#138 From Mediocrity to Magnificence: A Story of Resilience

Transcript of Interview

Find Your Voice, Change Your Life Podcast

Podcast Host: Dr. Doreen Downing

Free Guide to Fearless Speaking: Doreen7steps.com

Episode #138 Louise Gallagher

“From Mediocrity to Magnificence: A Story of Resilience”

(00:00) Doreen Downing: Hi, this is Dr. Doreen Downing, host of the Find Your Voice, Change Your Life podcast. All of you have heard me say how much I love doing this interview with people, especially new friends. I feel like we meet each other in this cyber world and our hearts start to resonate.

Louise is certainly one of those hearts that has resonated with me during the last several months when I’ve come to know her, so I’m sure you’re going to be touched. I’m already feeling it in my skin right now as you listen to her. Hello, Louise.

(00:36) Louise Gallagher: Hi Doreen, thank you for having me here today and I feel the same about you. It’s so exciting.

(00:42) Doreen Downing: Yes, it’s a shared moment of appreciation. You sent me a bio so I’m going to go ahead and read that.

TEDx speaker, coach, mentor, artist, storyteller, Louise Gallagher has been called a warrior poet with the heart of a lioness. She has transformed adversity into a life brimming with passion, joy, and service through weaving words and images into possibilities, inspiring women to embrace their creative essence and love themselves wholly.

There are a few more paragraphs here, which I will read, but I just want to make sure that people really took that in, that we can love ourselves wholly. That’s partly what you stand for. Louise’s memoir, “The Dandelion Spirit: Love, Lives, and Letting Go,” which recounts a hot, harrowing relationship, was adapted into a documentary for the Oprah Network. I haven’t seen that, but I’m certainly going to give us a link so that all of us can go listen to it.

In her work within the homeless serving sector, Louise spearheaded initiatives like the Possibilities Project, an art-based program in Canada’s largest city, homelessness community.

Beyond her coaching, painting, and daily blogging at dareboldly.com, Louise finds joy by the river, walking and playing with her sheep doodle, Beaumont. Through her love of life and creative expression, Louise endeavors to cultivate a world where we celebrate our human essence, connecting with one another through our inherent magnificence and love.

So, anybody who knows me, relates to all those words. I love that whole idea of essence because that’s what essential speaking is about. Speaking from your essence and the essence is magnificent and that’s where our power is. So, thank you.

(02:54) Louise Gallagher: Thank you.

(02:57) Doreen Downing: In the podcast, I usually like to start with not this brilliant, bold, magnificent being. I would say all of us popped out with deep magnificence, just brimming with potential, and then we get in an environment that doesn’t go, “Yay for you and all your wonderful potential,” and “Let’s grow you into the best person you can be.” So, could we go back and give us some snapshots of early life like where you grew up, family situations, siblings, that kind of thing. Just the facts.

(03:34) Louise Gallagher: The facts. Sure. So, I was born the fourth child of a French -Indian mother. My mother’s from India and she married my father during the Second World War when he was with the RAF and had come to visit her town.

I was the last of the four, so I was the youngest, and at the time of my birth, there used to be a story that I was supposed to be born December 9th, because that’s the day of the Immaculate Conception. My mother was very Roman Catholic. I was born two minutes after midnight. What a disappointment.

My father lost a case of beer and 20 bucks because I was a girl. Again, what a disappointment. That was the story that was around my birth. I remember I used to tell that story sort of as a joke until I realized that story is hurting me, so maybe I need to reframe it into something that serves me better, which is what I did.

I changed it into, I was born the fourth child of a family that loved me dearly and I was very welcome. The challenge is —I’m with you, Doreen—we’re born magnificent, and then life happens, and we forget our magnificence, and we spend so many years trying to find this thing we can’t remember what it was, but we know there’s something missing.

it’s not until we wake up and go, “Oh my goodness, I’ve been looking out here in the world for this thing when it’s inside me.” When we claim that space, then we remember, “Oh, great, I’m magnificent.” And I would rather connect with you through magnificence than mediocrity.

(05:05) Doreen Downing: Or the pain or like some programs—”Hi, I’m whatever.” That’s your identity. Somebody on my podcast said something about we haven’t lost our voice, we just forgot it. That’s what you’re saying here.

(05:23) Louise Gallagher: Yes. When I was little, we moved to England first. My father was with the government. And because my mother’s family had left India and eventually made their way to France, which was the passport they carried because of the city they were born in in India, we moved to France.

I spent 15 years living in Europe. I went to university in Strasbourg and in Heidelberg but I’m Canadian. I was born in Canada and I came back because of a man, which is sort of the thread that runs through my whole story.

I came back to Canada to find my roots because I didn’t have roots, and it was always fascinating to me to talk to people whose families had been located somewhere and knew their roots and knew where they came from. My father was from Ireland, so it was very disjointed and very disparate.

So, when I came back to Canada, I didn’t know anybody and I was in Toronto and that relationship fell apart. I was dating another man when I was working after university for a company in Toronto.

One day, we’d hit this man and I’d had an argument. The next day my boss asked me if I wanted a transfer and I said, “Oh yes.” Four days later, I went to Alberta from Ontario. And then that’s where I’ve been ever since, except for one year when I was gone for a while—three months.

I always knew there was something inside of me that wasn’t settled, that was searching for something. And I was abused by my mother’s favorite brother when I was five, when we were living—

(07:01) Doreen Downing: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Before we keep going, rolling down later life. Those are important— you have a gift for telling stories and reframing them. It’s important because I think people listen to the podcast and go, “Wow, look at what happened to her and how she has now not only survived, but has become more expressed of that inner brilliance, magnificence.

You were going real fast, so I just wanted to say, “Whoa, wow, oh.” As a psychologist, I just go, “Yes, a little difficult moment. How old were you?”

(07:42) Louise Gallagher: Which moment?

(07:43) Doreen Downing: You were talking about your mother’s brother.

(07:45) Louise Gallagher: I was five and we were in Paris. There were many things that happened but when it happened, I told my mother who didn’t believe me. What happened was I sort of buried the memory. I always had this one part of it that I couldn’t figure out where this image that was always in my head came from, but I knew that when we ever revisited my mother’s family in Paris, that I did not want to spend time around this uncle, neither my sister nor I did.

Our skin crawled around him. And of course, my mother would say, “You’re not being nice to your uncle,” and “You must be nice.” So, I grew up being a good girl, being polite, and accepting the unacceptable.

(08:37) Doreen Downing: Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. And what I also get is that you did speak up to your mother and you were not heard. This is what we’re talking about. The voice tries to make its way out into the world and how it’s not accepted or put down or made to feel like, I shouldn’t say that.

Did she just say you’re wrong or how did she make you feel like she didn’t believe you?

(09:04) Louise Gallagher: What happened was she basically told me that I was making up stories. I was a free spirit pretty well from the moment I was born, and there was always this sense that I was too spirited and so this was me making up stories.

Now I can tell you after years of therapy and work that I recognized that the gift of it was that I became a storyteller. My parents fought a great deal and my middle sister and I would hide in our bedroom under the covers and I would make up stories for her so she would forget about them fighting.

I started keeping a journal when I was little, like quite young. For me, yes, they were tragic and horrible things, but I can heal from those things, and it is the gifts that I found through them that strengthened me today.

When I approached my mother about that event, I had become a mother. The first time when I was 32 and then at 35, my second daughter was born and when my eldest daughter was getting close to five, I thought I needed to do something about my relationship with my mother.

So. I went to visit them and I sat down with my mother one day and had her tell me her whole life story and I gained a lot of understanding. At one point I asked her, but what about Uncle Noel? What happened to him? Her response was, “What was I supposed to do? He was my brother.”

My face was like yours. It was like, “I was your daughter. I was a child. I was unprotected.” my mother was bipolar and so, mental health was a big thing. I always thought, as a little girl, that my job was to make her happy.

It took a lot of work and therapy to realize that I was never that powerful, but she would stand in the kitchen with the four of us, and she would hold a knife to her breast because my father was away a lot, and say she was going to kill herself. In my little mind, I believed I was powerful enough to take that knife out of her hand if I could just make her happy.

(11:30) Doreen Downing: This is wonderful in terms of articulating moments like this really helps people visualize it and then also see this little one—you—in what was not a very powerful position yet still thinking there was something you could do.

(11:50) Louise Gallagher: Yes, but that’s where the voice piece came in, Doreen. I told stories. I made up stories, but it’s interesting—lying is not something that sat well with me, but making up creative stories, stories that I thought would make her laugh or forget the inner pain she had—

I loved my mother and she had the most beautiful hands when she spoke. She was really quite beautiful. When she spoke, her hands, cause she’s French, her hands would flow. I remember, as a little girl thinking, “Oh, I’m going to talk with my hands just like my mom. But it was interesting. For the voice piece, it was always trying to search for the words that could reach her, and I could never find them.

(12:35) Doreen Downing: Nowadays, I’m sure you have looked back at that moment and seen it as a gift, because to me, that’s what you do. You look back at moments, so you developed your ability to tell stories, yet there was something that not having the power with your mother—I hear that you’ve accepted it, but it feels like there’s something else that you took from that as a life lesson.

(13:02) Louise Gallagher: Yes. The thing I took from it is that ultimately we —I’m an experiential learner Doreen, so I used to joke and say, “I like big experiences.” I found big experiences and what I realized for a long time is that there was a part of me that was trying to kill off the part of me that was not acceptable to her. That was the piece that spoke up, that asked questions constantly, that was curious and always wanted to do it her own way.

I always had this dissonance of the part of me that, “I have to do it my own way. What other way is there?” Versus “Do it like your brother and sisters. Do it like everybody else. Be quiet. Be good.” I hate that expression, by the way. “Be a good little girl,” just makes my skin crawl.

And so, the gift for me was always to realize that I create my path. I choose how I walk this path and I am a hundred percent accountable for everything that happens in my life. I have to accept that you are accountable for yours. It doesn’t make me a great nurse at times, but I think it’s what helped me work in the homeless serving sector for so long.

(14:31) Doreen Downing: How is that?

(14:33) Louise Gallagher: Because I knew that I was there to create space for people to find their inner essence, but I wasn’t powerful enough to make the choice for them. I could create this space where they could see it was a choice.

When I started the Possibilities Project, —it was an art studio in this homeless shelter where I was the Director of Communications—I said to the clients who would come—and it was a beautiful space. It was on the sixth floor. It overlooked the river below. It’s a big, big shelter. It sleeps a thousand people a night —”This is your space.” We created a charter of how people needed to behave to be in the space, but they ran it.

Every so often, there’d be an argument about something and someone would say, “I’m just not going to come anymore,” and I’d say, “I can appreciate that’s the decision you’re making. I want you to know that my life isn’t affected whether you come or not. I have a great life. I love my life, so it’s not affecting my life. It could impact yours, so the decision is, which do you choose? To come to a place you love to be or just walk away? Your choice.”

(15:49) Doreen Downing: Oh, what a lesson. What you’re talking about to people today, I hope they hear that what you’re doing is saying, “This is who I am. This is what I’m responsible for, and there’s a line, and I’m not responsible.” It just feels like, “Wow, that’s a lot of freedom.”

(16:08) Louise Gallagher: Yes and my mother gave me that.

(16:10) Doreen Downing: Oh, yes, from the story we just told. I see that, that moment. I’m going to take a quick break, but this is so fascinating. I’m sure there’s lots of juice left to squeeze out and to teach our listeners today. We’ll be right back.

Hi, we’re back with Louise Gallagher today. Already, it just feels like one cheek is going one way with the wisdom that is going by so quickly and the cheek goes the other way and it’s just like, “Wow, wow, wow.”

Louise has a life filled with challenging moments. A mother who is mentally ill and she’s experienced abuse and some moving around different countries and not having roots, but the main thing that I’ve learned so far from Louise— and if you’re just tuning in, make sure and listen all the way to the end because you’re going to get some nuggets.

The main thing I’ve learned from Louise today so far is the ability to take anything and make it your own learning. Already, I’m taking something beautiful. Thank you, Louise.

Since it’s about finding your voice, we talked about early challenges and how we aren’t able to really be heard for who we are if people notice this or not, or accept this, or if they have other agendas. But here we are, going through your life. Where else would you say would be moments where you found your voice that you didn’t know wasn’t there?

(17:49) Louise Gallagher: I’m not sure. I didn’t know that it wasn’t there because I was in a relationship for four years, nine months, three weeks, two days. I like to be clear on it because I don’t want to say it was almost five because it was, it was not five. But I was in a relationship of escalating terror and it was awful. By the end of it, I had jettisoned and amputated parts of my psyche, parts of my being to just stay still.

I remember there was such a constant roaring in my head. I couldn’t even hear my thoughts because I was living in such terror. It was an abusive relationship, but it wasn’t physical abuse. It was this very powerful mental abuse. At the end, in the final three months, he said he was fleeing the province because the police were after him and he was taking me with him and he would let me go when he got out of the country.

(18:47) Doreen Downing: That’s what they call a hostage.

(18:49) Louise Gallagher: Yes, and I didn’t care. All I knew is that I had to get him away from my two daughters who were 15 and 16 at the time because they didn’t deserve him in their life. I did deserve him in my life. I had become so trauma-bonded to him that I didn’t know who I was anymore. I was who he told me who I was and he told me I was nothing without him.

We left the province and for three months, we hid out in a little cabin in the interior of BC. I was so broken and voiceless that I was basically his shill. I always joked and said I had a perfect smile so that nobody could know what was going on but I was waiting for him to get rid of me physically or I always would imagine I’d stand at this river that ran past the cabin and I could unhook gravity’s hold on my body and it would just fall of its own volition into the river and be washed out to sea and then all memory of me would be erased from my daughter’s minds. To me, that made sense.

Then this one morning in May of 2003, a police car drove up, arrested him, and I got the miracle of my life back. Now, I was broken, I was broke, and I was lost, but for the very first time in months, I reached out and I called my sister, who lived an hour away with her husband, and they came and got me, and I went back to their house and I stayed there.

I remember the morning after he was arrested—I’d actually fallen asleep eventually and I remember waking up and thinking, “Okay, I need to start writing it out.” I’d always kept a journal and then in those final couple of years, I had not written a word because writing is about truth for me and I couldn’t face myself on the page because I’d have to lie and I couldn’t do that because it’s about truth.

So, I started to write and the very first thing I wrote was, “Now for the hard part.” I remember stopping and looking at that phrase and thinking, “No, no, no, no, no, no. Going through that relationship was the hard part. This is the part where I get to heal and I get to choose how I go through it.” I made a decision that day. At that moment, I was going to go through my healing journey in love.

(21:26) Doreen Downing: Oh, say that again, please.

(21:29) Louise Gallagher: I made the decision to go through my healing journey in love and that meant I had to take all thoughts of him and push them away. I could not think, especially in those first months, because I knew how broken I was. People told me, “Oh, to heal, you need to write a list of all the awful things he did so that—” I went, “No, I don’t. I’m not strong enough to do that right now.”

All I am strong enough to do is to write about where did I go, who am I, and then to remind myself of some of the remarkable things I had done before the abuse so that I could remember the woman who was still inside me, but who had gotten lost.

The biggest piece was with my daughters who for that three months of my disappearance, they waited for the police to come and tell them my body had been found. Needed to heal that relationship and reclaim it because we’d always had a really powerful, strong, close relationship. Again, I realized I have to do this in love.

I would allow the anger to come out. I would take two dozen eggs and I’d go on a cliff with a girlfriend and I’d write all over my eggs and then I’d hurl the eggs over the cliff into the ocean, and scream and yell and just let it all out. But once I let that out, I had to come back to love.

(22:58) Doreen Downing: And where is love? What is the experience of love for you?

(23:03) Louise Gallagher: For me, the experience of love is accepting myself in all ways, and that includes the mother who was so lost, she deserted her children. I had to fall in love with that person too, and I did. My daughters and I, when I moved back to Calgary, which is where I live and where they were born, they moved back with me right away. They had been living with their dad while I was gone and they moved back with me right away, and we began to really weave together the love that had always connected us.

My eldest daughter described it as: in the beginning, between us, there was a river of pain flowing, and every time I stopped and stepped into their pain, their fear, their anger, and just acknowledged their feelings about it, and didn’t try to defend against what had happened, the pain was replaced with love until eventually there was only love flowing in the river between us.

(24:18) Doreen Downing: Beautiful transformation of the power, definitely the power of love. Well, this is breathtaking really to hear. The beautiful you in such a dangerous moment in life and getting wrapped up, lost, tangled in all the ways in which you were.

Then this moment of breakthrough with the rest, and then you said, “I healed with love.” I healed with love. I hope everybody who’s listening to this right now can feel the love of self, because that’s what you’re saying. It’s like you wrapped yourself up, embraced yourself with these huge arms of warmth and forgiveness and acceptance.

We’re coming to the end and I want to go on and on and on because there’s so much more to your story, but I know some of what I’m learning today gives me a better understanding of what you’re doing in terms of bold and daring to be bold and aging with radiance.

It feels like I’m here now. What can I bring that’s going to help, not just myself, but others who are moving and growing? Say something about what you’ve been developing.

(25:51) Louise Gallagher: When I worked at the shelter, one of the things I would do is I would tell people that the power of our voice is that when we tell our stories, they’re not our stories anymore. They’re stories out here. In essence, that’s what we’re doing right now, Doreen. We’re creating a story that is bigger than you and me and who’s ever listening. It’s now a universal story. That’s the power of giving voice to our stories and why it’s so important that we bring our voices out to share those stories.

For me, as I age, I turned 70 in December, one of the things I want people to know is that that’s not an ending of a career or of my making a difference, it’s just a new beginning. In this decade of my 70s, I want them to be sexy and scintillating and sizzling. I don’t want them to be quiet and subdued and sitting back and watching time flow by like the river.

I want and I believe all of us, especially women of our age, there is this space. We have so many gifts and we have learned so much in life and experienced so much. We were at the forefront of the women’s movement and we are still at that vanguard where we are breaking through barriers of aging and saying, “Look at me now, World. You thought you’d seen it all. You ain’t seen it.”

(27:24) Doreen Downing: Let’s shake our hands and just go, “Yes!”

(27:27) Louise Gallagher: And that’s really what Radiant Bold Aging is all about. She dares to speak up. She dares to not be quiet. She dares to not allow injustice to have a voice, but to give voice to justice.

That’s what I want to do.

(27:47) Doreen Downing: Oh, beautiful. A good way to come to an ending here. How do people find you?

(27:53) Louise Gallagher: Well, it’s all on the little screen behind me, but the easiest way is just to go to my website louisegallagher.ca

(28:00) Doreen Downing: Thank you, Louise. It’s been wonderful to have you open your heart and your wisdom and your life experience. I love the idea of stories now becoming held by all of us, not just your story, and we all have individual stories. The word you used was woven and we’re all part of the fabric of life. Thank you so much.

(28:26) Louise Gallagher: Thank you so much, Doreen.