Mardell has shared how listening to her inner voice helped her heal herself after her divorce and lead to starting her own colonic business. When she told me this, I asked if this was the first time she’d heard her voice. Given her background and her two abusive relationships, I was thinking that it must have been but Mardell said the voice had been there all along – she just hadn’t been trusting it. Here’s Mardell:
I’ve heard that voice many, many times. It’s just that usually I would hear it and ignore it because my impulse and my ego would pull me another way. I would always push it aside, saying “not right now” and then I would get in trouble.
That voice actually told me about these men but I didn’t want to listen because I living in a space of desperate. I think that’s one of the parts I’ve learned in my own healing: take the desperate out.
Desperate was pivotal in my marriages, in so many of my catastrophic relationships in the past, in my life and in my choices. Everything was based on desperate instead of listening to the voice and that meant trouble was on its way.
Desperate is what drove me into marriage. I was desperate to have a child, I was getting older, I was thirty-nine. I felt I’ d forgotten to write it in my Daytimer so I’d better pencil it in but it was getting late. There was a desperateness there to have something I had never done before and I knew my time was running out. Then there was a desperateness to leave that and go to another place which led me into another dark place.
The desperateness that made me hustle for business was a desperateness I needed to see. It was a survival desperateness, the truth of who I was. I had helped husband #1 build a real estate business: I funded it, I did all the classes, I put my name out there and he took it from me. He drove it into the ground and lost it all
I helped husband #2 build his business into a million dollar business from a picnic table in his condo, an idea and $1,000. I helped him build it into a major business, which he’s now lost in a takeover. He’s now an employee in what used to be his own company.
Desperate led me to think I wasn’t capable of doing things on my own: I wasn’t capable of just having a child and raising him on my own, I wasn’t capable of having a healthy relationship, I wasn’t capable of the whole courtship.
When you heal your gut, you start healing everything. You heal so many levels of yourself – in your brain, in your body and at a cellular level, that you start seeing clearly. When your gut is speaking, it’s clear, it has clarity, your brain has clarity, your body has clarity.
I can see it clearly now and it all links back to a desperateness and a feeling of lack of self-worth. I had to have a man to be complete. Society teaches us that too and so did Barbie when I was little. It all teaches us that the only way to have something is to build a “partnership” and I bought into that thinking.
After I left husband #2 and I started to heal, started to seeing clearly. I took the desperate out and thought, what did it teach me? The woman in the bank taught me,
I could go out and get an attorney,
I could stand up,
I could be strong,
I deserved to have my fair share of all that I had worked for.
When I started my colonic business, leveraged everything and paid that off in eighteen months, it taught me I had the skills I needed, the sales skills my father taught me, the marketing skills he taught me, my communication skills, my self-learning, my motivation.
I didn’t need a partnership – I already had everything I needed.
The Divorce Coach Says
I’m a big believer in listening to your inner voice but I’m a pretty recent convert. It was a technique used by the counselor I saw when I was trying to decide whether or not to leave my marriage. I think my voice had always been there because I can sense now a disconnect with decisions I made and what I was feeling. Unlike Mardell though, I don’t think I heard my voice, I didn’t even recognize it was there. Now, I’m learning to trust it more and more, like the mental health day I’m taking today 😉
When Mardell talks about being desperate, I imagine her circumstances were truly desperate. I don’t think you have to be desperate to feel desperate and it’s that feeling of being desperate that can lead to poor decisions.
How about you? Has your inner voice guided you to smart decisions? Have you ignored you voice and realized later it was wrong decision?
Photo Credit: dno1967 at Flickr