James Ballantyne

Tag: resilience

  • Ive been a little bit quiet recently…

    Ive been a little bit quiet recently…

    Which given my output previously was probably not a surprise. Writing on here has taken a bit of a back seat for a number of reasons. I quit Facebook for two months too, and whilst ive spent a bit of time on Substack, where theres other writers and far far less on current news, drama of politics and tbh quite a bit of stuff I just really didnt need to see, engage with or for it to take up my energy.

    I needed to switch off.

    Ive switched off before, and many of you know that involved avoiding the news and radio, and quitting twitter.

    Its been a time where I have had to face a number of battles, ones that will probably never get mentioned here, and also some personal challenges that one day might do, some of which began days after I temporarily quit Facebook itself.

    What I have needed to do is dig pretty deep into whatever reserves I have just to live, and when I say live, I mean respond well and stay emotionally afloat amidst alot, when trauma, triggers, fears and anxieties could easily start to pull me backwards, and this includes work, and rest and be there for people close to me who have been in a place of struggle too.

    So I have been a bit quiet recently, in terms of writing on here, but what’s been so important to me has continued to be ….. writing….. whether this has been daily journalling, free writing and expressing myself in words – the writing that releases, thats not for public consumption.

    I have also realised that the last few years of being in a good place has significantly given me the inner space to be able to deal with the last few months, even if that has also meant refining what I was spending my energy on, a refining that was as much about making powerful choice to favour myself in my own soul and power, and not give myself away to consuming and reading.

    I have been quiet recently. Because I am ok. Because i was giving too much at times to this type of writing, the type that could sometimes get me into that endorphin cycle feedback loop of positivity, and maybe even trying too hard to be creative, original or helpful, when actually what I needed instead was to be me, in my raw vulnerability, and write for me. Im already on journal number 3 for this year.

    And Im typing up version 2 of my second book, and yes, sadly this stuff has stalled too, but I am about to restart this too.

    Am I writing because I need to explain everything to you? No.

    Or to apologise? No

    Maybe its just to say thank you, thank you for the messages that you’ve sent me via whatever means whenever I have mentioned that ‘your words were meaningful today’ or when ‘you’ve sent a message of support’ when I haven’t been able to say why, and still can’t.

    Life is bigger than writing, and Life is bigger than the stuff and I am continually , daily remembering and giving love to myself, to feel loved everyday, is also to care for my energy and protect it, to realise I can sit and read, listen to music and not use what I read to write something, or to expend energy writing in the way I have done fairly prolifically in the last few years.

    I have been useless at ever doing a regular piece of writing, ie just doing one piece a week, and limit myself, its seemed to be in bursts, or gaps, maybe thats what I could do, more heat and depth, and not just noise. But let’s just see, maybe thats for a next chapter of writing…and the books I want to write will definitely take priority. Am I ‘coming back’ …maybe…but definatley differently..

    So thank you.

    Im still here, and im more than ok. I really am.

    Bless you, and thank you

    Much deep gratitude

    James x

  • Broke, but not broken.

    But I bet you think you are.

    I did.

    I thought I was too broken to be fixed

    The fear of deep scars caused by abused too much

    To afraid to go there.

    Too weak to want to

    Too afraid of the consequences

    Didn’t know what it would take

    What it would mean

    Then all the soothing tactics when coping.

    They would need sorting too.

    And they haunted my days like heavy weights.

    Thinking I was to blame

    Thinking I was broken

    Thinking…

    I’m too wounded….I don’t want to start facing it

    I’m too broken to even face it

    I’ll be going alone.

    Yet, I had no choice in the end.

    Dug deep when everything lost and clawed my way into safety and space.

    Turned around after running away for too long.

    Turns out I wasn’t broken

    Turns out what I considered sin ..was abuse others had done to me

    Turns out I had been normalised into thinking surviving was default

    Turns out I wasn’t broken, but holding onto things that weren’t mine to hold

    Turns out I wasn’t broken, but I had been broken.

    Turns out I was light and love underneath

    But that had been sniffed out, crushed and stolen from since birth.

    I wasn’t broken….but I had been broken.

    Yet…I wasn’t broken

    Because I didn’t leave the world when suicide tempted me as a child

    Or when emotional breakdowns occured in my 30’s

    I wasn’t broken.

    I wanted a better life.

    I wanted to escape

    I wanted more

    I wasn’t broken, and neither are you.

    You are not what someone, or a system has done to you

    You are not the weight of others expectations

    You are not the mask or the shield

    You are not broken.

    You just are.

    You are light, and love and joy all along

    This is your soul, you are breaking to find love inside

    And love is withing melting it down

    Your own love, you.

    You are not broken.

    Love is within.

    Love is you

    You are within.

    You are not broken, you are complete within.

  • What if the story we live by, is a story we cannot tell?

    Something happened to you

    Something happened to you..that wasnt your fault

    Something happened to you…that wasnt your fault….and you had to do something as a result that you cannot talk about.

    Something happened to you..that wasnt your fault…and you coped in life with self soothing strategies…that you cannot talk about either.

    Something happened to you….that wasnt your fault….and everything since has been about staying silent about it…silent….and hiding all traces….protecting it….protecting yourself…from what happened to you.

    Something happened to you, by someone who is dominant, powerful and sometimes insane, and bewilders you from any kind of action, and you can’t share it, for recrimination.

    Something happened to you…..that you dont think anyone will believe.

    That wasnt your fault.

    That wasnt your fault.

    (even if their insanity causes you to take the blame)

    It was something done to you, when you..when I.. was a child, when I was powerless, when I was dependent…

    That set so many patterns of life in motion….

    And a story that had to remain silent.

    We live by stories.

    We all have a personal narrative, a myth, a sacred story to believe, a story to live by.

    David Macadam says in ‘Stories we live by’ that by having this personal story we then accept, reject information to fit it, or expand our story to fit the new information.

    That was one of the things I learned when I was doing my Masters in Theology and Ministry at Durham, the psychology elective that I did with Dr Jocelyn Bryan.

    In 2017, doing my Masters, I didn’t have a story I lived by, not one I wanted to talk about, it was far easier, a defence mechanism, to use my brain to disect and critique the process of story making, story telling and consider how theology, story and drama all fit together, whilst I was feeling, well, I wasnt feeling anything, just dying inside. Even the Christian story that I believed , I had critiqued and was full of doubt of it.

    Yet.

    That sacred myth that I doubted had to do a lot of work, to hold me somehow when my psychological self was a scared, wounded, abused little boy.

    The story that I was actually living by, twas a story of shame, a story of abuse, for fear, a story that I didn’t want to acknowledge.

    That was the story I was actually living by…

    Because it haunted my every step.

    It was the story that had power over me.

    It was the story that consumed.

    It broke me into a thousand pieces every day, causing…

    One trip to eat extra food every day

    One more hour watching TV news

    Three more glasses of wine

    One more hour on twitter staying distracted.

    One more week watching Friday night soothing comedy.

    One more piece of bread, then another, and another, and another

    One more football match to overlay drama with drama

    One more piece to write to stay busy

    Another long bike ride.

    More work to do, fill the diary.

    One more anything

    To run…

    Filling an ache.

    Because I was so not actually ok, that I could barely say the words, let alone say I had needs, because, that would mean being in a safe enough place where my needs were validated, even if I could articulate them.

    One more coping mechanism

    One more denial of my self

    One more day to mask and pretend.

    One more day when I couldn’t share, just keep going.

    Survival isnt a story, its fragmented existence.

    One more self soothe

    One more ‘fix others, im not important’ moment

    One more hope of change, living a story of ‘conditional okayness’

    Fear, alone, isolation.

    The story I lived by, for too long, was a story of shame, fear, anxiety and survival, and masking this so that no one could ever know.

    Shame.

    Ends.

    When stories

    are told

    in

    safe places. (Brene Brown)

    Yet.

    Shame stories

    Held

    me

    for too

    long.

    It was a story I couldn’t tell.

    It was a story I held in silence.

    It was a story that I had no control over.

    It was a story that wasnt mine.

    It was a story of what someone had done to me.

    It was a story of my coping mechanisms because of that childhood abuse and the follow up behaviour, including relationships.

    My life, was someone else story.

    My lifeless life was someone else’s story.

    How I had adjusted to be for someone else.

    How I had given away myself.

    Actually thats so not true. Because I had never had a self. Self was broken from birth.

    When real

    stories

    of us

    being alive.

    get hidden.

    There was a story I was living by. But it wasnt a story about me. It was a story about how my life was orientated around the fear of someone else, and that I was a bit part player in my own life.

    It takes so long for someone to feel the main player in their own story

    Spiralling into an anxiety I couldn’t never acknowledge. Tears hidden, as breakdowns occurred in car journeys all alone to Coldplay songs, and reduced priced Tescos wraps scoffed.

    In avoiding the negative, we only encourage it to recur (John O Donohue Anam Cara)

    I look back and realise how barely I even existed.

    To do self care, to have needs, to accept love, to do quiet, to give myself any permission, to feel power…all deemed unimportant, selfish or impossible, so invalidated all of them.

    So that story began to change.

    Or, my relationship to my story did.

    As i began to realise what was done to me, wasnt my fault.

    As I began to realise how I had been trapped in emotional contagion.

    As I realised that change on the inside brought a sense of worth, and change on the outside…

    As I began to realise how I hadn’t been loved, just stolen from.

    As I began to realise, how I had survived

    As I began to realise the damage, yet also the inner strength and resolve I had to get myself to where I have got to.

    As I began to work through every brave step, and own the bravery of it all.

    As I began to realise who I am, and who I am not

    As I began to connect with my story, to dig deep into it all, and realise myself in it all. I had ran from a past I had to connect with, to face, to love for my self strength in it all.

    As I took loving myself seriously, and self compassion, and self care, and just undoing the critical voice of inner torment. I had to love myself in a way that I had only been able to love others.

    As I began to realise my own…sense of worth….sense of love…sense of being me, wounded in many parts, but not entirely broken, and capable of love.

    As I started to be my own story. I started to be able to own the story, to make this story about me, to connect the dots, and also now, to be able to be excited about the blank pages ahead, waiting for their colours to emerge.

    As I started to write it down, and realise I wasnt alone.

    As I realised that there was life beyond it, beyond it all.

    But at the time, the story I wasn’t able to tell was the story that I was living by.

    What if the story we live by is one of abuse and the shame of what we do to cope, and the silence of both of these things?

    For, It’s not what happened to us often…it’s the silence and hiding for so long. It’s navigating a life around the shame. Thats draining and energy sapping.

    Yet, it doesn’t have to be this way, not forever.

    Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is to stop living the story that others wrote for you.

  • How Richard Rohr saved my life.

    I have written before about a certain pink coloured book (link here to that post) that I consider to have changed my life, in terms of how I could see what had happened to me, and the behaviours of others.

    However.

    There was another book that I had read 6 months previously that had as profound an importance.

    At the time, my bookshelf was a mixture of Youth work, Theology, Mission and Social Justice books.

    My head was full of ideas.

    My life, however, was, and had been falling apart and I was in denial.

    I felt completely alone, no where to go, emotionally or physically.

    With no one to talk about what was going on.

    I was already unemployed at the time, what I didnt know was that I was about to be out of the family home, with no family support, and about to battle to save a marriage. I had barely any friends, and had at least 1 breakdown in that summer.

    I have no idea when I bought it, or how it got there, but there was a copy of Richard Rohr’s book ‘Falling Upwards’ on my bookshelf. I may have read 1 RR book previously, but I can not for the life of me remember when I bought it. However, I do remember picking it up to read from my bookshelf in about the April of that year (2018), and thinking to myself that it was a bit ‘woolly’ , a bit not ‘academic’ enough, for the James that wrote blogs on books and theology, this wouldn’t cut it.

    In August of that same year, with cracks opening wide, beginning to expose the fragility of my situation, I noticed it on the bookshelf. It was more that likely that with no money I could only read the books I had, so it was this books turn.

    To Summarise, Rohr outlined the two halves of life. The first he said was about achievement, making it, ego, and accomplishments. The second, he said was about becoming real, about to being true to the person who was actually inside, and not the masks, identities created for those accomplishments.

    He said that to get from one to the other, there is often something seismic, the wake up call, the breakdown, and this could appear/be in a number of ways.

    It all depended on how we responded to it.

    If I’m honest, I didn’t recognise the first part of what he described, even if I did see bits of me ‘being an internationally known youth worker’ or ‘well known for writing’ all of these things seemed even at the time, I didnt feel like I had achieved, or made it, or anything, I was full of shame, fear, self doubt, and emptiness, trauma I hadn’t dealt with and running away from and bottled up for a day I never wanted to arrive.

    But.

    I could recognise the middle bit.

    The breakdown. The situation of desperation. The need to be vulnerable. When everything that I even thought I had did begin to be stripped away.

    And as I picked up the phone to a friend to ask for a place to stay, and cried in relief when he said yes, I kind of knew.

    I knew that I was now in the beginning of this phase. I knew, and I could choose how I would respond to what was going on.

    I knew it was time.

    I said to myself on that very day of that very call,

    ‘I do not know what is going to happen now, but I am going to learn, I am going to face it’

    It may well have been the words from a book.

    (and there’s tears in my eyes today as I write this, recognising my journey in all this)

    It didnt matter. Because, ‘Falling Upward’ gave me a roadmap, it gave me something to cling to, it gave me a sense that it will be ok, and a sense that what I was about to go through wouldn’t destroy everything (and at that point I needed to know that there was something theological/spiritual about whatever was going to happen). I could hang what was about to happen on a process, (which has subsequently included amongst other things, 4 separate sessions of therapy, a considerable amount of time seeing, understanding and processing and healing from deep psychological childhood trauma, my own coping mechanisms from this, and facing the inner demons, all over the last 6 years). In short, it gave me a structure, and it gave me hope.

    Hope because at that moment, and had been for a considerably very long time, life had been dark, shadowed, avoided and I was in perpetual survival mode feeling trapped. But now I had hope. Hope that there might something beyond what I was about to start the process of going through.

    Hope because I knew of no one, and heard of no one who had walked a similar path, yes I had heard of ‘mid-life crises’ but I was already in crisis, but no one who shared their story, it felt as though I could hope because the path wasnt completely unheard of, tiny, frightened alone me, walking, falling, held with hope from a book. But it was hope none the less.

    Hope, because at that point no one had told me I was going to be ok. I just had to believe it for myself, and now this book shone a light on the possible future.

    But that I had to face, encounter, deal with, and not avoid everything that was about to arrive. For though much was taken, and I had to cling on at times, in a way, I started from a very low point already.

    And as I walked on the top of Roker cliffs a few weeks later, having received two weeks of safety, and care, that learning process was starting. It would do, and continues to this day.

    Where did that resilience come from James?

    Asked a friend of mine a few weeks ago when I was telling them this story.

    I think it came from when I was 12.

    When I told myself the same thing.

    I knew that that point that if I am going to make it in life I am going to have to do it on my own. I could not ask for help, have needs, have dreams, ask for money even, or support, I was alone and had to make it. 28 years later, and with the framework of a Richard Rohr book and a safe place to sleep in I dug deep into that survival and determined resolve, the lowest point had been reached already. I was broken, but not beaten, and that moment of vulnerability and seeing the path, was already a very small, but significant positive fall upwards.

    Richard Rohr, Falling Upwards, Thank you. Actually, you probably did save my life. You were probably my first Angel on this path.

    Thank you.

    You can purchase it here, for you or for a friend

  • Male Sensitivity : Part 1 (Realising my own)

    Toughen up

    You need to stand up for yourself

    Wimp

    You’re being sensitive

    Softy

    Pussyfoot

    And the ultimate..

    Stop being so Gay. 

    All words Ive heard in my life, some at school, some in places that were meant to be ‘home’. 

    What did all of these words and names mean?  What did they do? What did they communicate as to what is valued. 

    Especially for me, a Man, A boy, A teenager. 

    What about the following: 

    ‘You need to have a ‘thick skin’ to work here. Or to be a ____________ nowadays.

    And ‘that’ profession, it seems strange to say this about a profession that on the face of it should care about people, clergy, teaching, nursing, social work.. 

    What is being valued here?  What does this say about our society? 

    Who is this all in favour of? What is being left out? 

    Shall I be honest with you?

    Ive struggled to write this piece.

    Yet, as you know, ive been able to, or found it ‘easy to’ write about other aspects of my self realisation and awareness journey in the last few years. Including Abuse. Ive come back to the subject of sensitivity in the last month or so. Rereading Elaine Aruns book that I read for the first time 3 years ago, rereading it 3 weeks ago was like new pings going off all over the place, new pieces of my personal jigsaw making more sense, more realisation of how my childhood, schooling and subsequent has been affected by not being able to have my sensitivity valued, though not being able to know or communicate this. 

    Its as if I fear that admitting being sensitive is weak. 

    Its as if I then put myself in the ‘snowflake’ ‘woke’ or ‘wooly liberal’ category. 

    Its as if I then be vulnerable. 

    But what if? 

    I am Sensitive. 

    I am Male, and I am Sensitive.

    And it’s been a strength that ive had to hide. But it’s been there, I can tell.

    And I always have been. It was what to need to be to survive. And not just me.

    It wouldn’t have mattered to retort ‘ no im not gay, im just sensitive’ wouldn’t have helped in the playground. Standing up for bullies hasn’t been about punching my way back, but reporting to the right people. (And then I got bullied for being a ‘tell tale’… honestly.. what is the right thing?) 

    As I read the book ‘The Highly sensitive person’ by Elaine Arun and ‘Sensitive’ (2023) by Hannah Jane Walker, who writes from current research into sensitivity, and in conversation with researchers and psychologists and those in economics and business too, and an interview with Elaine Arun herself, my head is full of further questions and realisations, questions that might be for the future, and so this might be an introduction to ‘Sensitivity’ and specially being a Sensitive Man. 

    Would you like to hear more on this? 

    What insights do you have if you are male and think you might be sensitive?

    Has this been something you have struggled to admit? 

    Could you trust it if you discovered it?  Can I? 

    ‘What if the real story of sensitivity is one of profound vulnerability and resilience, care and empathy, Sensitivity is much more every day, much more mythic than we think. Sensitivity is fundamental to who we are, and I think fundamental to where we go next ‘

    Hannah Jane Walker; Sensitive (2023)

    Maybe it’s time to be proud of being sensitive. Maybe it is for me, maybe it is for you. Time be courageous and dig deep into this strength thats been hiding behind masks and expectations.

    What did it feel like to you to listen to your sensitivity, pay attention to that soft voice inside, and care, cooperate and listen, rather than seek to compete, dominate and rule?  Is ‘hardness’ a required mask?

    Male Sensitivity… let’s talk about it. What does this mean to you?

    Has being sensitive been a gift or a challenge for you?

    Are you in a job, a community or relationship which values sensitivity?

    Do share below, and let’s talk about it.

    References;

    The Highly Sensitive Person – Elaine Arun (1999)

    Sensitive – Hannah Jane Walker (2023)

    If you’d like to hear more on this, my recent video shared some of the indicators of sensitivity. Do give it a watch.