The Lowestoft Conference - Thoughts

Reading and viewing responses to The Lowestoft Conference has been an amazing experience, for someone who by nature fears rejection and disapproval it is an intoxicating and terrifying time. My #coa inner child needs to hear that people like me, that I haven't disappointed or upset them, that the response my actions create is the only measure of whether I am good enough.

My slightly more developed self still fears that I may not be good enough, but from the perspective of wanting my intentions to mean as much as my actions, for people to see that it is not my childlike grasping for approval that is important but my hope that other people will benefit from what I hoped to achieve.

For most of my life the feeling of not being good enough pervaded every aspect of my external persona - my absolute conviction was that I was indeed not good enough, that I was a bad person and that if people got to know my fears and vulnerabilities they would reject me. And rejection causes shame. And shame remains to me the most destructive force of my existence, avoiding it caused me to dissociate from real life, create a fantasy perception of me as 'together', and to ultimately bring me to the brink of extinction.

The most incredible lesson of my life has been that the more I show people the things that I saw as weaknesses - the 'real' me - the more people saw them as my potential strengths. As I offered people more of my truth, I could trust their judgement of me because it was based upon who I was not upon who I reflected back to them. It is a base skill of many #coa to have the ability to rapidly sense what someone likes to see in other people - or more to the point what they approve of in other people - and to adapt to it and reflect it back.

You'd reject me if I was angry, meet Mr Calm. You think chilled out people are annoying, just call me Mr ENERGY. You want it, I got it!

And most of the time it doesn't require a second thought, and to most other people it is imperceptible... other than to those of us who get it, we sense a persona that isn't real - either by choice or through intoxication - and we fear it. If I can't be sure I'm sensing who you really are, how can I present back to you what you'd approve of me to be?

So there we were at The Lowestoft Conference, my hope was that people would hear the voices on stage and find them powerful, that we would share an experience that was uplifting, and that people would understand a little more about the impact of trauma, the effects of PTSD, and the power of lived experience.

For me, incredibly, the outcome was so much more - I can barely describe the immediate feeling in the air once Josh began to speak. Now don't get me wrong this is a man who helped to change my life with his words, but the moment he moved eloquently through his talk to focus on the impact of him as a child and the impact he may have had on his own children people had a palpable, and powerful reaction. The realisation that even children 'too young to remember it' will be profoundly impacted by trauma they experience began to change the way people thought about life, began to reflect upon their own childhoods, their own parenting - and of the lives of people in a town which suffers from depravation and adversity.

As we heard from Ivan we experienced a man who has already revealed much of himself to the world, and exposed himself to risk but who before our eyes was on a minute by minute interrogation of his own vulnerabilities. I felt the impact of Josh's words still landing on him as we spoke on stage, as he reflected upon his children with humour I sensed that was a coping strategy for the realisation that they will have absorbed the trauma's of his previous life. But by the end I felt the same way as I often do when speaking to Ivan, that he offers himself up not as an example of good or bad but of human emotion, the power of feeling isolated, angry, and afraid. As his life is restored contact by contact with people who show him safety through diversity, I sensed he had felt a profound healing in the weekend's experiences.

And so to Dan, what can one say about Dan... other than it wasn't just Dan, it was Gem too - the most incredible team you could ever hope to meet. The power of the sharing, the raw, terrifying retelling of the story of a single day in his life began to take the air out of the room to be replaced by a deep collective inhaling of hope, the hope that beyond fear, beyond terror, beyond trauma was love, simply love.

Luke and Adam, and Paul and Steve provided an alternative and equally moving view on PTSD, shared experience, and hope.

My enduring memory is not of any single voice, of one particular story, but of the growing belief in the room that my ridiculous statement that Lowestoft could be 'the best place in the world' for people to experience positive mental health was actually possible.

So thank you to every single speaker, and to every single person who came or joined us later, or via Facebook. Not for feeding the #coa child in me, but for making the adult me realise that it's safe for me to just be me, failings, mistakes, imperfections and all.

The power of lived experience is the power to make someone believe that they are not alone, that they can survive, and that they can connect.