Timeline...

Birth

I was born premature in the 60s and my mum adopted with gusto the strict hospital regime of the time of 4 hourly feeds, no handling between feeds. I look back with sadness as we now know that this approach is very harmful for babies. It puts their nervous systems into repeated high distress and fundamentally disrupts their sense of foundational safety in the world. It made me alternate between withdrawn compliance and loud protest.

​

Early years

My family was very focused on looking good on the surface, determinedly ignoring the seething dysfunction underneath. Dad had undiagnosed PTSD from war trauma and reacted to anything I did that bothered him with hitting and yelling at me like a bomb was going off. Mum was resentful and took it out on me with mean, cold punishment and a mission to ‘break my will’. I oscillated between desperate compliance, hopeless dissociation and increasingly creative ways to escape. Sometimes I just couldn’t bear it anymore so I’d stand up and protest, no longer caring what punishment would come of it.

​

Maps

We used to take annual holidays in a touring caravan. Mum was a terrible map reader and Dad would blow up whenever we took a wrong turn. So during the long, boring drives I got curious about the map. I discovered that sitting forward in the middle of the back seat I could look over mum’s shoulder to try and make sense of how maps work. Fortunately I had, even at the age of 9, a strong spatial ability, so pretty soon I couldn’t stop myself piping up - “No mum I think it’s not this one, it’s the next one”. Soon after that map reading duties were passed to me. I never got thanks or praise, but the fact I could do it and that there were less explosions from Dad was reward enough.

​

Looking back now though, I can see that what I learned here was more than just how maps worked and that I was good at reading them. The very existence of maps told me something about the world I hadn’t known. It told me that there is a culture of collaboration in the human world that systemises knowledge and generously makes information available for people to use for themselves. Instinctively I sensed there might be other kinds of ‘knowledge maps’. It awoke a hunger to find them.

​

Reading 

Fortunately our house was a charity shop donation drop-off point and I was allowed to look through the books that came through. I’ll never know the owner of the counter-cultural books that were donated but they were a life-saver - another source of exposure to very different perspectives to anything I knew. They opened my eyes to the hidden realities and unwritten rules I was living under and showed me that radically different alternatives were possible. This awoke in me an urgent desperation to grow up as quickly as I could so that I could leave, find these alternative people, join them, learn from them and finally be able to have a very different life from my parents’.

​

University and independent life

Finally, leaving home and going to university I was able to find some of those people. I joined a feminist consciousness raising group, an assertiveness course and an anarchist group.

​

 I was particularly thrilled by the assertiveness group 'Women's Bill of Rights' telling me I had a right to my own voice, to say no, to identify what I really wanted and to honestly, openly and directly ask for it. 

​

I was shy and nervous at first, but eventually learned to love the role plays we did. They gave me a genuine, experiential opportunity to confront all my blocks and inhibitions and keep going till I broke through into the genuine capacity to actually SAY clearly what I wanted and to straightforwardly refuse what I didn’t want. 

I was surprised to find myself actually enjoying playing the bullying manipulator role for fellow trainees to practice on.

 

I got a kick out of experiencing the power of being able to push the not-yet-assertive one around. It was easy to feel how she wasn’t able to stand up to me. But as we went on and each got more practice I was in for a surprise.  The moment the budding assertive woman genuinely switched into being able to clearly stand unapologetically in her own assertive truth the dynamic utterly changed. I was astounded to feel the power just drained out of me. I viscerally knew that there was no point in continuing with bullying/manipulating tactics. I could feel that they wouldn’t work.

 

This person I’d been pushing around was no longer open to bullying and manipulation. I could feel the power in here and I was defeated. 

I was so inspired and liberated by experiencing that power shift from both sides that I passionately wanted to share it with others. So I trained to be an assertiveness teacher and for several years ran assertiveness and self-empowerment courses offering those same practical communication skills and ability to shift the dynamics of power.​

​

This has been the foundation of my now life-long

'Authenticity Adventuring'.

<<<MORE COMING SOON>>>