61 My Story - Living From The Inside Out featuring William Sinclair

My Story - LIVING FROM THE INSIDE OUT – By William Sinclair

How do you sum up fifty-seven years of life in one article? I guess you don’t.

We all have a story and this is mine. I hope it will inspire you to also move into living your life to its fullest potential, humanly and spiritually, because really they are both one.

Like the constant movement of salt water that erodes entire rock faces by the ocean or the desert wind that shapes sand dunes and can fire sand particles into your face with the strength and speed of a bullet, I allowed my story of childhood abuse and my own self-talk to both erode away my life and keep me hiding in the trenches.

I grew up in a house where love and abuse co-existed.

When she was a young adult, my mother had tried to kill her step father with a pair of scissors, while he slept, to eliminate his abuses on her own life. Take that anger and now give her children and you get some very dysfunctional life experiences.

My dad, who had introduced me to pornography earlier in life, tried working away from home as often as possible. “I’m just waiting for your mother to die so I can start my life,” he once told me.

Don’t get me wrong. I remember lots of loving things my parents did and sacrificed for me as a child. Dad sold his accordion to buy me my first drum set. Mom worked three jobs so she could send me and my brother on a holiday.

However, as I looked back on my life, whether perceived or real, there were many stories of abandonment, mind games, physical and emotional abuse, self-punishment and a sense of not being worth anything. These stories resulted in my lack of self-confidence, lack of self-worth and the unknown desire to keep abusing myself and sabotaging almost everything I put my hand to. Suicide was also a top thought in my consciousness.

The funny thing is, despite all these apparent set-backs, I always envisioned myself excelling at everything I did.

My faith base growing up was that of Roman Catholic. It was one of the things I seemed to cling to in my life. My mom’s answer to everything was, “Pray about it.” Except when I was old enough to ask about sex. Then her answer was, “Animals! Men are just animals!” I didn’t really know what she meant.

My God, at least the one I envisioned, was a punishing God on a distant throne that you had to journey to get to. If you were good then you got closer. If you were bad you got punished, for your own good of course, and you started back at zero. It wasn’t until I was in my fifties I realized that I had made my God a reflection of my mother.

As a teenager I dove into the music business realizing that when I strapped a guitar around my neck I got what I inwardly craved the most, attention and a form of love from others. Otherwise, I was a nobody to everyone. The more I played the more attention I got. So I got good at playing.

I started playing in pubs when I was around fourteen years old and in my late teens I got into just about everything a traveling band could get into.

My turning point came after I had moved to Canada from Scotland. Yes, I know, I forgot to tell you I was raised in Scotland until I was twenty-one. Or that my mother was born in India and my dad in England.

To cut a long story short and compress some passage of time together, I had worked my way across Canada. During that time I had a conversion experience, ended up attending a Catholic Bible School, then met my wife and started having kids. One summer, while the kids were little, we had flown to my parent’s house to visit with my mom and dad. A huge fight broke out between myself and my mother, followed by the usual “Nothing happened here so let’s stuff it” experience.

My wife said something when we flew home that changed everything. “That’s not normal life,” she said.

What? Up until that point I had assumed my entire upbringing was ‘normal life’.

From there, after almost curling up in a ball on the floor at work because a can of worms had been opened, I started going for counseling. It helped somewhat. It gave me coping skills and moved me to look at my past more objectively. It also helped me stop punching holes in walls and toned down, to some degree, the mind games I was playing with my wife. In my childhood I had learned that love was not something you got freely but that it had to be ‘earned’ in one way or another. That’s another story though.

As much as the counselling helped, it was still surface stuff in comparison to what I’m going to share with you now.

I had shared that I grew up as a Roman Catholic and also that I seemed to cling to that faith.

What I didn’t share was how strong that ‘cling’ was.

Despite my skewed view of who God was, and how distant that God was, there was definitely a Divine Presence in my life that had kept me living and glued to my wife.

I found comfort in th...