Читать книгу Cooking Without Made Easy: All recipes free from added gluten, sugar, yeast and dairy produce - Barbara Cousins - Страница 21

I was the second of two children, with a brother two years older. We grew up on an isolated farm and my parents worked very hard, so they had little time for looking after children. My father was moody, heading towards manic depression and locked in his own inner world of torment. He had lost his mother when very young and had had a tough upbringing. I soon learnt that it was best not to have any needs if I wanted to please my parents and, as a result, I began to cut off from my emotions at an early age. I learnt to smile rather than cry, even though I was hurting inside. I also learnt that if I did something exceptional I received some attention—and so I became a people pleaser and an over-achiever. I started losing touch with my intuition by spending time in my head trying to be what everyone wanted me to be and assuming that I was the cause of any deficit. Not surprisingly, this resulted in an unrealistically negative self-image, which laid the foundations for a life that would need many knocks to get me to examine, and begin to peel off, the layers I had developed through childhood and beyond.

Being in touch with our true selves and our intuition doesn’t prevent us from making mistakes, but it helps us recognize when we’ve made them, because things don’t feel right. I had stopped feeling, therefore it was very difficult to distinguish between what felt right and wrong.