Unhappiness is not an illness.

I am so SO tired of how normal it has become to pathologise people who suffer. I was reminded today of how -when my eldest son was born by emergency C-section -exactly 22 years ago on this day, and my body afterwards felt as if I’d been run over by a truck, and he then screamed incessantly day and night for at least six months, and I ended up just sitting on the sofa crying with him, and then a (stupid) visiting midwife diagnosed me with “postnatal depression"- I was livid. 

How dare she tell me that there was something wrong with ME.

I wasn't ill! The situation itself was, in fact, BRUTAL.

Pathologising people who suffer -handing out labels without questioning circumstances- is #gaslighting.

When you suffer at work, or in your marriage, or in society, it does NOT automatically mean that you are sick!

As a coach I am -obviously- all for taking responsibility for one's own state and know how powerfully personal/inner transformation can impact external circumstances. But this must -obviously- never take the form of gaslighting.

More often than not suffering is an expression of health in a situation or a system that is sick - or truly factually unbearable and not aligned.

Unhappiness is not an illness.

What if unhappiness is an expression of health?

A signal for an urgent need for change in the external circumstances?

pic of a much happier moment with my son(s)