spirituality I knew, deep down, I had to talk about and eventually, embody, as part of my business. During lockdown, like many of us, I started doing yoga daily to stay sane - and escape my family for 20 mins! For the first time ever I completed something - the 30 days of yoga with Adriene on YouTube. I then came across Alexandra McRobert and immediately signed up for her 200hr YTT online. This felt like home. Since then I have done her 300hr, her Advanced Yoga Sutras, Sober Yoga plus other providers’ CPD courses like Yin, Aromatics for Yoga and many more.
What I loved about yoga, and working my way through the holistic coaching course, was how I was doing them on my own. You see, nobody knows you, like you. Not the psychiatrist who talks to you for 15 minutes, or the GP who has 11 minutes less then that, and, honestly, just needs to get you out the door with some level of solution. But solutions to these problems aren’t quick, and they aren’t simple, and they aren’t one size fits all. But this inner work, it was all about self enquiry - deep diving into why you are how you are, with compassion. Self healing. Self care, too. Self care was the micro moments of self love. Self healing was going back, combing over hard things and exploring them. Facing up to things, in your own time. Coaching is about taking action. Problem solving, which my neurodivergent brain bloody loves.
What I love about self healing, is that we ALL can do this. You won’t believe how capable you are of healing yourself. Sure, use a practitioner to guide you but don’t forget how accessible all of this is to you, just by using books and watching videos! By deciding to do this, finally commit to it.
What really landed this sense of inner healing was getting out of my own head, beyond the coaching program I took, and into my body. It was the embodiment coaching and the yoga training. Ultimately, the coaching program got me a plan, but I didn't realize until later, the really secret sauce was the yoga I was doing alongside. Cracking myself open (literally, knees are so cracky), creating space in my body, allowing trauma to shift and recalibrate. Giving myself peace by not drinking. Sure, I was slipping up quite a lot, but I kept returning. Yoga had taught me self-compassion.
I started to read around the mind body ‘connection’. I read Gabor Mate, Bessel Van Der Kolk, and many more. I started to feel into what was I already knew was so true for me: all of you is all of you, there is no separation. Extend that further: all of you is made of energy, the same energy that all life is made from. We aren’t separate, not in our own physiology, emotions and spirituality - and certainly not from each other, and especially not from nature. This felt soothing. I never had to be alone. Suddenly my innate spirituality that had always been there, had a voice, a framework - and a purpose. It was really healing me. And that in turn helped me to be a better mum. Win, win.
This type of work, both in the psychology and spirituality world, resonated and made complete sense. Why on earth do we see the mind and body as separate!? It’s lunacy. Lunacy, even, is a word that is derived from Lunar - the moon. It was known, back then that behaviors were affected by changes in the moon. You see? The link between us, mind, body and soul - and the earth, the moon - it’s always been there. But we have forgotten our innate, particle-level oneness with the earth. We have fragmented ourselves into things that need to be fixed. Why? Well to start with, when we outsource our power, we become ideal avatars to sell products to by big companies who need us to be reliant on them for them to exist. I know - I am selling too, to some degree, all the time. But I like to think there is a difference: one is empowering and the other, disempowering.
Fixing ourselves suggests we are broken. But we are simply humans having human experiences. When we come into alignment with our true nature of oneness and innately self-healing beings, things start to get better on their own. Healing doesnt have to be complicated. I am re-reading a book on intuitive Ayurveda (‘sister science’ to yoga, mainly based around diet and lifestyle) at the moment in which she provides simple outlines for wellness that revolve around simple food, stable routine, relaxed self care practices. Living in alignment with nature, seasons, elements.
We have run away from ourselves. We are progressing way faster as humans than what we can actually keep up with. And our bodies, our nervous systems, are shredded by the effort.
It’s no mistake that it’s normally in midlife - what we used to call a midlife crisis - because we have to stack up enough crap, enough mistakes, to be able to stand still and say, enough - something has to change. Don’t feel too bad! Our 20s are literally for making mistakes! 30s? About realised that we made them, and wondering how to do better. 40s? Doing the work. OK, so some people go through this process quicker but this is very common as an arc of healing, age wise. (I mean, I could talk here about past lives and how that impacts our speediness, readiness and depth of healing in this lifetime, but that’s a whole other post).
Here’s what really shifted things for me: healing, true, embodied, soul level stuff - comes from a whole person approach. We can’t truly heal by sitting and being in the mind. We have to be in our body. We have to face what we have been avoiding, and it lives in our tissues (as the saying goes: ‘the issues are in our tissues’!). I went to therapy a year or two ago. Great therapist, lovely lady. After the session I had to beat my chest and jump up and down. During the session I was twitching I needed to move so bad! I needed to move, to shake that shit off, to process and transmute. This should be standard procedure - everyone needs to remember their own power to shift energy, to release and regulate, just like dogs and other animals do!
If, like me, you struggle to name emotions - it’s called alexithymia - then somatic/embodiment work is so helpful. You can instead use colors, textures - or nothing at all. You can simply feel into where in your body the feelings are.
So many midlife women, like me, try to “fix” themselves for years with books, courses, or endless self-improvement - and that’s great, definitely better than nothing. Truly though, healing doesn’t come from the mind alone.
When we get into the body, we start to cultivate an inner steadiness. We visit this place, often: this is not a one and done thing. We start to know, with regular visits inward, how to drop in. And guess what? That keeps us calm in stressful situations, too. We can hack moments that used to trigger us! This place, this warm, fuzzy safe core of us, we can go there anytime. And this knowledge, deep and embodied, it’s empowering: we start to feel like, hang on, we are braver, more calm, more resilient. We start to trust ourselves again. We stop abandoning and we start having our own back. We do more, say more - or maybe even do less and say less if that’s the energy that’s needed! Maybe a mix of both - you get to choose. And this time your true self is leading the way, not people pleasing, not intoxicated, or seeking something from others. Just, you.
And here is the icing on the cake - and the thing I like to think is different about my coaching and my work 1-to-1 particularly. We can feel and heal. Then we can take all the aligned action. We can envision and manifest our desires. But then? Then we let that shit go. Why do we do that? Why do we surrender? Well, through cultivating body based awareness and regulation, we realize that healing isn’t about life or other people being perfect - and we don’t need to be, either. It comes from knowing, deep in our mind, body and soul, that we can feel safe no matter what happens - rather than trying to control the outcome of every little thing - and that’s when we truly start to heal.
Thanks for reading Come Home by Rachel Brady! This post is public so feel free to share it.
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Some journal prompts:
+ do you feel like you have been in your head when it comes to healing?
+ what is stopping you from being in your body?
+ what would it be like to truly feel, and not be scared of what we find there?
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I am running a new 1-to-1 coaching program for Embodied Homecoming that combines Holistic Life Coaching, Embodiment/Somatic Work with Yogic Wisdom - I am giving a discount of £222 to the first two people that sign up and I only have 2 spots!
Code: homecomingbeta to get £222 off. Link below! Or, prior to that book a taster session with me to see what it’s all about! Link also below.
Embodied Homecoming 1-to-1 coaching
Come to my online Winter Rest session Dec 28th