The day I walked away from my family…

30th August 2021

Over the years I have had many moments when I have realised that my mental health was not in the best form but there is one event that really stands out for me. 

It happened about 4 years ago when my son (my second child) was about 2/3 months old. We were going to the park, myself, husband and two children. As we arrived I had the most overwhelming sense of doom, panic and hopelessness. I knew it had been creeping up on me over the recent months and I couldn’t take it any more. 

I handed the baby to my husband and I walked away from them. I didn’t look back. I just had to move. I couldn’t cope with the emotions that my body and mind were feeling. It was just all too much. I can still remember the look of total despair and disbelief on my husband’s face as I turned away from him. He had no idea just how bad things had got for me so he could not have possibly understood what I was doing. 

I am pretty sure both my children were crying as I walked away. As I went my mind told me that this is what I needed to do. I wasn’t capable of being the person they needed right there in that moment and it was breaking my heart. 

This painful moment was a huge turning point for me. I needed to admit just how bad things had got, that I wasn’t coping and I needed some help (although the help bit didn’t come straight away). I had to have some space. I needed to breathe and put my emotional needs first. It wasn’t pretty, it felt desperate and so full of emotion and I had no idea what steps I would take next. After I had walked around for a while I found my family again and felt so scared. I was pushing them away, what if I wasn’t good enough for them? What if I wasn’t able to be a good mother? I had been plagued by these thoughts so much but they were overwhelming in this moment. 

So we just walked and slowly, very slowly, I began to process what was going on. Let me tell you what had led up to this point.

My son was born on 12th July 2017 by planned c-section. He was breach and they had thought he was going to be enormous so for everyone’s safety, he was delivered this way. Except it didn’t go according to plan. Jack’s birth was very complicated and long and he got stuck just before he was delivered. When we was finally pulled out, he wasn’t breathing. As I type these words I can still feel the feelings rising in my body as I remember this moment. I was totally helpless on an operating table and my son wasn’t breathing. It was terrifying and everything felt like it was in slow motion as alarms were sounded and lots of doctors arrived in the room. I turned my head away in blind panic and then heard my baby cry. Never has there been a better sound in my life. The anaesthetist had breathed life into my precious boy. 

Jack was alive but he was poorly. He had a collapsed lung, he was in respiratory distress and he needed to be in the Neo-Natal unit for special care. The next 10 days were some of the hardest of my life. Jack was on a ventilator, at times on100% oxygen, he had a chest drain and I watched him fight  for his life in his incubator for as many minutes of the day that I could. Sleep was not my priority, my son was. We were transferred to a different hospital because of how serious his condition was and the rollercoaster continued. The doctors and nurses who took care of Jack (and of us) are without a doubt some of the most incredible people I have ever known. There is something so amazing about all the people who work in a Neo-natal unit and I will always have the most profound respect and gratitude for them. They saved my son’s life. 

Jack began to recover and 12 days later we were so lucky to be able to come home to begin our life as a family of four. I initially felt that I coped well with what had happened to us, I took time to reflect on the trauma of the situation and gave myself space to move through it. I had felt I was doing well. But, the truth is, on the surface I was doing ok but deep down inside I was closing myself down. Closing down my feelings because I didn’t feel safe to express them. A part of me  felt that I should be grateful for having brought my son home when I know that isn’t always the outcome and therefore I should’t feel all of the things that were coming up. 

I also just wanted to get on with life, I didn’t want to feel all the emotion that was coursing through my heart and mind. It was messy and difficult. As I look back now on this time it highlights to me even more how important it is to be able to safely work through our trauma and that we simply can’t ignore it. The more we stuff down what we are feeling, it will find a way to re-appear and force us to look at it. 

My initial steps led me to a process called EMDR (eye movement desensitisation reprocessing) with a counsellor with whom I had worked with before. This way of working enabled me to actually process the event of Jack’s birth. I was reliving parts of it over and over and close to suffering with PTSD. Working through this helped me process the events and so I was able to look at what happened and not be crippled in fear every time. It does not mean that the emotion of it goes away but I can talk about it now without breaking down. The trauma is no longer locked in my body and mind. 

That helped me for some time but what then became apparent was that this trauma had triggered a deeply held belief that I had been carrying for many years. The belief is that bad things will happen to me. This manifested as anxiety. I HAD to worry about everything and if I didn’t or if I missed worrying about something from a particular angle then it would be sure to happen to me.

How did this happen? Let me talk you through it. When my daughter had been born in 2015, that was also an extremely traumatic event. She was delivered via emergency C section after 3 days of labour, they lost her heart beat minutes before she was born and I had sepsis. It was awful. My daughter was healthy but I was extremely unwell for some time. It was a long recovery but I made it. So, when I was preparing for my son’s birth I had felt fearful that I would be ill again and not able to take care of my children. I felt that if I prepared myself for that possibility again then all would be fine. So many of us do this – we rehearse our worries as if that will prevent them being so difficult if and when they become realities. What I hadn’t contemplated was the possibility of him being poorly. In fact, just before I was given the spinal block to have the c-section, I said to the doctor, I really needed his birth to be my healing experience, to help me move past what had happened 2 years before. 

My deep subconscious mind interpreted this situation as a failure on my part to worry effectively. I didn’t worry about an eventuality and it happened. Queue some major anxiety. I now found myself constantly thinking of awful and tragic scenarios constantly, if I prepared myself for them then perhaps they wouldn’t happen. Of course on a conscious and rational level, I know this won’t work and is an incredible drain on emotional resources. But I had no control over it. 

This began to show up in every area of my life. I was on high alert ALL the time, scanning for danger and worrying about the worst possible events. You can imagine how exhausting it was. It also then meant that I shut myself down. Essentially I stopped feeling joy, warmth and real love because I was terrified that it would all be taken away from me. I became cold and mechanical and unable to express my deep feelings, in fact I convinced myself I didn’t have any deep feelings anymore. I couldn’t tap into them. Again, I had no control over this, my subconscious was doing it’s best to keep me safe. Don’t feel then you won’t get hurt. 

It also reactivated my crippling perfectionism, I was holding myself back in so many areas of my life because of fear of it not going the way I wanted. It stopped me from finding ways to get my coaching work out to a wider audience, what if it didn’t work? What if I was rejected? 

I had to take action. I found a coach who I trusted and together we began to peel back the layers and discover what was going on beneath the surface. My beliefs around things always going wrong were not created when my children were born. They go back much further than that, to early childhood. As I Iearned more I could see how I had created this strong negative belief of things going wrong for me (or good things being taken away from me) and then searched for evidence to prove its truth throughout my whole life. Whatever we want to believe, we can always find evidence to prove it. It was groundbreaking as I began to discover what had really been holding me back in my work, relationships, health, basically everything.

It changed so much for me. I am a keen learner so being able to see where all of these unhelpful beliefs stemmed from was so healing and it made sense and seemed logical (which I liked!) Also, it wasn’t as difficult as I had thought. It was so therapeutic and created lightness and freedom in my body and mind that it inspired me to train to be able to use the very same techniques with my own coaching clients. I recognised that even though I thought I was ignoring the negative beliefs by shutting down I was actually compounding them and carrying them all the time. What we resist persists. 

So, just over 4 years later, where am I now? I want to say I feel like a different person but that isn’t actually true. I feel like me, the true me, without so many layers of doubt, fear and insecurity. There are always deeper layers to travel to and I embrace these shifts with gratitude and curiousity and a greater awareness that I could never had dreamed of if I had not done this work.

I am committed to myself and my growth and I take every opportunity to go deeper when I can. My confidence levels are so much higher and there is growing self-belief that had once been a tiny flicker of a flame and is now a fully fledged fire. It does not mean that I don’t suffer set backs, quite the opposite. Life still happens but I am able to navigate through the stresses now with greater awareness and techniques that support me back to balance when I need it.  What does this mean for my work in this world? I have been to the depths of despair and travelled back through them, safely and now I am able to share the power of that experience to help my clients on their own pathways and for so many of them, collapsing the timeline for them so they can journey to confidence and empowerment in the best way. 

My top value is safety, I know that we often don’t share how we really feel because we don’t feel safe to. What if I am judged? Rejected? This sits at the heart of my work because I know what it feels like and I know how to help you through it. 

If you know you are ignoring your feelings and shutting down but you would like some help to work through it, I would love to talk to you. I offer a free 30 minute consultation to discuss how we can work together with safety and non judgment at the heart of it all. 

It’s your time. Email me at hey@sarahdodsley.com to arrange a chat. ❤️ 

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