LIFE SHOCKS
It might be finding out your husband’s cheating. Learning you have a serious illness. But a new book argues such shattering moments can be the catalyst to making your life BETTER
ONE WINTRY afternoon I was sitting at home, feeling despondent, when my fouryearold daughter ran in to greet me after pre-school. Seven weeks after a terminal cancer diagnosis, a targeted chemo drug had caused acne-like blisters across my entire face. In my most vulnerable hour, I was ugly and disfigured, too.
Gabriella straddled her legs across my lap and looked at me without speaking. I wanted to turn away, afraid my scars would scare her and she would think me ugly, but I knew I could not protect her from what was happening.
So I sat waiting, until she cupped my face in her hands and asked: ‘Does it hurt, beautiful Mummy? Shall I kiss it better?’ Then she kissed my cheek, before wiping away my tears.
Beautiful Mummy. These unexpected words struck something at my core, releasing a wave of leftover shame. In an instant, I not only forgave my face its current ugliness, but all the ugliness I had seen in it from a very young age.
Suddenly, I realised my ‘pizza face’, as I called it, had been dredging up judgments I had aimed at my appearance for years, judgments that had led to bulimia and a crippling lack of self-regard by my mid-teens.
This moment of clarity gave me the chance to tackle the remnants of those misperceptions and finally let them go. As a result I even began to feel grateful for what the drug, Afatinib, had done to me.
This is what I call a ‘lifeshock’: an unexpected moment offering an opportunity for increased self-awareness. These moments are collision points between life as we see it and life as it actually is. They shock us into paying attention.
A lifeshock might be anything from a throwaway comment that hits a nerve to the words, ‘Your lung cancer is incurable’.
SINCE
my diagnosis nearly four years ago, I’ve had multiple brain tumours three times, radiotherapy, targeted chemo, brain surgery and have been twice at the brink of death. On each occasion, I have needed to call on my inner resources and my condition has stabilised, at least for a time.
Of course I would, return cancer to sender in an instant if I could, but I would not return what the associated lifeshocks have given me, taught me and made of me.
I am far more myself now, at 52, than I was before my diagnosis, and these years have been the most creative, purposeful and fulfilling of my life.
This is what lifeshocks can do for us, if we know how to suck the marrow out of such moments — to make the most of encounters with forces that we cannot control, predict or plan.
Instead of resisting and resenting these encounters, we can learn to engage with them in powerful and transformative ways.
It was my late mentor and business partner Dr K. Bradford Brown, a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist, who first introduced me to the concept of lifeshocks. As well as teaching individuals about his work through the More To Life foundation, which runs transformational courses, I spent 20 years running a consultancy that took these ideas into large organisations, where we taught clients to dismantle their harmful, self-limiting beliefs and behaviours and thus improve company performance.
Lifeshocks expose the ways in which we limit ourselves. They also invite us to grow if we know how to respond to them.
When lifeshocks strike, we often draw false conclusions about ourselves, other people and the situation, which then determine what we feel and do.
For example, judging my sore face as ugly, I asked my husband to drive me everywhere to avoid public transport. I feared my little girl would recoil from me and even resented the drug that was keeping me alive.
Of all the things cancer could do to me, I thought, why this? It seemed so cruel. However, my ‘pizza face’ and the ‘ beautiful Mummy’ lifeshocks were exactly what I needed to flush the old judgments out of my system. This is how lifeshocks can serve us if we know how to engage them.
Here are some examples of how others have been able to use lifeshocks to find a new sense of peace and self-acceptance, even in their darkest hours . . .
HEALING THE HURT OF ADULTERY
THE key to using lifeshocks to our benefit is to notice them in the first place. We also need to become aware of the way we interpret these moments, the inner voice that judges and criticises in profoundly false ways. This is the primary cause of our suffering.
One of my clients, who I shall call Elizabeth Gurney, was a physiotherapist in her late 50s. She illustrates how challenging our existing beliefs can help us overcome even the most disruptive events.
She had been married for 32 years and had raised three children when her husband confessed to a nine-month affair.
She told me: ‘Sitting in the kitchen, my husband was opposite in an armchair, elbows on knees, head bowed. Suddenly he said with a quiet but clear voice: “She feels wonderful in my arms.” ’
Lifeshock! When I asked Elizabeth to describe her physical reaction, she described pressure in her head, ice- cold hands, a hollow dropping stomach and shortness of breath.
And her emotions? ‘Shock, high anxiety, heartache, outrage.’
When I asked what her inner voice was telling her, she said: ‘I’m left behind; I’m abandoned; I’m helpless and isolated; I can’t survive this . . .’
Slowly I got her to challenge these thoughts, replacing each false statement with a true one. ‘I’m left behind’ became ‘he may leave me, and I may leave him, but that does not put me behind.’
‘I’m abandoned’ became ‘I am able to take care of myself.’ ‘I can’t survive this’ changed to ‘I am still here. I am surviving it.’
Next, Elizabeth made some resolutions based on the lifeshock she had experienced. She would hand back the rings, and the expectations that went with them. She would start again, feel her pain but not ‘give up on love’.
Elizabeth came to realise how lonely she had felt in her marriage over the years, and how she needed to find new ways to love herself instead of expecting that all to come from her husband.
She even recognised this as her part in his affair. And thus she took responsibility for her life in ways that had been a long time coming, eventually finding new work she loved and a self-regard she had never previously known.
ARE YOU PUSHING PEOPLE TOO HARD?
IN ONE retail organisation, which hired my consultancy partly because it had a staff turnover of more than 40 per cent, there was a director with a fierce reputation.
He was a legend in the business and staff were almost universally terrified of him. They had formed collective strategies to cover their backs. On the days of his visits to stores, they posted a sentry in the car park to warn of his coming.
He was particularly critical if certain products were not available. Consequently, staff kept those products in storage until he arrived at the store. My role was to deliver a leadership
training for his team. Observing him closely, I noticed his dedication to the business.
‘Are you aware that most of your staff are scared of you?’ I asked, once I knew I had won his respect. It was a significant lifeshock for him. He really didn’t know.
‘Why would they be frightened of me?’ I turned the question to his team. Slightly squirming, they began giving him feedback about being critical and ‘getting angry when things weren’t perfect’. ‘But they should be perfect,’ he retorted. There was my moment to work with him. I asked him to break down exactly what he meant: his answers reflected his high standards of ‘delivering excellence, nothing less’.
When I asked what he feared would happen if they delivered less, it boiled down to letting the business down, letting customers down, failing at his own job and the staff all losing their jobs.
‘And what would that make you?’ I asked. ‘A bad manager. A failure. A fraud,’ was his response. I felt real compassion for him. His care for the business and his people ran deep. His bullying behaviour was driven by a demand for perfection, born of these false beliefs about himself.
Having worked with him on all this, we found new ground to stand on. ‘I am neither a failure nor a fraud. I do have high standards, but no one is perfect and I don’t need to demand that,’ he said. ‘I will recognise successes as well as pointing out mistakes.’
By admitting that his behaviour, however well intended, had a negative impact, he found a new path. And the knock-on effect was to improve working practices throughout the company and significantly reduce staff turnover.
EXPERIENCING YOUR WORST NIGHTMARE
SOMETIMES, lifeshocks include the most painful experiences imaginable. And when these moments come, being able to challenge your critical inner voice will help you to find the best possible response.
Earlier this year I interacted with a woman at a course I was teaching, who I knew quite well. She told me she had been coping with something in shameful silence for some time.
Having split from her partner, who was not the father of her children, her teenage son told her this man had abused him several times — a revelation that shook her to the core.
It stirred up old memories of being abused herself by her uncle. It was her worst nightmare, the one thing she had wanted to protect her son and daughter from.
She had plenty of experience working with lifeshocks, and by the time she disclosed this information she had already cleared a lot of self-recrimination.
She had also recognised how she had invested more of her selfesteem in being a devoted mother than in anything else.
But she hadn’t felt or expressed her grief. Letting out your grief can be profoundly healing, and it is often blocked by things like selfrecrimination and blame. Now, it was ready to pop.
So she lay on the floor, in the middle of our course, and wailed for 40 long, redeeming minutes. She went to the very depths of her sorrow. This was what was needed for her to move into a more intimate relationship with her son and into a more forgiving relationship with herself.
By working with this lifeshock moment and feeling her grief, she found unexpected light in the darkness.
WHEN BEAUTY CAN BE A CURSE
I WAS leading a workshop when I noticed a tall, slim woman with long blonde hair, delicate features and huge blue eyes. She was hiding from the group’s attention, so I sought her out.
‘What’s it like to be as beautiful as you?’ I asked intuitively when the opportunity presented itself.
Her eyes welled up: ‘ Don’t call me that.’
‘But you are beautiful,’ I pressed. ‘How many people here agree?’
When all their hands went up, tears streamed down her cheeks. This was a significant lifeshock for her. ‘ People just see my beauty,’ she eventually confessed, ‘ but they don’t see me.’
This woman’s exterior had overshadowed her interior for too long, and as a result she resorted to trying to lose herself in the crowd.
Having taken some time to win her trust, I brought her to the front of the room. She was very uncomfortable at first, but I encouraged her to bring her attention to the group rather than listening to her inner critic.
To her terror, I asked the group what they saw in her. Courage, honesty, strength, vulnerability, resilience, came the replies.
Her discomfort persisted, then tears rolled down her face. She seemed filled with the light that radiates when we know we are loved for what is on the inside instead of being judged — or accepted — for what is on the outside.
That day she came to terms with her physical appearance once and for all, as we can all do — whether blessed with beauty, blighted by a perceived affliction or haunted by a temporary ‘pizza face’.
ADAPTED from Lifeshocks: And How To Love Them by Sophie Sabbage (Coronet, £11.99). To learn about the upcoming courses Sophie is teaching, go to sophiesabbage. HAVE you experienced a ‘lifeshock’, and how did it change you? Tell us about it by emailing femailreaders@ dailymail.co.uk