This is episode 5 of 100 things I wish my Dad had taught me. “All complete healing is activated through gratitude and love.”

it’s very easy to slip into the mistake of thinking that today we are talking about healing the body. Actually we are talking about healing anything. Whether it’s a bruise to the ego or a bruise to the thigh, whether it’s a bang on the head or whether it’s an accident with work, healing is the process of getting over it and getting back to being normal, as normal as you were, before the event took place.

Events are Events until we judge them otherwise. A car accident is a car accident, death is a dance, insults are just insults, bruises are just bruises. But then we have the ability to judge. That ability is very healthy because it helps us stay safe. However, we have the ability to judge things and therefore box ourselves into some form of a prison of fear. Let’s say you went through a divorce and you were really angry with your ex partner because he or she did not do what you thought was right and it hurt you, then when you lined up for Tinder and swipe for a date you will no doubt try to avoid a person who reminds you of your ex. That is an indication that healing is incomplete.

Events are Events until we judge them otherwise. A child is living their life until they present to a parent something the parent really hates. The parent has no doubt gone through a life and remembered many events of the past especially their own childhood. The parent immediately reacts to scold the child for doing something that reminds the parent of their own judgement of their own childhood and next thing you know the parent is passing on their own wound to the child. This is not complete healing.

Events are Events until we judge them otherwise. You might be at work and somebody at work is giving you the shits. It could be a boss or a team member or somebody that works for you but that person is annoying the hell out of you. You can’t be annoyed at somebody unless there is annoyance already within you. Just like you can’t be angry at someone unless anger already exists within you. So the source of the feeling of being annoyed is already within us and yet we get triggered by a person at work who just sets a match to petrol. That petrol, the annoyance, is a memory of someone or something that gave us the shits sometime before and this person has merely triggered it. That is an indication that healing is in complete.

Events are Events until we judge them otherwise. You’re riding your bike down the street and it’s a perfect day but there is coming up a left-hand bend in the road. You’re writing at 30 km an hour and the weather is good and your tyres are new but all of a sudden you start tapping the brakes and feeling hesitant about commitment to the corner. Because of this hesitation in riding a bike through a corner you become aware that you are not on a good line to get all the way through the corner without smashing into the tree on the other side of the road and you have to make radical sudden jerky adjustments to your line to avoid the tree. That hesitation comes from the memory of a time when something went totally to hell during a physical activity riding or driving or doing something and here it is remembered in a nanosecond halfway through a corner that was perfectly safe. That is an indication that healing is incomplete.

Events are Events until we judge them otherwise. You are about to bid on a house in an auction. You know how much money you can borrow and you know how much you have added together you have your ceiling for the auction bid but the bidding goes above your ceiling. The auctioneer raises the Gammel once, twice, and then hesitates long enough for you to feel the perspiration dripping from under your armpits, between your legs, across your forehead. You look around and ask yourself what to do? You turn to someone who knows less about your financial situation then you and ask their opinion but they can only tell you how much they love to own the house which makes things even more complicated because that’s not the question. Can you afford to raise your hand and raise the bed just another $5000 and win this beautiful house of your dreams without knowing where you can get that $5000. The fact that you turned for help, the fact that you hesitate, the fact that you feel uncertain about following your heart over your head, shows that many events have taken place in the past that have caused you significant discomfort and pain because you followed your heart and not your head and lived to regret it. That is an indication that healing is incomplete.

Events are Events until we judge them otherwise. It’s time to go on holidays and somebody has suggested you go to Switzerland and snow ski. You go online and there are bookings all over the place available in Switzerland for snow skiing but you can’t work out which one is the best. You search for Google comments and you ploughed through hours of Facebook searching for the answers and after you have read 1000 comments you still are no wiser. You’ve been shafted before by online promises that did not manifest all you’ve taken holidays in the past that were expensive and disappointing and so you are hesitating. That hesitation reveals that you have still got a memory of something that went to shit and you don’t wanna repeat it, and that is an indication that healing is incomplete.

Events are Events until we judge them otherwise. You’re in a relationship and you’re having an argument and you really do feel pissed off with the person you’re arguing with. You feel sad and angry and disappointed and frustrated all at the one time. You know you love this person but at this moment in time you just can’t stand the sight of them. You stand there thinking to yourself have I got myself into the wrong relationship with the right person or have I got into the right relationship with the wrong person. Suddenly called chill goes through your body. You suddenly begin to think that you’ve got yourself into the wrong life. You ask yourself am I living a lie? What if we break up and we have to split up the house? What if we break up and have to split up the kids? 1000 what ifs run through your brain just as you’re standing there having an argument with your partner. You realise that you are putting yourself into a place you don’t want to be. And that’s because you’ve been here before. You’ve gone through some sort of a hellish break up in the past and you just don’t want to be single ever again and so you swallow your thoughts and smile and tell your partner that you love them and everything will be okay and sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry. You go to work and you feel like shit all day. You’ve stuck your tail between your legs and run from a debate that will, in the future escalate, and you know you’ve just given your partner license to tread on your head. Obviously, this is an indication that healing is incomplete.

Events are Events until we judge them otherwise. You are at work and you get a success. Something goes really well and you start to celebrate. You celebrate and you celebrate and you celebrate, you come home and you tell your partner how wonderful it is everything went so well and you are a success. You tell your friends that you are a success and how wonderful it is that you have finally achieved what you were chasing at work. You sit at the desk with your feet up on the table hands behind your head just thinking how wonderful it is to be alive and to have this job and to be the champion and to be so amazing that you have achieved this amazing incredible success because you are the best of the best of the best yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes, no. When we go up ourselves from success we are also gonna go down on ourselves, yes you can imagine it’s not easy, when we fail. The person who is obsessed with success is trying the damnedest to prove that they are not the loser they think they are. The more a person hangs their hat on success the more it reveals that they perceive themselves to be a loser and are trying to prove to themselves and the world that they are not. The obsession with success reveals that healing is incomplete.

Events events until we judge them otherwise. You feel stressed and somebody suggest to try meditation. You go to the meditation class and you feel like 1 million bucks. You come out of that meditation class floating on air. You are in Nirvana. You are in paradise. All your cares and worries are gone you feel so light and so openhearted you just smile all the way to the toilet and back. You just can’t wait to masturbate. Yes this is how life is meant to be. And as you walk down the street celebrating the magnificence and beauty of life in nature, you hear a certain sound coming from the pavement as you place your foot down and you continue to walk but suddenly there’s a strange sent around you and you look down and see dog shit oozing from the side of your ship. Light turns to dark, day turns to night, Nirvana turns to hell, and the world looks as if Armageddon is on its way. That dog shit has transformed your consciousness from angelic spiritual transformed enlightened being into a raging Bull with the consciousness of a frog. All in a nanosecond. The question might be what were you running away from in life that suit you to the meditation class in the first place. And that question if answered correctly will be dog shit on your shoe, or in another language things that you don’t like the don’t meet your expectation in the world. It may just reveal that you have unfinished business with the world around you and that your stress is an indication of one thing and one thing only. Your healing is incomplete.

Now let’s talk about the wisdom I wish my dad had told me. I thought that healing meant getting as far away from the source of the problem as possible. For example I sprained my ankle in football running my football career so I decided not to play football and get a far is way from football and football club and all the things that meant anything to me about football as possible. I applied the same philosophy to certain types of people and certain types of jobs and certain types of education and certain types of knowledge and certain types of social engagements and certain types of doctors and certain types of problems and certain types of service and certain types of well, you name it I tried to get away from what I didn’t like. I thought that was healing because the problem that caused me pain was a long way away but I learnt the hard way that this is not healing. Let me share a story with you.

One day long before the pyramids were built in Egypt, I was married. I had a wife and three kids. I owned business and was more wealthy than I had ever dream Dolph. I had a secret lover to make up for the mundane day-to-day life of a business owning parent and everything was going perfect. Two years later my wife made payback, which I now except I deserved, had an affair, fell in love and the next thing I know, I was single and my three children were on a yacht sailing around the world never to be seen again. In addition to all this all the money that I thought was a dream come true was exactly that it was a dream. It went along with the yacht, overseas. So just put me into a state of wound. I guess you could say that having are a mother who died when I was three would make such a situation 1000 times more sensitive, added to this backdrop was a violent alcoholic stepmother, which I had committed deeply to help my own children avoid, and so filled with wounds I became a great, shitty, father parent and partner. Ultimately I was just doing my best with all the wounds that I carried into the marriage.

When the shit hit the fan and I found myself sitting on my arse, broke jobless and mentally at the consciousness of a monkey, all those wounds surfaced and needed to be dealt with all I had only one other option and that was to exit stage right, suicide. The choice now seems ridiculous yes I had to deal with my wounds but at that time ideation with suicide made the commitment to heal not so obvious. I teetered on the brink for many months. Especially with a belly full of vodka. But I came to realise that I had made this mess and it was my job to clean it up.

Skip forward two years, burning through friends, seeking solace in the arms of available rescuers, escaping on holidays to all sorts of fantasy resorts and here I am two years later still wounded but thinking I wasn’t. I done a bunch of Zen and all sorts of Band-Aid repair work and frankly, completing my MBA and thinking what a wonderful amazing success I’ve made of my life with my new business, the past was behind me. It was then that I learnt about real healing.

Into my world comes Deborah. I was at a restaurant in Sydney and she was with a man at another table and I was with a mate at our table and she flirted with me like you can’t believe. By the end of the evening I had her business card and 48 hours later we were walking along Bondi Beach smooching and kissing and hugging as if there was no tomorrow. I fell in love. Or so I thought. But this in love was built on the concept of escaping from the past and so it wasn’t really in love it was in escape. Deborah was everything my ex-wife wasn’t, or so I thought.

As I continue to tell the story to you I shudder at the thought of your perception of me but I hope you understand this is in a time before Adam, arrived on the planet and so on what has transpired since but I tell his story because it’s real.

One week later after our Bondi schmoozing and our spectacular sex afterwards Deborah moved into my Darling point apartment and we were happy ever after. Every day I would come home from my business and Deborah would come home from her business and they’re on the kitchen bench would be our dinner that she had cooked. We had sex like rabbits and the neighbours complained about the noise. She was stunningly beautiful and I thought I was in that meditation class that I’ve been to before in Nirvana, in lightened and awakened and in bliss. This relationship palden and I introduced Deborah to the remaining friends I had who had survived the money grown period of my divorce and the aftermath and they all agreed that this was a keeper and I should, propose marriage. Which I did. And she excepted. The future was going to be fantastic.

Deborah worked hard. She had an import export business that made her a lot of money but she was quite often played by allergies and had a sniffly nose from time to time which for her was very annoying. Deborah was late at night sometimes and on the odd occasion had to be away on weekends travelling too far of cases to secure deals for the distribution of her products. She worked hard on her computer creating advertisements for her products to so, as a business person who had completed an MBA I was thrilled to be living my life with someone of a like mind, totally gorgeous, brilliant chef and well to say it mildly, and athlete in bed.

I hope you know me well enough by now to know that this story is leading somewhere frightening and I will save you the time by going straight to the frightening part.

After six months of absolute bliss, I was lying in bed one night when Deborah was working late and out. I read over it to her side of the bed and walked on the floor and there was her overnight bag. It was open. I glanced into the bag, being mindful of her privacy, that’s all what look like lolly rappers. One closer examination they were condoms. Hundreds of condoms. They were intermingled with credit card receipts. You know, the old days when you paid for things with a credit card and they would swipe the card through that machine and print a yellow receipt. Her bag was filled with them. They were all so leg garters, a pair of handcuffs, some other straps and well, let’s leave it at that. Lying there in the bed thinking to myself what could be a great logical wonderful delicious explanation for all this paraphernalia that had accumulated in the bottom of her overnight bag. I had no answer for it except that Deborah had a second life.

Sometime later around midnight Deborah arrived home. Of course I was up to greet her and stood at the front door with the bag. What’s this I asked?

She turned around and walked down the hallway of the apartment block and I never saw Deborah ever again.

A few days past and I thought well I need to deal with the fact that Deborah is a high-class hookah. Obviously she didn’t have a business. I checked through all the credit card receipts they were four between $400 and $1000 and some water for dates when she was away for the weekend in Brisbane but they were for a hotel in manly. There might also dockets for home delivery of takeaway food which it turns out was what Deborah was pretending to cook in the kitchen. But this is not the worst of it.

During the course of our relationship Deborah had introduced me to her friend who owned a telephone shop. On the floor of my bedroom were Deborah’s close and they needed to be either returned to her or disposed of so I packed them up in a green plastic bag, you know, the garbage bag type and took her Gucci handbags and put them in the car and took them around to the telephone shop to give them to her friend. I was grief stricken but because of my divorce I was a little more resilient than I had been the first time such a disaster had happened. Seriously I couldn’t afford to go down the shoot again. So I muscled up and took the garbage bag and the bags to the telephone shop. And here the story gets more interesting.

I walked into the front door of the telephone shop and the staff, 10 or 12 people started to laugh. Somebody yelled out “Deborah?” And it became conspicuous that I was not the first person to walk in the front door of the telephone shot with a garbage bag delivering Deborah’s belongings in a state of shock. When her friend came out from his office I noticed that he too had a allergy problem and a small sniffle in his nostril and then it became even more conspicuous that Deborah had been taking cocaine, and this was her supplier.

Deborah’s friend invited me to a party at his house some weeks later and I attended at point piper. This massive mansion send out of context for a telephone shot Owner but I didn’t question it. As I entered the house there were many people inside, a lot of women without any top on, a lot of men that looked a little seedy and a bedroom with $50 notes piled on the bed and a stack of white powder sitting beside it. People were cuddled up some having sex in public areas of the house. I met the telephone guy and said that this was not my sort of party and decided to go home but before I left he said I want you to meet some people. I went to a kitchen and dad were about eight men and the telephone guy introduced me as Deborah’s ex. They began laughing because too were Deborah’s exes.

After a few minutes hearing their stories, which in one or another where identical to mine, one guy asked how much did she steal? What do you mean I asked? Each guy revealed that Deborah had, in the process of living with them, written checks to herself and stolen massive amounts of cash from the bank account. This made my exit from the party more rapid than I had intended as I rushed back to examined my cheque-book (shows you how long ago it was) to see how much she had taken from me. Lucky it was very little.

It turns out that Deborah’s clientele were senior executives and well-known business people of Sydney and worked at the top of some of the largest banks in Australia. No weekends away where on a cruise boat in Sydney Harbour as a paid escort. Her current card receipts were from a hotel nearby my home where she took her clients. Her interest in advertising and business marketing was for promoting her services not her handbags. From the beginning to the end it was a fraud. And the story doesn’t finish here but I will finish it here for the sake of sanity.

What does shows is one thing and one thing alone. That incomplete healing makes a stupid. We tried to run away from things and we run right into them. It makes us naive in our decisions because we are easily taunted by the things that will help us avoid what is not healed. We become ignorant and easily manipulated because we are trying always to make up for something that went wrong. Healing, like the sort of things that happens when we have surgery is easy. Healing like the sort of things that happen when we break a leg and need to do physio is easy. But the mental healing and the real healing can only take place through two words.

Gratitude and love are the only two words on the planet, no matter what language you speak, Zac are the benchmarks of real healing. If you don’t like those two words you can come up with another two. But gratitude and love for anything that took place in your past is the only way to avoid being so stupid, as in the case of me with Deborah, that you don’t become blind to the reality, driven by escapism, vulnerable to manipulation and stupid.

To this day I still love Deborah. She has a place in my heart because my feelings towards her, based on her deception, were real I really liked it. I am thankful for her because she of all people in the world penetrated my mask and my fake healing of my marriage to force me to stand up and take stock. She made me more real than any other person has ever done in my life. She seduce me and proved how ignorant I was of the human condition and how little I was paying attention to my intuitive nature which would’ve seen right through her disguise from day one. But I was hungry, I was trying to cover up the hurt, I was running away from pain, and I ran right into it.

A key part of coaching is healing. Healing needs a healer. Healing needs a person who wants to be healed to become aware of the ignorance of running away from their wounds, especially emotional spiritual wounds of the type I received as a child with the death of my mother in the experience of an alcoholic violent stepmother. That shit has to be processed so that there is no regret and no living life in reaction to an event that is just an event until it’s judged otherwise.

This is the end of Episode 5. 100 Things I wish my Dad had taught me.

With Spirit

Chris – Ex partner and one of many of Deborah.