Emotional Safety

Getting your sh*t sorted looks like this...

In case you hadn’t heard :) I will launch my next book “Making Darkness Visible '' on Sunday the 30 July. What I want you to do on 30 July is go to Amazon.com and buy the Kindle edition for 99c.

And because there’s a lot of folks that won’t read a book unless they know what’s at the end of the book, I’ve put a copy of the last chapter below.

But why is that something that we like to do? 

It comes down to emotional safety, and what we need for safety is the perception that we have a choice. 

Almost all of us have experience of not feeling safe, and we all have a built-in ”authenticity” detector - even if we aren’t aware of it. 

We read the last chapter of a book before buying it because of this.

Getting your sh*t sorted means that we don’t need to read the last chapter of a book ever again.

Why? Because we’ve done the work that means that the emotional blocks that used to trigger us into aggression, saviour and victim consciousness are no longer there. We have dealt with our shadows, our darkness.

We feel safe because we are confident and calm about ambiguous situations, like not knowing what the ending of a book may be.

So here’s the last chapter of “Making Darkness Visible” - it’s the acknowledgement.

Acknowledgement

Every so often someone comes into your life, and you form a bond of deep friendship over shared interests and goals. And then sometimes they die and you lose them. 

The recent death of my close friend and mentor, Jim Linton, was the catalyst to write this book. Losing Jim got me to the realisation of how I didn’t realise I was lost in the darkness. 

Death is a natural part of the cycle of life, and for me, when I lose someone close, a part of myself dies too. 

But, from that death of part of myself, it clears the space for the new. His death showed me the way to becoming a better man.

The adversity of my childhood left me mentally crippled for so many years, and I was completely unconscious of the emotionally stunted cage that I had trapped myself in. It wasn’t visible. I didn’t know I was lost. I was in darkness. The darkness was not visible to me. 

Many people had pointed it out to me, but because I was trapped in it – I couldn’t see it.  This book was conceived in the darkness of my grief and loss for Jim. And his death inspired me to push myself to the next level in becoming better.

In contemplating Jim's death, I realised that what we deeply bonded over was that we both loved to do the right thing and make darkness visible. We did it by causing as much trouble as possible for the wilfully ignorant and incompetent people that we came by. We had a lot of fun making darkness visible in the name of “doing the right thing”. 

We didn’t want the glory and fame, and we didn’t want to make our families vulnerable, so plausible deniability was the name of the game. And, in making darkness visible for others, what I found is that it helped me make the darkness visible in myself.

Making darkness visible is a series of self-realisations. The moments where we realise that we see and recognise the steel bars of the cage in which we hold ourselves captive – in the form of unconscious beliefs.

This book outlines the darkness that held me captive for many years. Unconscious fears that blocked my courage, and the unconscious shame and guilt that blocked me from being present. I was unconscious. Trapped in a darkness of my own creation that was not visible to me.

As I made my darkness visible, I could then find my own way out, AND it allowed me to integrate in the many positive masculine AND feminine qualities that my ancestors gifted me. 

Non-toxic masculine qualities. Non-toxic feminine qualities.  

And the most important lesson I learned was that self-sacrifice is not required.

Vale Jim Linton. 

Thank you for helping me to make my own darkness visible through both your life and your death.

That’s the last chapter of the book and it is a metaphor for what it is that I do with my coaching clients. 

Getting your sh*t sorted looks like this:

We identify the emotional blocks that are our ‘darkness’ and we acknowledge them, learn from them and then integrate them. 

And in doing that a part of our identity dies a death, and it creates space for new growth, new freedom and new delicious adventures. 

In order to create, something has to die. It is part of nature and the universe. 

When I first started to write, it was from the perspective of the saviour archetype in the drama triangle. 

I had seen too many men harm themselves and others during divorce, and I had come close to death myself more than once too. I thought that if I could save the life of one man as a result of my writing then it would be worthwhile.

My writing then got transformed into my first three books that got published as a result of the death of people close to me - the death of my mother, the death of a good friend and the death of my marriages. In turn, these deaths also allowed me to integrate in the three archetypes of the drama triangle: the saviour, the aggressor and the victim.

As you can see from above, the death of Jim prompted me to start writing this fourth book, but it wasn’t until I started writing it, did I realise that the book was going to be about my clients getting their sh*t sorted and living lives of delicious adventure.

Many people have a book (or four) inside them, but they never write them. 

Don’t die and leave your books unwritten. 

Get your sh*t sorted out.

Choose to live a life of delicious adventure.

CHOOSE.

Thanks for reading this far, if you prefer audio editions and you want early access, then another chapter of the audio edition drops in Substack tomorrow…