Becoming My Authentic Self

Becoming My Authentic Self - Healing Myself Finally

2021 was my year for healing and I didn’t realise how deep that journey would go. I had been toying with the idea of going on an ayahuasca retreat but I needed a trigger for the medicine to call me. After a breakup of a minor relationship, I realised the time was now to begin this journey and so off I went to Spain to experience my first ayahuasca experience. As the medicine began to take effect, I was dreaming at how much it can help others, help those in the LGBTQ+ community, help troubled friends or family and something many others could benefit from. The critical event came when the participant to my right prodded me and said, “The medicine told me to tell you to focus on yourself and not others'. I was gobsmacked by this statement, and I just lay there startled until I let go and let the medicine get to work.

The said critical event led me to have a new perspective on how I see myself and how others see me. The big question being is why I have a huge desire to help others yet avoid anything to do with my own healing. Sure, I have a therapy session each week and practise many methods of self-care but am I living inauthentically by not digging deep into my own trauma and personal issues. I have spent my life helping others, from working as a nutritionist and also a drug addiction counsellor so it is something that comes to me naturally but do I also use these skills in a pathological way to protect myself from feeling the hurt from the past. What is it about helping others perform this task so well? The interesting thing is that I am not oblivious to my own issues, more perhaps I had them in a room of control where I could manage them nicely. This enabled topics like anger and forgiveness, rejection, humiliation, self-love, shame to simmer away nicely without ever boiling over and expressing emotion.

So how did I let myself go a bit, think independently and start to live authentically, effectively harnessing self-authorship (Love & Guthrie, 1999). I had to admit I was broken and needed help. Controlling everything was a way to feel safe and secure to not get hurt in the past and fixing others was a hybrid of being accepted and masking my own pain and not having to be vulnerable. Ultimately this behaviour wore me down and the cracks started showing, hence turning to psychedelics and therapy. But also lead to unhealthy numbing behaviours because the thought of being out of control was too much and there is only so much you could tout “everything is fine”.I protected myself with layers of defence, I couldn't even show the slightest bit of vulnerability in fear of losing control. But all this became unhealthy, I lost my way a bit, I was unhappy, I was engaging in practices I didn't want to do, all whilst pretending everything was fine. I had my borders of control and thought I was managing well but obviously not.

As I began the journey to a more authentic self, I became interested in the science behind psychedelics and instantly knew they were the missing piece to becoming a more authentic person and practitioner. When I was originally suggested the idea of a retreat with plant medicine, I said “are you crazy? I’m worried I’ll cry''. And then I stopped myself there.

After initially being startled by a stranger telling me to focus on myself, I spent the remaining ceremony sobbing my heart out. For some reason, I allowed myself to let go, let go and see what it was like to be vulnerable. I felt huge relief and it stayed with me.

Little by little, I started to let go of the things I didn't need to control. It was actually part of the process of learning to love myself, I didn't need to control so much because I faced the demons inside head on. Now, I'm not saying psychedelics are everything, they’re not for everyone and of course illegal in many countries but they were a tool for me to release stored trauma from all the hurt. I did them in a legal and supervised environment where I felt safe. And I learnt from the experience and am still learning, especially as a possible line of first person enquiry (Marshall, 2004)

Letting go of control was liberating for me, it is beautiful. It’s looking back in the past at the decisions you have made and realising it's unfair to keep punishing yourself for them. I wasn’t equipped with the operating system I have now back in the past and made the decisions in the past for a reason, based on how I felt at the time. As I have evolved, I have learnt and now the person who you are now would do some things differently, or perhaps you are the person now based on the decisions you made and what you went through. Life cannot be controlled 100%, well a life that is fulfilling and content.

From becoming a more authentic self, I embrace imperfections in myself, but this has also enhanced the way I work with clients. I feel now I have new tools in my belt, a lot more questioning and harbour new insights on the way I work with individuals, but not forgetting to continually work on myself in order to authentically help others, essentially helping to develop my inner coach on the road to personal mastery (Sutton & Robina, 2008, p.12).

The interesting thread in this portfolio is that as I reflect, I feel anger that in the moments of critical incidents, I was unable to reflect in action but more realising as Torbert (2004, p.2) states “action inquiry is not a set of prescriptions for behaviour that, when followed, invariably manipulate situations as we initially wish and yield the success we dreamed of. Action inquiry is not a process that can be followed in an imitative, mechanical way, learning a few ideas and imagining that parroting them back to others occasionally means we are doing action inquiry. Action inquiry is a way of learning anew, in the vividness of each moment, how best to act now. The source of both its difficulty and potential is that action inquiry requires making ourselves, not just others, vulnerable to inquiry and to transformation.”

Takeaways 

A rare opportunity to engage in an ayahuasca ceremony led to the camera turning on myself to let go and start living my life more authentically. This means embracing the past trauma and imperfections which are essential to enhance my professional career and the way I work with clients. Psychedelics are a device to access areas of my thinking and reflection which I didn’t think were possible. They enable me to look at myself and the world with a different lens to reflect in a different way. Together with integration such as psychotherapy, they help to forge a unique transdisciplinary practice as the work both changes myself as a person as well as myself as a professional. 

Key Themes: Authenticity, Self-Healing, Letting Go, Psychedelics