EXERCISE: WHO’S IN MY TRIBE?
On a separate sheet of paper compile a list of the people you speak to most on a weekly basis. For each person ask the following questions:
• Do they ask me about myself?
• Do I trust them?
• Is our friendship/working relationship a two-way street?
• Are they dependable?
• Do they suck or radiate energy?
• Are they control freaks?
• How do you feel when you see their name calling on your phone?
When you tally up if there are more negatives than positives then you know if it is a fair relationship.
BUDDYING UP
A great friend is worth their weight in gold. Consider the people you respect and trust and ask yourself if they might be prepared to help you achieve your goal, and how you can repay them. Do they have something they too want to attempt? Could you check in regularly on each other’s progress, coach one another? In the Special Forces someone always had my back and I always had theirs.
When it comes to finding a buddy for your goal, you need someone who has your back, someone who will be honest with you and tell you straight when you’re bullshitting yourself. This is the person you tell your secret goal to, rather than every person you meet. The more people you tell your intention to, the more diluted the energy required to execute it becomes, and you’ve talked yourself out of it.
CHAPTER 9
KICKING NEGATIVE HABITS
‘Addiction begins in pain and ends in pain.’
– Eckhart Tolle
ADDICTION: SELF-MEDICATING
Canadian psychiatrist Dr Gabor Maté is famous for his pioneering work with addictive behaviour. For 12 years he worked in Downtown East Side, Vancouver, one of North America’s most drug-afflicted areas. ‘In my opinion,’ he says, ‘an addiction is manifested in any behaviour that a person finds temporary pleasure or relief in but suffers negative consequences as a result of and does not give up, or can’t give up, despite those negative consequences.’ The greater the suffering in our youth, adds Maté, the stronger the addiction in later life.
Addiction is a form of self-medication and provides escape from suffering and comfort from alienation. In other words, it’s a pain reliever. The part of the brain that feels physical pain is also the same area that experiences emotional pain. Opiates, the choice of drug addicts, have been used in medicine for over 3,000 years. Marijuana, cocaine, opium (base heroin) and alcohol all possess not only mental but physical pain-relieving qualities. They work in the human brain because they resemble an internal opiate system operated by natural chemicals produced in our body called endorphins. Endorphins regulate the gut, the immune system and provide our brain with pain-relief. They also make possible the experiences of joy, pleasure and reward. The third function of endorphins is love, defined as the attraction which drives two bodies together with an attachment to take care of one another.
Dopamine, another vital chemical produced by the brain, is an incentive motivator, and is released in the seeking phase of hunger, or in the search for a sexual partner. It gives us feelings of happiness and euphoria, the feeling of being alive. Gambling, sex and shopping addictions all produce high dopamine levels.
Twenty-first-century science asserts the brain develops under the impact of its environment. In 2012 The Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University stated: ‘The architecture of the brain is constructed by an ongoing process that begins before birth, continues into adulthood and establishes either a sturdy or fragile foundation for all the health learning and behaviour that follows.’
The most important ingredient in the formation of a healthy-minded adult is the quality of the parent–child relationship they experienced at a very young age. Consistent parenting, where the mother and father are responsive, happy, non-stressed, approachable and available in their care, produces the most balanced people. These conditions have to be present in the child’s environment in order for their facets of self-regulation, stress regulation and emotional equilibrium to function normally as an adult. And if the right conditions aren’t met? Brain scans of addicts have demonstrated that the impulse regulator, which controls our desires, is not working properly because something that happened in our environment when we were children stalled its development.
In the West, doctors ask, ‘What’s wrong with you?’, when they should really be asking, ‘What happened to you?’ Instead of treating the symptoms, and separating the body from the mind, they should be looking at the cause. In other words, what happens to people emotionally affects their physiology. Adverse events experienced as kids can induce trauma (which comes from the ancient Greek word for wound) in later life, and left untreated, it will keep coming to the surface like a poisonous abscess. To understand our present dysfunction, it is our earlier self that we must return to.
UNDERSTANDING CHILDHOOD TRAUMA
My dad was a workhorse, fucking hell how he worked. We had a massive house with two fires, and my brother and I were constantly chopping wood to sustain them. This was between cleaning brass tables, taking the dogs out, and lowering down a Flymo lawnmower on a rope to cut the steep grass banks around the house; then cycling six miles to my grandad’s house where we had to mow his orchards and his lawn . . . jobs, jobs and more jobs. Friends even stopped calling in on me at home for fear they would be put to work. I thank my father for the discipline it instilled in me and the value of hard work, but really, it was just too much. As a kid you should have periods where you can just do your own thing. So, I rebelled against him, and when he left it was the best news in the world.
I can’t remember much else about my childhood, the good times growing up with my brothers and sisters, it’s clouded by too many memories of pain. The freakish trauma I experienced as a ten-year-old being attacked by a chimp is undoubtedly the Everest of my misadventures, but even before that I was impressively accident-prone. Every time we went on holiday my parents were nervous with anticipation that something bad would happen to me, because every year on holiday (with metronomic consistency) something did happen! I’d end up in some kind of bizarrely unlikely pickle, be it my shins being embedded with glass from the lemonade bottles I dropped in a French super-market, to the hook episode when we holidayed in Lyme Regis and were line-fishing off the pier – I cast the line, and the hook, true to form, sunk itself deep into my leg. I might also mention that my chimp wounds turned gangrenous while on holiday, and I almost lost my arm.
The bottle, the chimp, the hook. It was almost like a pattern, a negative loop of accidents I seemed to be stuck in, or perhaps inviting? Even at home in Blighty, I was twice run over by cars, and twice in later life living in Australia. But back to the incident with the chimp; it seemed like it was the eye of the storm around whose gravitational pull other negative situations were attracted one after the other. BC (before chimp) I’d always been a little mischievous, that was just me, but AC (after chimp) I started getting into trouble with the police to the point they knew me by name. It was as if I’d inherited some of its feral genes.
William Wordsworth said ‘the child is father to the man’, and that observation is poignantly true, at least in my case, for as we’ve seen with the work of Dr Gabor Maté, as a kid you are an experience sponge. A massive percentage of your growth is based on those formative years up to the age of ten. It was also during this time I experienced the polar opposites of wealth and hardship. After my dad left, almost overnight we went from a wealthy family to a struggling family. From having everything we needed – nice clothes, cool toys, great Christmases – to having nothing. All around me, the household conversations went from abundance, which we had taken for granted, to lack. These sorry undertones of loss carried on into adulthood, for the issues I experienced with my finances – no matter how much I earned I never had enough – hark back to the sudden lack I experienced as a child.
Violent trauma to the skin results in scar tissue growing over th
e wound. Unlike normal skin it is not flexible but rigid and masks feeling. Something similar happens with a deep trauma to the emotional self. Both lead to a hardening and loss of feeling. The essence of trauma is disconnection from the self, something I’ve experienced throughout my life as an addict, trying to heal a wound I couldn’t see or touch with the aid of alcohol or drugs.
If you have the privilege of being a parent, it’s so important to realise that the way you act around your kids, especially in their first ten years, will forge the later mindsets that govern how they live their lives. When I left my wife, I did so with good reason: we weren’t right for each other and no matter what I might have tried, this harsh fact was never going to change. Square peg in a round hole. I was unhappy, restless and we brought out the worst in each other. It was clearly not the right environment in which to bring up my son, Luke. Many parents remain in this half-life for the benefit of their children but staying in such a comfort zone is detrimental to everybody involved. Pretending everything is okay when your kids can see right through the deceit creates issues for them later around commitment and love.
Maté believes if we are to be content as humans, we can no longer remain programmed by our childhood trauma, as prisoners of our past, dictated to by experience; we must make a conscious choice to live in the present. As long as you’re aware of what happened to you and the impact it’s had on you, you can begin to reprogram your response to it. It’s about understanding yourself.
I’m 48 years of age as I write this book, and consider myself a happy person, but I’m lucky, in so far as I possess a brute determination and natural optimism that has outgrown much of my negative programming from those early years and my troubled teens, but to say that I’m healed completely of them would be a huge over-statement. I know I still have unfinished business with that near 40-year-old trauma of blood, flesh and teeth, and only one of us will win. But forgive me, I’m getting a little ahead of myself.
SOCIALISATION
We come into the world as creative, innocent human beings, born to imagine and produce amazing things. Sadly, this potential is short-lived, as we are swiftly socialised (or brainwashed) not only by the schooling system, but by our parents too. Each influences our thinking and behaviour away from our natural inclination towards joy to that of fear. We learn to moderate ourselves with lack rather than abundance, creating false ceilings for our ambitions, and limiting our right to be who we want to be.
Don’t misunderstand me, both influences come from a place of good intention (usually). Maybe your parents raised you to worry about money, perhaps they grew up without much money themselves; maybe your parents pushed you towards a career rather than supported you in your decision to follow your passion. For people who grew up during the war, who came through the terror of nightly air raids, and lived during the post-war years of austerity and rationing, it’s not surprising that they passed on their anxieties regarding money to their children, and through them their grandchildren with phrases like ‘money doesn’t grow on trees’.
Back in the Blitz, people were brought together by a common purpose to survive, to stick together, and during those harsh times found a sense of community. But I feel that we’ve lost that unity because everyone has become so competitive, so in their own silos, trying to ‘keep up with the Joneses’. People won’t talk genuinely to each other because they’re scared of showing any sign of weakness or lack of wealth. They’re buying things they can’t afford, and it’s all about the image. People are living enslaved in that. Their only goal in life is to look like they’re doing well regardless of whether they are or not. In fact, they happily sacrifice their feelings over the visual and material representation.
I was very much the same as everyone else. We go through life and buy what we’re supposed to, we follow as told. We’re not shepherds, we’re sheep. We’re told: ‘You must have achieved this by the time you’re 25’; ‘You must have a mortgage and a settled job to be socially respectable’; ‘You must have kids’. And for most they get to a point where they can then simply plateau, looking to the left and right and say, ‘Yep this will do, this is now safe,’ and commence their maintenance programme to sustain the lifestyle they have created, losing any enthusiasm to improve and grow beyond that point. Meanwhile, their health and happiness declines!
I think these prescriptive destinies we’re allotted are a trap to keep us locked in the system, in society. I too fell into that. I got married, bought a house, had a child. I lived in a Barrett home on an estate, and the only distinction between the identical houses, was the size and make of the cars parked outside. It was mundane, monotone and utterly limiting. I was working in a job as a soldier that paid me barely anything. Ultimately, that’s why I left the Forces, that’s why a lot of us left. But I didn’t help my situation with the amount of financial pressure I put on myself. I never seemed to have enough money. And as I’ve said, it stems back to my childhood, that severe lack, and my obsessive fear of not having enough.
We and we alone have the power to renounce the patterns of socialised ‘herd’ thinking and to start drawing on the wisdom of our inner self which has no boundaries to what it can do.
CHAPTER 10
DEMON DAYS
THE BANSHEE CALLS
My brother and I had been living in separate countries for 18 years by the time I decided to return to England to set up Break-Point. Excited at the prospect of seeing my family, I phoned my brother from Australia. ‘Mate, I’m coming home for good.’
‘That’s amazing!’ he said. ‘I’m so happy to hear it. However, I’m leaving.’
‘What?’
‘Yeah, I’ve got a job in Malaysia, and I leave just after you arrive.’
Of course, I was gutted, but the silver lining here was that because of him leaving, my mum was moving from her house in Cornwall to look after his home, which left her cottage empty. Returning with empty pockets, a house to stay in pretty much rentfree was a massive help. Here, I could finally get myself focused on Break-Point, and for a limited amount of time would not be ghosted by the need to keep working constantly. Unbeknown to me, the Universe was laying the foundations for me before I even knew what I was going to do.
Mum’s place was a cute little house in Hayle, my outgoings were minimal, and I was doing the odd bit of work here and there to keep afloat. I began to plan my own personal bootcamp in 2014, and top of the priority list was getting my drinking under control. Deep down, if I’m honest, I didn’t think for a moment I could ever really totally stop. My relationship with booze was like an illicit affair with a beautiful but dangerous woman that leaves you bleeding but still enraptured, and despite the fact you know she’s a banshee and will suck the life from you then move onto her next victim, you keep leaving the back door open for her. I was fighting the constant tension of not having booze in the house but wanting it terribly, dreaming of chasing the weekend again and kicking back with her on the sofa. When I went cold turkey, the banshee sent the demons chattering around my bed in the dark, a night of cold sweats, ghosts and insomnia. In order to delay the latter, those one-day sessions would turn into three-day binges, followed by another three days’ recovery; I was losing so much time.
HUMP DAY
‘Hump day’. I hate the word. What’s hump day? It’s Wednesday. People call it this because once you get over the midweek hump you’re well on your way to the weekend. So many are living their lives for Friday – Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are redundant, just blocks of time to get through till fantastic Friday.
If you only live for the weekend, something is missing, and you deserve more. Every day for me is a blessing. To me it’s not Wednesday or Thursday, it’s another day full of opportunity. But when I first got to Cornwall and was preparing for the bootcamp, I too was a hump-day believer. And by way of reward for reaching the weekend, I put poison into my body, polluting all the good work I’d done. It was as if I was a child and needed a present.
Time kil
ls even more dreams than doubt. It paves the way for the justification of failure. As humans we’re shortcut-focused and will do anything to reduce the amount of time and effort it takes to do something, not bother doing it properly and fail quickly or simply not even try at all. Admittedly, we all need to live with time because everything in the modern world is based around the clock, but we should be conscious of it rather than being its slave. The more you can remove yourself from it the better. You might think most of life’s surprises are over and one day is the same as the next but this isn’t so. You can find new things all the time, you just have to design your life in such a way that there is sufficient time to notice them. Most of us are moving too quickly to realise this. When you’re passive to time, when you’re not in control of alcohol, relationships, finances, health, you are living by the clock. Instead, you need to be the commander of all those things, as if any one of them has the upper hand with you, you become their gimp.
I knew that if I was to become Battle Ready and actualise my dream of creating my company, then I needed to get ‘dry’ first. I didn’t say to myself, ‘I’m going to give up for life,’ but like the 12 Steps programme followed by members of Alcoholics Anonymous, I would conduct my abstinence on a day-by-day basis. I said to myself, ‘I’m going to give up drinking for eight weeks.’ It seemed a bearable, achievable period of time.
The simple reason for my wanting to give up was it was affecting my clarity of judgement, productivity and creativity. I knew I’d achieve so much more when my mind wasn’t diluted with alcohol. I’d experienced periods of such intense clarity that I understood how powerful the mind could be, and its need for positive intent and visualisation to help it flourish. If I clouded this, I wasn’t going to deliver the dreams I was focused on achieving, for even in its lowest form, booze was affecting my mental stability and focus. I was also so very conscious how negative booze made me feel in the long term. It was typically ‘Short-term comfort for long-term pain’, which was the opposite of what I was looking for.
Battle Ready Page 11
