Mental health has shaped and scarred my life.

It’s taken me to the darkest places, yet enlightened me as a consequence.

I’m often asked by students in my professional coaching schools – who every so often observe me coach live on mentorship calls – what made me such an exceptional coach.

I could answer the question in various ways, citing numerous aspects, yet none would be so profound, or so far reaching, as my personal experience of mental illness.

In fact, I doubt I’d ever have to come to my calling and purpose if it wasn’t for witnessing my mother’s decline into mental derangement during my adolescent and teenage years.

To experience it to that degree… living with it – day-in, day-out – for years on end – in such a formative period of life – inevitably gives you a “nose” for it.

It also brought me the necessary curiosity, if not fascination, with what’s at play in the non-physical part of our being… and how it inevitably shapes our experience of life.

Not that any of this awareness emerged until some years later. There was too much trauma, too much drama, too much pain to bury to enable me to remain functional in my day-to-day life.

As the old, telling axiom states: “When the student’s ready, the teacher appears”.

And so it proved to be.

Only this particular teacher kept returning.

Clearly I still have much to learn, given I keep inviting the experience back, albeit in very different ways.

After witnessing the most acute lesson of all with my mother, almost thirty years later, I experienced my own.

Like physical illnesses, we’re all mentally ill from time to time – more often than we care to admit. 

Because of our archaic and pointless taboos on the subject, we call mental illness by a host of different names: stress, worry, anxiety, depression – they’re all mental illnesses that are, most of the time, fleeting in nature and not of a degree to cause too much damage and dysfunction.

In 2012, a situation transpired in my life that, in time, tipped me over the edge where I became increasingly dysfunctional in one of the most crucial areas of my life: my closest relationships.

Hurt people hurt people, and as is so often the case, those close by face the brunt of it.

I’m grateful to come to the awareness I did, before too much damage was done – because if you were to ask me what I fear in life, I’d respond, without hesitation, that I fear very little…

… aside from projecting what’s unresolved in me into my kids.

That shouldn’t come as a surprise given my direct experience of my mother’s mental illness as an only child.

Words can’t do justice to the gratitude I feel today for the great lesson my mother’s suffering brought.

I’d like to tell you I’m a man of such awareness I recognised the signs of my own mental illness straight away. If I did, I’d be lying to us both.

 Despite all those years of exposure, and my years as a professional working in the business of mental health, it took a while for this “physician to heal himself”.

I remember the precise moment I caught myself in the act – the moment of awareness – as I caught the impact of my dysfunction on the face of my ex-girlfriend and my young children. I also remember, just a few minutes later, with the kids out of ear shot, saying to my ex…

… “I need help”.

That’s how I came to work with a psychotherapist.

She used an analogy to describe how she saw me: a towering skyscraper, pouring light into the world…

… yet in the depths of the foundations holding this imposing structure in place was a hairline crack… 

… and when the previously mentioned situation tipped me over the edge, it split wide open, as if subjected to a powerful earthquake, and the tower shook to its very core.

This, the great teacher’s second lesson – to experience that which I’d witnessed my mother experiencing – not to the same degree (nowhere near it in fact), yet the experience all the same.

We never truly understand something until we experience it.

And still the teacher wasn’t done with me… saving the most difficult lesson of all for last.

To be concluded in my next article, “The Third Coming”

Warmly,

Christian

P.S. Those of us taking personal responsibility to shape life on our own terms seek control. The problem is where we look to assert it.

We bark up the wrong tree. We seek to control the conditions and circumstances of our lives rather than what creates them. 

All too often our focus is on effects not causes. The only part of the universe we ever truly control is our inner world, yet still we remain largely oblivious to how our inner world shapes our outer experience.

So if you’re wondering what any of this has to do with you, the growth of your business, and the quality of your life, the answer is, incontrovertibly…

… everything. 

Warmly,

Christian

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