“There is only one cause of unhappiness: the false beliefs you have in your head, beliefs so widespread, so commonly held, that it never occurs to you to question them.” Anthony de Mello
So often I am taken aback by the question, “Are you fully recovered?” from TMS sufferers, and even my own coaching clients ,who are already well themselves but don’t yet realize that fact. We live in a culture that fosters illness and fear, where the voices of recovery are drowned out by the din of chaos and messages of danger. We need to remind ourselves of the power of choice. The possibility of recovery, which was once a question mark in my mind… a “maybe’, a “wish”, a “dream”, a “remission” a “partial”, a “management”, an “alleviation”, is now a conviction of truth. Recovery is not a word or an abstraction,… it’s an action. A choice that any one of us has the capacity to make. As William James wrote, “Believe, and your belief will become fact.” As long as 1 person has recovered from your symptoms or label, you can be number 2, and if no one else has (that you know of!) then you can be number 1! If I had to distill the “how” of my recovery into one word it would be “belief”. You may be reading this and thinking, “Could you break that down into something a bit less ineffable?” Absolutely! I’m here to tell you that you don’t have to hit rock bottom to figure this out. My experience can serve as a way of skipping over the hell scape of the mind.
The two main sources of reference we have are science and religion, and one could argue that they share more in common than not. Both instruct us to believe, and our beliefs are based on an evaluation of something. When we re-evaluate, our beliefs can change. My process was twofold: 1.) Examine my falsely held and limiting beliefs that had created my self constructed cage, reject them and walk out, and 2.) Make the choice to have hope and a willingness to cultivate faith. I started re evaluating who I really was, and let go of the persona/facade I thought I “should” be. This meant healing all aspects of myself. There were things I needed to accept and of which to let go. With the strength I had used against myself to cultivate fear and obsession, I began to nurture hope and take back my courage. Safety no longer signified staying in my nightmare, it meant letting go of my vice grip on the bars and opening the door. The loss of hope has been described as a “soul sickness”, but the mere fact you are reading this blog is proof that hope is alive and well. No matter how cluttered our minds may be, hope waits patiently to be watered. From the hope we carry with us as we navigate the bumpy path, we move forward to faith….faith that the fear will lessen and faith that we are far, far stronger than we realize, and brave enough to keep going.
When we leave the familiar prison that may have been hell, but it was “our” hell, the one we knew, what we get in return is freedom . We get to have our lives because we say so…it’s not the property of our past traumas or illnesses, it’s ours….Recovery is there for the taking. The blessing of TMS is we get to receive the communication from our body (the “cry from the soul”)… that we have a right to take part in the living world, experience joy through relationships and use our gifts to make an impact. I know recovery to be a fact because I have seen it over and over and over. With equal certainty, I can say I am fully “recoverED”. I am not “broken”, never was “broken”, and neither are you!! Ultimately belief stems from willingness…If you are willing to take a leap of faith, to make the effort, you will begin to accumulate concrete results, and you will have the proof to bolster more belief. While I can’t claim that my “recovered” life is always sunshine and tulips, I can gratefully say I am no longer stuck in survival mode. I can imagine greater possibilities for my life and loved ones, and most of all, I have unshakeable faith in YOU!
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