Self-destruction switched to self-love...
Infinitely powerful energies and my incredible rebirth
In 2007 my mostly dysfunctional marriage of 26 years finally broke down, when my ex-wife had the courage to meet a new man.
We raised three children cooperatively and kept the marriage together until they established themselves, each as wonderful thriving bold, brave and brilliant adults, able to raise their own similarly bold, brave and brilliant families.
I am grateful for the years with my ex-wife; she’s a wonderful woman, like each of us doing her best in a crazy world, and everything is for a reason.
In 2010 My somewhat traumatised past caught up with me, when I met a new woman, Liane, who I think of as a ‘borrowed angel’, because she’d been deeply traumatised by her own upbringing:
in far too much unloving wealth,
Catholicism including attending a Catholic convent school,
a father who’d been a prisoner of the 2nd World War, among the parachutists (‘Red Devils’) captured at the disastrous Battle of Arnhem in 1944, and yet after the war he built a very successful company and made and managed to keep a lot of money,
and losing her youngest daughter Ella to bone cancer age 11 in 2009, for which Liane was unable to forgive herself.
And I became embroiled in this self-destruction, especially when Liane killed herself in 2015. It’s a long story, told partly by the music I wrote and recorded with Liane at RudeAngel.co.uk. Liane took her life shortly after completing the final vocal session for what was to be our album Ploughed Heart, leaving me to to complete and produce the album, with crucial help from four brilliant people, Rick, Shaz, Jim and Kathy.
I nearly killed myself and was extremely lucky not to, and not to kill other people too, in Autumn 2015.
I’d already begun endurance hill running before Liane’s death, which is in some ways very self-destructive, especially for anyone prone to anxiety, which definitely I was when I was in my relationship with Liane.
Liane never told me that she was suicidal until March 2015, but later in her inquest it was confirmed, when her family accessed her doctors’ notes as part of the preparation for the two-day coroner’s inquest, that Liane had been suicidal for the previous eight years.
This was among the catastrophic failings of the health authorities, noted in the coroner’s verdict, after an inquest that ripped Liane’s family (and me) to shreds, such was the determination of the health authority (Leicestershire Partnership Trust) to avoid responsibility for Liane’s suicide.
Also noted by the coroner as a catastrophic causal failing in Liane’s mental health treatment/suicide, was the fact that an experienced home-visiting case-worker had recommended that Liane be sectioned (admitted) to the mental hospital because she was so suicidal, and this recommendation paperwork was lost, so that the next day, a less experienced case-worker (Liane had many different case-workers, including many men, which she preferred not to be her case-workers, which was another terrible failing) recommended that Liane be ‘signed-off’ the crisis support, and her treatment referred to her GP (General Practitioner).
Liane was already planning her suicide, we learned subsequently, from her preparations.
Liane was also ashamed to be in crisis and under ‘mental health treatment’.
This is the stigma of ‘mental illness’.
And it is the shame and guilt of trauma, and of self-destruction.
After Liane’s suicide…
I carried on where Liane ended.
Liane was destroying herself on a high-carbohydrate vegetarian diet, and anti-depressants and sleeping tablets which her GP has prescribed, ostensibly to treat her grief, which the GP saw as anxiety and depression.
Grief is how we grow. It’s not a mental illness.
And so I was passed the baton of grief and depression, and a suicidal longing that I carried, raw and self-medicated, no GP for me, because I’d learned from Liane.
I was also stuck, with no way out, for several years, because also I knew how profoundly dangerous suicide grief is for the bereaved.
That’s enough for now, except that during 2021 I began to understand more about my healing, and in 2022, I started walking mostly instead of running, especially up hills.
I experimented with my diet and exercise (to ‘low intensity’, instead of inflammatory and self-destructive) and transitioned via ‘low carbs’, to ketogenic, and then in 2023 to carnivore, combined with walking every day, which rewires neurological connections.
I became a highly qualified nutritionist.
In 2015 Maria and I found each other again, after more than 35 years apart, not knowing each other to be alive or dead.
Maria was my first love and we were together 1979-80.
Maria saved my life, and in 2021 we co-founded LiveWildLiveFree.org.
We each rely on natural immunity. We rely on holistic medicine.
We do not use pharmaceuticals to protect us against illnesses.
We’re both becoming incredibly strong, physically and emotionally, and spiritually.
Fearless.
This is the switch from self-destruction to self-love.