#171 Turning Breakdown Into Breakthrough: A Journey of Awakening

Today, I interview Catherine G. Lucas who opens up about losing her voice in the midst of a painful breakdown. In her late teens she was already standing on stage for public speaking competitions, but by the time her parents divorced during her university years, the weight of family wounds caught up with her. Instead of enjoying summer with friends, she found herself in an acute psychiatric ward, her world shattered and her voice silenced.

Her breakthrough came much later, when she discovered that what had been called a breakdown could also be seen as an awakening. It took years of reframing and deep inner work to see her experience not as illness, but as a turning point with the potential for healing.

Through mindfulness, patient advocacy, and writing her first book, In Case of Spiritual Emergency, Catherine began to speak from her whole self rather than hide in shame. Today she helps others step into their deeper calling, showing that finding your voice is not about perfection but about expressing the truth of who you are in a way that heals and uplifts.

__________________

Catherine G. Lucas is the author of four books on how to move successfully through crisis and harness the transformational power it holds. A former university professor, Catherine left her academic career behind to step into her soul’s deeper calling, following a profound crisis of awakening.

She went on to set up a UK charity and now helps people step into their deeper calling. Her media appearances include BBC Radio 4 and TimeWarner TV, and she regularly speaks internationally. More recently, Catherine has convened the highly acclaimed Birth the New Earth summit.

__________________

Find Catherine here:
https://www.youtube.com/user/CatherineGLucas

https://www.catherine-g-lucas.com/

https://www.co-creatingourfuture.world/

https://www.co-creatingourfuture.world/free-gift-download/

Transcript

Transcript of Interview

Find Your Voice, Change Your Life Podcast

Podcast Host: Dr. Doreen Downing

Free Guide to Fearless Speaking: Doreen7steps.com

Episode #171 Catherine Lucas

“Turning Breakdown Into Breakthrough: A Journey of Awakening”

(00:00) Doreen Downing: Hi. Welcome to Find Your Voice, Change Your Life. This is a podcast where I invite guests who have had life experiences where they either felt like they didn’t have a voice, or they lost it for some reason. We get to hear not only their story, but their journey to find their voice.

Today I am very excited to introduce you to Catherine Lucas. She’s got a story about coming out of the closet around mental health and spirituality. Hi Catherine.

(00:38) Catherine Lucas: Doreen, hello. Thank you for inviting me. I’m really pleased to be here. Can I just add one little caveat? There is another Catherine Lucas, who is also in a related field and is also an author. So, I tend to be Catherine G. Lucas, just so everyone listening can find me online.

(01:02) Doreen Downing: Beautiful. I saw the Catherine G and thought, hmm, okay. But I’m glad you clarified it. This opens up for the audience to hear how people relate. You stepped in and used your voice to say, this is me and this is how I can be identified. So, Catherine G. Lucas, let me read the short bio you sent.

Catherine G. Lucas is the author of four books on how to move successfully through crisis. Following a profound crisis of awakening, Catherine left an academic career behind to step into her soul’s deeper calling. Oh, that’s a big breath for me—deeper calling. And now she helps people step into their deeper calling. Her media appearances include BBC Radio Four and Time Warner TV.

This is just a short introduction to you, Catherine. We’re going to open up the conversation and see where we land. Because you are, what is it, eight hours ahead of me in the UK, obviously the internet is bringing us together. Is that where you were born? I’d like to hear just a little about your history and family structure.

(02:38) Catherine Lucas: Absolutely. I was born in the UK, although we moved around Europe quite a lot when I was young. When I was six, we went to live in Italy for about six or seven years. My family eventually moved again, and now I actually live in Spain. I’m doing this call from a couple of hours south of Barcelona. So, the European blood is there in me.

(03:07) Doreen Downing: And where are you in the birth order?

(03:12) Catherine Lucas: Great question. Such an important question. I’m the eldest of two, and my brother is five years younger. But, you know, Doreen, it’s probably worth mentioning—because of where we’re going with this conversation—that I do come from a pretty wounded, dysfunctional family. My father was an alcoholic, and he was in the booze trade. When we moved to Italy, he was working for a very well-known wine company. So, we lived in Tuscany. That’s part of my family background.

(03:56) Doreen Downing: Right. When I was at the university, I did some research on children of alcoholics. I’d like to say I’m one too. Those fathers who, for some reason, find themselves in an addictive pattern… what that means for us as children is, I’ll just say briefly for me, it was learning to be really aware of what was around me. I think that’s a positive thing. I had to navigate the unpredictable. Sometimes situations were difficult or painful, but we learned something of value for ourselves.

(04:46) Catherine Lucas: That really resonates with me, Doreen. I guess sometimes it’s the mothers too. With my father, looking back now, I can see his own wounding. He lost his father when he was two years old. He was born about six weeks after the beginning of the Second World War. Can you imagine what a time to bring a child into the world? Then he lost his father very young.

I think he was just very sensitive. If he was anything like me—because I do tend to be more like my father than my mother in terms of that sensitivity—he was a sensitive man in a world which at the time didn’t really allow men to be sensitive. It was all about old-fashioned male values.

(05:40) Doreen Downing: Yes. There are so many directions we could go and uncover. I feel like, can we talk all day? We’re going to come up with not only the shared experiences you and I have had, but also some deeper insight. What you just said about sensitivity and men is about voices.

Moving around Europe, getting that European blood flowing in you, I know that sometimes children who go to new places have difficulty. Sometimes they become more adaptable. Sometimes it feels like I'm a newcomer. What was that like for you to move around?

(06:36) Catherine Lucas: Well, I once counted. I think I went to something like six different schools in seven years. That’s not great for a young child, really. Obviously, my brother was five years younger, so it impacted him slightly differently. For him, he always wanted to blend into the crowd and be accepted.

I think what happened for me was different. Maybe because I have some Leo in my chart. I actually liked being a little bit different, being the foreigner or the English girl. When I went back to England for my secondary education from age 12 on, everybody thought of me as Italian even though I wasn’t, because I speak fluent Italian.

It must have been hard, but I don’t remember it that way. I remember being excited every time we moved to a new house. I had a new bedroom, and I was so excited about what my new bedroom was going to be like.

(07:48) Doreen Downing: I like that perspective. I haven’t really heard that much. It’s usually about the difficulty and trying to fit in, like what you said about your brother adapting. But you were saying, hey, I’m new here, and that’s the Leo. My husband’s a Leo, so I really enjoy his ability to stand up, stand out, and shine.

That’s what I’m feeling today with you, that you’re shining. I love that you are here and opening up your life story for us to journey through. We’re journeying through your life, and you’re moving around and becoming more aware of yourself. Where would you say were some of the difficulties when you look back around finding your voice?

(08:50) Catherine Lucas: Well, things were going pretty well really. I was 16 or 17, taking part in public speaking competitions, debating competitions in front of quite big audiences, with all the nerves and excitement that come with that. Then I went to university.

Between my first and second year at university, I had a breakdown. It was actually the time when my parents finally split up and divorced. I was carrying a lot of wounding from years of family dynamics. That summer, while other university students were enjoying themselves or getting summer jobs, I spent my summer on an acute psychiatric ward. That was a shock. I was shattered. My world was shattered.

I think I was fairly naïve in some respects, fairly innocent. Some of the stuff that goes on in acute psychiatric wards is not fun.

(10:18) Doreen Downing: This is opening up a window that most of us don’t get to see, and I appreciate you giving us some insight into what goes on. We see it in movies.

(10:34) Catherine Lucas: Yes.

(10:36) Doreen Downing: Maybe a story about something you personally observed while you were there?

(10:47) Catherine Lucas: I can feel even just talking about this—it’s not something I talk about very often now, Doreen. I can feel the emotional charge a little bit, even though it was over 40 years ago. That’s the trauma. In fact, ending up in the hospital was more traumatic than the breakdown-breakthrough I was going through. It was a really traumatic experience for me.

If you don’t mind, I’d rather not talk about it because I wasn’t expecting to. It just feels like a little bit too much.

(11:24) Doreen Downing: Beautiful. Thank you for knowing yourself so well and modeling what it takes to take care of yourself in the moment. I do know that on the same side of it—just reframed—you called it awakening, right? In your bio that’s what I read. I knew there had been a breakdown, and I thought, look at what you’ve done. You’ve renamed it, reimagined it, and re-lived it in such a way that it became an awakening moment for you. So let’s talk about it in that way.

(12:09) Catherine Lucas: Actually, Doreen, it took a very long time for me to be able to reframe it. That’s partly because I lost my voice in a sense. If you are in the psychiatric system, patients have no voice. They have no power. That was part of my motivation.

Years later, finding my voice was about not wanting it to take people 20 years to realize that these experiences have so much potential for healing and awakening. The mainstream narrative pathologizes it—“you’re ill,” “something’s wrong with you.” It took me 20 years to turn that around.

Eventually I came across the work of Stanislav Grof, the psychiatrist who coined the term “spiritual emergency.” It’s a very complex process. In my case, with the wounding in my family history, it wasn’t just a beautiful spiritual experience. There were aspects of that—parts that felt wonderful and amazing and not like illness—but it was also enmeshed with mental health trauma, the shadow, all of it.

It took me a long time to unpack. Thankfully I did. Some people never get to. If they don’t step into another framework, they may never realize what’s happening. As part of my healing journey, I started moving into the mind-body-spirit field, and that’s how I came across the work of Stanislav Grof. If I hadn’t moved into that world, I might never have found it.

(14:18) Doreen Downing: Yes. The mind-body-spirit, all of that moving through you, because it feels like the taking down and taking apart of the form—whatever happened to you up until 20 years old. That structure we take on to survive in this society, and then it breaking down, in some ways, feels like something we all need in order to find more about who we truly are and what’s possible for us.

I know you just said it was complex, but I think in some ways that complexity is what you’re all about—helping people understand. Because that’s what you said: you don’t want people to take 20 years to find themselves. I relate to that too about finding my voice, which was a process. It wasn’t instant. I wrote a book about it. It’s a long process, and yet we’ve learned enough, I think, to go back and say, “Hey, just like you talked about in the bio, there’s a deeper part of you that we can reach,” and you know that because you’ve done that journey.

(15:44) Catherine Lucas: Yes, absolutely. That’s the beauty, really, Doreen. When we’ve been through the process ourselves—like you have with finding your voice and me with stepping into my deeper calling through crisis—we’re able to help others. Not all the people I work with have been through crisis, but a lot of the people I support need to rebuild their lives.

My perspective is that this is an opportunity to upgrade our lives because now we’re more in touch with the truth of who we really are.

(16:24) Doreen Downing: Oh yes, yes. I love it. It’s the same music I love to listen to, what you’re talking about.

I need to take a break so that we’ll come back in just a minute, and I’m so excited about going further and deeper into how we do this—how we wake up, how we listen to our deeper calling.

Hi, this is Dr. Doreen Downing. I’m back with Catherine G. Lucas. Today we’re talking about spiritual and mental health awakening, but it’s really about becoming more of who we are. This podcast is about finding your voice. What is the voice that’s true, and how do we discover and even believe and sense into what is actually our true voice?

That’s where we are today. Hello and welcome back, Catherine. We were both getting excited about this idea of deeper calling and the journey. So, let’s talk about it. Both of us took time. It’s not just a hypnosis session where people wake up, or EMDR. The work that you and I are doing—moving into spirituality—has a certain energy, a certain vibrancy and life force. How do we find that? That’s what I’d like to talk about now.

(18:09) Catherine Lucas: I think what’s relevant here is this idea that, like I said, it took me a while. In a sense I found my voice bit by bit.

For example, I got a full-time permanent teaching post at a university, what you’d probably call tenure. That was me starting to find my voice. I still remember to this day the very first lecture I gave to a hall full of students, all seated in those tiered rows going up into the distance. That was me beginning to put my voice out into the world.

But I was hiding a big chunk of myself, all the mental health history. I didn’t dare talk about that, certainly not with my students and not even with my colleagues. Although I did have a particular sensitivity whenever I had a student with mental health issues—I always gave them a lot of time and energy because I had so much empathy and compassion.

The first real piece of finding my voice was when I started talking about my mental health background without shame. While I was still working full-time at the university, I began volunteering on a psychiatric ward for patient advocacy. It was about helping patients have a voice, because I knew how powerless you are when you’re in that system.

Eventually it became clear I needed to move on. I decided to leave my academic post, which some people might have thought was crazy, but it felt totally right. I started working part-time for that mental health advocacy project. The man running it became such an important figure in my life because through his mentorship and encouragement I was able to just be all of me. They needed people who had real experience of the mental health system and of breakdown. Even then I wasn’t yet calling it a breakthrough, but it was an important step in becoming more of myself.

Around this time, I also learned to meditate, and that was the beginning of me moving into the mind-body-spirit world. I came from a very secular family—I don’t think I even knew what the word spirituality meant at the age of 20.

Later I ended up working for a prestigious mental health charity around self-harm. It was an exciting role and enabled me to grow and develop, but again I couldn’t be all of me. By this time, I was deeply involved in the mind-body-spirit world, and I couldn’t bring that to a mainstream secular mental health organization.

Eventually I decided to leave again this time after another crisis. It’s important to mention that I had to, in order to really heal, revisit that original crisis 20 years later. But this time I had very different support and a very different perspective. I was able to move through it. It was still very challenging, but there was a sense of healing and completion.

So for me, it’s been a process over time of finding my voice. Then, of course, when my first book came out, that was a huge jump in visibility, in finding my voice, and in getting my message out into the world. I’ve got a copy here actually, if anybody’s interested in my first book.

(23:16) Doreen Downing: Yes. See, I can’t read it. Say it out loud.

(23:19) Catherine Lucas: It’s In Case of Spiritual Emergency.

(23:22) Doreen Downing: Yes.

(23:23) Catherine Lucas: Moving Successfully Through Your Awakening. It’s very much about the complexity of mental health and spirituality, and it’s a really practical, down-to-earth book. It has a lot of people’s personal experiences, some of my own, but also many others who contributed and shared what it was like for them going through the process.

(23:49) Doreen Downing: Well, the process—it sounds like what I got from you just now is that finding your voice is a process, and it’s not just one voice. You talked about aspects of yourself, about “all of me,” and it seems like more of you kept coming up. You got to a point where you realized you couldn’t expand anymore, so you left and opened up a new arena, then another. And in each arena, you found more of yourself, and more of yourself means more voice.

(24:30) Catherine Lucas: Absolutely. And I think there’s a lovely synergy between your work and mine, Doreen. I help people step into their deeper calling, and part of that is finding their voice. Like you do, we need more and more people to find their voice. When you find your voice, it changes your life, but you also get to change other people’s lives. That’s the important piece.

(24:57) Doreen Downing: Nice. That’s partly what we’re doing today—speaking about what’s possible for people. They can go through these processes, and they can do it much more quickly than you and I have.

(25:15) Catherine Lucas: With the right support. Absolutely.

(25:18) Doreen Downing: Right. Your book sounds fabulous around awakening. So, this calling—how do people actually hear the calling?

(25:30) Catherine Lucas: That’s a great question. We feel called to different things at different times. The really important piece is that at any one moment we’re following our heart, our bliss, our joy. That basically is the calling. It may shift and change, although there may be one underlying calling with common threads. Even if on the surface we’re called to do two very different things, we might find there’s a thread that connects them.

So, it’s important that we’re all following our hearts, our bliss, our joy. That’s what will change the world. When more and more of us are doing that, we’ll start to see positive change.

(26:38) Doreen Downing: Mm-hmm. And the actual practice—because we both understand something about mindfulness—that’s why I was curious about listening. From my perspective, it takes taking a breath, being quiet, coming into the now. With so many distractions, how do I listen to my heart?

There’s a sense, a feeling. I’m kinesthetic, so that’s how I connect. But there are many ways to help people be more in tune with what their calling is. There’s a book by Greg LaVoy, it’s called Callings. Have you heard about that?

(27:30) Catherine Lucas: I think it rings a bell. I’ve not read it, Doreen.

(27:35) Doreen Downing: In my early training, it was one of the books that spoke to me, about callings. The title fascinated me. He talks about signs—waking up to and listening to your life as you’re living it and noticing. I think that comes back to mindfulness and awareness.

(28:04) Catherine Lucas: Yes. Part of my journey was seeing how mindfulness was really helpful in coping with crisis. It was one of the key things that helped me through my 2003 crisis. So, I trained to become a mindfulness trainer and worked with people. That was part of my journey.

I did that for quite a few years, working with mental health professionals, and with veterans coming back from Iran and Iraq. It was very rewarding, very beautiful work.

(28:46) Doreen Downing: Yes. We’re coming to the end of our conversation here. We’ll have to open up and see each other again, because this is so fascinating. I have so many more questions about your journey and how you’ve integrated it all.

As we come to a close today, I’d like to open it up for you to listen into this now moment and share whatever comes to you about your voice or leave people with some thoughts about voice.

(29:22) Catherine Lucas: That’s a great question, Doreen. I think people find and express their voice in different ways. For some it’s through writing, for some it’s through speaking, and for others it’s a combination.

Finding our voice isn’t just one thing. It’s multifaceted, and it’s going to look different for every single one of us. I’d encourage people to follow their own individual path in finding and expressing their voice, whatever that looks like.

(30:17) Doreen Downing: Thank you. That gives our listeners so much permission to trust their own calling. Finding our voice means discovering the multidimensional ways we come to know ourselves and express.

I like that you said express rather than just speak, because it’s not all about speaking—it’s about being. Being who we are, and that in itself is energy radiating outward. Voice may have a sound, but where we are going is that the idea of voice comes from a sense of being.

This opens a whole new conversation about deeper listening—how do we listen into those spaces where words aren’t being spoken?

(31:27) Catherine Lucas: Absolutely.

(31:29) Doreen Downing: Okay folks, stay tuned. We’ll be back. Thank you so much, Catherine.

(31:36) Catherine Lucas: Thank you, Doreen. Thank you for inviting me. It’s been an absolute pleasure.