“When you feel you don’t exist for anyone else around you stop existing for yourself too” S.G.
When I was aged 10, just one week before my 11th birthday the first major event took place that had a long-lasting effect on me. I witnessed my mother being killed outside my primary school by a driver who mounted the kerb on the road outside and ploughed into a group of mothers and some children.
Since that fateful day, I have had major trust issues with everyone but especially with women, and every time I started getting too close emotionally to someone, I would end up driving them away with my attitude, words or actions!
A second stressful life-changing event happened many years later when I was aged 29. By then I had got married and I was running my own Landscaping business. I had a daughter aged 3 and a stepson aged 9 and I was working long hours, juggling contracts and my only priority was to provide my family with a safe life. I felt that life was finally on my side, but somehow it wasn’t supposed to last. One week before my 30th birthday my wife told me she didn’t love me anymore and left abruptly taking my daughter and stepson to set up a new life with someone else miles away from me. The recession affected my business and soon I was overwhelmed with court costs and divorce fees.
I started falling deeper and deeper into dark despair and I ended up losing everything: my house, my vehicles, my business. I shut down to myself and the world, this was when a stress-related skin condition, psoriasis flared up. Now, over 30 years later, I still have the condition and it covers almost my whole body. It did go into remission a couple of times when I was stress-free, with no financial worries and in a ‘fulfilling harmonious relationship’, but which of course wasn’t supposed to last as my previous experiences had proved.
When I started working with Mia, I was at the lowest time in life. The pandemic had already begun and the country entered into lockdown. I was overworked and my sleep patterns were deteriorating, which was making my skin condition even worse. I felt very alone.
Mia explained to me that the effect of our first sessions would not be an ‘instant fix’ to my problems, but things would change and every day would be a little bit more bearable than the one before. I started having hypnotherapy and psychotherapy sessions fortnightly and I decided to be patient and work with Mia. It was then or never for me.
What Mia helped me with, was finding a secret that I would like to share with people who might go through the same suffering as I did, and I wish I had known this before.
I found out that to go to the root of your issues, of what you don’t want to face and have been running away from your whole life is the most liberating thing that anyone who has suffered deep trauma can do for themselves. I never knew I was running away. I always thought I was protecting myself. Mia taught me that the past doesn’t have to run my future and that I can decide what memories from my past I can keep.
With Mia’s help in getting the strength to look back into my past and issues which stem from the two different life-changing events, I had the power to accept what had happened to me and let go of what I was holding on to: my pain, my anger, towards my mother’s death, towards life, towards my wife, towards myself.
When you have been holding on to your pain and anger your whole life, without knowing it, it becomes second nature. For me, it became my skin condition, my psoriasis. When I started to let go, to really let go, I felt like my body started to feel different.
In time, I have found a new optimism and confidence about my future and about what I want and don’t want from life and relationships that I never knew that existed in me. People would notice that I had a new smile. What they didn’t know was that I had: HOPE.
After two months of hypnotherapy, I noticed that my sleep improved and became deeper, and I could remember my dreams afterwards. The effects of hypnotherapy in time surprised me as I had never believed in it until now. After six months of therapy and hypnotherapy, my back and back of the arms are almost psoriasis clear. My skin condition on the front of my arms and legs is improving continuously. I learnt that it takes time to reverse habits and ways of thinking that I had in place for more than 35 years. With Mia’s help and continuous support, I am re-discovering myself and one of the most amazing feelings for me is that at times it feels good to be me. I never thought that life would ever be again a place of hope for me. A place where I can feel valued or important to anyone at all. But I was wrong. Change is possible and I am a living example of it.
Thank you to my therapist for always believing in me unconditionally when nobody had any interest to do so. When you feel you don’t exist for anyone else around you stop existing for yourself too and that is the worst possible death of the soul.
Thank you S.G.