This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. See right for more information and a list of instalments so far.
‘Will we actually be doing any healing this session?’ I asked.
I was butting in, I knew that, but Stephanie had been droning on for half an hour about her psychic experiences and the session was only an hour long.
I think she was trying to convince me of her credentials as a healer and the reality of healing but I didn’t need that.
I’d had enough psychic experiences of my own to convince me that the material world was only the beginning, and I’d already had elsewhere small sessions of healing, or ‘spiritual’ healing as it was sometimes called. Sometimes I’d felt heat and sometimes nothing, but the experience had always been relaxing and enjoyable.
There was nothing invasive about it either, as often the healer hadn’t touched me directly. They’d simply moved their hands over my body, slightly above it.
And Stephanie herself came with endorsement. I’d become slightly deaf eight years earlier and now wore hearing aids (‘What don’t you want to hear?’ asked Louise Hay, the answer of course being my parents.). I attended regular hearing clinics at a local NHS health centre, an extraordinary place more like a mini hospital for non-urgent problems than a GP surgery. While waiting one day I’d discovered a complementary health wing and Stephanie was one of the practitioners.
So here I was.
Since my middle-of-the-night revelation, I’d worked my way through You Can Heal Your Life, chapter by chapter, each day typing out a list of affirmations and taking them with me on my walks so that I could practise them. I did a lot of crying both while reading the book and while reciting the affirmations to myself, but I knew from what Cheryl had said that this was because the words were hitting home. I was a word person, so I now had an effective and appropriate tool on my healing journey.
Stephanie, I hoped would be another.
She did stop talking eventually that day and I continued seeing her weekly for several months. (Even so, she still talked too much, and I still had to butt in.) I didn’t have physical sensations during her sessions but my mind wandered into empty spaces, coming back with treasures. One of them was the certainty that I needed to stop drinking alcohol.
Not only was I suffering from near constant migraines, but I also felt hungover most of the time. The two ailments were similar but not identical so sometimes I would be suffering from one, sometimes the other, and sometimes both at once. I’d cut my alcohol intake down to half a glass of wine a night, but I still felt ill.
So I listened to that prompting and stopped my nightly dose of oblivion, and the fact that that was how I saw it was probably message enough that the stuff was doing me no good. Stephanie’s healing simply pushed me over the edge.
I missed the alcohol dreadfully, but persevered.
Occasionally Stephanie asked me about myself and one day, because of what I said, recommended a book called The Handbook for Highly Sensitive People, written by Mel Collins, a friend of hers (cue another long story).
At the beginning of the book was an exercise called ‘Are you a Highly Sensitive Person’. This was a list of twenty-two questions, such as whether I felt overwhelmed in groups of people, whether I was affected by other people’s moods, whether I often felt deeply hurt, whether I had used alcohol, drugs or food as a coping mechanism, whether I struggled with self-love, whether I was a perfectionist and highly conscientious, whether I was deeply concerned about social and environmental problems.
I answered yes to every question but one, which read, ‘[Do] you feel you struggle to find the right relationship or have a history of “failed” relationships because your partner doesn’t understand your sensitivity [?]’
I didn’t tick that because I had Frog, didn’t I?
‘Don’t you think you ought to tick that one too,’ said Frog gently when I showed him the page.
Oh, I thought. Does that mean he doesn’t understand me or that our relationship has failed, or is he including Brian and my parents in that? In which case the answer would certainly be yes.
Whichever, the fact that Frog wanted me to tick that box, was simply another spur. I had to continue the process. I had to stop thinking that everything was all right really. The relevance of the questionnaire was something of a shock.
I was butting in, I knew that, but Stephanie had been droning on for half an hour about her psychic experiences and the session was only an hour long.
I think she was trying to convince me of her credentials as a healer and the reality of healing but I didn’t need that.
I’d had enough psychic experiences of my own to convince me that the material world was only the beginning, and I’d already had elsewhere small sessions of healing, or ‘spiritual’ healing as it was sometimes called. Sometimes I’d felt heat and sometimes nothing, but the experience had always been relaxing and enjoyable.
There was nothing invasive about it either, as often the healer hadn’t touched me directly. They’d simply moved their hands over my body, slightly above it.
And Stephanie herself came with endorsement. I’d become slightly deaf eight years earlier and now wore hearing aids (‘What don’t you want to hear?’ asked Louise Hay, the answer of course being my parents.). I attended regular hearing clinics at a local NHS health centre, an extraordinary place more like a mini hospital for non-urgent problems than a GP surgery. While waiting one day I’d discovered a complementary health wing and Stephanie was one of the practitioners.
So here I was.
Since my middle-of-the-night revelation, I’d worked my way through You Can Heal Your Life, chapter by chapter, each day typing out a list of affirmations and taking them with me on my walks so that I could practise them. I did a lot of crying both while reading the book and while reciting the affirmations to myself, but I knew from what Cheryl had said that this was because the words were hitting home. I was a word person, so I now had an effective and appropriate tool on my healing journey.
Stephanie, I hoped would be another.
She did stop talking eventually that day and I continued seeing her weekly for several months. (Even so, she still talked too much, and I still had to butt in.) I didn’t have physical sensations during her sessions but my mind wandered into empty spaces, coming back with treasures. One of them was the certainty that I needed to stop drinking alcohol.
Not only was I suffering from near constant migraines, but I also felt hungover most of the time. The two ailments were similar but not identical so sometimes I would be suffering from one, sometimes the other, and sometimes both at once. I’d cut my alcohol intake down to half a glass of wine a night, but I still felt ill.
So I listened to that prompting and stopped my nightly dose of oblivion, and the fact that that was how I saw it was probably message enough that the stuff was doing me no good. Stephanie’s healing simply pushed me over the edge.
I missed the alcohol dreadfully, but persevered.
Occasionally Stephanie asked me about myself and one day, because of what I said, recommended a book called The Handbook for Highly Sensitive People, written by Mel Collins, a friend of hers (cue another long story).
At the beginning of the book was an exercise called ‘Are you a Highly Sensitive Person’. This was a list of twenty-two questions, such as whether I felt overwhelmed in groups of people, whether I was affected by other people’s moods, whether I often felt deeply hurt, whether I had used alcohol, drugs or food as a coping mechanism, whether I struggled with self-love, whether I was a perfectionist and highly conscientious, whether I was deeply concerned about social and environmental problems.
I answered yes to every question but one, which read, ‘[Do] you feel you struggle to find the right relationship or have a history of “failed” relationships because your partner doesn’t understand your sensitivity [?]’
I didn’t tick that because I had Frog, didn’t I?
‘Don’t you think you ought to tick that one too,’ said Frog gently when I showed him the page.
Oh, I thought. Does that mean he doesn’t understand me or that our relationship has failed, or is he including Brian and my parents in that? In which case the answer would certainly be yes.
Whichever, the fact that Frog wanted me to tick that box, was simply another spur. I had to continue the process. I had to stop thinking that everything was all right really. The relevance of the questionnaire was something of a shock.
I skimmed the rest of the book, arranged in two main sections entitled ‘Self-help Strategies’ and ‘A Spiritual Perspective’, as most of the recommendations were avenues I was already exploring and I tended to get overwhelmed by other people’s systems, preferring to find my own with gentle nudges from elsewhere. (Another HSP trait?)
What the book did do however was give me a reason for why I was like I was and permission to carry on in what I thought was an abnormal way. For instance, needing large amounts of time alone in nature, needing days to recover from social occasions, avoiding people in general unless I really trusted them, never watching The News on television if I could help it.
And it showed that I could appreciate, even love, myself even though I found it so hard to fit in - especially with my family.
Although HSP was not an official diagnosis, like newly recognised adult ADHD, it was helpful to know that I wasn’t alone. Not that I would ever have said anything about it to anyone, except someone I recognised as being another HSP, as they would have thought (I imagined) that I was being highly pretentious.
‘Learn to share your amazing qualities of empathy, compassion, creativity, healing and much more with the world so that you can lead the happy fulfilling life you deserve,’ proclaimed the book's blurb.
Well, I wasn’t anywhere near that yet, but I was on the way, I hoped. And I had plenty of time as Frog and I were only in our mid-sixties. We had another twenty years to go, didn’t we?
Meanwhile, we had an addition to the family and she certainly wasn’t an HSP. Oh dear.
What the book did do however was give me a reason for why I was like I was and permission to carry on in what I thought was an abnormal way. For instance, needing large amounts of time alone in nature, needing days to recover from social occasions, avoiding people in general unless I really trusted them, never watching The News on television if I could help it.
And it showed that I could appreciate, even love, myself even though I found it so hard to fit in - especially with my family.
Although HSP was not an official diagnosis, like newly recognised adult ADHD, it was helpful to know that I wasn’t alone. Not that I would ever have said anything about it to anyone, except someone I recognised as being another HSP, as they would have thought (I imagined) that I was being highly pretentious.
‘Learn to share your amazing qualities of empathy, compassion, creativity, healing and much more with the world so that you can lead the happy fulfilling life you deserve,’ proclaimed the book's blurb.
Well, I wasn’t anywhere near that yet, but I was on the way, I hoped. And I had plenty of time as Frog and I were only in our mid-sixties. We had another twenty years to go, didn’t we?
Meanwhile, we had an addition to the family and she certainly wasn’t an HSP. Oh dear.
To be continued
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