this talk: is about self-discovery and healing - with Sophie French
Sprawled in the bed of my new Australian apartment where I'd travelled to from the UK, my boyfriend and friends in the next room, the sun scorching our balcony, two glistening swimming pools and a tennis court below, the waves licking the sand half a km away, I sobbed ~ wailed ~ from the pit of my stomach into my pillow. I expected to be ‘living the dream’, but the realisation that drop-kicked me in the ovaries: I could be on the other side of the world, but I couldn’t escape myself.
After all, if the gremlin in your head is asking ‘what’s the point?’ on repeat, it’s not just going to stop because you lost 6kg eating egg whites and hummus for a month and hopped on a plane donning your new pair of Havaianas.
In fact, the gremlin grew a second head and put on a top-hat: because I was ‘supposed’ to be happy. “What an ungrateful bitch.” It would yell at me over my heaving sobs.
I’d witnessed it so many times before in the lead up to stuff - I’ll be happy when…I’ve finished these GCSE’s. I’ve been noticed by THAT boy. I’ve got THAT dress. I’ve been on THAT holiday. I’ve finished University. I’ve got my dream job. I’ve lost that weight. Always waiting for something else to happen before life could really begin or this elusive ‘happiness’ I’d heard about could kick in.
I started looking for it in the stark light of nightclubs, in copious pizza delivery boxes and in the bottom of a bottle rosé.
Until eventually I realised it was never really a quest for happiness, but rather, an escape from unhappiness. Trying to run away from the madness that was going on inside my mind, to find some high that would act as a crutch for the confusion I was feeling about the hatred for my body and the anxiety I had every single morning when my alarm would go off and I’d feel so groggy and think: “there HAS to be more than this?”
The more I allowed myself to think about begrudgingly pounding my alarm off for the next sixty years, the way I thought it just was, the more confused I felt. The more I asked: ‘this CAN’T be it?’ The more I tried to escape and found myself in a mental health crisis as a result.
I was running really fast through my life in this bid to escape. A treadmill of coffee and chaos, rolling out of bed, slapping foundation on my face as I sped half-concentrating so as to not be late for work AGAIN, dashing into the office, my tummy whirring with unchecked worry, jaw and shoulder ache for trying so hard to impress and please, going for an intense run at lunchtime to distract myself from my hateful thoughts and punish my body and was only fuelled all afternoon by a cuppa soup and ryvita for whatever diet I’d been convinced of that week.
Endless colds, kidney infections, sickness bugs - I was down with them all, but had NO idea it could be affected by my lifestyle or how I was living or thinking or behaving. I’d just caught something in the office? This is just what happens when you’re a human? The closest I got to thinking I had anything to do with it was I was just a little ‘run down’.
My body had to drop-kick me to the floor to get me to pay any real attention. When I found myself, shaking, freezing and struggling to catch my breath in a panic attack one Saturday afternoon, I realised I needed to stop and figure myself out.
But figuring that out… I had NO idea what that truly meant or how to do that. I booked myself in with a cognitive behavioural therapist who was helping me overcome my irrational thoughts about my plane crashing on the trip to Australia I’d planned. Those sessions sparked something in my brain that made me realise it could be changed. It made me realise irrational thoughts were simply that - irrational. But after just a few sessions, I stopped going.
I wasn’t ‘suicidal’ enough. I thought that was kind of enough to feel a bit better, I was finally convinced my plane wasn’t going to crash, so I could head off and enjoy my year long trip to Australia because living somewhere sunny and not having to go to work was SURE to fix me, right?
After months and months of planning, counting down the days for an entire year, talking about it, and planning it, and saving...and training to be desperately thin because I thought ‘I’ll make more friends if I’m thinner’ the time had finally come to take the trip.
And that’s when it hit me. I’d been hanging out on a desert island in Fiji for weeks with my boyfriend, I was living in the Sunshine Coast with my boyfriend and friends, and I STILL WASN’T HAPPY.
You’ve got to be kidding me? I thought as I sobbed those deep hearty sobs from the pit of my stomach, overthrown with this feeling of doom bubbling within me.
And then I got it. If I was feeling like this, and I had it pretty good ‘on paper’, then others must feel like it too. It can’t be a coincidence that we are the sickest, saddest society. It was then I realised that nothing on the outside is going to help you, no matter how far you travel or how much you search externally: you have to start going inwards.
I had to find out what was going on. Not just with me, but with everyone. I figured I couldn’t be alone in this. Living in the most privileged time on Earth with the most opportunities at our fingertips, yet a deeper lack of fulfilment and a greater sense of sadness than ever before - what the hell is going on?
So I made it my mission to find out.
That's when I began my quest of self-discovery and personal development. I trained as an NLP Practitioner and Master Practitioner and uncovered the power of our minds and how everything we've learned and been conditioned with will be dictating our programmes and how we handle and process our emotions, and the way we see ourselves and the world. And the coolest most powerful discovery is that we can use this to support ourselves and rewire our thoughts and perspectives. I also trained as a personal performance and life coach where I discovered how the way we think can hold us back and limit our thinking and what we deem we can achieve. I trained in hypnotherapy and emotional freedom technique (EFT) where I discovered the power that our body and cells hold and how we can release blocked emotions and use these tools to support our mental health and wellbeing and physical health too.
I trained in these incredible tools and therapies firstly for myself and to support my own mental health and wellbeing and life direction, and I now support clients across the globe with these tools and resources too, via 1:1 coaching, workshops and retreats.
As I reflect on this story and my trip of travel that was the catalyst of my 4 year mental health healing journey and changed the trajectory of my life and career forever, it feels very apt that I'm due to head back to the Australian Sunshine Coast within the week. I'll be heading back to those ocean waves with a mind full of incredible tools, a thriving online coaching business I never dreamed was possible, a trust and calm in myself I've never felt before, and a very, very full heart.
You can find Sophie on:
Instagram