Suzy came to me midway through 2020. She was completely flattened by long covid and was unable to work, care for her children or even cook.
Before she got ill, Suzy had been a busy Mum, with a full-time job, husband, two children and an active life that had her training, running and playing netball competitively. She was the kind of person who many of us aspire to be, without ever quite making it.
And yet one little virus had brought her down to rock bottom. You see when I hear about someone like Suzy who works full-out and plays full-out, I wonder what it is she is trying to escape from. There is no me-time, and that often means that we won’t stop to rest because we’re afraid of what we will see when we look inside.
As it turns out there was good reason for Suzy not to stop and rest. She had a difficult history – including some less than adequate parenting and childhood trauma. She was working on the trauma already with another coach, so I knew she was happy to look at it at last.
Suzy had come to me for Perrin Technique, and was happy to take up the coaching sessions I was offering alongside it. One of the things she wanted to focus on in the coaching was how she was parenting her son.
Jordan was 13 years old when Suzy and I started working together and he was starting to pull away from the close family unit. Suzy was concerned about his screen time, and about her drive to control every aspect of his life. She simply didn’t feel safe if she didn’t know where he was, who he was with and what he and his friends were doing every minute of the day. And Jordan didn’t like how intrusive and controlling she had become.
There was another side to this as well. Suzy was the kind of person who liked everything to be perfect: a perfectly clean and tidy house, perfect diet, perfect children. But every so often she "fell off the wagon": the house would be left uncared for, she would buy and eat a lot of junk food and the children would be left to their own devices for a while. Then as the mess accumulated too much, the pendulum would swing and Suzy would go back to being the perfect Mum again. In the course of the session, Suzy referred to "mistakes" she had made - mistakes which she could now see were just part of being human, rather than a sign of being bad. But where had the pattern of cycling between perfect Suzy and messy Suzy come from?
As she examined what was going on for her with Jordan, Suzy began to look back more at how she had been parented. Her father had been extremely controlling and expected the very best from his children. And he had a temper. In contrast her mother had been wildly over-indulgent, and if anything went wrong - if anyone made a "mistake" - she would blame it on forces outside the family. For instance it was the ref's fault if Suzy's netball team lost a game.
So I asked the question "what do you think the relationship might be between how your parents behaved towards you and your pattern of cycling between perfect and messy?" And she saw it immediately.
With coaching there's no particular emphasis on unpicking the past and trying to analyse or understand it. Instead we can use the past to illuminate what we are up to in the present and then let go of old patterns and programmes that we can see are no longer serving us.
Suzy's first step was to recognise that her pattern of cycling between perfect and messy was something she had brought with her from childhood. Her next step is to recognise that she is ok whatever happens and whatever she does.
And perhaps more importantly that her son is ok too, so she doesn't need to control his every move.
If you are struggling with the pendulum swinging between a perfect self and a "bad" self, I'd love to hear from you. You can book yourself in online for a discovery session or just a short call.
