Podcast with stories from strong survivors by Amanda Haigh
Heal with the Reel is a podcast that give you tips, strategies and tools to live your best life after trauma with a particular focus on domestic and narcissistic abuse which is where my passion lies. My transformational journey began during the time I wrote my book ‘Fix your Future’ which is a memoir of my life journey with a self-help section of all the tools that I personally used.
Fix your Future: Live your best life: Amazon.co.uk: Haigh, Ms Amanda: 9798540919586: Books
So, I’m really, really excited today. I have my cousin, Sharon Glasswell, all the way from Australia as a guest today, she’s an NLP coach. The reason I do the podcast ‘Heal with the Reel’ is because I support women to find their confidence and strength again, especially after abuse. I support women that go through domestic abuse to really find themselves again because I know from my past experience, how hard it was to me, so Heal with the Reel is really about ways that we can heal ourselves and move forward in life from past trauma.
Yeah, so over to you Sharon do you want to introduce yourself?
Okay, so yeah, how exciting is it to be on a podcast with your cousin. It’s amazing, we lost touch for a long long time. And it wasn’t until, thankfully, for Facebook that we kind of touched base again. And I was really surprised to see that you were doing this kind of work because I don’t know anything about what happened to you. So, it’s really funny after we finally caught up to find out our lives have been kind of going in parallel. It’s bizarre, isn’t it? Really.
And I love it that we had that conversation about how we’ve got our little fears and you know, the little challenges that are blocking us from being the best we can be. We have the same fears, so I said isn’t that funny? That’s all down to epigenetics. Someday one of our great grandparents somewhere, obviously, something happened, and they were you know, scared to take that leap of faith who knows?
But as you said, I’m an NLP trainer and a coach and I don’t specialise. In women, but it’s really funny that most of my clients are women. I find that most of the people that come to see me are in their mid-kind of 30s. They’ve had kids and the world is different to the way it was when we were very young. Families and dynamics have changed. People are living all over the world. So, we don’t have that family support that we used to do. And, people often get to a certain age, and they think where’s my support system. Oh, they’ve all left, you know.
So, I started working with women and I found that most of the problems with women were that they kind of have been putting all their dramas and all their traumas from the years and Mandy, you’ll understand this. It all goes into a big bag. And at one point, you know, the bag overflows, it’s just there’s too much in there. And it’s time to do the housekeeping and you know, you look at this bag and you go, I’m not going in, that’s from too long ago and it’s too hard.
But what I found, this is really interesting, with a lot of people is when you actually do open that bag, and you tip all the contents out on the floor, and you start sifting through it often the the seed the root cause, the problem comes from something that you wouldn’t even imagine was big enough to cause that trauma. It’s from something that’s so small, it could have been a flippant comment to somebody in a child in a shop that even the mundane here, and the kid listens to it and ruminates on it and then it grows, and it festers and suddenly, you know suddenly becomes a big part of the bag and then you get your limiting beliefs from there. I’m not good enough. I’m not rich enough. I’m not pushing up. I’m not you know whatever it is, and then we never take opportunities.
So yeah, I just want to pick up on that because that is so true. When I started my journey to transformation, I went right the way back to my childhood.
I started writing and it all just poured out, I call it page dumping, my bag had clearly been very full, and I never knew this. I started journaling and my journaling ended up becoming my memoir with a self-help section of all the tools I used to heal.
My dad called me mini-Alma, my mum was a large lady. For people that don’t know. And I really believe that that’s where my bad eating habits came from. Because then I would secretly eat when people weren’t around.
Amanda, let me just reframe that for you. They waited a long time for you. Yeah, they waited a long time. And you know, your dad loves your mum so much. I mean, they wanted that, and they wanted their happy endings. And, and he was calling you that. Maybe because he loved your mum so much and you were the same and he loved you so much too. But you say when somebody says something to a kid, they hear their side of it.
I wrote my book especially for children to understand trauma in a way that is easy and accessible, it is called ‘Recycle your day’. https://www.sharonglasswell.com/ I wrote the book because some kids in school had a few problems and so I thought I’ll kill two birds with one stone. I’ll write this for you and send it to the school to read it and understand a bit about where we’re coming from.
It also helps the children to forgive the adults when they screw up. And that’s one of the reasons that I wrote it, so I sent it to the school, and they love it and now I’m working with the school. We put the programme through the whole school. And it’s really exciting that led to one thing and then led to another. So, I now have a workbook that teaches kids how to solve problems. The example in the front of the book is about how this kid in the other book solves his problems. So, it shows him how we did it. And then there’s journals at the back to fill in themselves.
