How can I stop living so small?

I have vulnerability issues. I literally never, ever feel safe in the world. As you can imagine, this causes many problems for me in day to day life, but it seems to be making the creating of a business next to impossible.

I am sick of this self-sabotage and I want to play bigger, but when it comes down to fundamental belief systems, you can’t just do a couple of sessions with a Life Coach or spend a week or two on it! 

I have spent the last 5 years working on this on a daily basis and I am only just getting to a place where I can see a glimmer of possibility. That’s pretty big! I am tired of people telling me that it’s easy to fix and seeing me as faulty. Guess what guys, that’s my issue and if you continue to see me that way, how am I ever meant to get better?

As many people know from their own childhoods, that there are many families that function with the philosophy that ‘children are neither seen, nor heard’. As an only child whose parents worked long hours, I learnt to live in my own world, to be independent. That is not natural for me, (I am an ENFP and need a lot of people time) but as a highly sensitive person, it was the only way to cope. 


I am scared to live big, it is so ingrained in me to be in the background, to meet other people’s needs and to not have any of my own, that I struggled for many years to even have a personality of my own! These days I am living authentically ME and I am a whirlwind of ‘Allie’ but still, every time that I come out of my shell, I get extremely vulnerable and need to cave again, sometimes for weeks, or even months! before I can summon enough bravery to try again.

When I was running OnlineCoachSupport.com with Colleen Roberts, I would do something big, something that I was proud of, but the first hint of negativity and I literally shut down. In the past this meant ‘checking out’ and I had severe episodes. I cannot remember anything about these periods. The longest lasted three months in my early 20s. When I was with my ex-fiance, they happened a lot. I would put my ideas forward, he would disagree, we would have a fight and it would send me into an ‘episode’. Apparently I would lie in bed and stare vacantly at the wall for hours, days, or sometimes weeks. I have no recollection of these periods, except for the intense emotional pain washing through my body.

I am soooo very proud of the fact that I no longer need to ‘check out’ to cope with life. Although it has taken a lot of work and commitment to get to this point. Some of the examples include:

• I don’t spend time with negative, confrontational people. We all have them in our lives, the people that want to disagree with whatever you say, just to be dicks and cause drama.
• I only go to places that fill my heart and soul with positive feelings such as joy, bliss and happiness
• I am no longer on Facebook etc. I make time to see people in real life and I have let go of the fake ‘friends’: the people who wouldn’t invite you to their birthday party, but are your Facebook ‘friend’. I don’t want to be a part of someone’s life unless they get joy from having me in it. 
• I have extreme reactions to food, for example, sugar makes me incredibly emotionally sensitive, much like having extreme PMS. I am on a strict diet to ensure that I am as emotionally stable as I can possibly be.
• I am working on releasing everything from my life that causes me stress (and learning how to read that stress in my body!)

Life is incredibly hard for me still. An expert in my condition likened it to having no skin on your arms and dealing with the pain that would result. Every time someone rubbed up against you, every time the wind blew etc Yet, we would be careful with this person. Having a condition where my emotions are raw however, people just mock me. I am labled as ‘mentally ill’, ‘crazy’, ‘worthless’, ‘overly sensitive’, a ‘drama queen’ etc. I really have NO idea how I am going to manage to be successful in a world where ‘doing’ equals successful. 

However, I am soooo incredibly proud of where I am in life and what I have achieved already. Going to dance classes and being willing to be a complete beginner is hard, yet I am doing it. Learning to not be devastated when a boy I like is not interested is hard, yet I regularly still ask them out and I am learning rejection coping strategies.


I yearn to matter in the world, but it’s still a major issue for me... I want to LIVE BIG!

I just watched a Webinar on creating and launching e-courses. I have been writing ‘Have a Love Affair with Yourself’ for the last six months. I have been living it for a lot longer. Yet I feel like I have no right to tell other people how to live. I believe so strongly in people being independent and respected for being who they are, that I don’t want to change them. I do not believe in ‘one size fits all’. I believe I have taken this into consideration in my course, but I am scared to see. I am scared to see if this will be a success, because then there is no going back. No possibility to ‘check out’ and what if I cannot cope…? 

But then again, one of the techniques that I mention in the course is about setting up a support network ‘before’ doing the work, so perhaps I should take my own darn advice and get started…

Action Step One: Actually post this on my blog.

Wish my luck my darlings, I so am going to need it.

Oh, and if you want more information on my e-course as I get braver and start telling people, join my mailing list at 

http://eepurl.com/bxcPZz

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