The turning point
When achievement could no longer earn what the child still wanted.
At about fifty-five, tired and deeply demotivated, Bertie recognised a belief that had quietly directed much of his life. He had been living towards his father’s expectations, or towards what he believed those expectations to be, hoping achievement might eventually produce the love and approval he had never experienced in the same way as his brother.
His brother had been the early developer: head boy, first-team sportsman and visible success. Bertie had been smaller, a late developer, bullied at school and by his brother, and then physically interrupted by the fractured hip. Comparison became more than something other people did; it became an internal measurement of worth.
Whether or not that belief contained the whole truth, it had shaped decades. Then came a simple but decisive realisation: he could no longer live his life for approval that might never arrive.
“I will live my life as me, not as an argument for why somebody else should finally approve of me. I am Me. I am enough.”
Years later, his father acknowledged that he had “not done too badly.” It was not the declaration of pride the younger Bertie might once have needed. By then, something more important had changed: approval was no longer the foundation supporting his identity.
This was not a rejection of family. It was a return to self, and one of the deepest roots of the work he now offers others: unconditional self-acceptance cannot remain something we wait to receive from outside.
