Seeking Help That Did Not Heal
Little did I realise how much of my life experiences, particularly from my childhood and teenage years, had marked me to such a degree that now, as a married man with a family and running a growing business, would be having such an effect on my heart, on my mind, on my thoughts, on my behaviour.
I'll never forget that first session with the man that became my personal therapist for around five years, where I was going to him because of challenges I was having at home in my marriage. His first question to me wasn't about what is taking place in my life then, but he was asking me to begin sharing with him about my childhood, my early formative years, my family life when I was a young boy. I recall wondering to myself, “Why is he asking about that? Why isn't he asking about what is happening now and the things that I'm battling with and what's going on in my mind?”
But no, he was going back to early years. I began to open up. I began to share things that I'd never shared with anyone else before, and what I started to experience was what I can reflect back on now is temporary peace, temporary understanding, temporary clarity, temporary progress. I didn't know back then that as I was opening up and sharing various life experiences which were having an effect on my adult life, I didn't realise that what I was seeing as real breakthroughs were only actually temporary relief.
After being in therapy for around six months, I had a period of what I recall was around 18 months where I didn't go and see the therapist. I really believed that I had been healed, that I had been set free, and that I no longer needed that support. But slowly and then increasingly, over that period of not having professional support, that dark, destructive voice was having an increasingly negative effect on me again. It got to such a place that I was hardly able to sleep properly at night. This led to alarm bells starting to ring when you're running a business, when you're commuting, when you're travelling, when you have responsibilities, when you have people looking up to you, when you have things to maintain, when you have a life to maintain. Not sleeping properly is not good, it is not healthy. And that led me to go back to seeing the therapist, and I was in and out of therapy sessions probably for about another three years. Over five years in therapy, and then, after all that, realising that I wasn't yet healed, I was still trapped in this prison of my mind.
Then came hypnotherapy. After five years of being in one to one therapy, I'm now in hypnotherapy, and whilst hypnotised, speaking about things which I'd not shared in the previous five years. I truly believed this was bringing the breakthrough. I truly believed this was bringing the freedom. It didn't. What I thought was permanent was only temporary. As I reflect back, I don't begrudge the two men, the two professional therapists, because they offered me what they had been taught, what they believed was the right techniques, the right solutions for me to be free from this prison of my mind. But the reality is, those things only ever brought temporary relief, temporary peace.
The reality is that the root, the very root cause of my destructive thought patterns, my negative behaviour, me doing things which I didn't want to do, me having on and off nights of trying to sleep, it was the root cause that was not spoken about through all those years of therapy and hypnotherapy. My heart now is for men and women who, perhaps like I used to be, are living a productive, successful, progressive life. Yet the root cause of why they themselves might be having destructive thought patterns or simply just struggling personally, privately in their mind, in that same prison that I used to be trapped in - my heart is to be there for men and women, and to in some way, help be a guide or a signpost to them, for them to understand the root cause, and for them to receive, not temporary, but permanent healing and freedom.
