The Power of Vulnerability

Vulnerability isn’t about exposing yourself. It’s about no longer abandoning parts of yourself in order to be accepted.

For a long time, I thought being powerful meant having all the answers. It meant being confident, composed and never showing weakness.

I built Unlock Your Powers around guiding people towards the reclamation of their own source of inner knowing. But in doing this work, I became increasingly conscious of the parts of my own story that I had kept hidden.

I have spent countless hours sitting with people as they shared their deepest secrets, their greatest fears and their darkest moments. I held space for their stories with compassion and without judgement.

And yet, at the same time, I kept my deepest truth buried beneath the surface of my polished exterior.

Perhaps, somewhere along the way, I thought that by “saving” others, I could somehow erase the pain and trauma within my own story.

But every moment of honesty I witnessed in another person simply reminded me of the story I had been too ashamed to share.

I now understand that accepting myself and my history is a pivotal part of becoming whole.

Owning my experiences without shame or judgement is, I believe, a necessary step towards becoming the person I am here to be.

So here we go…

This is my story.

When I was pregnant with my first child, I was also managing a mental health team within a Medicare Local. I was responsible for several programs, including suicide prevention and perinatal support.

When I went on maternity leave, I felt confident and accomplished. I had achieved the goals I had set for myself by what I believed was the societally acceptable age, and I was ready to step into my happily-ever-after with my beautiful new baby.

It turns out that fairytale was not written for me.

I was only hours into being a first-time mother when the anxiety began to surface.

Every cry felt like a knife being driven into my side. I tried desperately to bond with this gorgeous little baby, but instead of the overwhelming love I had expected, I felt nothing but dread.

I tried to convince myself it was the “baby blues” and that it would pass.

But month after month, it only became worse.

Around the six-month mark, intrusive thoughts and voices began to take hold.

I was disoriented and terrified. I became convinced that I was being watched and recorded by people at the park, in the shops and even in my own backyard.

I stopped trusting my instincts.

I barely left the house.

I became frightened of the world around me and increasingly isolated from the people who loved me.

Eventually, the voices began telling me that I should leave this earth because everyone would be better off without me.

I remember one day driving and seeing a truck approaching in the opposite lane.

The voice was clear and determined:

Swerve into the truck and it will all be over.

Something inside me stopped me from taking that final step.

I am grateful for that every single day.

By the time my daughter was eight months old, I had been prescribed antidepressants and Valium to help me sleep.

I didn’t take them.

I told my husband and my parents that I was following the doctor’s directions, but secretly, I was not.

There was something inside me that kept saying, Don’t do it.

One day, when the voices became unbearably loud, I took out the tablets I had been hoarding.

I seriously considered taking them all at once.

I was ready to end the nightmare.

And then, from the next room, my daughter called:

“Mummy.”

For the first time, I really heard it.

I fell to the ground and sobbed.

I cried for what felt like hours.

Looking back, I realise I hadn’t really cried at all during those first eight months.

I had suppressed everything.

The fear.

The grief.

The overwhelm.

The anger.

The shame.

I had been trying so desperately to play the role of the “good mother” that I had completely abandoned the woman underneath it all.

But in that moment, I could no longer carry the weight of pretending.

The crying was deep and gut-wrenching.

But the relief that followed is something I will never be able to adequately describe.

I wasn’t healed.

Not even close.

But something had shifted.

I had finally opened the door to my pain.

And for the first time, I was allowing myself to actually feel it.

The beginning of another story

From there, I slowly began searching for answers.

I wanted to understand what had happened to me. I wanted to understand the mind, our beliefs, our inner world and why we experience life the way we do.

That search eventually led me to the teachings of the Laws of the Universe, Neville Goddard, Bob Proctor, Louise Hay and many other teachers whose work profoundly influenced the direction of my life.

I began exploring the relationship between our thoughts, beliefs, subconscious patterns, energy and the experiences we create.

And slowly, I began to rebuild myself.

What began as a desperate search for my own freedom eventually became my life’s work.

It became my mission to share the answers I had found with other people who were searching for their own path towards freedom and liberation.

That is the foundation of Unlock Your Powers.

But there is something I have come to understand through all of this work.

You cannot fully reclaim your power while rejecting parts of yourself.

You cannot create an authentic life while constantly editing your story to make yourself more acceptable.

And you cannot become your highest version by deciding that the versions of you who struggled, suffered or lost their way were somehow unworthy of love.

Those versions of you need compassion too.

Vulnerability is coming home to yourself

For me, vulnerability isn’t about telling everyone everything.

It isn’t about oversharing.

It isn’t about making your pain public.

And it certainly isn’t about seeking validation from other people.

Vulnerability is the willingness to stop abandoning yourself.

It is being able to look at the parts of your story that you would rather erase and say:

“This happened. This was me. And I still love myself.”

There is an enormous difference between keeping something private because you choose to, and keeping something hidden because you are ashamed of what it might say about you.

One is self-protection.

The other can become self-rejection.

And I think this is where vulnerability becomes powerful.

Because the moment we stop fighting the parts of ourselves we have labelled as broken, difficult, embarrassing or unworthy, we begin to bring that energy home.

We become whole.

You don’t have to hide anymore

I spent years believing that my story was something I needed to overcome before I could truly step into my purpose.

Now I see it differently.

My story isn’t something standing in the way of my purpose.

It is part of the path that brought me here.

The darkest chapters of our lives don’t have to become our identity.

But neither do we need to pretend they never happened.

We can honour them.

We can learn from them.

We can hold the versions of ourselves who were struggling with compassion.

And we can choose what comes next.

Perhaps becoming who you were always meant to be isn’t about creating an entirely new version of yourself.

Perhaps it is about finally accepting all of yourself.

The beautiful parts.

The messy parts.

The confident parts.

The frightened parts.

The healed parts.

And the parts that are still healing.

Because true freedom doesn’t come from becoming someone who has nothing to hide.

It comes from becoming someone who no longer needs to hide from themselves.

And that is where I am now.

Ready to own my experiences.

Ready to own my pain.

Ready to own my story.

Not because I want to live in the past, but because I no longer need to run from it.

If you’re reading this and something inside you is telling you that you’re ready to live more honestly, to embrace more of your story and to stop abandoning the parts of yourself you’ve been taught to hide…

I believe we can do it together.

Love Jules xx