‘She’s always with me’ – Generational support where you least expect it

Ahead of starting my coaching qualification, I had pondered at length how my relationship with my late mother (and father) would show up in ‘my stuff’ as I worked through my journey to becoming a coach. Being a coach is about understanding yourself so you can understand others. Furthermore, I believe understanding the imprint of your early experience is important to who you are as a leader. My early experiences were not straightforward; plenty of trauma with big and small Ts. I have been conscious of the potential benefits and drawbacks of this in my practice as a coach as I now know how it effected who I was as a leader (more on that in a future post). On one hand, my broad and sometimes traumatic life experience can help me be highly empathetic and perceptive, but with this comes a lot of ‘stuff’ that needs to be kept in check. Never did I imagine this 'keeping in check work' could bring me closer to her (my mother).

My mother was a recovering alcoholic, addictions and trauma psychotherapist. She dedicated the last 25 years of her life to helping people who had experienced similar life paths to her.

My mother died in 2020 after a long battle with cancer. Her battle started when I was just a small child. Cancer initially only sent in the low-rank army – trying its luck with CCL, a relatively low-grade leukaemia. Failing that, it moved up the ranks to an aggressive non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma that carried a potentially terminal diagnosis. Well, she saw this one away too while I was in my 20s. Finally, cancer, getting frustrated with its inability to kill her, waged an all-out war on her brain. After ten years of remission from the non-Hodgkin’s, cancer sent in the Special Forces to break the blood-brain barrier and really see her off. While she did win a short fight the first time round, when they came back for a second, she’d had enough. She decided it was time to give them the ground. She decided when though; she chose her moment.

I am reticent to share her battle with health as an introduction to her as, she was life personified. Fit and healthy (well, apart from the cancer). She was beautiful, even with no hair. She was like some kind of wild horse that couldn’t ever be contained or explained. She lived a full life, from modelling in the 60s and 70s and her tales of wild parties, to doctors injecting speed in her bum for weight loss and working in film and TV. Roll on the 80s and 90s, she marries (a man on his third and soon-to-be-final wife), I am born, and she is taking herself to rehab. Imagine being away from a newborn for 6 months. While this caused me pain, I am now starting to empathise with how hard this must have been for her. She continued her career as a producer and location manager when the CCL diagnosis came. On discovering the diagnosis and need for treatment, she found herself a clinical trial, talked her way onto it, and off she went, often with me in tow. She continued to work throughout the entirety of her treatment. The notion of a woman in the 90s before the internet, with no medical knowledge or connections, blagging her way onto a clinical trial at the Royal Marsden in London when we lived in West Yorkshire, is extraordinary. And working through the treatment is some kind of mix of insanity and the most impressive show of resilience I have ever seen. I will reveal now this is not a love letter to my mother, more an ode to her resilient and extraordinary nature.

My mother did all of this without a qualification to her name.... she left school at 15.

In the early 2000s, following her divorce from my father, she decided it was time for a change. In her late 50s, she enrolled at Surrey University and later graduated with an MSc in Psychotherapy. Being dyslexic, not tech-savvy and with zero academic experience, she did it. I was a horrible teenager, and I didn’t go to her graduation. I will regret this until the day I die. What an incredible achievement. What an extraordinary woman.

Rightly or wrongly, I was always encouraged to reflect on behaviour dynamics from a very young age. An example of this is when I was little and bullied in school, I was directed to reflect on why these kids were bullies. I was encouraged to try and understand what was going on in their lives and to have empathy for them. For me at 10, this felt confusing, I just wanted a hug and to be told we ‘get em’ together not a complicated life learning. I held resentment for not having the support I thought I should have had, but now viewing this as my adult self, I can see how, despite the lack of warm fuzzy parenting, the essence of message was to encourage reflective curiosity and empathy, laying the ground work to make me the coach I am today.

As I progress along my journey as a coach, I feel like I am able to draw on her life experience and reframe mine to support me. She was hugely intuitive in her psychotherapy practice, and I am realising that has now also become a part of me. I am finding myself drawn to models, tools, and techniques I know she would have been using way ahead of her time in the early 2000s and, most importantly, I feel close to her. I feel I am starting to understand the weight of what she held for her clients and the gift she had. I have empathy and forgiveness for how that sometimes created an identity conflict for her between mother and therapist.

So, roll on some years, and here I am. A mature student who left school at 15, trying to now turn my hand to the academic world. I carry with me the scars and baggage of her journey and my own. And after years of trying to prove I wasn’t like her, here I am living alongside her experience and revelling in the strengths that she has passed down to me. I feel like she is right there supporting me and guiding me, more than she ever did in life. Does the negative stuff crop up? Hell yeah. She was an extraordinary woman who had little left in the tank for being a mother. But now I appreciate that when you are making a mark on the world as huge as she did, there isn’t room for it all.

I am drawn to the memory of a coaching experience of my own a few years ago with the wonderful systemic and constellations coach Sarah James Wright. Sarah tried to tune me into my ancestry that stood behind me through a powerful visualisation. At the time, it was too uncomfortable to stand close; I had something blocking me. I physically couldn’t complete the exercise. I wasn’t ready to let go of the resentments. But something stuck about that experience, and now, in this moment, I have, and I can, feel the support of my ancestors behind me. So, thank you, Mum, I feel you with me now. I hope I can make you proud and, in some small way, carry on this new family legacy of helping people. And thank you, Sarah; this experience shows me how coaching nuggets get lodged in there and become a part of us, helping us and guiding us when we least expect it.

I am grateful that even after years of therapy, I am finding new ways to heal old wounds and draw forward with what I have. Coach training and my own development journey is helping me to lean into what I do have rather than what I do not have and to forgive. For the first time, I am starting to lean into the notion that I am enough

So, if you have got all the way to the end of this ramble, know you are enough. We are all enough. My coaching philosophy is firmly rooted in the notion that we all have the wisdom and experience to support us in anything; we just sometimes need a hand to tune it in and understand how life experience shapes us.

I have shared this story as an act of ‘whole hearted living’ and not 'letting it all hang out' - in the words of the amazing Brene Brown. I share this in the hope it might help someone reading to understand that generational wisdom and learning from life experience isn't only for the unblemished. We all have more wisdom inside us than we know. As soon as we step back and create whatever space we need to allow it to come through it does.

I am sharing this in the month of June - My mothers Birthday Month - she would have turned 80 on Sunday

"Mum - I forgive you. Thank you for ALL that you gave me. You were and are enough” x