Hi, this is Wayne Brown from Life Back On Track and welcome to the next episode.

In this episode. I'm just going to be talking a little bit about my journey, what I've been through, and the challenges that I had, so you can understand how I ended up where I ended up today.

Now this story that I'm about to tell, I'm going to actually put it in two parts because I don't want to be dragging this out and using up a lot of your very valuable time. So this part I'm going to be talking about the struggle, what I've been through, the obstacles I had to overcome, and the pretty shitty places that I found myself in so that you can understand that getting yourself out of any situation is possible.

So for me, in my early twenties after doing all the typical thing of going to school and getting a job, I met someone who I felt I was going to be with the rest of my life. So we got married and we bought a house and then we started having children and it was a struggle because we were on one income. She stayed at home and looked after the children and the money was tight. We weren't destitute, but we were certainly living paycheck to paycheck.

Unfortunately, after about four years she decided she'd had enough and she up and decided she was leaving. She was not only leaving me, but she was also taking our two sons with her, which is typical when the woman leaves. Unfortunately for me, she is English and she was going to take them back to England, which for myself as someone who was a very and still is a very hands-on father, that ripped me apart.

Now that coupled with some other personal challenges that I was going through at the time, had sent me into a very dark place. So for a very long time, I was teetering on the edge of depression. I had daily thoughts of suicide. I was really in a shitty place for many, many, months and eventually, I started to pull myself out of it and pull myself back from the edge of the abyss and that was a real struggle.

I look back now and still wonder how I managed to get through it. However, I reached a point where I was realised I needed to understand something. So I started learning, I started reading books I started completing all the courses I could find. Because my money was really tight, I didn't have a lot of money to invest in the learning. Books and CD's, that sort of thing were about the only thing that I could afford at that point. So I was listening to CDs constantly, reading books on psychology, parenting relationships, conflict resolution, mindset, all sorts of things, just to try and make sense of what was going on in my head and maybe get some answers about what had happened with my marriage.

Eventually, I started to feel like I was getting somewhere, and if you know, and you have had that situation where you feel like "I'm making some headway here, you know, I'm getting it together" and then you get sideswiped and that's what happened to me. I met someone who I met through a mutual friend and I thought it was going to be ok. I thought maybe with all the bits that I'm learning, maybe things were going to start to look up. There was going to start to be an improvement and there seemed to be at the start, you know, when you start off and it all looks promising.

Then we got to the point where we were living together, we were sharing a house and it started to turn to poo. It didn't go well. It ended up being worse than my first marriage, which had been a struggle. We had arguments. It wasn't anything too intense, it was just arguments, misunderstandings, frustration. This second partner was a new level of toxicity, a new level of stress, a new level of conflict. It was above and beyond what I had had before, and it was very toxic, stressful, and painful for both of us.

For some reason, I stuck it out for 11 years. Eleven years of this amazingly horrible, painful period of my life. It was a real challenge. So what I attracted back then, was what I needed to learn. The one thing I've realised, is we attract into our lives, the people that we need, that bring us the lessons that are going to give us an opportunity to become more of who we are, that will challenge us to grow.

So, I stuck it out for this eleven years and eventually what stopped it, is one day I was looking at it and I had a vision of the previous eleven years that this pain, this toxicity, this struggle had gone on and it had changed virtually not at all. It was the same amount of struggle and it happened in front of people in public, It didn't matter. It was all over the place, arguments would go on for hours and hours.

I know that all of us have our struggles and we could compare notes, which would be pointless because it's not a competition to see who's got the biggest pile of crap to overcome. This isn't about that. I want you to know that this is where I was, this is the situation I found myself in with this pain and this struggle, this confusion, the stress, and I had to pick myself up after the first marriage because even though we were struggling financially when she left, I had to pay her out. I had legal fees. I had child maintenance. So I was really struggling financially, which put a huge strain on my emotions and my mental health. So I was under constant stress.

There's a score that they have where you look at incidents in your life and they give all these different incidents a score out of 100 and the highest is the death of a spouse. And then you've got all these other things underneath that and they say if you have a score over 100, the chances of you having a serious illness is dramatically increased. I think from memory my score was like 160 or 180. So I definitely should have been suffering health-wise. Thankfully though I was doing my best to eat well and move so that I think worked in my favor and kept me a little more on balance than I would have been.

Anyway, I looked at this journey of the last 11 years and noticed that nothing had changed and I had this epiphany that If I didn't do something now, I'd be there 10 years later, still going through the same crap. So one day I said to her, I can't do this anymore, I'm out of here. And she was a little bit shocked. The one thing that astounds me and I don't know if you've experienced this when you have a relationship where there's lots of struggle. You look at the behaviors, the habits, the attitudes that are causing the struggle, and because of them, you make a decision to end the relationship, which is what I did amazingly what she did, and if you've experienced this, please let me know.

 They then use that same behavior, attitudes, reactions, etcetera and magnify it as if to prove to you that you're doing the right thing in leaving. So leaving ended up being very easy because of that. And of course, I had to start over again. I had to start over again, which means I lost a heap of money again. I put myself under more emotional stress as I had to try and deal with this because I still had to deal with her. Thankfully didn't have any children with her, but I still had to go and deal with all the fallout from it, which was a struggle because, you know, it went through court and all of this sort of thing.

So, it put me in a not as dark place as before, but it still put me in a place of struggle and in all that time I'm still trying to be a part time father to my boys. So you know, I had all the struggle with that during the toxicity of the relationship etcetera. However, once I got clear, at that stage, I had been learning for around 14 years reading books, listening to cds, trying to make sense of things and I realized I had learned a lot of stuff, a lot of stuff.

I've read hundreds of books, done dozens of courses, listened to thousands of hours of Cds, and what I realised is a lot of the information out there was confusing and contradictory, and set up a mindset that was not going to work for me. So eventually I had to go through, get rid of all the stuff that was just rubbish, take the stuff that was good, the real gold. I decided and try and use that as a foundation to create something I could use.

So I'm in this situation where I'm living in this house after ending this relationship and I'm spending my evenings pulling it all together and eventually, eventually I create some systems that changed my life and that of many other people. So on the next episode I'm going to be explaining to you those systems, what they consisted of and how they helped me and other people sort out various aspects of our lives.

I hope you understand that if I can pull myself out of that situation I have described, and of course I could give heaps and examples and stories, not going into that because your time is more valuable than that. I just want you to know that no matter where you're at, no matter what you're struggling with, I've probably been through it, and if I can do it, you can do it.

I really do want you to know that if I can do it, you can do it. I hope you've enjoyed this episode. Catch you on the next one. Feel free to send messages, comments, questions and I'll answer them in the next one. Okay, take care, look after yourselves and remember, here's to a good life.

You can listen to the Life Back On Track podcast on your favourite platform by visiting our podcast website. Click HERE to check it out.

 You can also listen to my radio show “All About Relationships” which has its own podcast on your favourite platform by clicking HERE

Thanks for listening.