That WAS the plan! (PART 1)

Approximate reading time: 20 min

Just warning you, you might need to make some tea….this is gonna be a long one:-)

Quite a lot has gone on these last two years so I thought I might do a little catch-up with all that I have been doing with my time. I mentioned in my “The Stars are aligning post” post how I had initially move back to London because I had wanted to study a course that I had been interested in. The price tag of this course, was roughly about £9000. As much as I loved being back in South Africa I knew that apart from selling a kidney there was no way in hell I would ever be able to afford to pay that amount while it living off my self-employed teacher’s salary.

(Hell, I hadn’t been able to afford a holiday in 8 years!)

So London beckoned!

I decided to move back to London for a year or two, complete the course and then move back home to Cape Town when I was qualified and start my life with renewed vigour and purpose!

This illusive course that I was going to study was called Rapid Transformational Therapy created by hypnotherapist, Marisa Peer. She was someone that I had been watching, for about a year or so, on youtube and it is fair to say I had become mildly transfixed by her.

Her confidence, her calmness, her ability to not take anyone or anything personally.

Marisa Peer simply oozes “Ive-got-things-sorted!”

I wanted to BE HER!

(Truly)

(Ps I wrote a bit about her in my 2019 ‘Speeddating‘ Post)

Marisa teaches you how to use hypnotherapy to move clients forward and make huge mental shifts in their lives, in only one or two sessions.

By that time in my life I had already spent about 8 years in therapy and I was

You know those people that spew out stories like :

“Oh my life was an absolute mess and then I finally started going to therapy and 3 months later I met my husband AAAAAND now we are expecting our first child!”

(Well, I want to shoot people like that!)

While I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I was getting so much from my therapy, it just wasnt working fast enough!

At the (THEN ancient) age of 42, the absolute pinnacle-of -proof (In my mind) that my therapy WAS indeed working was me finally getting over my attachment issues

and bloody-well getting

attached!

So with elated exuberance, I sucked up all the success stories of people who had experienced RRT! How their lives had completely changed and how they were now finally living the dream.

To give you an idea, here are just a few reviews that I have found.

RRT help has been life-changing for me. Since childhood, I had struggled with major anxiety and no self-esteem. After therapy, the change was instant, unbelievable.

“In less than two hours with my RRT therapist, I was able to significantly undo a phobia about public speaking at work that was holding me back from promotion. I now look forward and actually enjoy presentations which I used to dread”.

“Having struggled with my weight since my teens, never being able to stick to any diet and failing over and over again. My whole life was a failure. My RRT therapist has made me realise that the problem wasn’t anything to do with food but all to do with what I believed about myself because of bullying and other past issues. I am now a size 12 which is what I never believed I could be”.

I wanted to be able to help people like that!

I wanted LIFE-CHANGING!

I wanted my miracle!

(PS Of course the added bonus was that Rapid transformational therapists charge anything from £250 – £1000 an hour and supposably have waiting lists a mile long….because let’s face it, we ALL dream of a quick fix! )

I qualified as a life coach in 2010 and still had not one single paying client!

My own inner turmoil meant that I so often just felt frozen and stuck!

I continually felt like I somehow needed to have the answers to all these questions people had about their lives and that I needed to know how to fix them.

Neurotic Angel verberated in my head:

“You know NOTHING!

You still can’t even fix yourself!”

Rapid Transformational therapy was going to be that ‘thing’ that would finally “FIX’ me.

Rapid Transformational therapy was going to save me from myself and

And then

Finally, I would be

and

I was going to save OTHERS!!!

So I spent my first two years in London saving diligently for my great transformation!

2019 was a particularly AWESOME YEAR for me.

I was going out every weekend!

I was meeting loads of new people!

I was BLOGGING regularly!

I was confident, happy and extroverted !!! (All without my old friend’s alcohol and cigarettes!)

I even stopped seeing my therapist during this year …… Whohooooooooo!!!!!!!!

Hell I even wrote an epic blog trilogy called “Creating the love of your life” about how I finally felt like I had conguered my ‘self-love’ demons. (Sigh the things we do when when we are young!;-)

My life was finally coming together!

Because I had a plan!

Yes ,the RRT was a lot of money, but

was worth it!

Hello, 2020!!

And that was pretty much when the wheels fell off, for me and the rest of the world!

I was back seeing my therapist every week, on anti-depressants, exhausted from manic, depressing dreams and struggling with a tidal wave of anxiety and self-doubt. I adored children but very much

~~disliked……~~

~~hat~~ed…..

the school system.

Desperate to somehow extract myself from it I attempted to start online teaching, (I mean I had completed a TEFL course for exactly that purpose in 2019- I wrote about this in my “Pass the Novocaine” post)

So NOW it was now time!

I applied to 19 different online teaching agencies, and officially joined 6 of them.

They all loved my resume and assured me that there was LOADS of work out there!

LOADS!!!!!

….I got not ONE job from any of them!

During this time I did manage to get one or two online teaching children which were mostly from referrals…but it certainly wasnt enough to make a new full-time career out of.

Neurotic Angel had a field day with me:

“There is a whole world of successful online teachers out there… what’s wrong with you?”

I am proud to say I managed to ignore her (most of the time) because I simply took it as a sign from the universe! 🙂

My teaching days needed to end!

. Now I was simply biding my time before I become a bonified RRT therapist…….

My time was coming!

I had faith!

Luckily I have a wise Aunt who suggested that before I actually spend £9000 paying for a course, perhaps I should actually try having the hypnotherapy myself.

I will admit I was annoyed at her even suggesting that!

Her immense lack of faith in MY DREAM was profoundly irritating!

But I’ll admit, a wiser part of me, thought that

just maybe she had a good point!

So I relented.

I found an RRT therapist and I was all ready to PROVE my Aunts cynicism WRONG!!!!

Before I go on perhaps I need to outline the basics of how Rapid Transformational Therapy works. The essential idea is that we all hold onto old negative subconscious beliefs that we somehow picked up in childhood. Often these beliefs were created to simply protect us as children, but as we grow older they actually start to hinder us and hold us back. In an RRT session clients are taken back through hypnosis to certain points in their childhood where these beliefs were first created. Often it’s the simple recognition of how a belief came about and what purpose it served that frees the client from the shackles of that particular belief. The success stories online are bountiful….

I personally don’t have very many memories of my own childhood, so I was intrigued to find out more.

To unearth those memories that caused all this shit and inner turmoil!

(They had to be there somewhere!)

And then perhaps…I would be FREE to be the best me that I could possibly be!!!!

DISCLAIMER: The RRT therapist that I worked with was truly amazing. She was calm, centred, caring and compassionate. To this day she still pops in every now and then to see how I am doing, often offering free little sessions of new things that she is trying.

She was and is an angel and my upcoming review has nothing to do with her.

Let’s start with an interesting fact, that I did not know!

David Spiegel, MD, a professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine, headed up a research study on what happens to the brain during hypnotherapy. According to his research findings he estimates that about 25 per cent of the patients he sees cannot be hypnotized. He adds that the ability to be hypnotized is not linked with any specific personality trait rather it has got more to do with a person’s cognitive style, and how their brain works. ¹

Yep, and apparently, as luck would have it, I would fall neatly into that 25% category.

#Thank you, Universe!

I found myself feeling slightly frustrated and anxious because it just wasnt working….

(Incidentally, I had also had a hypnotherapy session in 2008 to help me quit smoking which also felt like I was lying there trying to pretend it WAS working!)

(Ps I stopped smoking in 2019…so maybe it just needed 11 years to marinade?)

We were trying to go back to my childhood, and all I kept hitting was a blank.

I was fully conscious and anxious as hell.

Neurotic Angel: “NOOOOOOO You are paying £250 a pop for this!

You can’t FAIL at RRT!“

Eventually, I just ended up speaking about two memories that came to mind. These were memories that I had already unearthed a while back when I had been studying to become a life coach…

(I know it was cheating!! But I had to say something!!!!!)

I think it’s worth noting that most of my memories from my childhood involve my mum, who seemed to me, to always be angry.

Anna (The domestic that worked for us for about 20 years) once told me the story of how my granny (My mum’s mother) had been visiting us and we were all sitting in the lounge laughing and playing. My brothers were 5 and 4 years old and I was a baby. My mum had come home and in two minutes flat she was shouting about something and all three of us were crying.

Anna said my granny, who was the sweetest, gentlest woman I ever knew, just sat there looking so incredibly sad, shaking her head and said

“I just don’t understand why she is always shouting at them.”

My inner child feels the need to add, that this is by no means a judgement of my mother who loved and adored me, despite all her own issues. I have spent a lot of time over these two years really looking back at my own mother’s life and childhood trying to figure out and understand where/ how her deep wound manifested. She too had little child parts that were hurt and unseen which undoubtedly lead to all her own inner rage. I have subsequently found myself slowly starting to cultivate forgiveness and compassion for her as I have come to appreciate and understand that her rage was never personal.

I have also learned to have compassion for myself as a small child growing up with this anger

because for my ‘little-girl-self‘ it felt very personal.

Memory 1:

I was 4 or 5 years old and it was my birthday party. Our birthday parties were always extravagant detailed affairs. My mother was a wonderful hostess and always lavished a lot of love and care designing and making our personally tailored birthday cakes each year.

It was late in the afternoon I remember I started to have a meltdown……I can’t quite remember why. But I think it might have been because we were playing a party game that I didn’t want to play or because another child wanted to play with a gift I had been given.

(See if the bloody hypnotherapy had worked properly I could have given you FACTS!) Nevertheless….all I remember was my mother pulling me to the side of the garden, out of sight of everyone else, and shouting at me for being so selfish and ruining everybody else’s fun. She had put so much effort into my birthday and she was mortified by my behaviour.

Memory 2:

I was roughly 4/5 again as I remember I was in nursery school at the time. I had come home and decided it would be a good idea to draw with chalk all over the slasto paving outside our house. I had simply done so because that was what we had been doing the whole day at school. Anna who had been at home looking after me at the time didn’t seem to mind as everyone knows chalk washes off in the rain. No biggy! But my mum came home and she was furious. Again all I remember was her screaming at me, screaming at Anna and then phoning the school to yell at my teachers.

In both incidences all I remembered feeling was this utter shame and humiliation. Like I was somehow innately bad or defective and that no matter how hard I tried I just couldn’t get things right. I also felt this overwhelming sense guilt because my ‘bad behaviour’ had resulted in other people getting into trouble as well.

It felt to me like no matter, what I did my mother always seemed angry. And in my little ‘child-world’ (where everything still revolves around you) – I felt like it was my fault.

So I am recalling these incidences to my RRT therapist almost out of a state of resignation….

(we needed ‘memories’ to work on after all…)

But what I didn’t expect was the torrential sobbing that came with them.

I think that was the first day I really and truly connected to that angry, scared, lost little inner child part who just wanted to feel loved by her mother, without the constant rage.

Who needed so desperately not to be shamed for having a meltdown at her birthday party …who perhaps needed a little compassion and understanding that maybe at that point in time she was simply overtired and overstimulated? As a highly sensitive person (Something that I will write more about at a later date) I have begun to realise how I have a threshold of a couple of hours of energy and connection with other people. I can be extroverted, sociable and chatty and loads of fun…..but then I hit a wall, I feel overstimulated, overwhelmed and I just need to be by myself.

I am the perfect example of an omnivert!

My RRT therapist did such an amazing job at simply staying with this hurt little child part. She didn’t minimise her pain or criticise her for still holding onto all this ‘stuff’ from years ago.

She held the space open and didn’t rush her through the tears.

She helped me understand where this belief had started that I am never enough. As a young child mums, anger and disappointment in her own life always felt like my fault….and nothing I could ever do would heal her of it. As a child, I felt completely powerless to bring about that change I so desperately needed to feel safe in this world.

Alas, I wasnt a superhero – Just a little girl!

I’m not going to deny that after I finished my 2 RRT sessions I definitely did notice a shift in me. It wasnt as EARTH-shattering as I had hoped, but it almost felt like more space had opened up for those inner child parts to simply be acknowledged and seen. I had more compassion for myself, and I was less judgemental and harsh when the wheels would fall off! Although in all honesty, I had spent the previous couple of months, (Before the RRT) painting and writing about all my inner parts…..so I wasnt quite sure I could give RRT all the credit!

But as always I noticed myself wanting MORE and feeling frustrated. Yes, I was kinder to myself……but those critical parts were still there and continued to make themselves known on a regular basis.

Why weren’t they gone?

I was still struggling with my anxiety.

Why wasn’t THAT gone?

I also started to find myself feeling somewhat dissolution with the whole Rapid transformational Therapy thing!

I certainly couldn’t write a glowing review like the above-mentioned ones…..

Some of my parts worried :

“Is it just me?”

“Did I just fail to get it somehow?”

“Am I just one of those eternally stuck people that will NEVER heal properly?”

But I found that other parts of me starting to feel a little pissed off, frustrated and angry….

I found myself starting to really question this whole idea of ‘quick fixes’ ….. and the dangers of ANY therapist or therapy claiming to be able to provide just that for everybody.

As I continued to watch Marisa Peers videos I felt bombarded by titles like:

“You Can Silence Your Inner Critic”

“How You Can Become BULLETPROOF”

“3 Simple Steps To Remove Your Negative Thoughts!”

“DO THIS To Control Your MIND In MINUTES (BrainWash Yourself For SUCCESS)

(Gees, I felt irritated!)

I also found it interesting that as hard as I looked all I could find online was a wealth of glowing testimonies and not a single skeptic or nay-sayer who had actually experienced the therapy.

“Surely I couldn’t be the ONLY person in the world entire world that didn’t get her rather expensively paid for transformation? “

In my hunt for fellow ‘RRT failures,’ (Which was futile!) I read somewhere that Marisa has an army of digital marketers that make sure only the ‘positive stories’ see the light of day. I also read that if you do decide to study with her you need to sign a waiver promising not to write anything negative about RRT.

PLEASE NOTE: I have nooooo idea where I read this….Mmmmm…..I think maybe on a Reddit comment??

Ummmmm…..yes admittedly not the most reliable source of information.

Were I witness in a court of law my argument would undoubtedly be shot down with

“THATS HEARSAY! GOODBYE!!”

But I think the fact that there is nooooooooooo criticism out there speaks volumes in itself.

So I rest my case.

I’m a writer, I love thinking critically, I love researching things and gathering all sides of an argument, the entire plethora of information that could possibly be out there and then making a fully informed, unbiased opinion-

A huge part of me revolted at the idea of anyone else dictating what I could and couldn’t write about.

I mean Marisa does wonderful videos on how to deal with negative people and yet somehow her company’s way of dealing with them is simply to forbid, block and report anything that’s not positive?

Isn’t that um….. a little bit hypocritical?

Most of us can’t afford to hire the best digital PR teams in the world to block all those critics and nasty little trolls out there…..we somehow just have to suck up our confidence and pray that they don’t come after us with their pitchforks!

(I felt extremely annoyed.)

I also found myself slowly starting to rebel against this whole image that Marisa puts forward of the most perfectly put-together human being EVER.

Seriously no one is that put together, that impenetrable, that perfect.

Like does she have any flaws?

I wanted to see them…..

I wanted to hear how she too struggles at times….

that sometimes life got her down!

This unattainable perfection was beginning to bug me no end……AND don’t even get me started on her views on talk therapy.

As someone who has benefited tremendously from the longevity of my own therapeutic relationship, I felt her comments on how people didn’t need to spend years in therapy to be dangerous and dismissive. We don’t live in a one-size-fits-all world so what is the point of ‘ejecting’ other types of healing as essentially a waste of time?

Yes, I will not deny that had I forgone therapy all those years ago then I might just have paid off (half) of my very own (second-hand) Audi A3 by now!

***OOOOOOh she would have been beautiful!***

But that quite simply wasnt the choice that I made.

That wasnt the investment I made.

I chose therapy.

I chose to spend the money and the time working on myself through a therapeutic relationship. I love knowing that I have that safe space to explore my feelings and that I am encouraged to look at my triggers rather than simply just react to them all the time.

Although slow and winding at times….

No therapy doesn’t work for everyone and there are millions of people who have horrendous experiences with very bad, sometimes toxic therapists.

I get that!

But please don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater!

Now in just case, you might be thinking that I was starting to take all this a little bit toooooo personally-

DAM RIGHT!

IT WAS PERSONAL!!!!

What Marisa has done with her life and her career is amazing and awe-inspiring.

I genuinely believe that RRT has helped and provided relief for thousands/millions of people.

I just didn’t want to follow her path to success anymore.

How could I authentically advocate for a ‘quick fix’ when my journey towards healing has been anything but quick?

My path to healing has been like peeling an onion, one layer at a time, with a shit load of tears thrown in the mix.

It hit me with earth-shattering clarity that I was never going to be able to be like Marisa Peer (Or any of the other people I had idolised and compared myself to in the last 45 years!)

What a relief!

Finally,

Flaws and all.

Travelling on my own timeline

Letting go of this constant obsessing about where I was going to end up

and what time I was going to get there!!

The final nail in my ‘RRT-dream-coffin’ came when I scheduled a call with someone on her team to discuss starting my studies. (By then I was having very serious doubts but I still clung to a childlike hope that they could be relieved!!!) I wanted to address my concerns about promising a ‘quick fix’ to people, especially those with attachment issues who genuinely needed the ‘healthy relationship/container’ provided by a good long-term therapist.

And what about those people who, like me, might struggle to be hypnotised…..?

I had soooooooooo many questions.

The call lasted less than 4 minutes with a young, snooty provider taking offence to my line of questioning and basically telling me that there are millions of people that this therapy works for and I should go have a look at all the evidence online.

End of discussion

End of story.

End of my RRT Dream!