Dethroning Your Personal Tyrants

By Debbie Bradshaw-Badois

Dethroning Your Personal Tyrants is a personal account on releasing emotional blocks stemmed from negative events, people, relationships, or vices that prevent an individual from letting go of a painful past, healing, and moving forward in the present, living in peace. Throughout the book, it provides guidance to forgiving yourself and others with a focus on self-worth and self-love, which ultimately allows a person to take back the power in one's life.

Dethroning personal tyrants that were toxic and had an internal grip on you is transformative. It places you in control and on the throne of your life again. Each chapter outlines valuable advice that anyone can practice as a result of painful memories or situations that left years of unhealed internal wounds.

Through the lens of the author's own story, she shares critical experiences that left her with nearly five decades of healing to process. She writes about her journey to dethrone all the tyrants that kept her from living her best life and vital steps to achieve self-healing and a greater sense of happiness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fulton Books, Inc.
• Release date: Aug 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9798887317236

Book preview

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

Introduction: My Purpose

Prologue: My Story

Chapter 1: Making the Commitment to Free Yourself from Emotional Trauma

Chapter 2: Forgiving Yourself First, Then Others

Chapter 3: Dethroning Your Personal Tyrants

Chapter 4: Taking Back Your Personal Power

Chapter 5: Examining and Understanding the Wounded Self

Chapter 6: Healing: Actions to Practice Self-Love

Chapter 7: Removing Yourself from Toxic People: Ex-Loves, Ex-Spouses, Friendships, Family Members, and Toxic Memories

Chapter 8: Cleansing and Renewing Yourself

Chapter 9: Speaking Your Truth

Chapter 10: Managing Setbacks

Chapter 11: Choosing to Be Brave over Fear

Chapter 12: Moving Forward to Live in Peace

References

About the Author

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Dethroning Your Personal Tyrants

Debbie Bradshaw-Badois

Copyright © 2023 Debbie Bradshaw-Badois

All rights reserved

First Edition

Fulton Books

Meadville, PA

Published by Fulton Books 2023

ISBN 979-8-88731-722-9 (paperback)

ISBN 979-8-88731-723-6 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Introduction: My Purpose

My Purpose

My research and story have become a personal guide to inspire others who are on a similar journey to heal from a painful past. Throughout the context of this book, it will explore anecdotes from my personal experience that have developed from a journey to let go and dethrone the tyrants in my life that have kept me from healing from a traumatic past. It will illustrate how to release the tyrants to live fully in the present with peace of mind. Through specific steps that were key to my transformation, I have classified, shared, and outlined each meaningful process through twelve informative chapters.

To those who have struggled and who are currently struggling to mend from emotional, psychological, and even physical damage, this is meant to bring validation, guidance, and peace to your life. Every individual has a story that is impactful. Through tough, painful lessons that shape a person whether positive or negative, it becomes part of your character, but it should never define your potential, purpose, or the person you're truly meant to be.

Life is a gift; some of the most powerful blessings derive from a painful experience.

My own internal wounds and healing process have been the greatest blessings that have been bestowed upon my life. I have grown to appreciate the lessons that I have learned from this transformational journey and blessed to share this process in the most beneficial way.

Prologue: My Story

My Story

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

—Maya Angelou

I hid over four decades of internal baggage that became too heavy and ugly to carry inside.

It did not matter what I had accomplished professionally or who I had helped within my family circle and close friendships. I grew so emotionally exhausted from years and layers of hurt, anger, shame, guilt, and resentment toward people who had failed me. These painful events left deep scars.

My past had defined me for so long that my unhealed wounds had become too burdensome to live with. Inside, I had lost my joy to give or to receive love from anyone. I built emotional blockades that I had found difficult to remove. I knew, in my heart, the cycle needed to end so that I could finally live life without consuming thoughts, fears, and sadness. I was ready to live peacefully.

Forgiveness and letting go of past hurts needed to take place before the healing could begin. This was my mountain to conquer. I am sharing my experience to give a voice and validation to all those individuals whose light inside has been dimmed. It is time to shine again.

Early in life, I suffered from abandonment, and this issue transcended into my important adult relationships. Identifying the triggers from the original hurt that was inflicted upon me was critical to heal. I had to decipher what emotional burdens to eliminate to move forward. One of my earliest memories of abandonment occurred when I was three and a half years old. It became unconsciously rooted in my mind and soul, and it was the catalyst for all my dysfunctional relationships. It took years to unpack the psychological and emotional ramifications from so much hurt. I longed to feel whole and heal. It became my quest to explore the process of healing my internal wounds so that I could break this toxic cycle and live healthy again, free from any of the ghosts from my past that haunted me. This is my story and journey through the healing process.

My maternal role model had failed me; my grandmother on my mother's side used to say that my mom had experienced her own childhood trauma. In the early 1940s, my mother's biological father attempted to kidnap her while she and my grandmother were walking to church with her adoptive father in Joplin, Missouri. Her real dad made a hastily effort to snatch my mother and run, but after grabbing her, he tripped and collapsed in the middle of the street with my mother falling on top of him. He suffered a brain aneurism and died instantly. My grandmother described my mother's screams as terrifying, and that tragic day would remain locked in my mother's emotional memory bank indefinitely. My mother's hysteria would subside, but she would never deal with this traumatic event. Her unhealed wounds manifested into many years of reckless behavior after she married my father at the young age of eighteen and became a wife and mother of four. Her dysfunctional cycle would not only affect me and my siblings but also to extended family members many years later.

I had two older siblings and one younger sibling. I was the third child in birth order. We were raised in a suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio. My mother became restless in her role as a wife and parent after she gave birth to my youngest sister in 1969. My sister, Vickie, was born with Down syndrome. My grandmother always felt something in my mother snapped after she had my youngest sister. During this time period, society did not recognize individuals with learning or physical challenges as special needs. Outside resources were limited. The medical community in the late 1960s labeled Down syndrome children as mongoloids (deriving from the physical characteristics of the Mongolians). These children were, most times, institutionalized because society deemed them as unteachable, uncoordinated, and having underdeveloped intelligence. Down syndrome children in the 1960s was horribly stereotyped as unproductive citizens.

My mother did her best to fight against what society recommended for my sister. She refused to institutionalize Vickie