Welcome to Love Day, otherwise known as Valentine’s Day.
Today is an opportunity to shower yourself in love and compassion and to send messages of love to those who need them the most.
I was doing some journaling earlier, as I do most mornings, asking for help to show myself kindness and gentleness today (not always easy) and the word grace came to me.
Give yourself grace today, I wrote.
What a beautiful word – grace. What a beautiful concept.
To me, it feels like being wrapped in a warm, snuggly, safe blanket, with the permission to rest for as long as I need (which is something I find very hard to do).
This is apt for me today, and perhaps for you.
I’ve been giving myself a hard time lately, for some ‘mistakes’ I believe I’ve made, for some ‘messes’ I believe I’ve created.
In short, for not being perfect all the time. For being human (how dare I be human?).
And that’s not a kind way to be, it’s not a gentle way to be, it’s not a loving way to be.
So today, I’d like to give myself grace. And I wish the same for you.
The other thing that’s close to my heart today is a desire to reach out to people who need extra loving.
In the past six months, two wonderful men I know have lost their wives to cancer, one of those wives being one of my oldest friends. Both men are vibrant and healthy. Both men were looking forward to many more years with their partners. Both men, I imagine, are hurting profoundly today.
Another friend has lost her health and is living with a devastating diagnosis.
And another lost her beloved dog recently after many years of loyal companionship.
These people need extra loving today. Their hearts are hurting. How can I reach out to them and send them love?
And while I’m here, in this loving space, how can I send myself extra love? I’ve lost people too. Mum and Dad. My heart hurts.
That’s the problem with loving, isn’t it?
It often brings loss.
But healthy loving is always worth the risk, and even unhealthy loving teaches us valuable lessons and leads us towards healthy love.
If you are hurting today, dear Reader, I send you love.
If you are grieving, if you have experienced loss or heartbreak (haven’t we all?) or if your dreams of having a partner by your side or a different life haven’t yet materialised.
I send you a virtual hug and a big bunch of sweet-smelling flowers.
And I send you everything you need to shower yourself in love, compassion and grace today.
I’m here for you.
In fact, I will actually be here for you today, on Zoom, at 5 pm UK time, for my Love Day Love In.
To join, you simply need to belong to my Love Letters mailing list so that I can send you the Zoom link. You can sign up to my list at http://www.katherinebaldwin.com.
Love comes in many forms but one of the most important ways we feel loved is when we feel seen and heard, understood and acknowledged.
That’s what I’m offering you today.
I see you. I hear you. And I will be live on Zoom at 5 pm to do just that.
Maybe I’ll see you there, and if not, I send you so much love.
Katherine x
PS If you’d like my support on your journey to love, read on.
Resources to help you to heal and grow
Explore 1:1 or group love, dating and relationship coaching with me via this link. I have a brand new How to Fall in Love group programme launching on Monday February 19th and I’m offering £100 off the six-months programme and £80 off the three-month programme as well as 1 or 2 group coaching calls if you sign up by the weekend. Explore the group coaching programme here.
I have a number of transformational online courses on finding love and self-love that you can take at your own pace. Use the code LOVE10 for ten percent off all self-paced courses in the month of February. You can find them here.
My first book, How to Fall Love, includes many tools to help you to connect to your feelings and overcome unhealthy patterns. It also tells the story of my personal journey of healing and finding a healthy and loving relationship.
My TEDx talk on Finding Courage, Overcoming Fear and Breaking Free is here.
As we enter unchartered territory and prepare to traverse new terrain, I’d like to suggest that we create a map or a guide to help us to navigate through the year in a way that honours our hopes, dreams and heart’s desires and keeps us on track, despite the inevitable winds that will try to blow us off course.
You may be familiar with the ‘What 3 Words’ navigating system that pinpoints an exact location on the map. At the start of this New Year, I invite you to use a similar system to chart a path through 2024 – to choose three words that will orientate you to the sweet spot of your life, to that place where you feel happy, healthy, balanced, loved up, connected, aligned and fulfilled.
Three words to guide you towards your heart’s desires.
Three words to keep you on course to fulfil your dreams.
Three words to remind you, every day, about your priorities for this year.
Three words to alert you to the regrets you may have at the end of 2024 if you don’t prioritise your heartfelt intentions.
Here are my three words, in order of importance:
Health
I had to battle with myself to put health at the top of my list. I wanted to put my Number 2 choice (see below) as my Number 1 but then I realised that without my health, I cannot enjoy anything else in my life.
The importance of health hit me hard in 2023 as I lost a dear friend to cancer – a friend I met in my very first days at Oxford University (that’s 35 years ago); a friend I shared a bedroom with in my second year of uni; a friend I travelled around Spain with in my third year of uni; and a friend whom I lived with, at her home, with her family, during my holidays from uni; a friend with whom I had so many shared memories, so much shared history; a kind, generous and gentle soul.
As I write this, I’m looking at her smiling face in a photograph printed on a prayer card we were given at her funeral – a card that sits on the noticeboard above my computer, to remind me to be grateful, every day, for my health and for this precious life.
So, health is my first word.
I’m thinking primarily of my physical health – of taking care of my body, my joints, my gut health, my bones, my muscles – but also of my mental health, because the two are intertwined.
With this word as my guide, I hope, every day, that I will take actions or make decisions that prioritise my health.
For example, I hope I will get up from the desk and walk in Nature even when work calls. I hope I will remember to make time for my sea dips several times each week, even in poor weather. I hope I will make the time to build more muscle, to improve my posture and to keep my heart strong. I hope I will make food choices that honour my delicate gut.
On the mental health front, I hope I will make the time to meditate every morning, to exercise as often as I can and to connect with other human beings in real life as often as possible. I hope I will laugh more and dance more. I also hope to prioritise my other two words (below), because they are vital for my mental health.
What’s your top priority this year?
2. Relationship
My second word is relationship and by this I refer primarily to my romantic relationship, my marriage.
With this word as my guide, I hope to make choices every day to honour my beautiful relationship, to preserve it and to deepen it. I hope to find ways to have more fun times with my husband and to go on more adventures. I hope to be a kinder, more loving and more forgiving partner. I hope to commit to actions in my life and in my work that would bring more freedom to both of us so that we can spend more time together.
If I think into the future and to the end of my life, I know I will feel happy and content if I have invested in my relationship and prioritised it over work or achieving stuff.
Love makes the world go round and I’d like love to be at the centre of my world this year.
This guiding word also extends to my other relationships. I hope to prioritise connections with family and friends, acknowledging, as I wrote above, that life is short and incredibly precious and that healthy relationships and good connections not only enrich our lives but bring us joy and keep us sane.
What’s your second priority for 2024?
3. Purpose
It took me a while to locate this final word. I knew my third priority was something to do with my work but ‘work’ or ‘career’ or ‘professional life’ didn’t sound right.
Purpose does.
Soul purpose, to give it its full title.
Putting my God-given talents to good use rather than hiding away or procrastinating or allowing my fear to sabotage my work.
The word purpose encompasses everything I do. Although the novel I’m writing is a lot of fun to write and publishing it is a long-held ambition, it’s also connected to my purpose because I have created a lead character – a woman approaching midlife – who goes through the same relationship and life challenges that I have experienced and many of my clients experience. Through it, I hope not only to entertain but also to enlighten.
My relationship coaching and midlife mentoring is also part of my purpose. I see myself as a teacher and, dare I say it, an elder (yes, I’m getting on a bit) – someone with a treasure chest of life experience that can be valuable to others who might be navigating the same choppy waters, be they unwanted singleness, relationship pain, involuntary childlessness, bereavement, midlife crises, career dissatisfaction or a general sense of ‘how on earth did I end up here and what am I going to do about it?’.
My speaking work is also part of my purpose. I am committed to sharing my experience of an eating disorder and other addictions, burnout, breakdown, depression, trauma and so forth, along with resources to heal and grow, with audiences around the world.
I hope, each day, each week, to take actions and make decisions that honour this purpose and allow me to put my gifts and talents to good use in the world.
So these are my three words.
Health.
Relationship.
Purpose.
I have my guides, the markers that I can keep moving towards, the points on the map that I must keep returning to, even when I go way off course, if I want to arrive at the sweet spot of my life, feeling healthy, happy, balanced, loved up, connected, aligned and fulfilled.
There is one other word that I’m committed to this year – it’s a guiding principle, an overarching theme that connects and supports the other three words. That guiding principle is commitment.
I understand, now more than ever, that I must commit to actions and decisions in my life in order to reap the rewards that I long for.
Just as I had to commit fully to my partner in order to experience the wonderful benefits of a healthy and loving relationship (after many years of not committing to relationships, of being half-in and half-out), I also have to commit to actions in my business that enable me to serve others, make a difference and bring freedom and abundance to my life; I have to commit to steps to improve my health and wellbeing; and I have to commit to activities that will help me to build connections and deepen relationships with others.
If I don’t commit, I will miss out.
I cannot fully live if I don’t fully commit.
I can’t tell you how scared I am of commitment. I was so scared of committing myself fully to a relationship that it took me to the age of 43 to do so (followed by a commitment to marry him at 48).
My fear of commitment has now moved on to other areas of my life and to my business.
I am terrified of committing in case I feel trapped or suffocated (a legacy of childhood trauma). I am terrified of committing in case I miss out on other opportunities (also a legacy from childhood trauma and a feeling of lack). I am terrified of committing in case I make a mistake and make the wrong choice or commitment and can’t go back (again, a legacy of my childhood – a need to be perfect at all costs – and black and white thinking – I cannot make mistakes).
But just as I faced my fear of commitment in love and have reaped the rewards, so must I face my fear of commitment in other areas of my life in order to squeeze all the juice out of life and savour everything it has to offer.
Commitment will actually bring freedom, not take it away. That’s how I see it now. Without commitment, I am trapped, trapped in indecision and procrastination. With commitment, I can free myself.
So my commitment to myself and to you at the start of 2024 is to commit.
What are your three words, dear reader, or your guiding principle for this year? I hope you feel inspired to draw a map for yourself to help you to navigate this new terrain.
If you’d like some support to identify them or to achieve your heart’s desires this year, take a look at the resources section below.
Explore my upcoming events here. They include a 14-Days of Love online experience, a Sauna and Share event in Dorset and the launch of my How to Fall in Love – Laying the Foundations and Date with Courage, Clarity and Confidence courses.
I also have a number of transformational online courses on finding love and self-love. You can find them here.
My first book, How to Fall Love, includes many tools to help you to connect to your feelings and overcome unhealthy patterns. It also tells the story of my personal journey of healing and finding a healthy and loving relationship.
I work 1:1 with clients who are looking to create a healthy romantic relationship and/or build a fulfilling life. Explore my coaching offerings and book a free discovery call on my website.
My TEDx talk on Finding Courage, Overcoming Fear and Breaking Free is here.
So what can you do this day or this week to create a present and a future that isn’t dictated by your past?
Here are some examples:
If, in the past, you censored yourself and didn’t speak up, today you can have a voice.
If, in the past, you allowed others to trample all over your rights, today you can stand up for yourself.
If, in the past, you allowed your fear of intimacy to lead you into relationships with unavailable people, today you can make a choice to face your fear of intimacy and to heal the wounds that caused that fear to take root.
If, in the past, you abandoned your dreams and neglected your heart’s desires, today you can make a choice to honour your dreams and pursue your heart’s desires.
If, in the past, you isolated and hid, today you can make a choice to connect.
This is what I’m trying to do.
Every day.
To create a present and future that isn’t dictated by my past, or my mother’s past, or her mother’s past.
To live courageously, not fearfully. To shine, rather than hide. To speak up, rather than be silent.
I don’t always succeed. Sometimes the fear takes hold.
But my intention is strong and I am very determined.
I know you are too.
I know you have it in you to break free from your past and create a brighter present and future.
And if you doubt yourself, please reach out for support – reach out to me or to others.
As I said in my TEDx talk, which was both on the topic of breaking free and was an example of me breaking free, having a voice, speaking my truth, we can’t do it alone.
We can do it. But we can’t do it alone.
Wishing you the brightest of days.
Resources to help you to shine brightly
Watch my TEDx talk on Finding Courage, Overcoming Fear and Breaking Free here.
My first book, How to Fall Love, includes many tools to help you to connect to your feelings and overcome unhealthy patterns. It also tells the story of my personal journey of healing and finding a healthy and loving relationship.
I work 1:1 with clients who are looking to create a healthy romantic relationship and/or build a fulfilling life. Explore my coaching offerings and book a free discovery call on my website.
I have a number of transformational online courses on finding love and self-love. You can find them here.
Are you thriving or barely surviving, just getting by?
Do you use ‘survival tools’ or unhealthy coping mechanisms to numb your feelings, escape your emotional pain or cope with the challenges of life?
As you’ll know if you’ve followed me for a while or if you’ve watched my recent TEDx talk, I used to rely on a box of survival tools, including binge eating, binge drinking, relationship dramas, compulsive work and endless activity, to avoid feeling my feelings and to numb my fear of people and of living.
This was the legacy of my childhood trauma, of my complex PTSD. I needed to find a way to flee from my feelings, to take me away from all this, to get me out of here.
I needed to find a way to freeze my emotions, to check out from life.
Now, twenty years into my personal development and healing journey, I do my best to feel my feelings rather than numb them, to process my pain rather than run from it and to face life’s challenges without resorting to self-harming survival tools.
It’s not an easy path. It would be easier to continue to numb, escape, get high or check out.
It would be easier to avoid the grown-up things that life throws at me, to sidestep them, to bury my head in the sand.
But I can’t do that anymore. I don’t want to do that anymore, as much as it’s terrifying to face life in a fully awakened state, rather than asleep.
How about you?
Do you feel or do you numb?
Do you face everything, eyes wide open, or escape?
It’s about finding the courage to thrive, not just survive, to live courageously rather than fearfully.
If the talk benefits you, please like it and comment on it as that will help my message to reach more people like you.
Thank you, as always, for your support.
Katherine x
Resources to help you to heal and grow
My first book, How to Fall Love, includes many tools to help you to connect to your feelings and overcome unhealthy patterns. It also tells the story of my personal journey of healing and finding a healthy and loving relationship.
I work 1:1 with clients who are looking to create a healthy romantic relationship and/or build a fulfilling life. Explore my coaching offerings and book a free discovery call on my website.
I have a number of transformational online courses on finding love and self-love. You can find them here.
My TEDx talk on Finding Courage, Overcoming Fear and Breaking Free is here.
The poem above – or draft of a poem – is from a collection I am creating called ‘Poems from Midlife’, or something along those lines.
It’s an experiment. I am experimenting with poetry as a way to connect with my inner voice on a deeper level and allow my feelings to move through my body and onto the page.
I’d love to hear your thoughts. I pondered holding it back, not publishing it, perfecting it, reading a few books on ‘how to write poetry’, getting some expert advice.
Then I thought, just do it, Katherine. Just share it. So here it is. Shared with love. From one wounded yet determined soul to another.
Resources to help you to heal and grow
Thank you for being here. I’d love to support you on your journey of healing and growth.
My first book, How to Fall Love, includes many tools to help you to connect to your feelings and overcome unhealthy patterns. It also tells the story of my personal journey of healing and finding a healthy and loving relationship.
I have numerous online courses and I’m offering a 15 percent discount on four of my self-paced courses/recorded workshops that will support you to have a healthier relationship with yourself and with others. Use the code boundaries at the checkout to access 15 percent off any of these items (valid until the end of this week):
I work 1:1 with clients who are looking to create a healthy romantic relationship and/or build a fulfilling life. Explore my coaching offerings and book a free discovery call on my website.
My TEDx talk on Finding Courage, Overcoming Fear and Breaking Free will be released soon. Subscribe to this blog or to my website – www.katherinebaldwin.com – to view it when it’s out.
When some of our fundamental needs go unmet in our childhoods, we emerge into adulthood with a hunger or a craving for those needs to be met.
We then seek out ways to get those needs met, often harming ourselves in the process.
You’ll have heard the expression, ‘I look for love in all the wrong places.’
We do that because we have a deep hunger or craving for love, left over from our early life when we didn’t experience the love we needed to feel.
Transfer this to dating and romantic relationships and we end up in trouble.
Deep down, we know intuitively that the person in front of us can’t give us the love we desire, yet our hunger or craving for the missing piece of the puzzle prompts us to override our intuition. The hunger blinds us to the red flags.
I used to look for love in all the wrong places, until I found ways to heal those early life wounds – imperfectly because the scars remain – and to try to give myself what was missing in childhood, again imperfectly.
Only then – only when I had turned down the volume on the craving and satisfied the hunger to a reasonable degree – could I be open to healthy love and feel attracted to emotionally available people.
Thanks to this process, I am now in a healthy and loving relationship.
That’s not to say that I’ve stopped looking for love in the wrong places – I still look for approval, acceptance, validation, affirmation etc. – all of which, in my child’s mind, were equivalent to love – through my work or in other ways, often acting against my best interests and overriding my intuition.
There’s another hunger I carry that’s been getting me into trouble lately.
It’s the hunger for belonging.
I can’t remember how the first few days of my life transpired but I can imagine – I can sense how they went from the wounds I carry inside.
I emerged from the cosy, warm, cocoon of the womb, expecting to find the same feeling of safety and belonging on the other side.
Yet because of my parents’ own emotional challenges, they struggled to connect with me emotionally – to see me and therefore soothe me and help me to feel safe. So my natural desire and need, as a helpless baby, to feel at home, to feel like I belonged, to feel welcome and to feel secure was thwarted.
Those needs went unmet.
That missing feeling of belonging created a hunger in me, a craving – a craving for belonging, to feel part of, to feel part of a family.
Fast forward to adulthood and this craving drives me to run around looking for surrogate families, searching for that elusive sense of belonging, even when I don’t want to, even when I’m tired and need to rest, even when I know deep down that what I’m about to do isn’t in my best interests.
I seek out groups and teams and crowds because I desperately want to belong but my hunger is so strong and is based on such an early wound that it never feels enough.
No matter how much I try to belong, I can never belong enough to heal that early wound.
My efforts can also be counter-productive, because on a subconscious level, people pick up on our hunger for belonging, our craving for attachment, and some people will be spooked by this. They’ll find it too much, overbearing or suffocating and they’ll walk in the opposite direction.
This may be familiar to you from romantic relationships – the more you want someone and the more desperate you feel, the faster you run towards them and the faster they run away.
It’s taken a long time, many years of healing, but I am starting to understand that I need to meet my own need for belonging. I need to cultivate the sense that I belong to myself. And I need to find healthy ways to build a sense of belonging that aren’t based on a desperate search.
I experienced this on the beach this morning.
I spent the first part of my morning searching for belonging, wanting to be part of a group but feeling on the periphery (a familiar feeling).
Then I spent a bit of time on the beach on my own with my dog, watching the sun’s rays glisten on the water and the waves gently roll in, feeling the peace of the early morning, feeling my nervous system relax.
And in that moment, I felt connected. I felt at peace. I felt like I belonged. I felt at home.
It will be different for all of us but for me, Nature gives me that sense of belonging that I’ve craved all my life.
Swimming in the sea gives me that sense of belonging – reminiscent perhaps of floating in my mother’s womb.
Connecting to something greater than myself brings me that sense of belonging.
I hope I can remember this when I feel tempted to run around looking for belonging, exhausting myself and neglecting my real needs.
And if you have a hunger for belonging, I hope you can remember it too.
I belong to myself – that’s the greatest gift.
You belong to yourself – that’s a feeling worth cultivating.
Resources to help you to heal and grow
Thank you for reading. I am here to support you on your journey of healing and growth.
My first book, How to Fall Love, includes many tools to help you to connect to your feelings and overcome unhealthy patterns and behaviours, as well as the story of my personal journey of healing.
I have numerous online courses and I’m offering a 15 percent discount on four of my self-paced courses/recorded workshops that will support you to have a healthier relationship with yourself and with others. Use the code boundaries at the checkout to access 15 percent off any of these items (valid until the end of next week):
I work 1:1 with clients who are looking to create a healthy romantic relationship and/or build a fulfilling life. Explore my coaching offerings and book a free discovery call on my website.
My TEDx talk on Finding Courage, Overcoming Fear and Breaking Free will be released in a few weeks. Keep checking this blog or my website: www.katherinebaldwin.com to view it.
On The Love Retreat in Turkey in 2022, living my purpose and supporting women to find healthy love
I started this blog, From Forty With Love, just before my 40th birthday, in part to share my confusion about my age and stage and to pose the questions I couldn’t get out of my head:
How on earth did I end up here – single, childless and nearly 40?
Why am I still single? Why have none of my relationships worked out?
How am I going to find a partner in time to have kids? Would I try to have kids on my own?
Can I even have kids? Do I want kids? How will I feel if I don’t have kids?
Twelve years on, at 52, I now have my answers to those questions:
I ended up 40, single and childless due to a series of unhealthy coping mechanisms I developed to survive my dysfunctional childhood, including an eating disorder, workaholism and addictive and avoidant relationship patterns that kept me detached from my own feelings and from anyone who offered intimacy.
I was still single at 40 because I was still healing those early life wounds, still recovering from various addictions, still terrified of commitment and still stumbling blindly into relationships with emotionally unavailable men and running away from the available ones.
I would decide against solo motherhood because I’d grown up watching my mother struggle on her own with two children and it hadn’t looked fun.
I would, miraculously, manage to find and form a healthy relationship with an available man, after committing to some deep healing work, but not until I was 43, possibly too late to have a biological child.
I would never find out for sure if I could have kids in my 40s because I wouldn’t try. I would fall in love with a man who didn’t want children. I would also discover, after digging deep, that I was ambivalent about motherhood because of my early life wounds – I wanted a child but I was terrified of the responsibility, the loss of freedom and the possibility I wouldn’t be able to attach to my child because of my own attachment wounds.
As to how I would feel if I remained childless, it would be a mixed bag.
It is a mixed bag.
Bright Days & Dark Days
There are many blue-sky days when I barely think about being childless. I’m busy writing, running my business, enjoying my marriage, developing emotionally and managing a beautiful but anxious and strong-willed cocker spaniel.
I have acceptance. I understand how I ended up here – that it wasn’t my fault – and I have compassion for myself and my journey.
Then, there are a few dark days when I see a woman cradling a newborn and I have to leave the room to have a cry and there are the occasional black days when I ask some of the biggest and hardest questions:
What’s the point of my life if I haven’t had kids?
Do I have a stake in the future if I haven’t produced a new generation?
Why am I here? Do I have a right to be here?
And what is my womb for if not to nurture and grow a child?
Sometimes these questions floor me but I take comfort in knowing that I’d be asking similar questions about my place in the world whether I’d had children or not.
This kind of questioning is part of who I am and I know now, thanks to the deep work I’ve done in therapy, that the pointlessness and hopelessness I occasionally feel is a legacy of my childhood – of the times when, as a little girl, I felt helpless, like I was fighting a losing battle, that any effort I made to change the situation would prove fruitless and that, somehow, I may not survive.
Once I understand these painful truths, once I look them in the eye, I can process my grief, draw on my courage, find gratitude for all the wonderful things in my life and brainstorm a brilliant plan for my remaining years.
Celebrating My Worth
That plan centres on the following truth: that I am a passionate, valuable, creative being, irrespective of whether I’ve had children or not, with the potential and desire to create.
To create a life of abundance, joy, health, wellbeing and freedom for myself and my family of two, plus the dog (does that make two-and-a-half or three?).
To support, nurture and empower others to create freedom, love, joy, wellbeing and abundance in their lives.
To create more books – I am loving writing my novel and I have two non-fiction books to complete, not to mention poems and endless ideas for videos and podcasts. I have a creative talent and I am committed to bringing that talent into the world.
To create and cultivate a sense of deep gratitude, one day at a time, because I still have good health, while some of those close to me do not. In fact, I write this today with a profound awareness of the fragility of life as a dear friend, a contemporary, a woman who like me is 52, comes to the end of hers.
Life is a gift. I promise to remember that.
Going forwards, I know there’ll be dark days and perhaps some black days but my commitment is to create as many blue-sky days as I can going forwards by using my gifts and talents and making a difference, in my own life, in the lives of others and in this incredible world.
So, in answer to those tough questions:
Yes, my life has a point and a purpose.
Yes, I have a stake in the future.
Yes, I absolutely deserve to be here.
And my womb, like all wombs, is here to nourish, nurture and create, in a way that’s unique to me, unfathomably beautiful and of value, to present and future generations.
Support Is Available
If you’d like my support on your journey of healing and growth, I am here for you and I have a number of offerings:
I will soon be launching a membership community and a powerful group programme for women who are seeking support with self-love, finding and keeping healthy love and creating a life they love. Sign up to my love letters on my website and I’ll send you details in due course: www.katherinebaldwin.com
My first book, How to Fall Love, includes many tools to help you to connect to your feelings and overcome unhealthy patterns and behaviours, as well as the story of my personal journey of healing.
I have a series of transformational online courses to support you to build a healthy relationship with yourself and with others. Click here to explore my courses.
I work 1:1 with clients who are looking to create a healthy romantic relationship and/or build a fulfilling life. Explore my coaching offerings and book a free discovery call on my website.
Layer upon layer, stacked on top of each other, infused with memories that date back years, like ancient minerals threaded through rocks.
When we grieve for something in the here and now, this grief often triggers a deeper layer. Then this deeper grief triggers an even deeper layer and so on and so forth.
When we lose someone or something today, we grieve today’s loss alongside all the other losses from our past until the present day.
This understanding has proven helpful to me because often my grief can feel overwhelming. I’ve found it beneficial to untangle the past from the present and process the feelings respectively, rather than try and process them in one huge bundle.
This understanding has been especially helpful in relation to my childless grief.
My grief around not having children can be confusing because, unlike some childless-by-circumstance-not-by-choice women, I never really tried to have kids. I didn’t push it. I didn’t set my sights on it and go after it, like I have gone after other things in my life (careers, relationships etc.). I didn’t do my utmost to make it happen.
As I’ve shared previously on this blog and in my book, I’ve come to understand that I had huge ambivalence about motherhood, acquired in my own childhood, developed through studying my late mother closely, seeing her struggle, seeing how much she longed for freedom but bore so much responsibility (two young children to bring up on her own), seeing how much she yearned for a career, for adventure, for travel, but instead felt tied down, trapped, stuck, over-burdened.
Unsurprisingly, I didn’t want that life for myself. I wanted what she had always wanted: adventure, independence, freedom and a career – and I went after those things with gusto.
When it came to babies, I didn’t go after them with gusto.
Like many women, I experienced a rude awakening in my late 30s – that shocking moment when I realised, all of a sudden, that I’d given my all to my career, that I was entirely single with no clue how to have a healthy relationship and that my fertility was hurtling towards a steep cliff.
I had my moments of panic when I desperately looked for a man with whom to procreate, paying little attention to whether he’d make a good long-term partner or not.
And I had another awakening in my early 40s – more of a slow dawning – when I began to connect with my ambivalence, with the push-pull, with the ‘I want this but I don’t want this’, ‘I want this but I’m terrified of this’, demonstrated perhaps by the way in which I fell for and kept falling for, despite my best efforts, a man who said he didn’t want children, a man I later chose to accept exactly as he was, love and marry and with whom I have found so much joy, love, laughter and contentment – with whom I have built a childfree life.
Now, in my early 50s, my childless grief stirs less and less. The decision to parent an anxious, active cocker spaniel called Layla Joy has given me a glimpse of what a struggle it would have been for me, for us, to care for children, to swap the freedom we’d both known all our adult lives for huge responsibility.
But now and then, another pregnancy strikes nearby, in my vicinity, in my neighbourhood, knocking me for six and my childless grief comes rushing towards me.
I let myself feel it, because it’s important to feel it, but I am also curious about it. I pause and I examine it carefully in the light of what I’ve written above – through the lens of my ambivalence about motherhood and my certainty that having children would have challenged me, challenged us, massively (alongside its undoubted rewards).
As I examine my grief, I ask these vital questions:
Is this my childless grief or my childhood grief?
Am I grieving the child I haven’t had or the childhood I didn’t have?
Am I longing for a child or longing for a different childhood?
Am I grieving the loss of a child today or am I grieving the multiple losses I and my inner child experienced in early life?
I think these are important questions to ask.
If I had been unaware that my longing for a child may, in part, be a longing for a different childhood, I may have pulled out all the stops to have a baby, only to find that the child didn’t fill the empty hole I felt inside.
That would have been a crushing discovery that no doubt would have triggered some form of post-natal depression, some kind of baby blues.
I would have been trying to fill the deep hole inside, the emptiness, with something that was the wrong shape, as I did with excess food and booze and work for many decades.
Round peg. Square hole. The round peg doesn’t fit and the hole remains.
The truth of this has become even more apparent since I began parenting our gorgeous pup, Layla. While I love her deeply and longed for a dog for years, one thing is now obvious to me: I thought she would be the missing piece in the puzzle. I thought she would fill the gap. I thought I needed a bigger family, more members in my tribe, in order to feel whole.
Now I see, with some sadness, that nothing was missing from my beautiful marriage. And the hole I was trying to fill with my furry dependant – the same hole I would have been trying to fill with a baby – remains, because it has a different shape.
It’s the emptiness I’ve felt ever since I was a tiny tot because certain vital needs weren’t met in my childhood, because there was a rupture, a disconnection, because I felt lost, unwelcome, unsafe.
The hole is on the inside, not on the outside. External fixes won’t work. It can only be filled from within, with self-love, self-care, self-parenting and connection, to myself, to something greater than myself and to others.
I wonder if these words resonate with you, dear Reader, especially if you are childless-not-by-choice.
If so, I offer you the following questions, as an act of service and an act of love:
Are you grieving the child you haven’t had or the childhood you didn’t have, or both?
Is your childhood grief amplifying your childless grief?
Is your longing for a child infused with your longing for a different childhood?
Is your loss of a child or of motherhood layered with all the other losses from your past?
If the answer is ‘Yes‘, or ‘Maybe‘, or ‘A little bit perhaps‘, I hope you receive this answer as good news.
In my case, this knowledge has helped to soften my childless grief, to lessen it, to spread it more thinly so it’s not so heavy, not so suffocating.
I hope it does the same for you.
This knowledge has also helped me to know, for sure, with absolute certainty, that the answer, the healing, is never on the outside and is always, always on the inside.
And, as I’m sure you know, that’s the same for you too.
Thank you for reading.
I send you love, compassion and healing and I welcome your reflections, in the comments below or to katherine@katherinebaldwin.com
Katherine x
Support Is Available
If you’d like my support on your journey of healing and growth, I am here for you and I have a number of offerings:
I will soon be launching a membership community for women who are seeking support with self-love, finding and keeping healthy love and creating a life they love. Sign up to my love letters on my website and I’ll send you details in due course: www.katherinebaldwin.com
My first book, How to Fall Love, includes many tools to help you to connect to your feelings and overcome unhealthy patterns and behaviours, as well as the story of my personal journey of healing.
I have a series of transformational online courses to support you to build a healthy relationship with yourself and with others. Click here to explore my courses.
I work 1:1 with clients who are looking to create a healthy romantic relationship and/or build a fulfilling life. Explore my coaching offerings and book a free discovery call on my website.
We gravitate towards what we know – towards what we’ve always known.
Towards what feels familiar and comfortable and therefore safe.
We do this even if the thing we gravitate towards is bad for us, detrimental to us, goes against our best interests.
For example, if we didn’t get our needs met in childhood, having unmet needs will feel quite normal to us, familiar, comfortable and therefore safe.
So we won’t express our needs and wants and we’ll accept less than we deserve – we’ll make do with crumbs rather than the whole loaf.
This may mean we end up in a relationship with a person who doesn’t value us, and we stay in it, well beyond its expiry date, because it’s all we’ve ever known.
Being mistreated feels quite normal.
Or we end up in a career where we’re undervalued or taken advantage of, and we stay in it, well beyond its sell-by date, because it feels comfortable.
We’re used to feeling invisible.
We’ve never known any different so we don’t expect anything different – we don’t expect anything better.
If we were neglected, and we haven’t done any healing around that neglect, we’ll be drawn towards people who neglect us, and we’ll neglect ourselves.
If we were abandoned, and we haven’t done any healing around our abandonment wounds, we’ll be drawn towards people who abandon us, and we’ll abandon ourselves.
These childhood legacies can be so damaging.
Our early life baggage can weigh us down.
But we can break free.
The key is to understand that we have a choice.
We deserve better and we can choose better.
We may have to summon all our courage.
We may have to dig really deep.
We may have to get lots of support.
The chains can be heavy, tough to break.
But little by little, chain by chain, step by step, we can release ourselves from the past.
We can escape.
Did you know I’m writing a novel about this? About a woman who finally realises she can break the chains of generational dysfunction, transform inherited patterns of behaviour and courageously carve out her own path.
The novel draws on many aspects of my own life.
Because this has been my journey and it continues to be my journey – to throw off the chains of the past.
And it’s the work I do with so many of my coaching clients.
I guess if I were to sum up my life and my work I’d say I was in the freedom business.
Breaking myself free and helping others to break free from harmful legacies, from painful relationship patterns, from erroneous beliefs, from imprisoning careers, from behaviours we’ve inherited and from survival tools we developed that no longer serve us.
It’s powerful stuff.
It’s also challenging. It’s not an easy path to take. It’s the road less travelled.
It requires a delicate balance of grit, self-compassion and surrender.
As well as a willingness to ask for and accept help.
But I’ve always liked a challenge and I know too much to go back – to return to the trap, to put the chains on again.
There’s no way I’m going back. Not after coming so far.
So I’m up for this journey to freedom.
How about you?
Support Is Available
If you’d like to continue your personal growth journey in some wonderful company, I’m hosting a Summer Love & Life Support online experience for women, running from Aug 1 to 31. The experience includes 3 live Zoom calls, also recorded, and an online community where you can support and be supported by courageous, like-minded women. We’ll be exploring self-love and self-compassion; authentic relationships and facing our fears in life and in love. Click here for more details.
My first book, How to Fall Love, includes many tools to help you to connect to your feelings and overcome unhealthy patterns and behaviours, as well as the story of my personal journey of healing.
I have a series of transformational online courses to support you to build a healthy relationship with yourself and with others. Click here to explore my courses.
I work 1:1 with clients who are looking to create a healthy romantic relationship and/or build a fulfilling life. Explore my coaching offerings and book a free discovery call on my website.
Freedom awaits. Photo taken on my Love Retreat in Turkey.
I imagine the answer is ‘No’ because if you did, you wouldn’t get anywhere.
Yet that’s how many of us run our lives, run our businesses or run our relationships.
Let me explain, using myself as a case study.
My business (which involves coaching, speaking and writing, for any readers who are new to this blog) requires me to take action.
It requires me to be visible; to be seen; to tell the world, or anyone who’ll listen, about my services, via my writing, via social media, via the press and so forth.
Yet when it comes to doing this, I’m operating with a handicap.
I’m in perpetual conflict with myself.
You see, part of me wants to be visible; wants to be seen.
But part of me is scared of being visible and terrified of being seen.
Why?
Because my younger self – or my subconscious – remembers a time when it didn’t feel safe to be visible, when my visibility wasn’t welcome, when it felt safer to stay quiet and hidden, to keep my head well below the parapet.
It’s like there’s a constant dialogue going on inside: ‘Go for it, Katherine! Move forwards,’ swiftly followed by: ‘Stop, Katherine. It’s not safe. Let’s hide.’
Pull-push, push-pull. See me. Don’t see me. See me. Don’t see me.
One foot on the accelerator. One foot on the brake. Not going very far.
Fortunately, I’ve been on my healing journey for two decades and I have lots of awareness and some wonderful support so I have managed to press the accelerator a little harder than the brake over the past years.
I have managed to write and publish my first book, How to Fall in Love. I have published articles in the national media and spoken on the radio. I have built a coaching practice that has supported and continues to support many clients to find a healthy, loving relationship and create a fulfilling career and life. I have hosted some 10 wellbeing retreats in the UK and abroad. I have written 70,000+ words of my novel and 20,000+ words of a book on overcoming emotional overeating.
So yes, I have moved forwards.
But I can see, all too clearly, how I’ve held myself back too, how I’ve pressed the brake and sabotaged myself.
I am acutely and painfully aware of the opportunities I’ve missed, the articles I haven’t written, the books I haven’t finished, the retreats I haven’t hosted, the social media posts I haven’t posted and ultimately, the money I haven’t earned and the abundance and freedom I haven’t enjoyed. I have seen how I have pulled and then pushed with my business; how I have struggled with consistency and follow-through.
One foot on the accelerator; one on the brake.
Now, to be clear, I don’t want the accelerator pressed into the floor either. I know what that full-on approach does to my brain and my body. For decades, I used excess food and alcohol to give me the courage to release the brake. Fuelled by binge eating and binge drinking, I raced around the world at top speed, took crazy risks, climbed the career ladder, worked too hard and gave too much, eventually burning out and breaking down in my 30s.
I don’t want to do that again.
Nor do I want my desire for visibility to be driven by my early life wounds – by a deep craving for love, acceptance and belonging that dates back to my childhood, to when my developmental needs went unmet.
It’s about a healthy desire for visibility born out of a desire to be of service to my fellow humans, by finding ways to share with others the knowledge that has helped me to change dysfunctional relationship patterns, find a healthy partnership and break the chains of addiction and self-harm.
Service-driven, not ego-driven.
If I can think about being of service, I can get out of my own way, face my fears, get all the support I need, take my foot off the brake, gently press the accelerator and cruise forwards.
The accelerator-brake analogy works for dating and relationships too.
The push-pull dymanic was a key feature of my dysfunctional dating years and it’s one of the most common dynamics that presents in my coaching practice.
You know how it goes: I want you. I don’t want you.
I want love. I’m scared of love.
Come closer. Go away.
You’re gorgeous. Urgh, you’re repulsive.
It is this dynamic that I had to understand and overcome in order to commit to a healthy relationship and get married (we celebrated our fourth wedding anniversary last week – hurray!).
And if you are looking for love but keep driving into brick walls, you may have to do the same.
Ask yourself if you’re accelerating too fast and diving into unhealthy relationships because you’re craving love, affection, validation, acceptance, touch etc. And if the answer is ‘Yes’, take some time to heal your inner wounds and meet your own unmet needs (my coaching can support you with this).
Ask yourself if you’re braking too hard because you’re scared to love, scared to commit, scared of getting hurt, terrified of loving in case you lose the person or get rejected or abandoned. Again, I can help with this.
Commit to your own healing, get all the support you need and then find that happy medium, find the cruise control.
Love is service too, an act of service, to ourselves, to others and to the world.
By finding the courage to love, we give ourselves an incredible opportunity to heal.
And we offer others the opportunity to heal too.
Our hurt happens in relationship (often in those significant, early life relationships that form a template for the rest of our lives). And our healing happens in relationship too.
Love is a journey, an adventure. It requires courage but it’s absolutely worth it.
If you’re ready to face your fears and move forwards, I’d love to be of service to you. Read on for resources including my next relationship workshop.
Thank you for being here.
Katherine x
Just married! Cruising with my husband. Photo by Camilla Arnhold Photography.
Additional Resources
My next relationship workshop is called Managing Triggers to Build Healthy Relationships. It’s on July 11th at 6:30 pm BST (1:30 pm EST) on Zoom and you can either join me live (highly recommended) or sign up for the recording (also valuable). As a blog subscriber, please accept a £10 discount (join live for £22 or receive the recording for £12. Simply insert the code Innercircle10 on the checkout page. Find out more here.
My first book, How to Fall Love, includes many tools to help you to connect to your feelings and overcome unhealthy patterns and behaviours, as well as the story of my personal journey of healing.
I have a series of transformational online courses to support you to build a healthy relationship with yourself and with others. Click here to explore my courses.
I work 1:1 with clients who are looking to create a healthy romantic relationship and/or build a fulfilling life. Explore my coaching offerings and book a free discovery call on my website.
I am a writer, coach, midlife mentor, motivational speaker and the author of How to Fall in Love - A 10-Step Journey to the Heart. I specialise in coaching women and men to have healthy relationships with themselves so that they can form healthy and loving romantic relationships and lead authentic, fulfilling lives. I coach 1:1, lead workshops and host retreats.
From Forty With Love 