You don’t need to be racked by Anxiety to have Fear ruling your life. You may not be aware of it, but there is an underlying fear every time you fail to do something you know would improve your life. Even those little actions count. Fear keeps us stuck. Fear keeps us from living our potential, and Fear limits the love we can receive. In this 4 part series I’ll use the stories of 4 women to illustrate how we can identify and clear those fears. To protect my clients, the women’s names have been changed, and may have elements of another’s journey integrated to give you a richer experience.
Loss of Control
Anna is one of those amazing super organised, highly effective business women who just get things done. She had achieved all of the personal and business goals she’d set herself to date. She believed she’d be able to have a baby and raise a child with minimal disruption to her busy schedule. Anna confessed she had to shed some girlfriends who simply weren’t coping well, in her eyes, with motherhood. Working to a busy schedule, she had planned her pregnancy, a birth by elective caesarean and a minimum time off work, all coordinated with her husband’s commitments.
Anna was aware from her friends’ experiences how time consuming and disruptive IVF is to a busy life, so was highly motivated to try more natural fertility support options first. She maximised her chances by insisting her husband have a sperm analysis, and join her in clearing heavy metals and toxins out of their bodies, cutting back on alcohol and caffeine and consulting with a naturopath specialising in natural fertility. Anna monitored her cycle she could calculate exactly when she needed to schedule in sex. She was quite thrown when she didn’t quickly conceive in the months she had allocated, and grew increasingly frustrated as the months passed.
One fine day in the forest a monkey came across a jar left behind by some careless picnickers. At the bottom of the jar were some dried fruit. Delighted, the monkey thrust his hand inside and grabbed a handful. He grimaced in pain as he tried to pull his fist full of fruit out of the jar, but clenched, it was too big. He danced around in frustration, waving the jar on the end of his arm in the air. By the time his friend came along, he was slumped on the ground, looking glumly at his fist inside the jar as he thought of all the sweetness he was prevented from tasting. “Let go” suggested his friend. “But I want the fruit so much.” “Let go,” urged the friend. “But I’ve worked hard for this.” “Let go,” came the response. By now the monkey was thirsty as well as hungry, so with a shrug and a sad sigh, he let go of the fruit and removed his hand, rubbed raw from trying to force it out of the jar. “Now,” said the friend, “How else can you get what you want?” A moment later they were both savouring the sweet fruit.
Although Anna was highly successful, she was also highly stressed, always with a feeling that there are never enough hours in the day. She had cut contact with friends with babies and toddlers as they reflected a reality she didn’t want to face. In our work together Anna identified to herself, that she was concerned a baby would impact on her business success, her ability to work long hours and achieve highly. She realised she needed to either de-stress, make space in her life for relaxation and nurturing activities in preparation for a child, or else decide a child really didn’t fit into her life style.
We explored why she wanted to conceive and what it would mean if she did, and also if she didn’t. Anna realised her desire for a child was partly due to the hormonal surge common to women in their late 30s. Mostly it was due to it being on her list of expectations, that is, what she thought others thought she needed to do to lead a full life, even though she felt motherhood was boring and a lesser occupation. Every woman is different, and Anna identified that what she really wanted was to reconnect with her husband, and inject some fun into her life, so that’s what we then focussed on.
Jane, on the other hand, really valued family connection, so in the same situation she chose to reorganise her working week to allow space and de-stress time, and to work on clearing her underlying fears of childbirth. During pregnancy her work priorities changed again, and she implemented the partial exit plan she had designed earlier so she could be the mother she wished she’d had, and still maintain an active interest in her business.
(c) Sue Lester, Growing Content 2010 www.growingcontent.com.au
Leave a Reply