#1 Should Your Trauma Define You?
How To Turn Your Pain Into A Purpose... Without Purpose Consuming Your Life
Welcome to KULT.
This publication is for women who have experienced trauma, rupture and/or epiphany. KULT is a growing, structured approach to managing one’s energy, drawing parallels to discussions about “intentional living” that protects against external systems, further trauma and expectations, through ritual, creativity, authenticity and expression.
I want to share with you quickly my first encounter with the word trauma.
HINT: Like most of us, it was loooong after I’d experienced a good share of it…
A good few years ago, I read Mastin Kipp’s Claim Your Power. It was a good read. Probably good enough to link here to it on bookshop.org, but after a run-in with him online and being blocked by him, his profits can go suck a fart.
However, never wanting to dismiss good theories because of a dick-of-a-creator (he purposely posted triggering content, admitted it and then wouldn’t back down), the book was pretty valid and helped readers lead their own life’s epiphany; the elusive walk from their dark night of their soul into the light of their destined path.
At that point, I thought the book (and anything “self-help”) was more about aspiration and motivation, rather than shadows and demons. It was good stuff.
It made me realise how your traumas, and the stories you’ve therefore created for yourself, can open your empathy and turn your pain into a purpose for serving others in life.
This could be a profit-free calling, mini project, a side hustle or a fully-stoked career.
Whatever hurt you most could be sculpted into a service... something more.
Community.
Connection, on the deepest level. With yourself and others also experiencing the same.
The then Good Girl, people pleaser in me was having a great time.
Does Trauma Have A Say In Destiny?
As I reflect on my own path, I’ve traversed many a career.
But, ultimately, I’ve oscillated between giving through health industries and creating via artistic ones.
Pharmacy, nuclear medicine, mental health.
Make up, wigs, costume, visual merchandising, branding, styling.
And now writing.
Where I’ve landed today, is a journey of realising that whilst Kipp is onto something, it leaves a massive gap for us still to manage:
Who might we have been, had we not suffered?
It’s made me realise that, as usual, balance is everything.
And that it doesn’t take a Good Girl to get a Good Life.
This is where my new work began.
And KULT was birthed.
The True Balancing Act
If we do not balance who we are and who we could have been, there are two hell pits awaiting for us as we Crash Bandicoot or Sonic our way through the levels of life…
On one side of our path is pleasing.
And on the other is privilege.
Serve “too much” and all you’re doing is burning out your own creativity and expansion. You lose who you are, amongst the weight of a world that never stops needing.
Don’t serve enough, and you’re eaten by the feeling of undeserving. You witness a world needing your hand and you freeze with fear, thinking it’s guilt, when really it’s privileged responsibility.
So, whilst Kipp’s theory of claiming power being connected with your biggest pain is a great one, I feel we need a personalised, agile system to ensure that we arrive at our deathbed suitably served and dutifully serving.
When Pain Becomes Identity
I saw the opportunity to ask this question for this article:
“Is trauma your purpose or your cycle?” - because I see so many people follow a certain path:
Trauma happens
Trauma recycles original traumas
We forge stories we tell ourselves that limit (protect) us
These stories guide what we do
This trauma informs our path, often reflective of what hurt us rather than who we could have been
We forget what life could give us without this trauma
We don’t heal from the trauma
A serving life is lived, with no space for who we are and what we deserve - another trauma cycle in itself
We don’t live a balanced life
We resent during living
We regret later on
I see our truest path as becoming who we were meant to be, not becoming something.
We deserve to be realistic about where we are but also deserve to be revelatory with who we now get to become…
Someone who is not only amazing from their very birthright, but who has the empathy and loving understanding of just how dark life can be.
We deserve the right to form our own light in all of this.
So, how do we achieve a balanced life of who we were meant to be and who we became because of the things that happened to us?
It’s pretty straightforward, when you put your boss hat on…
You Wouldn’t Run A Business Like This
You’d do it in a Marketing office as a Service Level Agreement, a Lawyer’s office as a contract and a Contractor’s office as a Standard Operating Procedure… and yet I don’t know why we don’t do it more in our lives.
Now, there are the pretty tools in the opening pages of a new-age life planner book from a decent stationery brand or two, but nowhere in the working fields I’ve ever worked (especially within education) have I ever seen enough shouted about life contracting in a serious, serious form.
(BTW: Fuck Life Coaching for a second…)
I’m talking serious, how-do-I-wish-to-operate-until-I-don’t-anymore-planning.
How can we achieve a balanced life, unless we allow for it?
How can we allow for it, if we don’t plan for it?
How can we plan for it, when we don’t decide who we are?
And how do we decide who we are, if all we ever do is live with what we ended up as being? 🫠
I lose sleep over this shit, as you can tell.
A More Alive Way To Design A Life
We’ve all seen the exercises out there, segmenting life into wheels, boxes, lists…
Family, Friends, Career, Finances, Home, Health, Hobbies… blah blah blah.
Cold.
Crap.
Boring.
How to make a life less interesting in ten stale words or less. 🤦🏼♀️
How about instead:
Connection
Purpose
Community
Creativity
Expansion
Art
Spirit
Drive
Nature
Cycle
Procurement
Deletion and Editing
That already sounds wayyyy more fun, vibrant, real… alive no?
Life will make you believe that it has to revolve around three things:
FAMILY (Toxic networks often built around tradition and expectations that benefit the country/ systems you live in)
MONEY (An invisible energetic commodity that makes you live in constant lack, bringing you down and distracting you from your own being-ness)
WORK (Often doing things you’re not naturally wanting to do with people you wouldn’t choose to share your last breathmint, let alone 40+ hours a week of energy)
And yet, so many of us don’t have much money, are lacking a full family and will never make it up a full career ladder… yet we can be so happy and full… if we choose to engineer it that way.
So, what is the secret to feeling a full life, no matter the mix above?
Simple - you energetically care about your own path, not just the rest stops with other people, causes, missions and guilts along the way.
Simple… not always easy, though.
Design A Life You Can Live Inside
So welcome to a world of self-becoming… but in a new way.
The place you come to live when life makes you want to die.
The place where we actually make life interesting - to design, strategise, collate, collect, define, progress and feeeeeeel our way to our next chapter.
Where we create a healthy cocktail of authenticity and lived experience (a.k.a trauma), to create something meaningful, eclectic and, well, fucking downright tasty.
So, if you’re ready… want to come on this journey with me?
I want to take you with me, to a different kind of next step.
Not the Instagram kind.
Not the “side hustle” kind.
And not the “mid-life crisis” kind…
The kind you build when life has already broken you once (maybe a few times) and you refuse to live on autopilot ever again.
A place for designing how you actually want to operate.
For editing, deleting, reclaiming and choosing.
A place where lived experience and creativity meet structure.
This is the work I now call KULT.
It’s not a sales funnel to epiphany or a ladder to over-commitment and long term investments. It’s my FREE Substack words (that I will adore until my dying breath) and the chance to work with me if you ever felt called to. That’s it. Nothing more and nothing less.
I’m a pagan witch, damaged writer with mental health industry experience, training as a Spiritual Director and have been beaten up by life a good few times, in a good few ways… I’m in my own trauma recovery, rediscovering life over 40 and a complete and total work in progress; wanting to help other women along the way. This will never be “top-down” authoritarianism from someone too far up their own arse to admit their own lived experience. This is real and raw.
So, if this piece touched something in you and if you’re tired of mistaking trauma for destiny, you’re welcome here.
👉 Follow, subscribe, pay to subscribe… whatever feels right for you.
Just join me.
Lilith x
Thank you so much for reading and being here with me on this messy, beautiful journey.
If this was useful and you would like to know more, join me in whatever way you can. Follow, subscribe, pay to subscribe for full benefits.
@KULT is a new operating system. That Sacred Decay is the behind-the-scenes.
If you want to work with it more directly, you can enter here:
👉 enterkult.substack.com or DM me for 1:1 work.
🤍 If you want to treat me to a decaf, vanilla, oat milk latte, feel free ☕️