3 Steps to Emotional Recovery: How to Be Open to Healing
Self-help saved me and could save you too.
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” – James Baldwin
I was saved by self-help in ways I never thought possible. It changed me so much as a person I now live in a universe completely different to that of my younger self.
A new universe, one of possibility.
This is why I endlessly come back to writing self-help — a subject matter usually so full of snake oil salesmen and bullshit artists — because for all its trite ubiquitousness, somewhere, right now, self-help will be reaching out to someone, pulling them back from the edge.
Self-help opens doors and lets light in. It is a cheat code to life. It dragged me kicking and screaming through what I now see as the 3 stages of healing.
I want to explain these 3 stages using my own story of healing to illustrate how self-help can emancipate us from ourselves.
Step One: Awareness
I grew up in a poor, turbulent and dysfunctional household surrounded by alcohol, violence, hospitalisations and police intervention.
