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My Story

Updated: Jul 17, 2024

This is the first chapter of my story. My life used to consist entirely of work, sleep, and repeat. I may as well have slept in my suit in order to save a little extra time each day. It reminded me of a TV advert where the man went to bed fully dressed for work, wearing with his bowler hat, still holding his briefcase and umbrella (well I do live in London), ready for the next day.

 

I was empty, deadened, numb, disassociated from my feelings, yet in excruciating emotional pain: A pain that was too much to bear. Anxiety and fear ruled my world, but I didn’t know that was the case. I thought it was ‘drive’, but in reality, it was terror: The fear that a child carries when they grow up in a dysfunctional home without unconditional love (more on this later). I carried that fear throughout my teens and into my adulthood. But it was buried oh so deeply inside. That pressure on my chest drove me to impossible heights, just to find that at the summit there was no joy. I built the wrong tower. I put my ladder against the wrong wall: But how could I know otherwise? I didn’t like the view from the top. At that point I didn’t know who I was, and I didn’t know how the world really worked.


This chapter is an exercise in vulnerability, sharing my Truth with you, inviting you to do the same. The rest of this book will be in service to you. What follows in the subsequent chapters in this book is how I learned important and tough lessons that have miraculously changed my life: Lessons which may guide you to finding your own way to escape from your predicament of numbing your fears and pain with external validation and various unhelpful distracting and numbing behaviours, and from participating in fuelling drama with your own unconscious egoic reaction: This will be the transformative journey from pain to peace, purpose, and real personal power.



My real journey began four years ago when my life crashed. I was truly brought to my knees as a ‘gift of desperation.’ I thought I had it all, according to societal standards – the nice house, a beautiful family, the ‘perfect’ job. But I was empty and so full of fear that I tried to end my life twice just to get away from the anxiety. I have learned that joy and gratitude are an inside job, and that they come from wanting what we have, not having what we want.


In my first ever therapy session, four years ago, the therapist asked me who I was without the trappings of what was on my bulging 40-page curriculum vitae. I was dumbstruck by his question. I asked tentatively after several failed attempts referencing my CV “There is no me?” A smile turned up the corner of his lips, and he said, “There is a you; You just don’t know you yet.” I had an inkling of what he meant, but where to start? “Tell me more” I replied, overwhelmed but intrigued. I felt totally unravelled. I was like a peach stripped to the bare stone. That began the journey of a lifetime: The journey of the second half of my life. As I watch the football tonight, the 2024 Euros to be more precise, aged 51 years old, I know now that life truly is a game of two halves.


In the first half of my life (I didn’t know that there was to be a second half yet) I had become a doctor: A reconstructive and cosmetic plastic surgeon. Someone who ‘fixed’ people at their request by adding to, subtracting from, or modifying the shape of their bodies. For almost three decades I had strived and succeeded with this plan and had got to the top of my ‘game’. The worst place to be in life is when you achieve all your so-called ‘dreams’ and you are still miserable. There is nowhere else to go, but your whole being is uneasy, anxious, deadened, and numb. How did I arrive at that place? And where to go from there?


Plastic surgery comes from the Greek word ‘plastikos’, which means to mould or to shape. So, you may well ask, why is a plastic surgeon advocating that we should look within for true joy rather than pay to shape ourselves to meet the external expectations of society? This seems to be the dis-ease of our times.


I almost didn’t write this book, because I almost didn’t survive my life to tell you my truth. I wanted to write it on behalf of the people who did not make it: Those who have successfully committed suicide. In the healing and recovery groups that I go to I always notice the empty chairs, and we have a moment of silence for those people who did not make it this far. As you read this chapter of my story, allow yourself to reflect on how my account relates to your own childhood and how it may be affecting your subconscious behaviour now.



My psychotherapist and psychologist at the time of my breakdown four years ago told me that in five years that I would be grateful for this arduous journey. This sense of gratitude occurred before five years. I lost everything, including my house, my career, my reputation, and my family, albeit temporarily, but I found me, and I started getting clarity on how the world works. It isn’t easy but it is simple. And you can do it too. It’s called healing and recovery: The recovery of the real you. For me this has been the bridge to everything that was missing in my life – actually realising that I wasn’t actually missing anything at all. It has been the 12 steps, it has been 'A Course in Miracles', it has been the Hero’s Journey, it has been full time inner work, plus the devouring of books on philosophy, positive psychology, spirituality, and so much more: I realised that what all of these have in common is that they are all metaphors for personal transformation. It has been the hardest thing that I have ever done, but also the most worthwhile by a long shot.

 

I truly believe that this is a journey within that we must all make, including our inevitable journey through ‘The Dark Night of The Soul’. We sometimes need to be metaphorically punched in the face before we can wake up and realise that we must take this journey: A 'knockout blow' before you can find real peace, unconditional love that was there all along, joy, true abundance, and bliss. Inside me I found an invincible summer. Love your fate, my friend: All is well. You will see...


 

It’s a long story, but I can summarise it in this chapter. But first, shall we rewind? I want to share with you from a very tender, heart-felt, open, authentic, and vulnerable place. Why? Because recovery and healing have taught me that there is no other way to be. Anything else is ego. And prior to this journey there is no way that I could have or would have done this with you. I was, like so many of us, asleep. Today, I wanted to speak to your souls: Your true Selves (note the capital ‘S’), the unchangeable, but often hidden part of your psyche.

 

Like you, and everyone else, I was born full of hope, presence, love, joy, peace, and vitality, with a ready-made blueprint for my life: It’s encoded in our DNA. What is planted in each person’s soul will sprout: As an oak grows from an acorn. This is your unique combination of gifts and talents that you have to contribute to the world, to collectively make it a better place. The privilege of a lifetime is becoming who you truly are. So, what has gone awry? The whole problem is that our parents and society don’t nurture us for being who we truly are: They don’t recognise and encourage our own dreams and passions, based on our blueprint. It’s as if they had seen a different plan for us: One of conformity based on their own fears: On what they thought was expected of them, so that they would be loved, maybe through you. A plan that completed them, not you.



Surely, it’s time for an alternative utopian ideal? Who just loves this dystopia? I don’t see any hands up. Is it any wonder that we feel unworthy, as though our self-worth is contingent on external people, things, places, or circumstances. This is the basis of ‘emotional insobriety’, which is the basis for all addiction and much mental illness. No amount of ‘imitation love’ (a term coined by Greg Baer, another surgeon who had an awakening after mental illness, addiction, and the author of the book 'Real Love') can satisfy us. Addiction is just the seeking of imitation love, which is the human predicament. We don’t feel worthy; or loved for who we are. Is it any wonder that our lives feel unfulfilled, empty, and joyless? We all just want to be seen, valued, and heard, because we really weren’t as children.


We all have the same wounds: We didn’t receive parental unconditional love as children. We weren’t accepted for who we were. We were made to think that we would be loved for who we could be. So, you didn’t feel truly loved. You can’t give bread to a starving man if you don’t have any yourself. You need to love your Self unconditionally and be open to receiving that love before you can give it to another. This is pretty hard to do if you didn’t receive unconditional love from your parents when you were growing up. You cannot ignore the pain of not being loved, so you use unconscious behaviours to get ‘imitation love’ or you protect your Self from feeling the pain. We paradoxically feel invincible and numb, yet unworthy and unloved.


When we were born nothing bothered us, not for more than a few moments anyway. We were totally present, in the same way that our puppies appear to be. But our parents were asleep, unconscious, but we didn't know it: Neither did they. They had taken the blue pill (from the iconic film 'The Matrix'), forgetting everything that had happened to them previously in their life up to and after the point of having us. How could we have known that we really should follow our dreams when we were only a little child? We were torn between wanting to be our true Selves and being petrified that that would mean that we would be abandoned by our parents (attachment needs always win over authenticity), and that we would die, unworthy, unloved, abandoned, and alone, which are our greatest fears. Our survival instincts kicked in. We thought that there was no other choice. We chose survival, like every other child would have done: Like every other child does. The conflict between who we are and who we want to be is at the core of the human struggle. It's mine. It’s yours. And it’s everyone else's. So, searching for approval and external validation becomes a matter of survival. Not only that, but marketing, social media, families, and society at large all reward our external validation-seeking behaviour, until they don’t. Is it any surprise that we flounder? We need compassion and unconditional love, not judgement, drama, conflict, conflagration, and hate. We need to be confident that taking the red pill was the right choice.


We saw lions everywhere: Our parents didn't protect us: For they were the lions. My father left when I was two years old. My parent’s marriage had broken down and my father left because he wanted my mother to be happy without him. What an amazing expression of true love. He didn’t think that he could contribute to her happiness. He was right: My mother could not be happy as she hadn’t been unconditionally loved by her parents, and as a result she didn’t love herself: Her parents were super critical of her. She was French and she had escaped Paris to England to marry to get away from them. She was super judgemental of everyone. It’s no wonder, looking back now, that I became a plastic surgeon – the present day harbinger of aesthetic judgement.


But my mother was still bound by her parents’ expectations of her. She couldn’t escape. Perhaps my father didn’t love himself enough either: I will never know. I didn’t ever get the chance to speak to him about it. You see, he loved my brother and I and wanted the best for us. But all I could feel, without the perceived wisdom of a retrospectoscope (don’t worry if you don’t have one, you can borrow mine) over four decades of living in fear, and hundreds of hours of therapy, was that he left my brother and I because he didn’t love us, although he did.


My mother remarried a further three times, including to a man who suffered from depression, and another who was an alcoholic who didn't like children (who I lived with alone for two years during my A level years while my mother was conducting her extramarital affairs). My brother had left home.


My mother tried to commit suicide in front of my brother and me using violent means twice by the time I was seven years old. I remember her holding the biggest knife from our kitchen against her wrists, then against her chest, with its point aimed at her heart, screaming that she was about to end her life, in front of us. She also tried to jump out of the front passenger seat of a car on a motorway at full speed: With my brother and me trying to hold her in the car from the back seat. She screamed to my brother and I that she wanted to die, as the life she had wasn’t the one that she wanted. You see by her living her life in accordance with her parents’ wishes (like everyone else) and societal expectations, she could not be living the life that she wanted, and she could not feel loved simply for who she was, however hard she tried.


The irony is that we pass this childhood trauma down from generation to generation, unaware that we are doing it. All that my brother and I could feel that was that we were not even worthy of our mother wanting to stay alive for us. We were not loved unconditionally. Sure, we were loved when her friends came round, and we were dressed up in matching outfits and my mother would proudly announce by the time I was five years old that I would be a doctor and that I would go to Cambridge (she had gone to the Sorbonne in Paris, but left after a year to escape to England). All that I can remember is that I liked going to the doctor’s as he would give us unused plastic syringes to play with after we left his practice. My brother and I would fill them with water and squirt each other in the car on the way home: Until our mother told us that we were bad for doing that. All I heard as a five-year-old was that I was bad, unless I would become a doctor. Is any of this resonating with you yet?


At age seven I threw myself into a swimming pool, wanting to die. I couldn’t swim yet and I thought that no-one was watching. I was saved by a passer-by who dived in to rescue me. I remember being in his arms as he lifted me out of the water and feeling ‘loved’ for the first time. He saved me. He loved me. A stranger loved me. This is the human condition. We all just want to be loved. And because we didn’t feel unconditionally loved as children, we seek love in the wrong places: From other people, places, events, and things. This is ‘imitation love’ as we don’t love ourselves, and we can’t, as we feel that our parents didn’t love us.


The human condition conditions your mind. You soon find an armour to put on: It stops you feeling any of your emotions: The toxic shame, the pain, the anger; even the joy. That’s why you feel dead and empty, as well as afraid. The shame is the worst, the most excruciatingly painful emotion. It's toxic to you. You are ashamed of being you. You are shame. Shame has become you. So, you shut down your emotions: You bury them deep inside. But emotions are buried alive, so they bubble over as subconscious behaviours when you least expect them to. Like a football held under water for too long: It always pops out of the water at some point. I have felt a lifetime of constant mortal fear, shame, and unbearable pain: Shame stemming from emotional neglect and abuse and the excruciatingly painful feeling that I was unworthy of love. I wasn’t worth my mother’s time. My way of escaping those feelings was to seek external validation and numbing of my pain: Like everyone else. I remember donning my suit of armour, right after my mother’s two suicide attempts.


The survival need to feel that you have to be someone who you are not, in order to survive, is trauma. Trauma is trauma. Whether it’s from being in a war zone, or after what appeared to be a regular middle-class childhood (which it was): Trauma takes its toll on you. It gets buried in your subconscious and your body as unbearable emotional pain, waiting, preparing to resurface when you least expect it, sometimes decades later. My nervous system was ‘bejangled’. I know that’s not a real word, but it describes the feeling well. I have since learned that this is called a 'dysregulated nervous system'. I thought that the pressure in my chest was ‘drive’ (it felt like a nuclear reactor) to perform and I thrived on it, but in reality it was actually heartache. I closed my heart to emotion as the pain was unbearable as a seven-year-old. I moved into my mind. Then I started believing those 60,000 negative, catastrophising, repetitive thoughts that we have daily. I didn’t realise that those thoughts were not even mine. And thoughts turn into feelings: A constant sensation that I wouldn’t survive. Those feelings and thoughts are intolerable, so you try to roll over and go to sleep. We don’t think that we can ‘unhook’ ourselves from these thoughts, but we can.


Even as a baby I had been trained to be unconscious, to allow myself to cope with not being allowed to be me. I was totally asleep. Like everyone else. My ego was petrified that if I wasn’t worthy, I would die. I had become "King Baby': A terrified wrong-sized, wounded seven-year-old ego running the show that was my life: The shadow-like squatter in my mind who I was too scared to evict. The paradox was that as I felt that I had zero worth as a human being, perhaps if I could become the best at everything that I did I then I would be loved. It’s how many of us are. It’s what drives us. Doctors, lawyers, actors, people in the public eye; in fact most people. Then you do become the best at everything you do. No, you go beyond the best. Way beyond. But it's not enough. And it gets worse: It's never enough. The need for praise, love (or what we think is love), and validation is insatiable. External validation addiction is the most powerful addiction of all and underlies all the other addictions. We either seek validation (‘success’, accolades, external material things, social media likes, followers, and ‘relationships’) or we numb the unbearable pain of not getting it with any substance that will allow us to escape our emotions and find oblivion. I had a quarter of a million followers on social media as a plastic surgeon, but it was never enough, as it never actually meant anything, and our appetite is unbounded. When you feel unconditionally loved you don’t need anything else in your life, but when you don’t, then nothing else will ever be enough. Does any of this sound familiar to you?


So, like you, and in fact like everyone, I was born with a mind that was at ease, and a heart that was full of joy and love. But then the world happened. Our parents, the influential adult figures in our lives, and society, conditioned us into fear. Fear that we are unlovable unless we behave in a certain way, that we are unworthy unless we achieve certain things, that we will be abandoned unless we sell our souls in order to please: If not, we think that we will die. Not a great start to life: But this is our starting point, soon after being born, maybe even before.


I thought that my childhood had been pretty normal, and indeed it was typical, but it was far from ideal.


My mother was a narcissist and a compulsive sex and love addict who suffered from mental illness. My brother and I were made to move schools and home addresses six times as she searched high and low for love. My mother would never spend time with me or my brother. She never came on holiday with us. She screamed at us every night, threatening to have us adopted. I had no father to protect me: He had been kicked out of the family home by my mother when I was a toddler. My mother gave all my pets away or had them put down every time we moved house, including my dog, a Lhassa Apso named ‘Kitchu’. I never had friends for more than a couple of years due to our frequent moves. For forty years I was not aware of how my severely dysfunctional childhood had affected me. I felt numb, impenetrable emotionally. I thought everyone felt like that. My heart was encased in concrete. I subconsciously abandoned people before they could abandon me. All the while I was abandoning myself. I have been in survival mode for four decades, living from my ‘reptilian’ survival brain. This is the proven result of what a psychiatrist or psychotherapist would call childhood trauma.


From an early age, I became an academic over-achiever.  Over-achievers are generally exceptionally capable and fiercely ambitious but are driven by a profound belief in our own inadequacy, which comes from a feeling of unworthiness, in my case, caused by the lack of validation and unconditional love from my parents throughout my childhood. I totally forgive them, they were unconscious of what they were doing: I am simply recounting what happened and how it made me feel. Some children grow up believing that they are noticed and valued by their parents only when they are excelling. That was me. This attitude may persist long after they have left home because they have internalised that insecurity as part of their identity. This form of emotional abuse is not seen as abuse, but it is. The returning Vietnam vets who suffered from trauma were those who had experienced emotional abuse as children. If it’s hysterical, it’s historical.


Having to bury your true Self in order to secure survival attachment needs to your parents in lieu of authenticity as a young child is severe trauma: As I said above, it's a matter of life and death to the child, and it conditions our adult mind to act unconsciously to continue to hustle for our worthiness. It goes on relentlessly in what seem like perfect families. For me, it was coming last in a sports day race where my mother stormed off and called me “A useless loser” at the age of seven, driving home without me so that I had to make my own way home across town. I buried the emotion of toxic shame deep inside, again and again. Its unbearable nature bubbled subconsciously up in the form of me running five marathons in little over three hours as an adult, each time beating my personal best. But I could not outrun my own deep feelings of being a “Loser”. It was only when I had therapy after my massive nervous breakdown that I realised why I had run all those marathons. In truth, I was not running for a charity, I was running for love. I was bullied in both my state and private schools for being too studious and bad at football (I was never picked for the team): The perils of the patriarchy!


A dysfunctional childhood creates a deep wounding and resultant coping mechanisms. The greater the extent of self-inquiry and exploration you can undertake, the more effectively you can enable your own healing, along with cultivating self-awareness and understanding, which in turn creates the ability to meet your Self with grace and compassion. 

 

 

So, what can you do as a child or an adolescent? I tried to build a ‘tower’, a tall one. That's all I had the energy to focus on – ‘success’. Our life is out of balance. Achievement becomes imperative. This is why so many ‘successful’ businessmen have disastrous personal lives. The spokes (the elements that one needs to keep in balance) in our ‘wheel of life’ become of all different lengths, or there is only one spoke (‘success’) and so the wheel won’t turn without feeling ridiculously bumpy. I know from my coaching of billionaires who are suicidal and empty inside. Their tower is made of dust, and it has no foundations. You see, when we build without purpose, we don't have an architect (our seven-year-old ego doesn’t think that we need one) or any help (how can we trust anyone if we can’t trust our parents?) We feel like we are fighting the Universe, alone: And we are. But we think that if we just keep going, we will eventually win: We won't. We don’t think that we have another option. We can’t ever make the tower high enough. We don’t have any foundations and our tower is made of dust, and to dust it will return. It is building the tower that keeps us going. When the tower is finished and we are still depressed, our world falls apart. We find ourselves in the worst place imaginable. We don’t realise that we can ‘let go.’ Don't just do something, sit there. The foundation of joy is presence, mindfulness, and meditation. For mindfulness I recommend the book by the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh 'Peace is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life,' which is in my suggested reading list. More on this in a later chapter.


My self-worth had become entirely dependent on achievement and the validation I obtained from other people. That drove me to try to achieve beyond all the competition. It drove me to doing five A levels, getting into medical school, getting a Master's degree in philosophy and Natural Sciences from Trinity College, Cambridge; then a PhD from University College, London, and other higher degrees, diplomas and qualifications, with over twenty letters after my name. None of these achievements ever made me feel successful, worthy, or loved. When I attended an interview to continue my medical studies in London, one of the interviewers asked me if I felt an existential angst, I replied yes, was offered the place, but the conversation was not continued, and I was left none the wiser. They must have sensed something, but nothing was done about it and I didn’t know why they asked that question.

 

When I was 18 years old I invited my mother up to Cambridge and announced to her over dinner that I was thinking of leaving medicine to become a writer as it felt more in line with my purpose. No-one realised that I was very depressed, even me. Not my family, and not my college. My inner voice had spoken to me. I had got a glimpse of the life that I was supposed to lead. But my mother responded by storming out of the restaurant and not speaking to me for a year. So, I went back to sleep on my dreams and buried my head (and my heart) back under my medical text books. In my whole medical career, I have never had a lecture on joy, inner peace, wisdom, or purpose. I even did a master’s degree in Cambridge on the history and philosophy of science and medicine. I loved that course. But one can’t do a degree in wisdom, and I was never taught any.

 

Overachieving is a childhood trauma response: It's a condition. It's known as the ‘curable childhood curse of the prodigiously capable’. For a society that rewards accomplishments and showers us with the weight of external validation, it’s time for us to take a hard look at the costs. Many overachievers feel unworthy to the core. Beneath every behaviour there is a feeling, and beneath every feeling there is a need. According to the Wall Street Journal, a study of 400 people has shown that 75 percent of us overachievers have suffered childhood trauma. Our lack of unconditional love as children gives us the need to feel loved. When we meet that need rather than focus on the behaviour, we begin to deal with the cause, not the symptom. This is the compassionate approach. A recent study has shown that 70 percent of doctors are experiencing burnout, 36 percent of UK surgeons have trauma symptoms, and that 12 percent of UK surgeons have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) (compared to 4 percent of the general population, and 14 percent of returning Vietnam Vets). One in five surgeons are alcoholics. Surgeons have a six times higher suicide rate than the general population. None of these figures are widely known, but they are publicly available. Doctors can be patients too. We are not invincible or invulnerable. We are human beings devoted to looking after other human beings. Who is looking after us? We don’t know if surgeons are people with mental illness who choose surgery because they are ill or if the process of becoming and being a surgeon takes its toll and makes us mentally ill. Maybe it’s both. Surgeons are highly regarded in society and operate in a ‘theatre’ – a likely environment of choice for an external validation addict. Just like actors and lawyers.


You see, as we feel unworthy to the core, we keep the pressure cooker that is our life on high heat just to keep going. We live for the future and are never present. But the pressure will need release. No-one can keep that pressure going indefinitely: No-one. It's not a question of if our life will crash, but when.


We don’t see it coming: The self-sabotage. We unconsciously drive the car that is our life off the road. It's the only solution that we can see. It all needs to stop. We don't see any other way. How could we? We are asleep at the wheel of our life. The crash shatters our body armour. The pain is excruciating; overwhelming. It's the same pain that we felt as a child, before we donned our emotional armour. It makes us think that there is no hope left at all. It’s the darkest and most painful place in the world. When it happened to me, I wanted the generational cycle of childhood trauma to end with me. I felt totally empty and desolate, disconnected, numb, and in terrible pain at the same time, flipping between the two. Again, I have no resentment for my mother. It’s just the way that the world is. Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.

 

I wanted to be a reconstructive surgeon, training for almost two decades, and I worked in this role as a senior surgeon for over three years. I felt fulfilled, happy, and at peace when I was helping reconstructive surgery patients after cancer. Every time I finished an operation, I felt the alignment and bliss of fulfilling my purpose in the service of others. When my career path was blocked recurrently due to local politics, mainly the result of egoic fears of people who were ‘senior’ to me (that old chestnut), I embarked on a career in cosmetic surgery as the only choice that I could see. Although I became rapidly successful, with long waiting lists and reviews as being in the top five cosmetic breast surgeons in the United Kingdom two years running in my first two years of private practice, with eighty five star reviews, I felt increasingly empty, unfulfilled, lost, and disconnected from my true purpose, as well as increasingly ostracised by a lack of a collegiate atmosphere due to local rivalries and competition over private practice work. The paradox about ambition and achievement is that those who value them the most are the most full of hatred and envy when they see it in their competitors. I was surrounded by surgeons who hated me as they wanted a practice like mine. It is a very sad world.


This toxic atmosphere created an even more toxic brew full of conflict and drama where I was harassed, trolled, persecuted, and stalked by recurrent offenders who tried to destroy my life and wanted to ‘cancel’ me. They are people who are full of jealousy, envy, hate, and anger, and they are a 'grievance looking for a cause'. They are spiritually sick lost souls. They did not know anything about my life. They hid behind masks, pretending to be ‘victims’ and to be other than who they really were, behaving like snakes, so that they could persecute me through projection. They are fast asleep. In reality I have to thank them for catalysing my own transformation. The most 'evil' people that you meet can therefore be your greatest teachers about the human condition. Without their persecution, projection, lies, and abuse I would not have found inner joy, true unconditional love, lasting peace, worthy purpose, wisdom, Truth, and spiritual bliss. I pray that those who tried to hurt me can find peace by taking the inner journey: Not everyone can.


I had got to the top of my profession; I looked out from the tower that I had constructed and realised that I didn’t want to be there. I was surrounded by toxicity and felt dead inside. I didn’t know that I was mentally ill and neither did anyone else. I had high-functioning depression, severe anxiety and had developed compulsivity as my way out of pain. I felt deeply that I was a complete failure. How could I not be happy? When you finally tick off every measure of external validation and still feel unhappy you have no-where else to go: That is truly a desolate place to be. I didn’t realise that all along I was simply looking for the unconditional love that I had not received from my parents. I have heard others describing this sense of utter bleakness that I felt, as the ‘Dark Night of The Soul’. Everyone you meet always asks you if you have a career, are married, or own a house; as if life is some kind of shopping list. But nobody ever asks you if you are happy. I think that everybody should become famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it's not the answer. I see that now. All the fame I look for in life now is to have lived it quietly. Amen to that.

 

If you are ever tempted to look outside for approval, realise that you have already compromised your integrity. I subconsciously started seeking validation from the people I was doing my very best to help. When my work addiction failed me I turned to external validation through people, strangers, via my social media following, subconsciously looking for ‘imitation love.’ Addictions can never be fully satisfied: They are insatiable and unconscious; until you make them conscious.

 

I thought I could fix other people through cosmetic surgery. What I did not know was that no one can actually fix anyone else. No-one actually needs fixing. We are all born whole and worthy. Our only problem is that we don’t feel unconditionally loved, we don’t feel worthy, and we don’t realise that joy can only come from inside ourselves. The solution to that is to do inner work by looking within, as I will describe later in this book. At the time I was not aware that operating on anyone who in reality is subconsciously seeking happiness (love, worthiness, and joy) through surgery (outside of themselves as external validation) goes against the basic principles of an approach to life that brings peace and joy that I will describe in this book. We are all addicted to chaos.


Like me with my career, when my patients had the surgery and they were still not happy, people didn’t always realise that it was because deep down they didn’t feel worthy or loved under any circumstance, just like me. Changing someone’s appearance cannot make them feel loved. No one else can ‘fix’ you. It was a disaster waiting to happen: A surgeon who did not know that he was mentally ill and spiritually dis-eased, operating on people who did not know that they were ill, where we were all unconsciously seeking external validation, which is the human condition. Cosmetic surgery is the ultimate metaphor for external validation. It’s what feeds social media. It’s what feeds marketing for beauty products and drives the photoshopping of every photograph that is published. Even the people in the photos don’t look like the people in the photos that we see in the magazines and on social media.


As the Buddhist Monk Thich Nhat Hanh wrote in his book 'Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life' that surgeons and psychotherapists discard parts of you in order to heal you: The only way to true healing is to transform, not discard. We need to see things as they are. We need to transform the beliefs that underlie our feelings.


I thought in my insanity that I could fix my patients and that as a result that I could make them feel loved. I did not know that we were all subconsciously seeking the love that we had never received as children. An operation would never do. We are all looking for unconditional love, but we need to find it within. Just prior to this time both my step-father, whom I had gotten close to, and my father both died and I was not given the time to grieve due to my workload. This was the final straw in my teetering mental health. My mental breakdown led to my crossing professional boundaries, which I would never had done previously. External validation, like every addiction, can never be enough. In the midst of this chaos, I spiralled deeper into an even deeper depression, severe anxiety and panic attacks, wanting my life to end. The pain was truly unbearable and the life I had known totally collapsed.

 

This led to a sharp course correction in my whole life from whichever power was directing my life purpose. Although I wanted to die, I believe that now it was a cry from my soul to begin again: A rebirth. You have to die a few times before you can really live. I knew that I had to change my whole life. I knew that I had to find another way to live. I knew that I had to give up the ‘wrong tower’ that I had created. I knew that I had to find peace, joy, and self-worth in another way. But how?

 

I had to let go of everything. I am now too connected to my true purpose and growth to allow who I was to stand in the way of who I am becoming. We have two lives; the second begins when we realise, we only have one. We need to learn to fall upwards. It is the part of you that loves you the most that sends you challenges in order to redirect your life to your true purpose. The dying words of my step-father, who I had become close to, had been “Love is all.” Eventually, we will come to understand that real love heals everything, and love is all there is. Yes, but what is real love? How do we find it? And how do we rebuild our lives? We will explore this in a later chapter.

 

According to the landmark book 'The Body Keeps The Score' by Bessel Van Der Kolk, nearly half of us trauma survivors numb our feelings with addiction. Trauma also leads to a number of other symptoms, signs, and self-limiting and self-defeating behaviours such as having few or no boundaries, fear, panic, self-sabotage, and people-pleasing. People-pleasing isn’t love, its fear. People-pleasing takes a lot out of people, so we often struggle with high levels of anxiety. Behind our people-pleasing is a fear of conflict and eventual abandonment. So, as a coping mechanism we do whatever it takes to make people happy, even if it makes us ill. Paradoxically our self-worth is usually quite low. We self-sabotage as there is a cognitive dissonance between our success and our sense of self-worth: We just can’t rationalise the two in our mind: “How could someone as unworthy as me be a success?”


Overnight, the trauma of losing my work, career, reputation, income, my family, and all that I had spent decades building caused my ego, my terrified seven-year-old self to dissolve (this was a good thing). But what was left in its place?


The inner earthquake of your life imploding and it’s passing away of your ego-based self heralds further transformation: An impulse or prompt which calls you to get in touch with your true Self: Your soul; and through that connection you will grow into higher ways of being and new paradigms of living. As destroyed as I was, I saw the nature of the human condition laid bare, had total compassion for it, and I wanted to guide others who were asleep at the wheel of their life and in excruciating pain to find their own path of Truth. I wanted to guide others who were subconsciously driven by their unbearable unhealed wounds into a life of peace and joy. But when you reach for your true purpose, the remnants of your ego will naturally try to survive. It will not go gently into that good night. It will rage, rage, rage against the dying of the light. Your fear (which is simply your wounded inner child trying to survive) is who brought you here. They have a loud brash voice as they speak with the voice of your inner critic, the inner voice that replicates your parents’ criticisms, which no longer serves you. You need to begin to listen to the voice of your true, or ‘Higher’ Self: It is speaking quietly. That is who you really are and speaks Truth. Doubt and fear are not real: They are constructs of your mind, which so far has only listened to the loud voice of your ego.


The collapse of your ego-based sense of self is an ominous, tumultuous, disruptive, disorientating, and disconcerting experience, like a terrible earthquake. I felt every single piece and moment of its collapse, in slow motion. I was in agony: Terrible physical, mental, and emotional pain. The ground upon which you have constructed your life, without foundation, as your parents did not show you how, is quaking, tremoring, and crumbling all around you. It will feel that everything is breaking down and falling apart, which it is: In the same way a caterpillar metamorphoses by literally dissolving before the emergence of the butterfly.


There will be a period of intense suffering, even overwhelming thoughts of death, that will precede your ascension into light. This earthquake is of your conditioned, acquired, mind-made self-concepts; everything that you have held as true, as conditioned by your parents and society. The inner earthquake is a death knell for a system of consciousness that is to be no longer. Your prevailing system of thought begins to collapse. This was a good thing! It was losing its grip on me. I was starting to wake up and become Self-aware, for the first time since my early childhood.


The collapse of any system means significant change, and significant change always engenders resistance. It's time to let go, accept, surrender to, and embrace the ‘isness’ of your situation. You have to stop judging and stop resisting. You are no longer who you were. Your fear came from your ego's need to control: To ‘get’ the love that you never felt as a child. Your fear is that of your seven-year-old self trying to cope in an adult world. This is the cause of all our fear and is the problem with us all living in Neverland. To the ego, any relinquishment of the status quo of limiting beliefs is perceived as impending death. Let that ego go. Let everything go: Surrender it all. Your doubt and fear came from the ego, so let those collapse with the ego. They are not real. There is no invisible lion. There is only unconditional love. It was there all along, a banquet of love from my family and friends, but I had never seen it, as it was never mirrored to me as a child. So, I looked for it in the wrong places. That’s the human condition until we wake up. I needed to learn to love myself.

 

How do you come to know the Truth in life? When something is profoundly true, then you just know it’s true. You feel it, don’t you? Science can’t absolutely prove something to be true or untrue, ideas can only be accepted or rejected based on supporting or refuting evidence. So, the concepts of the mind, consciousness, the soul, love, or some kind of ‘Higher Power’ at work can’t be proved or disproved as there is no scanner or test that can provide the evidence to support or disprove that they exist. But you know when something is deeply true, such as the existence of your consciousness and your true purpose in life. You know your Truth. It feels like joy and peace.


So, the opinions of others should count for little. People love telling stories about other people as they think it improves their own self-worth. When you know your Self, and love your Self, false narratives become immaterial, and you are set free from illusion, conflict, drama, and hate. The Truth will set you free, but first it will shatter your illusions. This is a good thing. It is never the Truth that is painful. It’s the destruction of the falsehood that you have become attached to and mistaken for Truth. William Blake wrote “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” And on truth, Byron Katie wrote “When you argue with reality you lose, but only 100% of the time.” True awareness means breaking through illusions. It is only when we wake up to our illusions and realise that we have built our entire ego around who we thought we were supposed to be so that our parents would love us that we begin to see the Truth, through the lens of love.


There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul. One does not become Enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. There is nothing like a complete nervous breakdown; a breakthrough forcing you through your ‘Dark Night of The Soul’ in order to wake you up from the illusions that you carry. This is a kind of re-birth. The Dark Night of The Soul is a kind of death that you die. What dies is the egoic sense of self. Of course, death is always painful, but nothing real has actually died – only an illusory identity. Now it is probably the case that some people who’ve gone through this transformation realised that they had to go through that, in order to bring about a spiritual awakening. Often it is part of the awakening process, the death of the old self and the birth of the true Self.


In the middle of a dark night there is a light we cannot see at first. But we see it eventually, at dawn, and at the break of a new day. It certainly is darkest before the dawn. I was starting to experience the deep impulse to transform by the arising of life's big questions: "Who am I?" "What is my purpose?" "What am I doing with my life" "Is what I have taught about myself and life really true?" I was beginning to question the foundation upon which my life had rested. This is the stage at which you are starting to give your Self permission to self-define what is good, true, important, meaningful, and purposeful in your life. This is a momentous step on the journey that is your life, when your veil of self-imposed beliefs begins to lift, and you glimpse another world of possibility. You are beginning to sense that there is far more to who you are than you have come to believe. You are beginning to realise that you can't define your Self or find joy or love by anything external to you: How you look, what people think of you (remember what they think of you is a mirror of how they judge themselves), what you own, and what you do are all truly irrelevant. All that matters is who you choose to be. Do you want to continue to be asleep, unconscious, creating drama based on false narratives, judgement, fear, and shame? Or do you choose to become the highest version of you? The most authentically loving, compassionate you? If you are courageous enough, and awake enough, you will choose to embark on a heroic journey of self-discovery that will shine a light of a higher Truth upon the illusions and shadows of your limiting self-concept. You will become a light for others to do the same. You will step out of the drama triangle that was your life, and that of everyone around you. It is the most painful journey that you will ever take. But it will bring you to a much larger, new life of infinite possibility.


Yet, I was still so engulfed in my shame. I asked myself: Can a seven-year-old sin? That is who was running my life. He controlled it from a place of fear, shame, and pain. He was asleep, unconscious. But I was now starting to wake up. If I was to recover, I had to find a way to forgive myself. I had to forgive the wounded terrified inner child in me, through understanding, and through compassion. I also had to evict my ego from controlling my mind, and gently ease my inner child into my heart. I had to discover the hollowed-out cave inside my armour, beneath my breast plate, a space to breathe, a sanctuary of peace, and settle my inner child there. This was easier said than done, as I felt that the whole world was against me: I had detonated my world out of fear and a futile search for unconditional love outside of myself. This is the human condition.


Where was I to begin? Healing is so excruciatingly painful: Because you feel your wounds for the first time, and you feel the collective pain of our society. I came to realise that through healing I had a far greater purpose than me. I could contribute to collectively healing the collective wound. We could all stop hurting other hurt people. Our terrified seven-year-old self now just wants to play, create, and experience joy. Well do you know what? We can let them, and now our adult Self will always be there for them: The ‘higher’ you, the adult assertive you that you have just met and are starting to embody, will love you and always show up for you. When you love your Self and have total radical compassion for your Self, when you accept your Self fully and forgive your Self, then you can step into the full light of the Higher Self that is inside you.


Does this story, albeit dramatic, resonate with you? This is the journey that you have ahead of you. The solution to the human condition is to wake up, take the red pill from 'The Matrix', and go on a ‘Hero’s Journey’. This is how we will stop hurting each other unconsciously. This is the call to adventure. You, the hero, will receive a mysterious message, an invitation, a challenge. Soon enough, you will get your own wake up call, if you have not done already. It is as if the Universe knows when we are ready for adventure and sends us a herald. Perhaps it’s reading this book? Depending on how long we have been ignoring it, the call could present itself either ‘sublimely’ or ‘painfully.’ The likelihood is, it will be somewhat painful, like my awakening. It might manifest in the form of finding out that you are ill, losing your career, home, reputation, or financial status, or all of these, as in my life. Maybe you want to 'drop out' of the world for a while and travel or dive into philosophy? You may want to cocoon for a while. Maybe you want to change careers. You know deep down that whatever this is, you must do it. Regardless of how we are called, the call is always nerve-racking. But know that the call will continue to come back to you in progressively more painful ways the longer you ignore it. The lessons keep coming until you choose to grow. Your ‘ordinary world’ is at odds with the plans that life has for you, and you won’t be able to fight the Universe forever: You have tried that – and look how that worked out for you. And when we suffer the human condition, we invite drama from other unconscious people, when what we really want is peace.


So, for the hero to be called away from their ‘ordinary world’, there must be an event, a discovery, or a danger that stimulates him or her to depart from their apparent safe haven, and a traumatic event or a pending crisis is often the trigger as in my case. An event that disorients or unsettles the individual and the subsequent questioning of one’s assumptions and perspectives are two initial phases of transformative learning. Or it may be a subtle rising up from within that sets a person on a transformational path. This marks the move from ego and the known world to reflection and the unknown world. In either case, eventually there is a (strong and clear) call to adventure, which creates an acute awareness of the need for a significant change, not just to impress people or to be validated, but because you can’t go on like this, and we (the hero of our life story) must face what it means. For me, I was so depressed, anxious, terrified, empty, lost, dead inside, disconnected from myself, and was so full of unresolved emotional trauma, pain, and shame and had no idea that I was mentally ill. My craving for success meant that externally it appeared that I had achieved everything that I had ever wanted. But I could no longer numb my pain with anything outside of myself, such as accolades.


Whenever people hear the same call they will be, consciously or unconsciously, asking themselves, “What will happen if I say yes? Will I be safe? What will become of me if I do? What will people think of me? What will I lose?” Inherently these questions create a tension born of the need to leave that which is known and comfortable for the unknown and risky. And this requires the making of a grand choice. Fear, or the thought of losing validation from others, makes us hesitate to accept the call. This is particularly acute if the held fear is that you are not worthy. The realisation that you can’t go on as you are, as what you have tried so far simply hasn’t worked, sparks the departure. Although you may be afraid of the journey, the journey is what will ultimately dissolve your fears. If there is a refusal of the call, this may come in many forms: It is often related to the fear of changing or growing. But being afraid of what other people think, the need for external validation, and your lack of self-worth are in fact the whole problem.


Marketing and social media accentuate and prey upon these fears. The Hero’s Journey is a timeless solution to a contemporary societal problem. Your refusal to heed the call may be the voice in your head saying, “You are not worthy.” That is the crux of the problem and is why you need to grow, to realise deeply that you are the hero of your life story, the main protagonist, as well as the author. You need to tell your Truth. That is the only way to be truly seen, accepted, and loved. Only openness, vulnerability, honesty, and willingness will work now. When you critically reflect on the obstacles that you confront, you may come to see how old ways of thinking have restricted your growth. You will deeply realise that growth is sorely needed when you grasp that the only thing that is going to help you stop the cycle of drudgery, pain, and fear is you. Your egoic fear is what messed up your life. You got in your own way. You must have been very powerful: You destroyed your life. You are being guided and you are participating in the ‘great mystery’. And it has very little to do with you except your ‘yes’ seems to be crucial. It matters. You have a choice, but all heroes eventually say ‘yes’ to the call for adventure, but not without initial hesitation. The call to adventure (in other words, to ‘transform’) is always accompanied by the free will of choice to accept or refuse the call; though greatly encouraged, it is never forced. If you are supporting people along the transformational path, the ‘yes’ is crucial, and people need the time and space to come to that decision of their own accord and on their own terms, even if that means that they straddle the two worlds and live with the tension that comes from not choosing to commit fully.


Transformative life coaches, spiritual guides, mentors, Enlightened Witnesses, and other ‘lightworkers’ or ‘way-showers’ can, however, play a vital role to facilitate how fear is overcome, so that the threshold into the unknown world can be crossed and the heroic journey begun. Everyone needs a guide, unless you want the journey to take aeons and you want to make countless mistakes during your recovery. Have you committed to your own transformational journey or are you hesitating or refusing the call? Do you live straddling two worlds? What keeps you from ‘letting go’, surrendering, being present, and trusting the flow of the process? Is it fear or ego? Are these the same? Ego stops us from moving into higher levels of consciousness, existence, and being. What is keeping you living in the ‘ordinary world’, and from committing to the transformational journey?


Opting out of the journey resigns you to a miserable life and personal 'Hell'. As violently as God smites Jonah and as aggressively as fate curses Phil in the movie Groundhog Day, the Self shakes your life with mishap after mishap until you finally wake up and say, “OK. I accept the journey.” By refusing the call, we binge on substances; on social media, and our digital persona – the land of ego. We throw ourselves into workaholism, all to distract us from our own frustration and anxiety with living lives that go against who we truly are. The myth of King Midas is a story about someone was refused his call. The man with the “Midas Touch” worked hard and made lots of money, only to discover that his life had been a desolate wasteland, wherein even all the gold in the world could not satisfy him. Having chased off the trappings of success, he failed to find fulfilment. In this process of denying himself, he rejected his true riches, which were actually the unique set of interests, values, talents, and relationships he’d once had. Having been blinded by the golden illusion of ‘security,’ he overlooked his true riches. He looked for breadcrumbs when he had a banquet by his side. A person might want to be an artist, change their profession, or travel the world, but instead he forces himself into a more ‘socially acceptable’ life, but that is the whole problem. And it is merely procrastination, self-sabotage, and delaying the inevitable. The reality is that we cannot stop the inevitability of the journey. We can only make it more comfortable by allowing it to happen or make it more painful by resisting. There is flow in discovering and living your true purpose. This is the way to Real Personal Power. You can stop fighting, but only once you have faced your greatest fears in your personal Hero’s Journey. More about the Hero’s Journey in a later chapter.


If you want to know where to find your contribution to the world, look at your wounds. When you learn to heal them, teach others. This is now my purpose in life. Try not to become a man of success: Rather, become a man of value.


When we come from ego, we are magpies, looking for shiny things and ‘imitation love.’ What we need is to move from the veil of fear and the prison of our minds into the reality of unconditional love, into the heart, with all the intuition that it brings about doing the right thing for ourselves and others. Everyone has two choices. We’re either full of love: Or full of fear. I know which I choose. The greatest freedom is to be free of our own mind. William Shakespeare said it best “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Aldous Huxley wrote in ‘The Doors of Perception’ that “Most lead lives at worst so painful, at best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul.” If drama and ‘imitation love’ transcends your Self for a few moments, would it not be better to transcend fear for a lifetime through unconditional love and compassion? I am an external validation addict, and a workaholic. The first symptom of addiction is denial. Unbeknownst to me I was addicted to work, success, and the validation of people.


The second thing my therapist said to me was that the only truly important connection is with those people that love you unconditionally. Deepening those connections is our life’s work, and the solid foundation from which we will rebuild our lives. We are all suffering from the same problems. We just don’t know it, so we blame and resent each other, rather than guiding each other. I have learned that those that judged me the most are those who were most afraid to look within: Those who had unresolved personal stories that closely resembled mine.


The heartache from my lack of unconditional love as a child that I felt as a pressure in my chest and a relentless drive to succeed was in fact energy being lost. It would have ultimately caused me to have a fatal heart attack like my otherwise healthy father at the age of 75. My mental breakdown was like resetting me to my ‘factory setting’, so that I could start over, a ‘breakthrough’, to the presence and peace that I had as a child before my parents and society got hold of me. But now I have the clarity not to go to sleep again. I would like to bring peace to those in pain, by guiding them back to their inner knowing, in whatever way I may be of service. When you learn to be guided by your inner instinct, you know that, in every moment, no matter what unfolds, you have the ability, the compassion, the focus, and the concentration to deal with anything.


You lose your Real Personal Power when you distance yourself from others. This is all due to fear. You lose your Personal Power whenever you act on fear. The road to authentic power is always through your heart. Intellectualisation can be a defence against truly heartfelt realisation, and as an academic it is something that I am prone to. You cannot find your soul with your mind, you must use your heart. This is the journey that I am on: To drop out of my mind and into my heart. One should never suppress an emotion. Recognise what you feel. Let it pass like a wave and remain in your power. Always remember the infinitely wise words “This too shall pass” and “All is well”. You then become capable of anything, and you stop building towers made of dust in order to impress the world. Love is the highest intelligence and power. It’s all in your heart. Open your heart. It is the dancing heart that is harmless. It is the dancing heart that is innocent. Clarity is the perception of wisdom. It is seeing with wisdom. It is being able perceive and understand the illusion and let it play. Clarity evaporates fear. You suddenly see how the world really is. You see through the illusion. This is how I have moved from pain to peace.


In this book I will share the painful lessons that I have learned on my journey to find my true path, so that perhaps you will avoid the pitfalls in the road that we all need to take to wake up, to stop contributing to drama and hate, and to find our seat of ease: A journey from pain to peace. No one can fix anyone else, and no-one is truly broken, we can only guide people to heal themselves. When the Japanese mend broken objects, they aggrandise the damage by filling the cracks with gold. They believe that when something has suffered damage and has a history it becomes more beautiful. I cannot make you happy, no-one can, but I can commit to support you in the creation of your own joy. 


We need to journey within, find our true purpose, realise our inherent self-worth, and be of service to the world, using our unique talents and be unconditionally loving. Only that which you give away, you keep. It says this throughout the Bible. You are loved, you are worthy, and you will find joy.


In the presence of real love then anger, fear, and conflict are eliminated. It takes courage to live your Truth. It takes courage to be seen. It takes courage to love. I get you; I see you, and I celebrate you. Your freedom, expression, and love liberate you and offers others a powerful possibility for who they could be. I hope you serve and inspire the whole world. This chapter tells my true story of recovery and the lessons that I have learned.


Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen. Courage is contagious. A critical mass of brave leaders is the foundation of an intentionally courageous culture. Every time we are brave with our lives, we make the people around us a little braver and our organisations bolder and stronger. I am a writer, even though this is my first published ‘non-medical’ book. I am a fully qualified Transformative Life Coach. I am many things that I don’t even know yet. In fact, my book is all about true healing, and wellbeing – the side that no-one sees or talks about. My purpose as an author is to guide people out of pain and into peace, and this feels totally aligned to my inner purpose of awakening. When the deepest part of you becomes engaged in what you are doing, when your activities and actions become gratifying and purposeful, when what you do serves both your Self and others, when you do not tire within but seek the sweet satisfaction of your life and your work, you are doing what you were meant to be doing. Although I would not have possibly consciously chosen my life path so far, it was designed by a Higher Power so that every experience that I have and will have upon the Earth encourages the alignment of my personality with my soul. Every circumstance and situation give me the opportunity to choose this path, to allow my soul to shine through me, to bring into the physical world through me its unending and unfathomable reverence for and love of life. When you do not take your interactions so personally, you will be able to see that each offers you a choice - to see your Self as an argumentative victim who reacts to the circumstances of your life, or as a creator who chooses your responses to them. Remember that no-one is you, and that is your superpower. What you read in this book you won’t be able to unread. So, make sure that five years from now that you make sure that you chose your life, and didn’t just settle for it. Right now, your assignment is you, so cultivate you. Everything else will fall into place, based on the solid foundation that is you. Align your inner purpose with your outer purpose.


I have had over 200 hours of therapy, as many hours of life coaching, and have read a similar number of books in positive psychology, philosophy, spirituality, and timeless Truths, and have come to see that there is a common thread of truth to all these approaches. The first man to see an illusion by which men have flourished for centuries surely stands in a lonely place. All Truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. The more I read, the more I realise that these Truths have been told for millennia, yet they have been hidden from us in plain sight. It is for each of us to keep bringing them into the light.


It is like life comes full circle. We start off as babies receiving and giving love and joy. Then the trauma hits us, and we fall off the 'track.' We become lost, unhappy, and empty. The world tells us we need to work hard to be successful, loved, and externally validated. So, we do it and for people like us we do that very well. But we remain unhappy, unfulfilled and lost, so we do more of it and become external validation addicts.


By hitting rock bottom or near death we undergo metamorphosis back into the joyful and awake infant: An incredible process and a complete rediscovery that what we knew from the beginning was correct. Living is about presence, compassion, love, connection, community, and joy. Every one of you is a masterpiece learning to master peace. The greatest gift you can offer the world is your most authentic Self. You were created exactly as you are as who you are is who this world needs. You are your saviour and the world’s saviour. Imagine what seven to eight billion human beings could accomplish if we all loved each other without condition and with compassion, in peace. No one can stop you once you have decided to grow. You will radiate peace and joy as you walk the path: You become effulgent. Your light will light the way for others, and they will heal and do the same. The pain will leave you, once it has finished teaching you. One day you will tell the story of how you overcame what you are going through right now, and it will become someone else’s survival guide. There is only one question: How to love this world. As Robert Holden, leadership super coach wrote in his book 'Higher Purpose' “When people are struggling to find their purpose, I advise them, Stop trying to find your purpose, and instead start to recognise when you feel most on purpose.”


My mother died the day before my birthday a few weeks ago. She was buried in France, her country of origin. My father had died five years previously. My brother put some items in my mother's coffin to symbolise her life – one of which was a kitchen knife as she loved to cook and even taught others to. Little known to him was that it was the very knife with which I had attempted suicide four years ago. The woman who smothered me with neglect as a child, taking the blade with her for eternity to protect me from further harm, sealed inside her coffin. In that moment, I stopped looking at where I had fallen, and instead started looking at why I had slipped. I hate to say it, as it sounds awful, but I feel such relief since I buried my mother a few weeks ago. She can hurt me no more, and yet I feel connected to her soul, thanks to my recovery journey into healing.

 

 

I am now a voracious reader of spiritual, psychological, Deep Coaching, and philosophical literature. I run a recovery meeting with over 200 international members every week, and give regular invited lectures and shares on these topics, and I have had three sponsees, and two sponsors. I have written a free eBook on Enlightenment for you and over 250 free articles on personal transformation in order to serve you. Simply click on this link to access all my free articles:


 

I can’t share without mentioning fear again. It has taken me four years to name that fear. My fear is my ‘inner child’ not feeling safe in facing the world. Fear to me is nothing more than a bubbling cauldron of our unfelt feelings. We are not here to suffer. We are here to remember who we are, guided by our Higher Power. The Universe does not create our fear, we do. So it is in our power, guided by our Higher Power, to feel our emotions fully then surrender them to them. That is how we get rid of fear. Feelings, when felt, only last a few minutes, so why do we carry round this bubbling cauldron for decades? It's not a question of if we will falter, but when. And the only person who can truly catch you when you fall is you. You are your saviour. But you do need a guide, who has walked your path before you.

 

No amount of imitation love will be enough if you didn’t get real love as a child. If your primal needs of unconditional love are not met as a child you cannot get enough substitute gratification as an adult to replace it. This results in endless cycles of insatiable cravings, overwhelming emotional pain, and disappointment. Adult cravings can never satisfy our unmet infantile needs and our experience of childhood and adolescence creates a false identity, the ego. Yet, even we don’t love our false self. Instead of primal needs being satisfied we experience primal emotional pain. This makes us scream silently. To experience a rebirth we must feel our initial pain as that is where our growth and wisdom are buried alive. I know that my journey now is to face all my pain. But do you know what, I have learned to love the catharsis of crying. Bring it on.

 

Almost 50% of my step 4 in my 12 step recovery was about my mother. Despite dropping my resentments, for a long time I was full of suppressed rage about her dysfunctional parenting. However, I now forgive her, and now only connect with her soul through love. This is the gift of living in the present. I choose to become a transformer of darkness into light. No darkness can hold us back. Train your mind to think with unconditional love. It will work miracles. Bless everyone who enters your life. Compassion will begin to flood your life. One is not defined by one's past, one is prepared by one's past. Your future Self will guide you in the present moment.

 

Taking care of your Self at your lowest point in your life is the bravest thing you can ever do. The difference between a good life and a bad life is how well you walk through the fire. If this is where you are right now, I hear you. This book is for you. It’s everyone’s story. It is a book about choice: The choice to carry on stumbling in the dark or to live life as the highest version of you. I truly believe that hardship is a calling to the door through which it is pure light. But we must choose to go through the door, every single morning when we wake up. Are you ready to take the journey of a lifetime? I will guide you: All you need to do is turn the page. Next, we will dive into your story. The rest of this book is all about you. It's everyone’s story.


It’s the story of the human condition: It's my story, and also yours and everyone else's. But it needn’t be that way. I feel the physical tingling sensation of alignment when I am writing this book. Do you feel it too when you read it?


Only you can give birth to your own saviour - the true you. I can be your midwife of sorts! I am here to guide you on your very own journey. Only you know the answers deep inside you. I will see the new you in the next chapter of your life…


Namaste.


Sending you love, light, and blessings brothers.


I work with men who want to find their true Selves. Let me know if you would like to continue this conversation...






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“Transformative life coaching uniquely creates and holds the space for you to see your self afresh, with clarity, and step into new ways of BEing, which will transform how you perceive and intuitively create your world. My work is to guide you to raise your own conscious awareness to the level that you want to achieve.” Olly Alexander Branford


My coaching themes and services for men: Transformative Life Coaching, Transformational Coaching, Life Coaching, Personal Coaching, Positive Psychology Coaching, Recovery Coaching, Trauma Informed Coaching, Work Addiction Coaching, Workaholism Coaching, Addiction Coaching, Mindfulness Coaching.


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Hello,

I am very pleased to meet you. Thank you for reading this far. I very much look forward to connecting with the highest version of you, to seeing your highest possibility, and to our conversations. Please do contact me via my website for a free connection call and a free experience of coaching.

See you soon,

Olly Alexander Branford MBBS, MA(Cantab), PhD


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I have a Bachelor's degree in Natural Sciences from Trinity College, Cambridge; a Master's Degree in Philosophy from Trinity College, Cambridge; a PhD Doctorate in Scientific Research from University College London (UCL); a Medical Degree (MD/MBBS) from The Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine, London and have been a doctor and reconstructive trauma and cancer surgeon in London for 20 years. I have published over 50 peer reviewed scientific journal articles, have been an associate editor and frequent scientific faculty member, and am the author of several scientific books. I have been awarded my Diploma in Transformative Life Coaching in London, which has International Coaching Federation (ICF) Accreditation, as well as the UK Association for Coaching (AC), and the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC). I have written over 200 free-to-access articles for you all about transformation - just click on my blog on my website to read them. I have been on my own transformative journey full time for four years and I am ready to be your guide to you finding out who you really are and how the world works.

 
 
 

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