There is treasure under your own feet, if you’re willing to dig. It’s time to give yourself the love you’ve always deserved.

Contents

Introduction

1. Feeling and Healing

2. Childhood

3. Family Drama

4. Little You

5. Trauma

6. What Holds Us Back

7. Self-Esteem

8. Love and Relationships

9. Boundaries

10. Body Image

11. Sex

12. Identity and Justice

13. The Ups and Downs of Stress

14. Grief

15. Trying Therapy

16. Final Thoughts: Living Your Best Life

Acknowledgements

Sources

Resources

About the Author

How To Use This Ebook

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Introduction

‘I can’t wait for all of this healing crap to be over.’

I was three years into my training as a psychotherapist. All of my emotional buttons were constantly being pushed and to say that I was exhausted was an understatement. The multiple layers of unlearning behaviours were becoming relentless. I had had enough. On this day, I was on the couch with my own therapist (yes, therapists need therapists) and in desperate need of some hope and reassurance.

‘At least once I’ve worked through all my past stuff, I can just sit back and live my best life.’

I leaned back, resting the back of my head on the sofa. I needed to visualize the never-ending glow-up I’d eventually have after hundreds of therapy sessions.

But there was a pause. And when my therapist finally responded, her voice was gentle but the truth of her words shattered me.

‘Tasha . . . you do realize that the healing doesn’t stop? It’s an ongoing journey for all of us. This healing crap is lifelong.’

Her smile was kind and empathetic, like a parent gently telling their child that Santa Claus isn’t real.

This was one of many ‘Real Talk’ moments that I would have in our five years of being in therapy together. The truth was painful but it was exactly what I needed to hear. From then on, I let go of the agonizing expectation I had put on the healing journey to be a perfect trajectory.

Healing isn’t always big ‘Aha!’ moments. It’s often small and subtle and revealing, like throwing a pebble into the ocean and realizing something so small can slowly cause ripples over time.

The self-love journey can be long and frustrating, so I’m here to walk along with you

Let me start by saying I’m so glad that you made it here. Since this book found its way to you, it’s possible you feel like your past might be holding you back somehow. You might be on a search to try to understand what healing is and what healing you might need to do. You might also be finding your self-love to be challenged by patterns that you’ve picked up throughout your life, like having wobbly boundaries or choosing the wrong relationships. To unpack all of that, we need to embark on a journey of healing the many parts of our past and present.

Healing isn’t linear. It also isn’t easy and we can often get stuck in the process. Often healing is about paying attention to where the pain is, and this isn’t always comfortable.

But I don’t believe therapy and the journey of healing has to be dry or scary or daunting. It can be painful. But we can also tap into joy and gratitude during the process. Healing is bittersweet like that. There can be pain, but there can also be some deliciously joyful, fun, sweet moments too.

Whatever we don’t address becomes a mess

One of the main things that we learn in therapy is whatever we don’t address becomes a mess. Our past shows up in mysterious ways – be it unhealthy patterns, unmet emotional needs, or the people we continue to attract into our lives – and influences how we relate to others in the world. Until we can unpack our roots and history, we will be haunted by it. It isn’t until we have real conversations with ourselves that we uncover what’s really going on.

Real Talk is my way of communicating and bringing the tools learned in therapy into your hands. This book is a guide to support you to have genuine, authentic conversations with yourself, in order to start the journey of healing your past experiences and cope with the pressures of modern life. Real Talk is about having what psychologist Bettelheim calls ‘an informed heart’. On this journey, I will be sharing therapeutic life lessons that come up in the therapy room time and time again, so that you can start to heal for your future and love yourself the way you deserve.

Old ways won’t open new doors

As a child, I didn’t see or have a language for feelings, trauma and mental health. Being of Black British Jamaican heritage, these topics were taboo, despite the various issues in my household. Such issues were hardly spoken about, so I didn’t have the words for my story. And so I grew up shutting down a lot of feelings and not knowing how to articulate them. I became a quiet child with big emotions, who couldn’t articulate what she was feeling or needing. Though I looked like a good girl doing well on the outside, holding in these big feelings made me feel socially anxious most of the time.

My big feelings followed me into my adult years through my inner child. Little Me wanted to implode. On the surface, people knew me as cool, calm and collected, but beneath that I was bubbling with anxiety and a deep distrust in my own feelings. I became a people-pleaser in my relationships, fulfilling other people’s needs because I didn’t know how to fulfil my own.

Like most mental-health professionals and advocates, it was my own story that led me to becoming a psychotherapist. Not only did I want to help people resolve their own crap, but I also wanted to learn how to resolve my own. Old ways won’t open new doors and so I had to unlearn many of the ways I had learned to survive, so that I could start to live a life that was closer to my best, most self-loving self.

As a trained integrative psychotherapist, I meet a lot of people who were once children with big feelings. But now they are grown-ups with big feelings and adult-sized emotional wounds. These wounds show up as perfectionism, self-sabotage, people-pleasing and general lack of fulfilment in life, love and relationships. Each of these wounds come from something we’ve survived in the past that never had the chance to heal.

In my professional life I felt frustrated that so many people might never be able to access the deep and fruitful work of being in therapy. And so I began to share my knowledge and mental-health tools through the wonders of the internet and social media – creating a community around @realtalk.therapist for those who want to work on themselves but can’t access our overstretched or sometimes expensive services. This book is my way of making the benefits of therapy as accessible as possible by giving you the tools and insight to help you heal and live your best life.

I can never be the expert of your life

First things first, I can never be the expert of your life.

No one can take that place except you. I’m also definitely not perfect or superhuman or fully healed. However, my expertise as a psychotherapist specializing in childhood issues, and my intention to share some of my own pains and mistakes within these pages, will allow me to help you look at your history through the needs of your younger self.

Real Talk is about giving yourself the change to heal from things you usually don’t like to think about. This book is not always going to help you feel better. But it will make you feel more. When we feel more, we give ourselves permission to feel and release the big feelings that we’ve been carrying all along.

I have learned how to take my clients to the past to find important lessons of wisdom and I will help you find your answers too. But finding answers can also bring sadness, grief, rage, disappointment, confusion and a hundred other emotions.

By embarking on this journey you will feel deeper, truer and more authentically yourself as you unravel the past in search of wisdom. This is what self-awareness does.

As someone who sits on the complex intersection of being Black, British and female, I don’t see mental health and wellness through one spectrum. Instead, I will challenge you to question the role that some of your own identity and intersectionality plays in your mental-health and healing journey.

By tackling the wounds that may have been weighing you down, you will also move further along your self-love and healing journey, acquiring the tools that your parents or teachers didn’t have in their toolbox to teach you. Here is a new place for you to be seen and heard.

The journey ahead

I’m so glad to be on this journey with you.

You’re the driver of our jeep. You have control of where we go, how far and at what pace. I’ll be in the passenger seat, holding the map and giving you directions for where we could go if you’re ready. And we have space in our jeep to pick up nourishment and equipment to help you along the way. If you need to pause for a pit stop, do it. If you need to go back a few miles, go for it. If you need to drive past something too difficult for right now, you have full permission. We need to do this at your pace.

It’s best to start at the beginning of the book and work your way through. Each chapter is unique in its own right, but they also lean into one another. Within each chapter there are patterns to unlearn and relearn, based on theories I’ll share about our emotional and psychological needs.

Healing work doesn’t work without doing the work. So I have filled this book with moments to pause for self-reflection. Real Talk Moments will help you pause and reflect on what we’re thinking about. These are full of some big questions, for you to check in with what you’re feeling and reflect on your own past experiences. And Real Talk Exercises will guide you into a moment of deeper healing, using creative expression, visualization or things for you to feel confident in taking action on in your life. Creativity tells our ego to hush, so that we can focus on saying the real thing, rather than the right thing. It can be helpful to have a journal or a notes app, to help you explore these.

As much as this book is about self-development and healing, you might find it useful to share things that you learn in conversations with the people around you. Not everyone will be able to respect or understand it because it might trigger their own insecurities around their healing or pain. If you’re in therapy currently, I highly recommend sharing things that touch something for you with your therapist, so that you can go deeper with that healing.

My clients are my best teachers, and they inspire me to be the best therapist that I can be every day. Throughout the journey, I will share stories inspired by my clients, without using real names or real details, to protect the people I’m so lucky to work with.

For me, Real Talk means real stories, so I’ve invited some mental-health experts and advocates who have been kind enough to share their own wisdom and stories. I hope they bring you reassurance and compassion.

I will also be sharing some of my own personal anecdotes and things I’ve learned along my journey as a therapist but also as a human in healing. By being real with you, I hope that I can encourage you to be real with yourself too.

Before we get started, let’s check in . . .

Exercise: Hopes and Fears

Take a moment to pause and reflect on the following questions. You could journal, draw or create a vision board of your answers . . .

What are your hopes for this book and the journey ahead?

What do you want to learn about yourself?

What are your fears?

What might you need to let go of?

1

Feeling and Healing

There is no healing without feeling.

Before we start unpacking our stuff, there’s a question you need to learn to be comfortable answering: how do you feel?

Learning to say what we feel is one of the first things that we do in therapy. But its so much harder than it sounds.

So many of us live on auto-pilot. We eat, sleep, repeat through our lives without really pausing to feel the feelings we’ve been carrying along with us. Our lives don’t leave much space for our emotions. And thanks to technology and capitalism, there are too many other things that we find easier to give our time to.

But even without that, a lot of us don’t quite know what we’re feeling. Because we haven’t been taught how to acknowledge and be with our emotions. It’s just not common knowledge. I’ve met so many clients who have stumbled when I’ve asked the question, how do you feel? We’re more able to say what we think will make people feel comfortable instead of saying what we really feel.

But doing this only sabotages our healing and self-love, because suppressing our emotions stops us from moving forward. The more we gate-keep our feelings, the more we also gate-keep our healing. There is no healing without feeling. Just like a wound, what we feel tells us where the pain is. We can only heal an emotional wound by allowing ourselves to bear and soothe the pain of it until it passes. We have to feel it to heal it.

On this journey, there will be lots of moments for us to check in with how you’re feeling, as well as what you felt in the past. So let’s start by getting to know our feelings . . .

What actually are feelings?

In order to get along with our feelings, we need to understand what they are and why we have them.

Science tells us that feelings are temporary reactions from our body. They act like minions who work for our brain, picking up information from our environment to tell us about our subjective experience and how to respond to it. They carry this information from the body to the brain and back again in a continuous loop, all around the body. This helps us make decisions we need to make, like who we want to spend our time with or what ice-cream flavour to choose. Our feelings are like the anchor to make sense of our experiences. Without them, we would be lost.

Our feelings tell us what we should approach and what we should avoid. It’s like the difference between coming across a cute baby and coming across a wild lion. We lean into things that make us feel safe, valued and curious. But we lean out when we feel disgust, fear or hate. These signals are there for our emotional survival.

So what do our feelings have to do with our healing? Let me start by saying, we all have a bit of a façade which leads to us hiding our feelings. Something that psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott called a False Self. Our False Self is our shield, which protects and defends us against pain, shame and rejection. It does this by falling in line with learned social norms, fitting in and control. For example, smiling when we’re actually feeling emotionally rough. We take control by only showing people what we want them to see, like a mask.

That means we also have a True Self – the most authentic, spontaneous, messy and vulnerable parts of us. We are born as our truest selves, and in our early years we allow ourselves to be and feel just as we are. As we grow older, we start to learn from our environment and adapt to the expectations of others. It’s normal to have a dance between our False Self and True Self, as they take it in turns to show themselves. We keep our true selves to ourselves and our trusted circle, and show our false selves to the world.

But in order to be our true selves, we need to be emotionally available to ourselves. The more honest we are with our feelings, the more emotionally available we are to ourselves and our healing. The more we hold back with our feelings, the more emotionally unavailable we are to ourselves and our healing.

When we are emotionally unavailable to ourselves, we often invalidate our emotions by thinking things like:

• My feelings make me weak/too much

• It’s not good to be so negative

• Think happy thoughts

• Its silly to feel this way

• It could be worse/Get over it

• Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger

• Feelings don’t matter

• I’m being dramatic.

As my clinical supervisor once told me, if we don’t grow up with an openness about feelings, we learn to be scared of them. The truth is, invalidating our feelings doesn’t make them go away. It just means we store them up until they spill over and overflow into all areas of our life. And the more we deny what we feel, the more these feelings have a hold on us. Not only that, but when we block the feelings that don’t feel good, we also end up blocking the ones that do feel good too.

Real Talk Moment:

• How do you respond to your own feelings?

• Think of someone in your life who openly expresses their feelings. How do you feel about that?

• Think of someone in your life who doesn’t openly express their feelings. How do you feel about that?

Checking in

Real talk, are you fine or are you neglecting yourself emotionally?

In my own therapy, it took me ages to learn to stop saying ‘I’m fine’ each time my therapist asked me what I was feeling. I didn’t realize that ‘fine’ is actually not a feeling. Unconsciously, my false self wanted to gloss over the real messiness I was feeling inside.

Learning how to talk about our emotions is like learning a whole new language. There is a societal expectation for us to be fine and feel fine all of the time. And often a fear that if we were to be truthful about our feelings, we might kill the vibe or make the moment awkward. Our mother tongue might be full of words like fine, good, OK, all right, blessed to describe our emotions. But again, none of these are feelings. They’re just words that help us avoid speaking our truth, like putting on an emotional plaster or Band-Aid. It is a layer of protection which helps us temporarily and covers up the messiness and complexity of what could be really going on beneath the surface. And hiding ourselves is the opposite of self-love.

So let me take a moment to ask you, how are you feeling? And I mean, how are you really feeling right now at this moment? It’s OK if you can’t figure out what word to describe that feeling as we’ll come to that. But for now, describe what’s happening in your body at this very moment. You might want to briefly close your eyes to check in with yourself. What is your mind telling you about what you’re feeling? Maybe it’s busy with overwhelm and confusion. Or maybe it’s peacefully quiet. What does your heartbeat have to say about what you’re feeling? Is it racing with anxiety or beating with excitement? And check in on the rest of your body. What sensations are happening, where are they happening and what are they telling you about what you’re feeling? What are those emotional minions of yours trying to communicate to you?

Have you ever felt swept up by your feelings? Sometimes our emotions can feel subtle, but other times they feel big and overpowering. It can feel like we’ll never be able to shake the feeling off. And we shouldn’t have to. But there is one simple but important thing that we need to do: name them.

‘Name It to Tame It’ is super-simple thing we can do to help us not be swept away by our feelings. It literally is what it sounds like: we need to name our feelings to be able to tame them. Scientifically proven by psychiatrist Dr Daniel Siegel, when we label our feelings as what they are, it calms our brain and taps into the parts in charge of problem-solving and understanding. It helps us make sense of things before we start spiralling.

This is why therapy introduces people to their feelings. When we link what we’re feeling with why we’re feeling it, we’re able to be more emotionally available and loving of ourselves. But to do that, we need to know and connect with the wide range of feelings we have access to and have a sense of what they feel like in our bodies so we can recognize them. Only then can we name our feelings to tame them.

When we are little, we usually know about the most basic of feelings: happy, sad, bad, angry, scared, surprised. Our emotional minions deal with these feelings differently, so they show up in our bodies in different ways.

Feeling

It can feel like . . .

It usually means . . .

HAPPY

Lightness, butterflies in the stomach, can’t stop smiling

I’m valued and safe

SAD

Lump in the throat, heavy chest, stinging eyes and wanting to cry

I’ve lost something important to me

BAD

Sinking feeling, feeling small, time slows down, pit in the stomach

I did something bad, saw something bad or I am bad

ANGRY

Tense muscles, headaches, tight chest, hot skin

This is unfair. I’m hurt or my boundaries were broken

SCARED

Stomach ache, heart flutters, feeling on edge, sweaty palms

I’m in danger or at threat

SURPRISED

Wide eyes, still body, numb feeling

I wasn’t expecting this and need to let it sink in

We’ve all experienced these feelings at some point in our lives. But we might have been told some wrong information about them, which still stands in the way of us feeling our feels. So here is some real talk about our feelings:

There is no such thing as a bad emotion

Society loves to tell us which feelings are acceptable and which ones are not. For example, we’re often more comfortable showing happiness and joy than we are showing sadness. But there are no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ feelings. There are just feelings. All feelings have a purpose and we all have permission to feel them. Just because a feeling doesn’t feel good, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t feel it.

Your feelings are not your personality

There is no such thing as an angry person or an anxious person. Our emotions are not our personality traits. Most of the time, our feelings are just temporary. They come and they go. Some might stay longer than we want them to, and we might be going through a particularly rough chapter in our lives. Your feelings are not who you are.

More than one feeling can exist at the same time

Sometimes we can feel contrasting feelings at the same time. We can feel many things at once, even when they contradict each other. One of my favourite phrases is the Japanese term mono no aware. It’s that bittersweet mixture of sadness and gratitude we can feel when something amazing is ending. Like being in a loving friendship group at a particular time in your life but knowing that circumstances are about to change. We can feel happy to have them, but also sad and mourning that things will never be the same again. Both feelings can exist at the same time.

Some emotions work together

Sometimes one feeling can hide another. This can happen a lot if we’ve been hurt or betrayed. Imagine being ghosted or ignored by a close friend. You’d probably feel angry and confused about what happened, and that might be the first thing you show other people. But then deep down, there might be another feeling. Like sadness or feeling bad, believing you must have done something wrong for that to happen. So one feeling shows itself, whilst the other feelings are in hiding.

Exercise: Feelings Wheel

Now that we’re grown-up, our feelings are a lot more complicated than six basic emotions. So let me introduce you to the wide range of your emotions. This is a feelings wheel. It shows us how our six basic emotions can get more nuanced and specific to what we’re going through. For example, there are different types of happiness, like feeling proud or content or powerful.

The more that we check in with ourselves, the more comfortable we will be with talking about our feelings. And we’re also less likely to feel overwhelmed by them. By using a feelings wheel to check in with yourself regularly, you can open up your emotional vocabulary.

Here are some check-in questions to try:

What word/s best describe how I’m feeling right now?

What does that feel like in my body?

How am I feeling about the week ahead?

What words describe me at my happiest?

What words describe me on the most difficult days?

Feeling unlocks healing

There are sure to be some hard edges of healing. Being on a journey of healing and self-love means we have to come face to face with some tough emotions. It can be a scary and brave thing to confront our own feelings. The difficult thing here is that so many of us haven’t been taught how to stay in the presence of our own pain. We recoil when pain and discomfort show up because they scare us.

One of the most incredible things about us being human is our capacity to feel. No other living being comes close to the vast range of emotions that we can feel. And the fact that we feel big, real feelings gives us our capacity to heal from anything we set our hearts to.

A common phrase that we might hear is ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’. On the contrary, I believe what doesn’t kill you can make you softer, kinder and more resilient.

Many people are terrified of that. To be soft means to be vulnerable and we’ve been told that this is the same as weakness. And in some families, cultures and groups that softness hasn’t been allowed. Having to be tough and resilient in the face of adversity can lead to the image of strength being prioritized over vulnerability.

A researcher in the field of vulnerability and shame, Brené Brown describes vulnerability not as weakness, but as our biggest measure of courage – where we lean into uncertainty, risk and being emotionally exposed. Vulnerability is a choice that we make to be curious and to surrender to the need to be in control. We bravely choose to face scary or difficult things to bring us closer to what heals us.

An analogy that I share about vulnerability with my clients is that it’s like letting go of the handrail at a roller disco. Surrendering to the fact that you might fall without it, and people might see you fall flat on your back. But, taking that risk is the only way to grow and get better. When taking those risks of vulnerability, we are able to embrace being scared and courageous at the same time.

When we are vulnerable, difficult and painful feelings will come up. As much as it’s uncomfortable, emotional pain tells us where the wound is. Once we know what’s coming up for us from beneath the surface, we can start working on it and attending to those needs. It’s down to us to be our bravest selves by asking fear to step to the side so we can bear being closer to what hurts us. As much as it is painful to visit where the pain is, going to the emotional places that scare us helps us heal from them.

Being emotionally available to ourselves

Healing is about learning how to be more emotionally available to ourselves. When we give ourselves permission to be vulnerable, soft and messy, we give those feelings the air to breathe. We take a moment to fill our own cup. Because how can we be emotionally available for the other people and things in our life if we’re not emotionally available to ourselves first?

Therapy introduces people to their feelings. But there are other things you can do too. Try these practices to open up a more emotionally available relationship with yourself:

• Pay attention to what’s happening in your body on a regular basis. Check in with what your emotional minions are communicating to you physically.

• Be intentional by creating pauses in your lifestyle so that you have a chance to catch up with your feelings. Give yourself the gift of your own time.

• Empathize with your emotional needs, not just your practical ones. For instance, a lot of us are more likely to talk about how tired or stressed we are than about our actual feelings. Get into a practice of digging deeper and finding out what feelings are hiding behind your practical needs.

• Own your feelings by using ‘I’ statements, instead of projecting or passing your feelings on to other people. For example, ‘I feel frustrated’ instead of ‘You frustrated me’ or ‘You feel frustrated when’.

• Figure out the root of why you’re feeling what you’re feeling. Every emotion we feel has a root cause and a back story. Allow yourself to gently trace back to understand what needs to be healed and worked through.

• Notice when you might be avoiding something and allow yourself to be curious about what you’re afraid of.

• Give your healing breathing space. It can be tempting to pack our healing journey with different healing methods, because we want to get to our best selves quickly. But healing needs as much pause as our feelings do. Allow space for joy and connection too.

• Allow your feelings to come and go, rather than letting them stick to you.

• Be honest with your feelings, even if it might piss someone off. This might even include ending things and putting boundaries in for people and things that drain you.

• Allow yourself to practise being more vulnerable with people that you trust. But also be respectful of your emotional capacity, and how much of your emotional availability you give to others.

Exercise: The Guest House

A piece of poetry I live by is ‘The Guest House’ by Rumi. The whole poem is a beautiful metaphor of how we can visualize our feelings as guests visiting our home. Each morning a new guest, aka a new feeling, arrives to visit us.

Seeing our emotions through the metaphor of a character is a method of externalization. In the therapy room, externalizing is when we look at a feeling or an issue as if it is outside of us. We turn it into a person or an object or a metaphor, so that we can actually look at it from an outsider’s perspective. We can even turn a feeling or an issue into a character. It might sound a little weird, but when we visualize our feelings as a person, they become something we can have a conversation with. It also helps us empathize with our feelings, instead of seeing them as our enemy. Even welcoming our most difficult feelings can bring us closer to healing the wounds they come from.

Try this exercise to visualize your feelings in this metaphor when you feel them surfacing. You can write, draw or just visualize what comes up. If you feel silly doing this, close your eyes and give yourself permission to be playful.

There’s a knock on the door and you go to answer it. Imagine your feeling as the person on the doorstep:

Who is it? What feeling is at your doorstep?

What do they look like?

How does your house guest greet you?

How does it feel to see them on your doorstep? Is there relief, dread or frustration? Note that feeling down, but try to remain polite.

How would you greet them with compassion and kindness? Invite them in.

Give them the floor so they can tell you what they need. How can you be there for them at this moment? What can you do together that you would both appreciate?

When your house guest feels more settled, feel free to walk them out and say your goodbyes.

The more we make space for all of our feelings, the more space we make for us to heal and grow self-love. When a feeling feels too big, remember you’ve got this. Even when the feelings feel uncomfortable and the healing feels messy, you are more capable than you know and more resilient than you realize. The more you practise being with uncomfortable feelings, the more you will strengthen your emotional muscles too. Let yourself feel the big and difficult things when they come your way. You’ll be surprised at just how much you are able to live through it. And if you’re ever in doubt, reach out to someone you trust or a trained professional to walk you through it. But you’ve got this.

Lots of people come to therapy realizing that the big feelings they have belong to their past. It can be so unsettling to realize we’ve been carrying emotional baggage for years or maybe even decades. But I think it’s great when this happens because it’s a sign that we’re emotionally ready and available to do the work of healing. We didn’t have the emotional tools back then, but we have them now.

And there’s one place where a lot of these big feelings come from. Let’s take a trip back to our childhood . . .

Real Talk on Feeling and Healing

• We often live on auto-pilot, leaving no space for our feelings to catch up with us.

• Feelings act like minions who work for our brain, picking up information from our environment to tell us how we feel and how to respond in a continuous loop.

• The more honest we are with our feelings, the more we lean into our true selves and our healing. The more we hold back with our feelings, the more emotionally unavailable we are to ourselves and our healing.

• Fine is not a feeling.

• Vulnerability is a choice we make to face scary or difficult things and bring us closer to what heals us.

• We can treat our feelings like house guests who need our time, respect and attention.

• We need to name our feelings to tame our feelings.

• Healing is about learning how to be emotionally available to ourselves.