Sofia – My Story

Everything always happens at the right time for the right reasons. I can’t tell you why it took me so long to write my 3000 stories, but here we are, 6 years after attending my first Be Activated course, which completely change my life. As someone who usually loves to share my thoughts in word form, I’ve long wondered why this story, my story, has been so hard for me to formulate words to. It is a story that has completely changed the trajectory of my own life, but also of the lives of many others. It is a story that I so frequently share with clients and in group meetings, yet I somehow wanted these words to have impact to a larger audience… but it’s hard to have impact if you don’t share in the first place. So here I am hoping that my story can have a further reach than the clients I see and those I stand in front of.

I grew up in a close knit family environment with a beautiful combination of chaos and order. I grew up in a Greek ethnic household, with an alcoholic parent.

I was always considered the ‘perfect’ child at school – a word I long resented. I got straight A’s in class, I was good at sport, a state and national representative in Football (soccer), I spent many hours volunteering my time to others, empathetic, I was organised, ate well, neat, I was studying medicine… whatever society likes to classify as ‘good’, I aimed and hit every target possible.

To balance the chaos in my life, I created as many forms of order as possible. I controlled every aspect of my environment, I had written my life plan down when I was 12, which I had followed to a tee up until this point, I had OCD and an eating disorder. My body balanced my artificial order with chaos in the form of depression, anxiety, I was suicidal and suffered from severe panic attacks.

I hit a point where I knew I either had to change something or I was going to end my own life. I attended my first BA course when I was 21 in 2018 after dropping out of studying medicine just 6 months prior.

It’s hard to find words that have as much significance as my own experience. But on day 3 of my first BA course, my life completely changed. Doug, being the prick of a man that he is, asked me to come up to the front of the room, elicited me into a panic attack and then completed a release.

If I’m honest, I can’t even remember what the release was, I want to say it was my calf point, but my mind was such a blur at that point it could have been anything. Regardless, the specific point is not the important part of this story. I can’t remember much of the rest of that day or the day to follow. But what I can say is that I have not had a single panic attack since that day. For context, prior to May 2018, I had been experiencing panic attacks almost every day since I was 12. That’s almost 10 years of daily panic attacks of various forms, ranging from full blown panic attacks, vomiting, to just not being able to move or speak. That was my life. A life I learned to control and ‘live’ in. I knew no different.

Not that I need to toot Doug’s horn, but Doug’s ability to create a space where every individual has the ability to be vulnerable enough to let shit go and pick on people at the right moment is honestly one of the most inspiring and impressive things I have ever had the privilege to witness and been part of.

It’s hard to describe how differently I walk through life since that day. But I know that everyone in my life has experienced that change within me. I can definitely say that not everything was ‘fixed’ in that moment. It has still taken years of unravelling, processing, growing and learning to get to where I am in present time. But I have enjoyed the process since. I have enjoyed and experienced my life since. Where I once sat in an emotional capacity that was nothing short of numb, my eyes only seeing what was directly in front of me and my mind only every striving for the future. I can now say that I can see. I mean really see. I can feel. I fell in love – a feeling I don’t think I ever thought I would actually experience. I have the ability to create and share my passion. And I have the privilege to be able to tell my story.

I continue to attend every BA course I can. I continue to use BA and its principles with every client I see and every person I interact with. It might have just been the right thing at the right time. But BA has changed the way I see life, walk through life, experience life and therefore the impact I have on every single person I meet.