A Little Self Reflection
It’s my birthday this week and I have been spending time self reflecting on my life over the last ten years. My reflections started when I decided to look at how much money I had spent on “up skilling” myself. I was staggered by the fact that I have invested well over £30k! yes Thirty Thousand Pounds. My wandered to consider what else I could have done with that money - new car, house extension, lots of holidays, move house. So many, many choices and yet I chose to spend this money on me.
My investment in myself started with a crazy decision to start studying for a degree, I chose a Batchelor of Science with Honours no less :-) in psychology. Now, I was already working 50 hours a week and running a home and family but still thought this was a good idea and it stopped me watching the dross on TV. I can’t say it was easy, I also became seriously ill part way through my degree and really struggled in the end but I did it. I am Karen Pullan BSc (Hons). Well done me.
As I came to the end of my studies, I had found a huge interest in psychotherapy and completed several modules of my degree with this in focus and so I started the look out for a psychotherapy course I could start. I was struggling to find something which fit with my current lifestyle and then by a chance meeting I was introduced to Scarborough Counselling and Psychotherapy Training Institute - SCPTI for short. I arranged a meeting and ended up with an interview for a place on the course and I was in. Three years of training, intense training, I felt as though I had been put through an industrial washing machine and then through a mangle before getting a tumble dry at the end. My life as I knew it was turned inside out and upside down. My awareness of myself and others changed. My entire belief system was challenged, what I thought I knew turned out to not be real. I also discovered that even though I had my psychology degree I actually knew nothing. Who was it who said No matter how much I read I still find I know nothing? this is so true for me.
Part of the training was to undergo regularly weekly personal therapy for the duration of the course and beyond. So up to now four years of weekly personal therapy. At first this started as a tick box exercise I have to admit. I remember sitting in the therapists room with my arms folded and said “I am only here because I have to be”. My therapist smiled and nodded but that smile said to me “OK, let’s see, but I know better!”
I had been practicing yoga for several years and my yoga teacher was moving away. Panic set in, I wondered if I would ever find another yoga teacher that I liked. And so, true to my script I searched out a course and trained to be a yoga teacher. Once again this was running in parallel with my SCPTI course and people around me wondered whether I was taking too much on. But I really had begun to know myself and what I was capable of and so off I went.
Another emotional journey of self discovery ensued. I was taken to places within me that I had not yet discovered even through therapy. Combined the SCPTI training and the yoga training tore me apart and put me back together again.
And so here I am, beaten, battered, bruised, cared for, cherished, healing. At times I wondered what the hell I was doing to myself and paying for the privilege of it.
So, now I ask myself was it worth it financially, HELL YES! would I have been better off spending the money on that extension, new car, holidays - Nope, not a cat in hells chance. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.