I’ve had quite a few people have a positive impact on my life, luckily. I’ve had some truly great bosses who have encouraged me, believed in me, and some of whom I have become good friends with. There are and have been some amazing people in my life who have helped shaped my perspective, my thoughts, and even my direction to whom I will be eternally grateful. So, selecting one story from all those was challenging. But then I remembered a conversation I had with someone the other day, and the story I wanted to tell here popped into my head.
How many times have our parents said to us ‘I only want you to be happy’ or said to other people ‘I just want for my child what makes them happy’. I know I have. And I genuinely do only want happiness for my son. I was having this discussion with someone the other day, about happiness. How we can choose it in the here and now for ourselves, that we don’t have to wait until we have material possessions, a great love, a particular job, even a sense of security before we feel happy. We can choose in this moment to think…I am happy. Right now, here, in this moment, I have everything I could ever want. Even in the midst of ill-health, we can choose to think that ‘okay, I might feel rubbish at the moment, but other than that I have everything I could ever want and so, I am happy’. Because happiness isn’t conditional, it is found in the little things, and it is not an external state, it is purely an internal one. This conversation was me giving some gentle, informal coaching for someone who is struggling and stuck in a mindset of lack brought about by their physical issues.
This coaching ability was honed and trained by a wonderful woman, Denise, who trained me (and others) over a number of years in hypnotherapy, and Neurolinguistic Programming to Master level. I also took a pure coaching course with her as well, plus other coaching courses I have undertaken. But it was Denise who started the flame in me of wanting to help people through coaching because of how much it had helped me. My first experience of (successful) therapy was through someone trained by Denise, and it had been such a good experience I had decided that I wanted to delve into it further. And so, I met Denise. It was during a 1:1 with her that she said something to me that was so profound, it has coloured a huge amount of my thinking. I was talking about my mother and how she often said she only wanted me to be happy, but it didn’t always feel that way. And Denise said ‘parents often say that without thinking whose definition of happiness they were working from: theirs or their child’s’. That one sentence has had a huge, and ultimately positive, impact on my life.
I love my mother, I think she is an amazing woman and an incredibly strong one. She’s funny, she can be silly, she can be wise, and she can be the most infuriating person I have ever met. Because her shadow side is someone who is rigid, controlling, and believes that her outlook is the right one and everyone should follow it. She is very houseproud (I grew up in what was basically a show home) and would rather spend her time doing housework than going out for the day. This, I suspect, is where her controlling nature manifests itself in her own life, the fact that everywhere has to be perfect before she can let go and enjoy herself. She is a frustrated interior designer, and has always had a beautiful home. She has been a huge fan of buying ‘doer-uppers’ and I remember the first time I purchased a property, I overheard my step-father saying quietly to her ‘remember, she can’t afford potential’, the word my mother always uses when she sees a ‘doer-upper’ house that speaks to her.
That shadow side of her, the controlling, has been the bane of my life frankly. My mother and I are in some ways very similar, in many ways very different. I am not a housework person. I do it, reluctantly, but I don’t do it obsessively. I would rather spend 15 minutes doing something else first thing in the morning than get up early to do the hoovering as my mother would prefer. I will always make the bed first thing in the morning, but I will not allow the fact that things need dusting to stop me from going out and enjoying myself. My mum is an introvert through and through, I am an introverted extrovert insofar as I can do the extrovert bit for a period, then I need to be an introvert to recharge my batteries. My mum will say she doesn’t like something (like pasta) without having ever tried it, and she will hold steadfast in that belief. I will try something, and then decide. But it is in her view that she knows what is best for me that is the thing that has brought most contention between us. She likes to do things by the book, I like to see how things can be done a bit differently. She doesn’t want to rock the boat, I do. She has never liked a single boyfriend I have ever had, I have no idea why. She doesn’t either, she just hasn’t liked them and has always made her feelings quite clear on the matter. Usually, she brings the reason back to her in some way ‘they only want your inheritance’. It’s not that great! And in so doing, undermined the fact in my mind that perhaps they liked me. In some ways, she has made life unbearable and when roused to a temper by her inability to control me, has shouted some pretty horrendous things to me. She never apologises, just goes back to normal after a few days as though nothing happened.
So, when it comes to whose definition of happiness, she is very much working from her own. Her definition of what is happiness, and how I should follow that. She’s never asked me what would make me happy. When I’ve talked about travelling, something I am passionate about, she pooh-poohed the idea as being frivolous and irresponsible. I am a fan of home schooling, something she thinks is just horrendous and makes me a terrible mother, disregarding the fact that her grandson’s confidence was being destroyed in school, and is now being rebuilt. She has always urged me to write, until I did and then she decided it was (again) frivolous and irresponsible. Because I am not writing what she thinks I should be writing. She has copies of my books, and has not read them. She never really showed any interest in the career I used to have, but because her version of happiness is having a settled 9-5 job, has berated me endlessly for not following suit anymore. Her vision for me is to have a very staid husband that she can control who provides everything materially, to have a perfectly curated and spotless home, to have a 9-5 job that she can boast to relatives about, and to have the perfect child who is seen often but not heard. All of that, to me, sounds like a slow death of my soul. Yes, she wants me to be happy but on her terms. It is where my round peg/square hole conundrum in my life has come from, and one I am working on shifting to round peg/round hole life.
My son has always been fascinated by all things Japan. One of his favourite films is ‘The Last Samurai’, and he is a devotee of Manga and Anime. Any girls he has liked have been Japanese or Chinese. He loves the food, the culture, and it has been something that has been inside him since he was very little. He has this pull to that part of the world. I don’t. I have been to China, to Shanghai, for work and while it was fascinating, I have no desire to return. I would like to go to Japan for a holiday, but while it’s on my list it’s not on the top of the list. There are other places I want to go to first. When he announced recently that he thought he would like to live in Japan, maybe even spend time at a university there, my first reaction was ‘NO!’. He is my only child, I don’t want that level of separation between us. And then I stopped myself. This wasn’t about what I wanted, this was about what he wanted. Denise’s words, as they so often do, came back to me. It wasn’t my definition of happiness. My son isn’t an extension of me, he is his own person who has a right to pursue the things he is passionate about. So, I smiled, nodded and agreed that if that was something he wanted to do, he should pursue it. It might be something that sticks with him, it might not. But he has the right to have the freedom to express his desire and not have me pour scorn on it as happened in my own childhood. And I defend that right for him to other people. If I suspect his grandparents or even his father denigrate his ideas, I am there defending his right to have them. Because I didn’t, I was allowed the ideas that conformed to what was deemed acceptable. And it has had a massive, and negative, impact on my life.
So, when Denise said those words to me and I reflected on what they meant in my life, I started on a journey to truly examine who I was and what happiness meant to me. It’s not a short journey, there are lots of things that impact it especially my innate people pleasing, or should I say mother pleasing given I’ve already experienced parental abandonment through my natural father. As with everything, it was slow to gather momentum but is now running full steam ahead to do as I choose, to identify my own happiness and definition of it. And I have passed on that view to my son. I am determined that he will identify his own version of happiness now, while he is young, and for that not to be tainted by me. His version of happiness is to not feel like that square peg in the round hole at school because he doesn’t learn by rote, but by having a thorough understanding of a subject which is inconvenient for teachers who are tasked with teaching to remember, not learn the depth. So, he is home schooled and can explore subjects in greater depth. And he is learning better as a consequence. He is not being made to feel stupid because rote doesn’t suit him, and feeling like he doesn’t fit in, the same feelings I had at school.
No, I am a firm believer that we do not apply our own definition of happiness on anyone else, that it is applied purely to our own lives. And that we allow others to define their own happiness and encourage them to pursue it. For that insight, that awareness, I can never thank Denise enough.
Louisa Simpson 