What I learnt from a mental breakdown

Disclaimer: All opinions are my own.

In March earlier this year, following the completion of my company's latest funding round, I suffered a debilitating mental breakdown which resulted in several trips to A&E and a trauma therapist. However, there is a saying that "a breakdown can be a breakthrough".

I can't really emphasise this enough: fundraising is NOT good for your health. It is all or nothing, and every entrepreneur is very conscious of this.

Unfortunately for me, I was not only was dealing with the stress of fundraising and insomnia. Little did I know that I was also carrying the post-traumatic stress of growing up in a chaotic home environment and of the physical, intellectual, emotional, sexual and spiritual abuse throughout my childhood.

Through recovery, I learnt some valuable lessons:

Lesson #1: Self-help doesn’t work

“Stop seeking”, I remember Chris John telling me. Chris is one of Europe's leading trauma therapists who has trained extensively with Pia Mellody of The Meadows rehabilitation centre (and author of "Facing Codependence" and "Facing Love Addiction").

Before I started seeing Chris, I was a self-help addict, and I always thought that if I read enough self-help books, I could heal my wounds. After going over my history, he pointed out that I had experienced lots of trauma growing up. What?

Trauma isn’t always caused by cataclysmic events such as war and earthquakes. A parent hitting you or a teacher shaming you in front of the class is felt very intensely as a child, and it traumatises us. These early frightful experiences get stored in the oldest part of the brain, the "Reptilian Brain”, which doesn’t respond to logic. It can, however, respond to feeling. As Chris says, when it comes to trauma: “feel with it, don’t deal with it”.

.... > Continue reading article on nickhatter.com