About Me (Introduction)

I'll be honest and say that I know nothing about blogging at the moment, so thought the best way of learning would be to just try starting one.  I run a website called livelifesatisfied.com which I set up a few years ago.  I set it up as a resource to try and encourage and give advice to people suffering from depression and other emotional health related issues.  It seems that lots of people are viewing it daily throughout the world, but I feel that I am out of contact with people who are viewing the website and I guess I want to try and do something more interactive, and I am particularly keen to give people an opportunity to ask questions.

I never wanted people to know I had emotional problems

I guess the starting point would be to tell you a little about me.  On the website I have very much avoided revealing much about myself because I guess I didn't really want people to know that I have struggled with emotional health related issues.  I think that by starting this blog I pretty much will have to abandon that policy.  

My story

So I am 34 years old.  During my teenage years my emotional state gradually deteriorated until by age 17 life was completely unbearable.  I was very religious at that age (I am not religious any more) and I used to pray for an hour a day.  Actually for exactly an hour.  Bizarrely, I would know exactly when the hour was over, I guess I got conditioned over time, and I would look at my watch exactly at the end of the hour, and finish.  I felt that God could not accept me and feared that as a result I would go to hell and spend eternity being punished for my bad doing.  All the Evangelical Christian literature was aimed at telling me I was actually forgiven for all my bad-doing, but I had got hung up on some Bible verses which I believed said that I could never be forgiven.

I just wanted to die

So I used to cry every day, and beg God to take my life.  I felt that the ultimate sacrifice was to be willing to die for my beliefs, and much of my time was spent praying for people who were being killed for their Christian beliefs.  I thought that I should probably go to one of these countries and be willing to die for my beliefs, and that if I wasn't willing to do that, again, I would not be acceptable to God.

I tell you all this just as a little snapshot to show you the state I was in at that age.  I felt as though God could not accept me and I was going insane with anxiety and fear.  I would spend much of my time trying to convince myself that I was forgiven and that I wouldn't go to hell, but it was fruitless, I never managed to convince myself.  And so I wanted to die.  But I thought that if I killed myself, this would be a sin, and I would go to hell, so this was not an option.  But I just wanted to be dead.  I hated life - it was completely unbearable.  

Things are good now - there is hope for those who are suicidal

I guess that the whole point of my website and everything I am doing in relation to it, is to try to encourage people who have lost the will to live, or hate their lives or have unbearable anxiety or low self-esteem.  I would like to talk to people about how I managed, over the last 12 years, to overturn all of this in my life, and reduce the anxiety, low-self esteem, depression and suicidal existence which used to be all I knew.  I have spend the last 7 or so years studying Psychology and Counseling and applied the same obsessive rigour to my study that I used to apply to my religious beliefs.  And as a result I have learnt enough to change my life.  My hope is that I might be able to pass on some of what I have learned and help some other people who are hopeless to begin to live a satisfied fulfilled and happy life. 

Please ask questions

Please do ask me any questions - if there is actually an option to do that on here.  I won't promise to answer everyone's questions, but I actually would far rather write in response to someone's question rather than ramble on about things that aren't very useful to anyone.