There’s a book available from Amazon that has the intriguing title ‘Onion Therapy’ and as its author, Paula Reed, lives in Barrow I was keen to find out more.

Paula’s book was published in 2019 and in it she lays bare her own traumatic childhood, as well as the stresses she had to face in her working life and then she tackles the different ways you can overcome them. Her own childhood traumas included maternal neglect, paternal alcoholism and sexual abuse by family friends from the age of nine. Writing these things down was very hard for her but she is proud of herself for doing so as it helped her face her poor start in life and successfully move on. What’s more she knows her book has helped many people, as they have told her so, and it is this that has given her the greatest satisfaction.

But what is Onion Therapy? Well, it’s a process of discovery that works on anything. It enables you to discover who you are so that then, and only then, can you start to rebuild a better, happier, and contented you by learning to be at one with yourself.

There are four steps.

To start, you need to define and accept where you are now; make a ‘life balance wheel’ to give you ideas. ‘A life balance wheel’ is divided up into segments such as family, health, finances and you score each one. Once finished it provides a snapshot of your well-being and the level of satisfaction you have in your current circumstances.

Then you PEEL. You identify extremes in your life, physical and emotional, positive and negative i.e. extreme feelings of anger, anxiety, depression, frustration, sadness, not feeling good enough, lacking confidence, loneliness, addictions etc., cancer and/or any physical illnesses that affect or impact your life.

The third step is to REVEAL. Find and understand the root cause of these extremes, believe that you can do something about them and create the desire to change.

Finally, you can HEAL. Identify a bespoke strategy of change that suits both you and your lifestyle that you can implement and maintain.

Peel, reveal and heal - that is Onion Therapy in a nut shell.

Paula believes in the power of the mind when dealing with illness, even helping to cope with cancer and says she has a lot of experience of this illness as for ten years she steered the Loughborough Cancer Self Help Group where she often gave talks. In fact, the book itself was the result of the mother of a cancer patient asking her to write down all her thoughts and experiences and this she did.

To buy the book go to www.oniontherapy.co.uk

Gaynor Barton