How my belief caused a breakdown
This time 2.5 years ago I was in the middle of a breakdown.
The story I was telling myself led me to burn myself out, which deepened and darkened the story I was telling myself. It was a doom spiral situation that only ended when I crashed entirely and could barely function.
It all started with me closing my photography business of 8 years and retraining in Human Design, getting my EFT Practitioner certification and doing a 9-month course on Aromapoint Therapies as well. Three major courses all at once. As you do…
It was way too much in one go. The first problem was pure information overload, which is very dysregulating to the nervous system, especially for HSPs as you’ll know if you have read your Create Your Own Stress Relief Toolkit.
The second problem was the story I was telling myself on repeat, day in, day out.
“I don’t have time to rest because I can’t afford to now I have closed my business and have three courses to pay for on top of bills.”
“I need to study during every spare minute of the day because I have to gain these qualifications and start earning money as soon as possible.”
My story was one of lack. Lack of knowledge, lack of money, lack of time to rest, lack of time to spend with my family and friends. The more I told myself this story and lived from this place of lack the more stress I put on my nervous system, which as you can imagine, made the whole thing worse.
I studied every spare minute for each of the three courses. As well as studying all day, I was reading textbooks at bedtime, listening to webinars in the car and even watching them in the bath. I wasn’t giving myself any downtime to rest at all.
Now I have studied the nervous system I understand how dysregulating that was for my body. How I put myself under so much stress I drove myself into a freeze response. I literally shut down.
As if that wasn’t enough, our family dynamics took a nosedive around the same time. Again with the benefit of hindsight and my newfound understanding of the nervous system and how its dysregulation can seriously affect our lives, I realised it was all related.
My little boy has a lot of open centres in his human design, which means he took in a lot of my “stress” energy at that time. Not only that but he amplified it back as that’s what open centres do. This looked like him “playing up” and people kept commenting on this and what a nightmare it was. This just caused me to retreat because in my burnout state it all felt too much.
He was feeling my stress, seeing me retreat away from him and as a result, he was going into his own stress response, which is fight.
A cycle of fight meeting freeze is not a great place to be as they kept exacerbating each other.
So it was a perfect storm of stressors from every angle, all intensifying each other. All the while I kept pushing myself harder and harder to learn more, learn faster because when I was qualified then I would be able to earn money again and contribute to my family and all these problems would magically disappear.
The shame and guilt that I felt because I wasn’t contributing added even more stress on my poor body. I felt totally worthless. My confidence was at an all-time low.
In the end I broke.
My body couldn’t take anymore. I’d already stopped looking after myself properly because I just didn’t have the energy. I just couldn’t cope with daily life. I’d drained my energy tank bone dry.
It turns out when you get to that level you can’t even brush your teeth. This is sometimes a struggle to remember to do at the best of times (because #ndlife) but this was different. I had nothing and that just made me feel even more ashamed of myself.
Burnout is a spiral of doom unless you’re aware of what’s going on and can have compassion for yourself.
It’s only now with hindsight and more learning (but at a manageable pace!) that I realised what had happened and have been able to connect the dots and see how everything was linked. My Recognition Magic in action ✨
All this chaos, mayhem and distress in my family was caused by the story I was telling myself in my head.
It wasn’t bringing me what I wanted, it was bringing me the complete opposite.
Slowly but surely I’ve changed that story and with that I have changed my life.
I have my energy back.
I have my self-worth back.
I have my self-belief back.
I take time to rest without panicking about it.
I follow the energy in my business and trust that as a Generator doing what lights me up, not what I “should” do is what brings me what I want and in a fun way!
I have clarity on what I am here for and my next steps.
I trust in myself and my ability to handle whatever comes up. The joy of a regulated nervous system!
I know the power of feeling grounded and good enough and what that makes possible and I want you to know that too.
This is why I’m so passionate about helping others to change the story they are telling themselves.
As a line 3 in Human Design, I am here to learn (usually the hard way!) through experience and share what I have learnt. That is the role I am here to play.
So now all this hardship makes sense to me and I am excited to share with you what I discovered and how to get yourself out of the deep dark wood of despair and back into the daylight. Not just to back to where you were before but where you have always dreamt of being!