Our Summer masterclass, hosted online, 7pm on Wednesday 24^th July, 2024 is inspired by the book, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” by Joseph Campbell, and is co-hosted with special guest, American bestselling author Tom Richards.

I first heard about this excellent book during a podcast about a year ago when I interviewed the excellent Mark Attwood, who recommended it. I’m still reading it, and no doubt it has had a profound impact!

A recurring theme, in the work I do with my Write Coach clients, is the notion of the hero’s journey, and concept of healing through writing, and documenting the story of one’s journey.

Having written several books and having published three, all in a narrative non-fiction style, and all documenting the process of overcoming depression, addiction, lack of self-love, codependency, and more recently, the cruel business of parental alienation, psychological and emotional abuse, and overcoming narcissistic abuse, I felt well placed to help guide others through the process of navigating a path through overcoming family trauma, childhood trauma and multigenerational trauma.

Somehow, and without any kind of deliberate business plan, in the last four years since the lockdown I just fell into doing healing work, ghost writing, and writing mentoring, off the back of my own lived experience. The work is not easy, but it is hugely fulfilling.

Somewhat wistfully, I’d always had a close relationship with the astral, having been interested in dreams, psychoanalysis, and the interpretation and meaning of dreams, and by nature I was sceptical and philosophical. My original plan had been to go to America and train as a psychiatrist, once I had completed my degree programme in Psychology and Philosophy, despite being gifted at languages. A more straightforward career path might have been English, French and German. But doing things simply was not my style. I was drawn to the things I was fascinated by, not the things I was “supposed” to do!

And besides, life had other plans!

Disillusioned with academic life, with its broken promises and dreary ego-fuelled prescriptions, I wandered on the fringes of society, first as a dealer, in a casino, dealing black jack and roulette and looking for somewhere to go at 4 a.m. after my shift and realising my evening time was everyone else’s sleep time. Then I somehow fell into merchandising and door-to-door sales, an incredibly tough apprenticeship in how to handle objections and rejection, body language and non-verbal behaviour, as well as the art of negotiationship. Again on the fringes of society, people would ask when I might get a ‘proper job’ !?

Other jobs came and went and being a black sheep by nature, I did not fit in most places I went. Factory jobs, customer service agent jobs, advertising sales, whether in England or after emigrating to Ireland, becoming comfortable with the uncomfortable, and being consistently inconsistent seemed to become the norm for this black sheep.

Family life beckoned and I was gifted with fatherhood during my thirties and forties. Led by my unhealed family trauma, life was characterised by service to self and feeding the hungry ghost, until I crashed my car into a ditch in the summer of 2018.

Whereby I came home without a scratch on me and started listening to 432 Hz music and watching videos about healing from codependency.

What followed was very difficult. Bereavement, family separation, marriage breakdown, isolation, rejection, scapegoating and gaslighting. I had been hoodwinked into believing I was the problem, while being stuck in a narcissistic family dynamic.

A doormat in my own marriage, my unconditional love for my own children was used as a weapon to hurt me.

Perhaps I was meant to go and crawl in a corner and die. It may have felt like it.

But I didnt.

I emerged stronger.

And sought counselling, therapy, healing modalities. Guided by mentors who seemed to appear at just the right juncture, life took many interesting turns until I realised that throughout my life, the treasure I had been seeking, lay within me. Like one of those smart ass memes, if you feel down, just check that you are not in fact surrounded by arseholes, I think the saying goes.

With a passion for mental health awareness, I became an advocate for mindfulness and meditation. The books I wrote may or may not have been popular. I didnt care. It became evident to me that I was not writing for an audience. The crux of my writings was honesty, truth and telling it like it is. Realising this might make me about as popular as a fart in a lift, if it helped one single person from throwing themselves off a bridge, I reasoned it was worth it. More about my books here.

A man writing about his vulnerability and poor decision making/life choices was nothing revolutionary.

Nonetheless, the expressing of what had been hitherto suppressed and repressed, was in itself great therapy. Indeed the cathartic process of writing about what I had been through, led to the creation of Write Coach Ireland.

Aware I won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, I nonetheless sought to make myself available to support people all over the world, going through the difficult business of writing about the stuff they’ve had to overcome.

It never fails to impress me, how courageous my clients are.

Courage, humility and authenticity are at the heart of this work. I hear very distressing stories, things that no human being let alone a child, should ever have to suffer.

And yet they do.

And if theres one recurring them, it is this idea that only the finest of blades, is honed in the hottest of fires.

The very suffering and overcoming of that suffering, is what defines the character of our hero.

Man or woman.

Not all heroes wear capes, as they say.

My guest for the online masterclass is Tom Richards, American author and bestelling writer. Tom has lived in Ireland for forty years and written a host of books including Dolphin Song and Surviving Ireland.

More about Tom in our recent podcast here. Or follow him on Facebook here.

The podcast I did with Mark Attwood, can be seen here.

Do feel free to get in touch via email or social media, if you would like to join us, and I will share the link.

Looking forward to this one!

Much appreciated

Carl J Ashley

July 2024