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Inspired Living
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From Mess To Success: My Story, by Rick Thorn
By Rick Thorn |
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Rick inspires people to unleash the power in themselves and their material to transform others through teaching. He has helped businesses, educational organisations, as well as individuals with their training needs through a unique consultancy service he developed called Inspired Teaching. He has brought out a CD on inspired teaching with best-selling author, Nick Williams. |
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Apr 2, 2005, 15:22 |
From Mess to Success is my unique brand of guidance and coaching, designed to identify the elements in your life that could be improved and equip you to make positive changes. The 7 core principles were developed through calling upon my own radical experience of going to 2 different types of ‘hell’ and having to find a way back each time. Working with clients, I use these principles to experience to heal the past and give people the mental, personal and spiritual tools you need to build a better future.
From Mess to Success is underpinned by a very simple but transforming belief: namely, that mess is not mess; it is the seed-bed of success. When you feel you are in a mess you are actually entering your own unique training centre that can be to place through which you are trained for your success. Mess is not mess.
From Mess to Success is about how to transform mess into success: it is about seeing that however bad we think our life situation is if lived through in a focussed and hopeful way, it is possible to transform the bleakest of experiences.
The principles are not grand theories, but have been forged out of my own radical experience: from an ultimate mess from which no one thought I would escape. In my work with people I have used these principles to help others work through their situations and come out the other side more whole, much happier and with a definite purpose and sense of hope.
My Story
Twelve years ago I was in a complete mess. I had been suffering from manic-depressive psychosis, agoraphobia and severe anxiety for 5 or 6 years. I was under a doctor, clinical psychologist, psychotherapist and a consultant psychiatrist; I was on a large cocktail of medicines, which included anti-psychotic drugs, lithium, anti-depressants, anti-anxiety medication and tranquillisers. I went to my appointments each month, and didn’t really do much else. I had a real sense that things were getting worse rather than better, despite the enormous amount of medication I was on and therapies I had received or was receiving.
My life looked as if it was going to go on like this until they got things right, and I would be able to do some sort of work again. I had already given up a good career, partly because it was not right for me, but significantly because I knew that my health was far too fragile to carry on, so I wanted to get well and be able to start to think about what my future was going to entail. It was a very frustrating and frightening time, during which I lurched from mood-swing to mood-swing, from hearing voices to full-blown panic attacks, to very suicidal thoughts. Then one day everything changed.
It was my regular monthly appointment with the psychiatrist. I had got very used to these after 6 years or so, so I didn’t really think much about them, but this one was very different. I went into the consulting room, and as always, answered the usual questions, talked a bit about how things had been and waited for the response. The responses had been very much the same for a few years: a change in medication, a suggestion about therapy, and a discussion about some new drug that might be worth trying. What I was not prepared for was what I heard on that day.
The psychiatrist put down his pen, looked at me and started to explain that basically they had tried everything. There was no new medication, or combination of medication as everything had been tried. I was told that I now had to face up to the fact that this was what my life was going to be like. And then came the real sting in the tail: ‘And of course, it goes without saying, you will never work again.’ These final words were more devastating than anything else. So this was it, this was my life, and all I could hope for was occasional respite from the appalling symptoms and experiences I suffered most of the time.
I left that consulting room with my head spinning. I knew I was severely ill, but inside my head was a tiny voice – almost indistinguishable from the babble of voices that were always there – that said ‘no’. It is not going to be like this; this is not as good as it gets, and a feeling inside of me that no one was going to tell me I would never work again. This was the day that changed my life.
To accept this prognosis would mean the end of everything. All my hopes and dreams, any ideas of a new career (and I knew I still had stuff to do, even in that state), and any hope of what might be called an ordinary life. This would be a kind of death, indeed at one level perhaps even worse than death itself, as I would have to live this death for the next 30, 40, 50 even 60 years. The idea that this was my life, and this was all it could be was something that I just couldn’t, no WOULD NOT, accept. However messed up I was, there was this little voice that said ‘no’.
I went home and sat around for hours trying to take in what had been said to me, but also constantly hearing that little voice that kept saying no. The next day, after hours of thinking I made a decision: I was going to come off all my medication and try to get my life together. My thinking went something like this: the worst case scenario is that I become so ill that I do commit suicide, and if that was the case it couldn’t be much worse than the life I was leading; another scenario was that I became so ill, was put back on medication and I had to accept that this was as good as it gets; and a third scenario was that maybe, just maybe, I might have the resources to heal myself, get better and would go on to live a fulfilled life.
I need to make clear that I am not suggesting people come of medication, stop treatments, or not do what specialists are telling them. My own situation was that I had never been violent, was not a threat to anyone but myself, and also had spent years reading about my health problems, getting to know them in some detail, as well as an intimate knowledge of myself through therapy. But however much this was a calculated and educated risk, it was a huge risk.
When you apparently reach the end-of-the-line, one’s thinking really starts to change. Throughout all my treatment, even though I had made myself very knowledgeable about my ‘conditions’, there is a sense that we, as humans, just seem to accept things. We accept such things far too easily. When the goal posts change, and suddenly I was confronted with a radically new prognosis (that this was the end-of-the-line), my thinking became much sharper, and this was the point I started to not accept what I had been told.
Perhaps, my thinking went, they are wrong. There was no doubt that I was experiencing the things that led to the diagnosis, but that did not mean I had to accept the prognosis. And this is the real point, however skilled, educated and knowledgeable a professional is they are not prophets: their look into the future is, in the final analysis, a guess. It may be a very educated guess based on years of experience, at times the guess might be right, but it is a guess, and they may not be right. If we accept that they get the diagnosis correct (though this is certainly not always the case), we must start to see that there is no crystal ball that gives us details of a determined future.
The first few weeks, after coming off my medication were, to put it bluntly, bloody awful. I felt worse than I had ever done, physically, mentally and emotionally. I decided that I needed to do something else, and that coming of medication alone was not enough. I remembered something a philosopher had written about angst, dread and fear, and how in such extreme states ‘everyday familiarity collapses’. The beginning of the development of the principles of From Mess to Success came from this reflection. If everyday familiarity had collapsed, I needed my life to become familiar again. I needed to put back the structures, and the possibility of hopes and dreams that had been ripped away from me. As I pondered on these thoughts, the principles began to establish themselves.
The Seven Principles
Principle 1. Believe It Can Get Better; daydreaming your future
Principle 2. Be Courageous: confront the demons
Principle 3. Get Some Structure
Principle 4. Set Some Goals
Principle 5. Create Moments of Safety
Principle 6. Create Moments of Fun
Principle 7. Acknowledge Yourself & Your Successes
Although I felt awful, as I started to put some simple structures back into my life, things did start to improve, and after a few months, I really did start to feel a bit better. It was a very slow process, especially at the beginning, but then given I had been told there would not be progress with my condition, any progress, however slow, was fantastic.
Although at times my progress felt slow, and sometimes painful, there was a particular day when I knew that things had definitely changed, and that I was, without question, going to make it. It was a day like most of the others, and it was about 6 months after I had come off my medication. By then, my days had a fairly clearly defined structure, so I knew what I was doing. I got up as usual, had a bath, made some tea, and while the tea was brewing went out to get the post. I had one of those post-boxes on a post outside, and the first thing I did each day was collect the post and deal with it.
It was a very sunny spring morning, one of those days that are bright with a fresh chill in the air. As I went outside the door I felt that something was different. Initially, I really though that there was something physically different, so I looked around for the change that I was sensing but hadn’t registered as it were. You know that feeling when you know something is different, but you can’t quite see what it is – then your partner says ‘do you like my new hair-cut then!!!’ or you realise that next door have pained their house bright green!
I looked around, but could not see what was different. Then it struck me: it was my whole vision that had changed. This is quite difficult to describe, but all I can say is that everything I was seeing looked clearer somehow. It was if, for the last 12 years I had seen the world through some sort of haze, or that my eyes had some sort of gauze on them so I saw the world in a weird soft focus. On this morning, it was as if the gauze had peeled away and I could see everything clearly. But with this vision came a feeling of clarity – it was not about just physically seeing things in a different way, it was about feeling different.
It is very hard to try and capture this experience, but what I did know, without question, was that something very substantial had changed. As I saw things more clearly, what I began to feel was hope. It suddenly dawned on me, or at least this was how it felt, that the worst was over. After 6 months, I began to realise that it was my third option, that I just might get better, which was the one that was going to happen. I had not become ill again, I had not killed myself, and I had not taken any medication, or had any therapy or other treatment, for 6 months.
Two years after stopping all my medication and treatment, I was extremely well, had worked for a year, and was now ready to really begin to think about what I wanted to do with my life. Not a bad result for someone who was told he would never work again! But it got much better than this. I then went back to university to do a postgraduate course, after which I got funding to do a PhD. I ended up as a senior lecturer in a university with an extremely good career ahead of me. But the story doesn’t stop there; indeed, things were to take another radical and interesting turn.
About 7 years ago, after coming out of the bath, my partner noticed a strange black lump on my back. I looked in the mirror and was certain that this had not been there before; I also knew enough (having had a friend that had died from it a few months before this) that it looked like a form of skin cancer. Suddenly I was scared. I had never sunbathed or anything, so surely this was just a mole gone a bit funny, or some sort of bump or knock I had forgotten about that had gone a bit strange. So, I went to the doctor who referred me to a consultant.
Some weeks later I was sitting in a room with a doctor who told me that I had skin cancer, and that it was the most dangerous form: a malignant melanoma. I saw the consultant again, and he told me that they needed to take a large lump out of my back, give me a skin graft to cover this and check that it had not spread anywhere else. Here was another mess, and one that I was totally unprepared for: but then, who is ever prepared to hear that they have got cancer?
I had the surgery and the skin graft, plus another 6 moles taken off for biopsy and tests to se if the cancer had spread. The good news, a few weeks after the surgery, was that all the other moles were fine; and that as far as they could tell the cancer had not spread anywhere else. However, I was told that I would need to come for very regular check-ups to ensure that it did not return and that it had not spread. Seven years on I am absolutely fine: the cancer did not spread and has never returned.
But, again I was in a situation in which I had to deal with both the illness and the consequences of such a radical illness. I did use conventional medicine, and also used a variety of alternative healing methods (later on, I had a lot of Shamanic Healing), but the principles I had previously developed suddenly were being used in a very different way. At one level, these principles were (are) so much part of who I am that I do not need to think about using them, I sort of do so automatically.
But they were an integral part of becoming well, and they were refined again through this process. I am not saying that these principles are a cure for anything, let alone cancer, only that without them I am not sure I would have survived emotionally and spiritually (perhaps physically as well in places and at times), and that they very quickly gave me back purpose, control of my life and hope. And now they had done it on two occasions, with two very serious health problems.
You are inspirational!
The real point of all this biographical information is not some ego trip, neither is it a way of showing off! I have spent a chapter telling you this information so you can see that the principles I have developed are not some nice idea or flowery theory I dreamed up one day. They have been lived through, and forged out of my own radical experience. And I repeat again, I am just an ordinary bloke: nothing special, no super-powers, and no access to some secret healing methods known only to elite. Put simply, I am just like you! The point of my story is to show you that anyone can achieve what I have achieved: you can turn your mess into a success.
This is my story, and like your own stories, it is unique. Your stories will be different, and they will have their own twists and turns and their own issues to deal with. I have developed these principles in the context of my own life and experience, and have now refined them into general principles. But you must make them your own: they are to be seen as guidance and not rules. My story is the inspiration for these principles, and I hope inspires you to believe that you can change your life. But, the real point of all of this is that you become inspired by your own life, because once your own life inspired you, your mess has become success.
Rick is available for one-to-one sessions, to give talks and run workshops. Contact details, and some other articles explaining more about From Mess to Success can be found on his website: www.inspiredways.com.
© Copyright 2006 the author, otherwise PS-Magazine.Com
The publishers cannot accept any responsibility for any damage or harm caused by any treatment, advice, or information contained in this publication. In the case of illness, you should consult a qualified practitioner before undertaking any treatment.
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