Sometimes I feel like I’m a bull in a china shop. Crashing around, hurting people… smashing things…
It’s felt like that sometimes, especially on the path to change. But you know bulls aren’t really supposed to hang around in china shops, and as much as the owner might give me disapproving looks, or try to get stuff out of the way in time, it’s not really going to change the fact that I’m a bull, and a china shop might not be the best place for me.

Then here comes the personal development world on the horizon, singing out the powerful message that if you want to do things differently, you can! It’s just a matter of discipline, hard work and consistency. Repetition, affirmations, resolve. ‘I am a beautiful butterfly’. ‘I am a beautiful and charming, delicate butterfly’. Well… maybe, somewhere deep inside of me is something that identifies with being a beautiful butterfly. I’m open to that. After all, we are never only one thing (we are all way more complex and nuanced than that), but what if I stopped fighting the bullish part? What if I removed myself from the china shop, for a start? Acknowledging, of course, that there may be other breakable things along the way- that the skills I learnt there amongst the fragile racks of fine china may be useful at times in the future. But I don’t have to dwell there, where I’m not welcome, where my skills and abilities are not noticed, certainly not celebrated. Perhaps I could remain open enough to keep looking for the place that a bull is a welcome addition. Seeing myself, grazing peacefully in a wide open meadow, for example.

This leads me on to other humans, and why I cannot and will not believe the idea so commonly bandied about that ‘some people are just evil’, because I think that as a species we do ourselves a huge disservice by holding up this dichotomy of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Even as a victim of sexual assault, I believe that there would be more to gain from seeking understanding and focussing on healing than on the rhetoric that ‘bad people’ should be ‘locked up and the key thrown away’. It’s a VERY big topic, but what I know intuitively is that I don’t want punitive justice for the person who harmed me. I want to seek understanding, and to pursue healing, not punishment. This has been unexpectedly contentious. It seems that once you are the person harmed, the World wants to decide for you what will happen, what is just and what is ‘right’. It’s been a long time since I operated with such a model of the world as ‘right and wrong’ or even ‘true and false’, though, and that seems to be an important piece to have had in place before this happened to me. It’s almost as if I get a chance to road-test a principle I felt I had- that punishment is not the way to best deal with transgressions from our best selves.

When an idea, principle, belief or value comes from us as people, it infiltrates every part of our life. For example, as a ‘victim’ of crime, I feel no more convinced by punishment as a solution as I do as a parent of two children or as a former Veterinary Nurse. If I will not rub a dog’s nose in its own urine to ‘teach it a lesson’, nor shut my child in their room to ‘think about their behaviour’, why would I believe that similar actions are an appropriate, just and fair way to treat someone who committed a crime against me. Some might (and have) say ‘but in doing that, the criminal took away their right to be treated fairly- they didn’t treat you well, so you shouldn’t feel compassion for them’.
To which I would reply with the story of Thecla. Thecla makes my heart sing the loudest of all the courageous women in Megan Watterson’s Divine Feminine pack that I hold so dear. She is sent to trial and sentenced to death in a stadium, where she is supposed to be attacked by a lioness, who instead protects here. She eventually baptises herself, and the women in the crowd start to see that she has been misjudged, and will not let her be harmed. Further to this, I would love to draw attention to a story I heard about an African tribe (I can’t find the original source, but if nothing else it demonstrates a principle beautifully), in which a woman hears a song before conceiving a child, teaches it to their partner and then sings it throughout the child’s pregnancy and childhood. If, at any time in a person’s life, they break the societal rules of the community, they are bought back to the centre of the community in circle, and their song is sung to them, to bring them back to themselves. One of my mentors, Marlee Liss (the first person to take a sexual crime through restorative justice in the US) talks about the questions which occurred to her after she was raped, which was ‘what happens between when a baby is born and someone becomes a perpetrator of a crime’? For me, there is so much within that question that holds so much hope. If we really want a safer, kinder more just World, we need to look at questions like these, first and foremost. It seems to me that for too long, our attention has been diverted towards the punishment and retribution rather than healing and moving forwards. Especially since, in my own and many other cases, the justice we are told we should seek is out of reach. The statistics in the UK for bringing perpetrators of sexual crime are horrific. Truly unacceptable, to me anyway. But that’s not the same as saying I want everyone thrown in jail. It doesn’t work. The same way putting your toddler on a bottom step to stew in the horrible feelings of having done wrong, doesn’t work. We need to re-think everything, from the bottom up. From our education system’s ‘traffic-light’ behaviour management systems, to employer’s ways of disciplining their staff, to the police and everything in between. The way we do this is to dig in. To not turn away in distaste from the parts of society that trouble us or don’t work. To see the struggle for other people is not so different from the one we face. To understand that the same system that makes a victim a victim makes the perpetrator a perpetrator. To look for the ways in which we can effect change, within us and within the structure and systems in which we operate.

I believe the biggest thing we can commit to doing is to the work of personal change. To live from our values, principles and beliefs even when it is not the easiest thing to do. Even when it means we don’t get to be ‘right’, but instead need to seek understanding in those whose behaviours, thoughts and beliefs do not align with our own.

Fiercely,
Claire X

Unlike some marital breakups, what I’ve always acknowledged is that my kids have an excellent dad. I didn’t enjoy being married to the man, and we fundamentally disagree on some of the basics of life… but he’s a great dad (and who cares what I think anyway!). Moreover, he wants to actively parent, despite having assumed that his role would naturally drop away over the years and months, he wanted active involvement (albeit on his terms). Yet somehow, we fell into a familiar pattern that seems to be the norm in Britain. He became a ‘weekend dad’. You see them in the park, in the queue at McDonalds… counting down the minutes until ‘I’ll be taking you back to your mum’s’. I’m not making this up, either- I’ve heard several dads saying exactly that.
So when did we get so stuck in this loop- where single mums are taking it all on- sometimes to the extent of living in a completely separate location from the other parent? I want to make two side points here. The first is to acknowledge that I’m assuming that one parent is male and one female. As someone who has been in relationships with both men and women, I’d like to just flag that I realise these relationship dynamics may be different (or the same!) depending on particular circumstances. Secondly, there is always the unspoken thing where abuse may have influenced the decision to live further away from a co-parent. People who leave abusive relationships are badass and brave and I salute you, and the choices you make to keep your family safe. Frankly, I salute any mother making any decision for her family that feels right at the time. Not just deciding, which ultimately is the easy part, but acting on it.
Here, though, I want to speak of the situations where once free of the relationship (and I recognised elements of emotional and financial abuse in my marriage which I have since worked to heal), the most empowering thing is to release control of how the other parent handles their time with the kids, and to work towards a more equal parenting balance. I have recently completely changed the time ratio with my kids, and now have 50:50 parenting with my kids’ dad. Even through the week, so that school pick ups and drop offs are shared equally. It wasn’t always that way, though. In fact, he had deemed it impossible due to full time and inflexible work patterns. I maintained that full time and inflexible working were a choice he was afforded which impacted my choices in that regard. Whether that’s true or not, I was ready to explore difference, but it didn’t happen instantly, so lets look at how it unfolded.
In the middle of the pandemic, for reasons known only to my deeper intelligence, and with work almost impossible due to home schooling two children, I told my ex-husband to stop giving me maintenance for the kids. It wasn’t a huge amount of money, anyway, and I was uncomfortable with the energetic ties it created between me and my ex. I’d been feeling that way for a while, but then I read a book that influenced my decision heavily, which was ‘Kickass Single Mom’ by Emma Johnston. In it, and in a couple of podcasts I listened to, she argues that taking maintenance money from their ex partners keeps women from fulfilling their full potential in a variety of different ways. I had to admit, I used the money as a cushion, and it didn’t really fit with my feminist values to accept it (though that could really swing both ways!). Anyway. Rather than saying ‘I don’t want your stinking money, you stingy b******rd’, I said ‘I set you free, and I set me free’. And it was done. Of course, the next month I lost my ability to earn any money temporarily, but that’s another story for another day...

You know how the old saying goes 'Before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes'... Well. I found myself feeling judged by my ex-husband the other day (how much of this was true and how much was a mirror, I'll never know!). I was thinking to myself that he shouldn't judge me, that he should be more understanding of me and that he should look at things from my point of view. Yet, in all of that, I made no space to look at things from his point of view. I was expecting something of him that I wasn't prepared to do myself. As usual, this new thought bought me some freedom for the emotional pain I had experienced while thinking (and believing) that he 'should' do all of those things. Ultimately, I'm in charge of me and my thoughts and actions. He's in charge of his.

Across the four years since we've been separated, it's always been the case that the times I've had the least influence and suffered the most, have been when I'm hoping, or expecting for him to change. The times I've felt the most empowered, have been when I'm changing how I see things, and gaining more flexibility myself.

Which led to to this blog post, and something that occurred to me yesterday. The harder it is to see from someone's perspective, the more freedom there is to be had from doing so. That is to say, if you can seek to understand something that exists from a way of looking at the World you would never dream of adopting, the more of a 'brain workout' you get. So next time you encounter someone with a map of the World that has you scratching your head, thank the Universe for this opportunity to gain more flexibility. You don't have to agree with what they think, say or do- but if you accept the invitation to attempt to understand (rather than to proved you're right and they're wrong), then you just might find that out the other end of the encounter, you're experiencing more peace.

Many times I have seen women express that they were gaslit by their narcissistic ex. I too once read an article about gaslighting and looked afresh at my relationship dynamics with my then husband. Across the ages, women’s truths have been questioned. This has never been more important to me than now, as I continue my quest for justice after I was sexually assaulted in 2020.
Yet as a coach and a practitioner that is interested in getting the most possible wellbeing for myself and my clients, I have to remain open to what works. It seems to me, that spending eternity thinking about and blaming an ex-partner for the troubles in your life (low self-esteem, self confidence issues etc) is a somewhat disempowering stance, and I started to look for what might serve me better in creating the kind of life I want. So, what is ‘gaslighting’? Well, google tells me it’s when somewhat deliberately denies your version of reality in an attempt to control or undermine you, ultimately leading you to question your sanity. Well! That’s pretty unpleasant, no?
Yet at the same time as someone is ‘doing’ this to you, the opposite must be true. If they don’t believe in your version of reality, then you don’t believe in theirs. How can we be free of this never ending spiral of uncertainty? Where each person disbelieves the other, with varying degrees of malicious intent? I think it’s time to call out ‘the truth’. The truth is, there IS no truth. They believe what they believe, and you believe what you believe. Beyond that, its all smoke and daggers. By which I mean, perception. Because, you see… we do not see the World as it is, we see the World as WE are. So you may actually have perceived different versions of reality, and all the arguing in the World won’t have you see each other’s ‘point of view’. Now. That’s not to say that there isn’t potentially some other stuff going on. Maybe you’re being coercively controlled in other ways. Ugh. Because it happens. And that sucks… AND no-one can actually BE IN your mind, controlling it. So. How do we ‘take back control’? I think it comes down to being more open, not less. TO learn to trust yourself and your version of events. To understand that when respect is not being served, you don’t stay and eat, you leave the table… this is radical responsibility for self. Am I victim balming? I hope not. I am, however, speaking as someone who has been on this journey. Who has felt controlled and restricted, and then taken the journey to understanding that the biggest restrictions I’ll ever face (no matter who I’m married to, who my boss is, or what my mum says) are all in my own mind. Which is actually excellent news, because ‘we are now entering the dimension where we have control… the inside). So if you’ve ever been faced with someone who denies your reality… I want you to stand a little taller, knowing that you matched them all along, without even knowing it, by denying theirs right back!
Now as to the beliefs you have and values you hold that had you create that reality in the first place, perhaps that’s a blog post for another day…
Fiercely,
Claire x

Many times, people fall into the trap of wanting things outside of them to change, and feeling that everything will be better for them as a result. I say this with great compassion, because many times… I’ve been ‘people’. Yet, as I’ve engaged in change work for the last three and a half years, I’ve discovered that it is not so much what’s going on around you, as the way you relate to it. That has stood the test of time, and even event that I would *seriously* rather hadn’t happened. Maintaining your personal sense of power will help with how you relate to the people, places and situations around you. The great thing is, if you instigate change at the level of YOU, you don’t have to scrabble to see each and every situation in more empowering ways, it becomes more like a way of being. From this ‘being’, you will find yourself doing different things than before, and when you do different things, you tend to get different outcomes.
Another way in which I see people trip up, is that they expect specific outcomes from their new way of being and doing. In fact, many times, people have asked me what specifically I hope for when I try out a new mode of operating, and in truth… often the answer is just ‘a different result’. I trust that because I’ve ‘done the work’ on me, that I’ll adapt with or be able to further influence the outcome, should it not be to my liking. But I can’t know until I try. That’s why I don’t put too much emphasis on confidence these days. Am I confident that what I’m going to do will have a good outcome? Not really. Do I hope so? Yes. Does the action come from a positive intention? Yes. Is it aligned with my values? Usually, yes. If not, I might re-adjust. This is what really gives me a groudedness in my decision making process that goes beyond confidence… Because I know that each action, each choice, each decision, can be adjusted and tweaked if it doesn’t bring about the results I would like. I’m still getting over a sneaky perfectionism that was covert in as much as it manifested mostly in inaction, rather than the perhaps more classic presentation of trying to make things perfect, I just wouldn’t even attempt it.
So sometimes I adopt a ‘fail fast, fail forward’ approach. At other times, I lean in to the developmental ‘edge’ that feels like it will get me the most gains. Sometimes I’m focussing more on building relationship and other times its more introspective work (to be tested later in relation to others!).
I used to be a big believer in the saying (in fact, I even have it on my wall) ‘if a flower doesn’t flower, you change the environment in which it grows, not the flower’. These days, I believe that yes, we do have a way that’s more natural for us to be, but also that fairly huge components of what you might have thought of as ‘personality’ can in fact shift and change when we engage with personal change work, and start to experiment with engaging with the world differently. I’m not saying ‘don’t be yourself’, but rather that social conditioning and repression may mean that what you think is yourself, is actually a somewhat watered down version. The courageous work of digging in will have many people come back to a truer version, and THAT feels great!.
re to edit.

As a therapist, I know that trauma can impact people’s lives in big and little ways. Some ‘big’ trauma can have ‘little’ effect, and some ‘little’ trauma can have big effects. I’ve used inverted commas because this highlights something. It’s not really about what happened, it’s about the sense (or meaning) that was made at the time. Whether it ended up meaning something about you, your worth, your power to change things or influence them, how worthy you were of love, respect, good things, kind treatment… you name it. If the traumatic thing happened, and you made meaning of it in a certain way, it lives on in your life expressing that meaning in certain ways until such time as this becomes apparent (which, for a lot of people, may be…. Never).
This week (amongst others), I’m reading ‘Pathways to Possibilities’ by Rosamund Stone Pilcher, in which she shares the stories of people for whom the messages they absorbed in early life had major impacts on their adult lives. That’s actually pretty true of almost everyone. It’s just sometimes those messages are more empowering, and sometimes less. Often within the seemingly empowering lessons, there are subtleties that create a kind of bind. ‘You can do anything if you work hard enough’, for example, could seem outwardly empowering. Yet when someone finds themselves, aged 35, burnt out and wondering where their youthful exuberance went… they might realise that the subconcious message that you have to work hard to get what you want, led them to pursue hard work, and never consider that what they want to achieve might be easy. No doubt, working hard will have had its upsides- perhaps they reached the top of their company, or really excelled in academic studies… But sometimes, that message might lead to them staying in a disempowering relationship longer than they ought, labouring under the Impression that hard work will be the answer.
Yet these things so rarely get examined. There is often an impulsive rejection of the values and beliefs under which we were raised or a wholesale adoption. Either way, there is another path. In ‘Pathways to possibility’, Stone Zander describes the implementation of a thought process called the field of awareness. In the field of awareness, the person does not identify as the individual having a thought or experience, but more as the awareness itself. It’s what my mentor James Tripp calls ‘getting in touch with the ‘I’ that chooses’. On removing yourself from the thought or emotional reaction, the distance can afford the ability to see the reaction as a memory of a time that came before. SO the experience points to a past memory, often of being much younger, in which meaning was made about how the world works, other people or the person themselves. On examination, the new event becomes not so much the truth of the situation, but a pointer towards a memory that could be usefully examined. To do this, she suggests finding the age at which the memory occurred (even if approximate) and what meaning was made. She shares the experience of a man who was not taking enough risks at work, and missing out on promotion as a result. The feeling of taking risks pointed back to when, as a boy, he’d cut flowers for his mum from the garden. The wrath of his dad for cutting his prized flowers had resulted in the childlike assumption that he made bad decisions, which he had carried forward in life until the day he met Stone Zander. On seeing this, he was able to free himself from that belief, and become the field of awareness once more.
I love this concept, and have been playing with it. Perhaps I need to go into it more deeply, because it has great potential, but I do find it hard to self-facilitate this process. However, the principle of ‘child-made’ stories is a key one. Stone Zander states that every time you find yourself sure of something, and having the corresponding emotional experience, there is a childish story at play that could be examined. This I find easier, and seriously liberating. Whereabouts might you have a story about someone that you keep playing whenever you interact with them? What if you gave them (and yourself) the huge gift of liberating them from this, and staying open to the possibility that you might have got it wrong. Reserve the right to change your mind about anything and anyone at any time. A world of possibility awaits if you do, because you get to experience the world in a myriad of different ways, even if nothing changes.

When you separate from your partner, especially if that partner has some narcissistic tendencies, it can be really hard to rediscover yourself amongst all the lies, all the arguments, all the drama. I’ve certainly been there. Then a funny thing happened. I was on a training course, learning to do what I do (more about that here). We were asked to have a kind of ‘virtual conversation’ with someone we hadn’t been getting along with. Seeing an opportunity for some self-work, I chose my soon to be ex-husband. As I got the opportunity to speak to him without fear of his anger or frustration, for the first time I bought my truth to the conversation. Little did I know, the next step was to hear this as I fully embodied being HIM.
                As I stood there, looking back at myself, a wave of confusion came over me. I felt sadness. I felt frustration and I felt totally blocked from thinking up any creative solutions, let alone an adequate answer. It was the first time I had ever truly walked in his shoes.
                There is great power in taking a third neutral position. It’s even more powerful if you are facilitated to do so by a coach or therapist. That’s where we went next in this training exercise, and as I stood looking at my ex and myself, observing the frustration, seeing the hurt, a fresh insight just popped into my head. A totally new piece of wisdom, as I said to us both ‘you are both children of your families, and it was always going to be very hard to marry those two different ways. You didn’t know that at the time you were trying to work things out, so you need to be kind to yourselves now’.
                The simple fact is, no-one wants to be an arse. People’s behaviours are a result of various things- how they were bought up, their experiences to date, any lessons they received about how the world works, that they took on at a subconscious level and now operate from. When we, as women, step away from seeing ourselves as a victim, and instead start to recognise the larger patterns at play, we gain a huge amount of our personal power back. Because, and you might want to take a note of this- the person with the most amount of flexibility in any given situation is the one with the most power. And that, my friend, can be you.

There’s a funny thing about change- the conversation out there in the world would have you think it’s impossible. A leopard, as they say, can’t change it’s spots. That may be true of leopards, but it isn’t true of humans. How do I know? Because I’ve changed my spots, and I’ve seen a lot of other people change theirs.
                Further to the conversation, there are also the attempts we’ve made to change that can keep us thinking it’s REALLY HARD. Yo-yo dieting, trying to stop smoking, trying to stop yelling at your kids. There are many things we do as humans that we don’t want to be doing, that we’d rather not do. If we had a choice, it seems, we’d choose not to. Yet, technically, we do have a choice… and yet changes don’t happen… and there’s a very good reason why. Because only about 5 % of what we do as humans is controlled by our conscious mind.
                If we kept everything within conscious control, life would be overwhelming. Imagine having to think about every breath, every heartbeat, every individual eye movement. You’d never get anything else done. But along with the physical elements of daily life, more complex reactions, behaviours and even thought patterns become habitual. Making a ‘concious effort’ to change won’t impact these- they became unconscious so you can get on with being you- no matter how much you might dislike how being you is working out right now.
Meanwhile, know that what I’m saying here is that we have huge capacity to change, that it can really be very easy to do so, but that you also need to work on the kind of self-awareness that allows you to see the things that are turning up as ‘problems’ and courageous enough to ‘be with’ them long enough to allow them to transform. I’ve heard people say they really don’t want to ‘go there’ with their stuff, because they’re afraid what they’ll bring up. Which I find sad, because a concerted effort to work on yourself leads to a life of freedom to be who you want to be. And if that sounds good, perhaps you’d like to work with me! I’m a coach because I believe in coaching. I believe in coaching because I’ve been coached- and will continue to seek coaches whose way of being, or ideas, or skills, resonate with me.
True story, I once signed up to work with a coach because whereas everyone else sat on chairs on the stage, she sat cross-legged in front of hers. So maybe you sign up to work with me because I’ve got blue hair… Maybe something I said on one of my Live videos was interesting to you. Maybe you just want to expand your horizons… Or maybe you’ve got some trauma in the background that you’re ready to be free of. Whatever it is, trust your intuition, and keep believing that change is possible. I do!

As a single mum, you can feel a little helpless. In fact, at times, I’ve felt A LOT helpless. Like, properly alone in the world, trying to figure everything out. Put simply though, I was wrong. I have received so much help and support, and when I start counting up the things that have happened, it really starts to flip that old story on its head. Did you know, for example, that if you do further education as a single mum, the financial support available will probably top up your childcare so its free? There are also hardship funds, and practical support, as well as heaps of information. If I hadn’t accessed the excellent advice of the student services at Abertay University, for example, I would have believed the Citizens Advice Bureau’s incorrect assertion that if I went self-employed, I’d be switched to Universal Credit. That wasn’t true, and staying on Working Tax Credits meant it was possible to launch my business. It changed the trajectory of my life, and nearly quadrupled my hourly income. So make sure the advice you’re getting is sound.
                Other amazing things have been being accepted onto coaching programmes free, receiving huge amounts of help from friends and relatives, and having people reach out to offer their help when I wasn’t doing so well.
                When our minds are left to their own devices, we can tend to focus on the negative. Its an evolutionary strategy, a protective mechanism. Great for surviving, not so great for thriving. Rubbish for getting the most out of life. Because when you’ve got a lot ON your mind, you can’t get a lot FROM your mind.
                If there’s one other thing I know, having worked with a lot of single mums (and people more generally) is that you (yes, YOU!) are not counting the wins in your life. Give yourself a high five when something goes well. You’ll be wiring your brain for positivity and you’ll start to notice the good things more. And trust me, if you’re raising tiny humans, no matter how hard you’re being on yourself- there are wins you aren’t yet counting! Over time I've learnt the huge benefits of just... being kinder to myself. It's not always easy, especially if you're swimming against the tide of popular opinion. It IS however, always worthwhile. Haters gonna hate, might as well start loving yourself!