Disclaimer:

I mention potentially triggering things about sexual trauma. If you know this may trigger you please keep yourself safe and supported.

This article is quite long.  This is a brief synopsis of my life. I feel it would lose meaning if shortened. It explains powerfully why I am a therapist:

I had a difficult childhood as both parents would be considered dysfunctional in modern parlance. I won’t go into a lot of detail, but my mother, for reasons which I have come to understand and have more compassion for in later years, was often thoughtless and cruel. Father was hard-working, often not at home and emotionally distant and, therefore, effectively, an absent father. I was an only child and learnt from an early age to be self-sufficient. However, I had a strong awareness of spirit as a child, often talking to people ‘who weren’t there’. Norman, for instance, was always my friend. (He, in later years, told me he is my life guide, and his real name is Melchizedek.)

As a family, we would often visit historical sites as a Sunday outing. I frequently saw and spoke with people dressed in very old-fashioned clothing. It took me some time to realise that these people were no longer alive. My parents did not accept my descriptions of these experiences, which shut me down psychically. I had closed down fully by the time I was 10 years old, forgetting my communication with my ‘friends’.

As Carl Jung says, ‘Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.’ (from Memories, Dreams, Reflections, C.G. Jung)

However, as a teenager, once I had left home at 17, my awareness and psychic experiences started to return. I was told by friends that I should develop as a medium as I was aware of ‘presences’ in various places where I lived and worked but didn’t ever want to take this path. I had many psychic experiences, some terrifying. I had no desire to be terrified again. I also felt that being a medium would require taking more responsibility than I was prepared to take at that time. I felt too immature in myself to take on the serious responsibility of sharing with others their deepest thoughts, weaknesses and strengths, pain, heartbreak, and desires. Some people thought this kind of work was a ‘bit of a laugh’ and I never felt like this. I felt I couldn’t do this work without taking it very seriously, so I didn’t develop further as a medium at this time.

In my early 30s, after the failure of an abusive marriage, I went to a healer. I received healing over two years and then started training to be a healer myself. I worked for three years alongside a very experienced spiritual healer and then qualified as a National Federation of Spiritual Healers (NFSH) healer. However, despite my spiritual healing training and counselling, my relationships did not improve. I met someone else, however, he was violent, and he raped me before I could escape. These traumas, and others not mentioned, led me to realise that it was my behaviour that was destroying my life. After all, I was the common element in all this trauma. I needed to take responsibility for the relationships I chose and the decisions I made. All the pain from my dysfunctional childhood and relationships was rising into conscious awareness.

I also trained as a graphologist (handwriting analyst) during this time. This raised my conscious awareness of who I was significantly, as graphology is an excellent psychological tool that provides an in-depth personality and abilities assessment. This, coupled with receiving healing and counselling, forced me to face things I had previously been denying or dissociating from.

By my late thirties, I had come to a crossroads. I realised that my life was not going to improve until I committed to more deeply understanding myself. One evening, I felt a presence with me. Someone with enormous light (Jesus?) came to me and gave me a choice: one path was to stay as I am, and I knew in my heart that to do that life would be painful but not change; the other path was also painful, but if I committed to change at least the pain may end one day. I am not religious, though baptised into the Christian religion as a baby, so maybe this was a vision of Jesus or some other guardian angel. I did, however, have a growing realisation that there was more to life than just our physical senses and that all my connections with spirit were important. So, I committed my life and further development into the hands of God/the Universe (the ‘Management’ as I call this energy) and decided to take the path of growth. I did not fully understand then just how important this commitment was. This giving of my life to a higher power travelled so deeply into my psyche that even in my deepest moments of despair, even when I realised that I had let myself down again and again, as I continued to do for some years, at some level I knew that I had still made this commitment and needed to pick myself up and keep going.

I continued my spiritual development, learnt to meditate, and ran The Healing Space which delivered training in healing and spirituality. During this time, I further trained in Reiki and Indian Head Massage. However, my life of trauma was far from over and I experienced a devastating series of traumas over a five-year period from age 44 – 51. During this time, my then relationship ended, my business partnership ended, and I lost The Healing Space. I lost my home, my dog, my cat and nearly killed myself and my father in a road traffic accident. Shortly after this, my father had two serious heart attacks. Other events also occurred which are too horrible to mention. Thus, over a five-year period I was never out of traumatic effects. These events occurred back-to-back without time for me to even begin to recover. At age 52, I moved back to Kent, my home county, with what I believe to be Complex PTSD, though I never had this diagnosed. I had lost vast tracts of memory and was paranoid, very fearful and anxious.  I had trouble processing new information. I write these words and yet they seem empty and cannot fully explain the feelings of horror and isolation that I felt. I would go home at night and lock all the windows and doors, close the curtains, and bury myself in blankets and cushions on the settee and shake and shake in terror – all symptoms of Complex PTSD.

On moving back to Kent I landed a good job at a local university. This catapulted me into spending the next 10 years being educated, as well as working full-time. My Director at the university told me I could not work in a university without a higher education qualification. She started me on a journey of learning to think critically, which brought back the thinking capacity that I had lost in all the trauma. I also started having more therapy again at this time and gradually and slowly over 10 years of continuous therapy put myself back together. During this period, I have done post-graduate management training and trained as a counsellor and psychotherapist, completing an MA in Psychotherapy and Healing Practice. Who would have thought it eh?! After a lifetime of feeling excluded and traumatised from such an early age, and losing everything owned twice, finally I felt as though I was on my path in life with the skills I needed to fulfil my passion of working with people who needed help recovering from trauma. I completed my degree at 61. It truly is never too late!

I would mention that the MA concentrated mainly on the work of Carl Jung – someone whom I much admire. I am a Jungian Psychotherapist and work a lot with his concepts and ideas on the structure of the mind or psyche, and more.

A tarot reading in January 2015 told me that I was coming to the end of any karmic debts. I took this to mean that all of these traumas and challenges were coming to an end. My reading in October 2015 confirmed this. Karma is done for this lifetime. I did wonder if this meant that I would die, however, I seem to be here still! Phew! Apparently, I am now to do much-needed spiritual clearing work. My most recent reading states that my life is about to change for the better and that important developments are about to occur that will change my life’s work.

In 2023 my father died. There was much relief, and reminiscences came to the fore. Many realisations and discoveries too that have enabled me to reframe why I am the way I am. A psychic reading told me that my father sexually abused me when a baby. I had always wondered why I was so traumatised and finally, I understood why. My physical reaction to being told this was incredible. I shook for 2 days, and couldn’t sleep or eat. My body told me that this was true even though I had no memory of the abuse, and still don’t. This is not uncommon with abuse that occurs before 5 or so years old.

I moved house in 2024 away from my home town and the many memories. That was an enormous relief frankly. I now live close to the sea and fresh air in a quiet village. That suits me well and I can feel relaxation and calm through to the bone – a new experience for me.

I am happy to live the rest of my life here, doing the work that my life and training have prepared me for. I support people in recovery from childhood and ancestral trauma using a combination of my training (counselling, psychotherapy, healing, Reiki, and intuitive coaching), and the life experiences that I have survived and processed. Training alone is not enough, and neither is life experience, but a combination of the two gives me and my clients understanding. I needed to learn my therapies to understand and heal myself first before I moved on to other people. I am still healing myself – that never stops, but now do feel that I have been doing that long enough to pass some of my knowledge onto others. It’s a joy supporting myself and others to be the best they can be.

Linda Bishopp.