In terms of your upbringing Is it Nature or Nurture that wins the race?

“Needs are imposed by nature. Your dreams can be soiled by nurture.”

Much has been researched and written about the impact of nature and nurture. A lot I will agree with and a lot, I won’t. We are spiritual beings having a human journey and not human beings having a spiritual journey. Each and every one of us will apply a different meaning to similar or even identical experiences because of who we are, what our highest values are, what our paradigms are, how we have been conditioned, and ultimately I believe because of the soul contract we entered into before we were born. Remember, this is my belief and you will apply a different meaning based on your values and beliefs.

If it was my soul contract to come back in to the world as my mother’s daughter, then it is my duty and destiny to share the experience and the lessons I have learned. If my experiences resonate with you as this is something you have experienced, great; if all this does is teach you how conditions impact on your paradigms behaviours and results, that’s perfectly fine too.

I have always told anyone who asked that I had an unconventional childhood. I do believe that in today’s world both my half-brother, Douglas and I would have been removed from her care. My mother was born in an era when women were not expected to excel in the business world and I truly believe that she never reached her full potential in life, and this played a huge part in her behaviour. From a young age it was all about her, and I have heard over and over again that if she didn’t get her own way as a child she was fearsome to behold. Both of my Grandparents and her brothers and sister were quite afraid of her temper.

If You Had To Live Your Life According To The Rules, They Were Going To Be Hers!

She lived her life according to her own rules, and if she changed them and you hadn’t caught on there was hell to pay. In the mid 80’s in South Africa my mother suffered a massive brain hemorrhage whilst we were at a netball practise. She was rushed to hospital and was placed in intensive care. It was the only time in my life I saw her a little scared as she didn’t want to die. We were told that recovery was unlikely and my mother, who hadn’t attended church in what was probably 20 years wanted to see a Church of England, Anglican Minister.

This was no small request, at this time we were living in pre-democratic South Africa, in the Capital City of Pretoria, and the population was predominantly Afrikaans. I managed to find the only C-of-E Minister in the province and he duly came to see her in the ICU ward.

I am sharing this little piece of Nature versus Nurture now as it will give you greater insights to the experiences of my youth going forward. When the Minister was finished with my mother he looked visible shaken. I was about 22 years old at the time and I could only imagine the stories, or confession she must have given for him to have that look on his face. I offered him a cup of tea in the hospital cafeteria, which he gladly accepted. When we sat down he asked me how much I knew about my mother’s life and just how much of it I was aware of? I took a deep breath and said most of it. As a young girl I was her confidant and alibi, I had to know where she was and who she was with in case something went wrong. I will never forget the shocked look upon his face when I said this. As I had thought my mother had given a confession of sorts, she had shared with him apparently in great detail the escapades she had been involved in. His shock however was that she had asked him to bear witness to her declaration to God that she knew what she had done was wrong, both now and when she was doing it, but that she had wanted to do it and if she lived her life over she would do it all the same. She calmly looked him in the eye with her steely blue eyes and said that she was ready for her judgement day.

When My Memories Became Really Clear

My first real cognitive memories of day to day life started around the same time as my mother’s shock-filled permanent, return in to my life. Pregnant with my half-brother and new husband in tow, I only found out much later that they weren’t married then. England in the 1970’s was a vastly different country to what it is now. Most rented housing was controlled by the council and there were long waiting lists in every area. When my mother arrived back in the town where I was living with my Grandparents, we were not eligible for council housing as my mother had not been living and working in the area. There were long waiting lists and housing was scarce. The council were building a brand new housing estate, but it would be years before we’d reach the top of the list. This wasn’t going to stop my mother though and she headed off to the housing office. There was always something about my mother that men found magnetic, they were drawn to her in a sexual way that I have never been able to understand. She wasn’t a beauty in any way and at this time she was well into her pregnancy, but she wasn’t going to let that get in her way. A few trips to the housing officer, and a few after hour’s sessions and we were at the top of the list and moving into our home.

I had changed schools when we moved and a lot of my memories of this time are of looking after my half-brother while my mother and step-dad partied a lot, often at the pub or at friends. It was an OK time though, this was a time when there was enough food, and the electricity and gas were always on.

Suddenly we were moving away from Aylesbury, from my cousins, my aunt and my grandparents to Romford, closer to my step-dad’s family. Romford is almost 60 miles away from Aylesbury, and in the 1970’s that would have been considered a long way. My little world was turned upside down, and it was in Romford that the nature of the relationship between my mother and I was defined. My mother didn’t like having children. We were a great inconvenience to her in so many ways, “You always needed something from me, this was how I heard her describe motherhood once. As a little girl it was very evident that if I needed something for my half-brother and me, I was going to have to find a way to get it myself.

The effect of the Three Day Week

Things were starting to get very tough with the economy and my step-dad was working in the automotive industry, part of the manufacturing sector. The coal miners were on strike and the ability to generate electricity was severely impacted upon by this.As a result of this the Conservative Government of the day had to introduce the Three-Day Week. From 1 January until 7 March 1974 commercial users of electricity were limited to three specified consecutive days’ consumption each week and prohibited from working longer hours on those days. This meant that workers were only paid for three days work a week instead of six. Even though this time then passed it had a serious ongoing effect on industry, and on our home. My mother and step-dad took on extra jobs, but it didn’t stop the electricity and gas from being cut off. The fridge was bare, but incredibly there was always money for cigarettes and alcohol.

Just after my 9th birthday the first of many quiet showdowns occurred between my mother and me. I was never one for conflict, with her temper it never worked anyway. I had to learn strategies to use with her dependent on her moods. This was a lot to process for a young child, who was now responsible for the house as they were never home. My step-dad wasn’t a bad guy, but he was pretty hopeless around cooking, one night my mother left him in charge of making us some supper, egg and chips, this was probably the first time, and it was definitely the last. He got distracted playing his guitar and left the chip pan full of oil on the camping gas stove. It caught fire and in his panic he threw a cup of water on it. He nearly burnt the house down. From that moment on cooking became my responsibility when my mother was working late, and soon that was all the time.

Why Was It That All Her Friends Were Men?

This was around the time that I began to realise that most of my mother and step-dad’s friends were men and my mother was very friendly and affectionate with them. Sometimes when my step-dad was working at the pub these men would drop by, my mother would give me money for sweeties and tell me to take my half-brother to the park and only come back in a few hours. As this continued and the weather turned to winter my mother would leave us in the house and give me a story to repeat over and over until I knew it off by heart, where she was, what she was doing, in case my step-dad came back. I soon understood that I was being told a lie, that I had the alibi and luckily my step-dad never asked, even if he came home earlier than she thought, he never asked. Many times when it was a short visit, I was left to keep my step-brother entertained downstairs with some TV while she took the friends upstairs for a while. My relationship paradigms and conditioning was being undertaken in an environment whereby I believed for a long time that it was normal to have a husband, and several boyfriends at the same time.

This behaviour continued when we moved to Uxbridge, and was particularly bad when we lived close to the social club. I remember a few times when I asked her not to go out with these men, or not to take them upstairs, she just used to laugh at me and tell me not to spoil her fun. So instead I asked her not to tell me what she was doing and the strangest thing happened, my mother looked me in the eye and said

Suzie, I have to tell someone where I am, you’re in charge of this house so it’s best if it’s you!

My mother used sex as a weapon, she used it to get what she wanted and she used it to punish her partners too. By now I was in high school and she embarked on a torrid affair. She made sure that my step-dad was working at the pub, three or four nights a week, she would work with him at the pub but always managed to pop home, under the auspices of checking on me and Douglas, but it was to spend time with this new man. This one got the better of her in a few ways and she didn’t like it, she liked men she could push around and control and this wasn’t him. She ended it with him, and he didn’t take too kindly to it. He began a reign of terror in my life that seemed to last an eternity. With my mother and step-dad working nights a lot of the time I was at home with my half-brother. I would get obscene phone calls every night, he would tell me where I had been that day, and tell me that he would get me down at the canal and do me. The abuse went on for a while before I told my mother, her first reaction was that I should just tell him to come over and do me at the house. She knew exactly who it was and it didn’t seem to bother her at all. It was only after people spotted him following me and reported him that my mother took it seriously, but she was never apologetic for her behaviour.

Nothing changed and the harder I tried to understand the more confused I became.

My only respite was my weekly visits from my Dad, Monday evenings for a cuppa and a chat. We were never left alone so I could never confide in him as to what was going on. Sometimes he would take me down to visit my Granny and Grandpa, his parents in Portsmouth for a weekend. I kept everything bottled inside as I was too scared to tell him what was going on. One moment I was scared that he wouldn’t believe me because it sounded so far fetched, and the next I was scared that he would confront my mother and she would find a way to stop my Dad from being able to see me. I was in such turmoil that I had constant stomach pains and cramps from the anxiety.

These weekends away were the times where I had some normal family time, my other Godmother, my Dad’s sister would come around to visit. I have wonderful memories of shopping trips to Brighton and walking the Lanes with her, once we even misplaced her car, thinking it has been stolen, when in fact we were looking for it in the wrong car park!

Let’s Take a Moment

In Bringing up Douglas I share different aspects of this story with you too. Getting to this point I want to stop and analyse my upbringing from a coaching perspective. From the emotional side and from a nature versus nurture perspective.

What happened to me through these years was that I absorbed the emotions that I couldn’t process, each time and each experience built another layer over the previous layer and so this went on year after year, experience after experience and it formed all of the paradigms and behaviours which I used to escape from her, although tragically, I never really did until much later in life.

For a while during the recovery of her brain haemorrhage I managed to have candid conversations with her around what I experienced growing up. She acknowledged her part in my unconventional upbringing but she wouldn’t accept responsibility for a single thing that I had had to endure. It just happened and I should deal with it were her words. I began a journey then to accept what she was, although there were times when I screamed at her “You should have been a prostitute, because at least then she would have been paid for the sex!” Her response, was “You’re right, I should have.”

We have had years of estrangement, times of truce, times when I helped her through some dark times and times of accepted involvement, when she worked for me in my business. I can count on one hand how many times she hugged me in the last twenty years, and on the other hand I can count how many times I remember her saying she loved me.

It was only in my late forties that I could process the anger related to my relationship with my mother. I am one of the most even tempered people you will ever meet, but this is from years of conditioning, making sure not to wake the beast, my mother’s temper, so as not to endure the wrath of her temper. My mother never raised a hand to me, she did all the damage she needed to, with and through words. I had bottled up the anger inside me since I was six years old, pushing it down, covering it with another layer until I was numb to it, numb to the pain of all my childhood experiences, controlling all the anger, the sadness, fear, hurt and guilt which meant it could never fully be released.

Not A Good Parent, But Loved By Her Friends

My mother was not a good parent, by her own admission she wished she hadn’t had any kids, but she could often be a very good friend. Many have told me how proud she was of me, how much she loved me, but really, it means nothing to me now. Every child, myself included needs to hear it from their parents, from their mother that they are loved, not from someone else. We kept up appearances for years until her nature took over again in 2010 and she dealt our relationship a final blow. I will share this with you in The Art of Betrayal.

In Nature versus Nurture, you’ve read another snippet from my life’s story and how the significant emotional events I experienced, mostly at the hand of my mother, honed an internal belief (otherwise known as a subconscious paradigm) within me that I was not worthy and deserving.

Question:

Is what happened to you as a little girl still controlling you today as a grown woman?

Exercise:
  1. What’s just stirred within you as an unwanted belief which you know deep down, is crippling your success?
  2. Who or what event planted this belief in your subconscious mind, where it took root, establishing itself there as a massively destructive yet very real truth?
  3. What’s the price you’re paying for still having this belief rooted in your mind, as part of your most precious thought operating system (TOS)?
  4. Do you want to replace this piece of crippling, destructive mental virus code with a piece of new code which will serve you well and enable the success you desire?
  5. Here’s how: follow this link and Change Your Paradigms
My profound lesson:

As you will learn in one of the other articles I’ve written, I knew how to make money – lots of it. Goodness, I built a massively successful media business which I sold for a pot of money. However, given my internal coding that I was not worthy and deserving, as fast as money flooded in to my life, so it flowed out again. Only when my ship came in, did I discover, much to my shock and horror, that my thoughts, emotions and actions were not rooted in a wealth consciousness. Quite the contrary, when you believe you’re not worthy and deserving, what you have is a poverty consciousness. I’ve turned this brutal yet precious lesson in to a positive and so every day without fail, I make sure I am working in the gym of my mind, building my wealth muscles if you will, so that when my fleet of ships (note the plural…) come in again, and they will because this is what I expect, all the money will stick to me like superglue.

To Your Success, with love

Suzanne.

About the Author: Suzanne Styles

Suzanne Styles is a certified coach, hypnotherapist, speaker, and mentor dedicated to helping women rewrite their personal and professional stories. Drawing on her journey of resilience, entrepreneurial success, catastrophic failure, reinvention and profound self-discovery, Suzanne empowers her clients to step into their full potential. She combines deep personal insights with actionable strategies to help women overcome challenges, embrace their unique strengths, and create fulfilling, purpose-driven lives. Whether you're seeking clarity, confidence, or a complete life transformation, Suzanne's coaching provides the guidance and tools to turn desires into reality.
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