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Begin Again is for people in the second half of life who sense that the identity they've been carrying no longer fits. Host Winston Faircloth — spiritual director, daily poet, and fellow traveler — brings honest conversation, personal story, and original poetry to the journey of remembering, releasing, and returning to who God created you to be. Visit www.myreuniontour.com for more resources.
Welcome to Begin Again. If you're new here, this is the recognized movement of my reunion tour, a faith based journey for people in the second half of life who sense that the identity they've been carrying no longer fits. Last episode, I introduced the question, what if the life you crafted no longer fits who you're becoming? And I also introduced the wall. The inflection point were formulas and identities that once stopped working, and the inward journey becomes unavoidable.
Winston Faircloth:At the end of that episode, I made a promise. I said I was going to tell you the specific story, my own story of where the vow of self sufficiency came from. Something that happened when I was eight years old, something I carried in silence for decades, something the math work and the spiritual direction work eventually helped me see clearly for the very first time. And today, I'm keeping that promise. I'd like to start with the poem.
Winston Faircloth:This poem is called Shelter. It's from day six thirty six. The world outside can feel unsafe at times. Where shall we rest? Who shall we protect?
Winston Faircloth:At times, we can forget how small and vulnerable we are in a big world. Dangers lurk and wait, yet you are here. These reminders serve us not by frightening, but by recalling how dependent we are on fresh mercies every morning. We get to choose where we seek protection, in the arms of another or under your mighty wing. Others may flee or fail.
Winston Faircloth:You love unchangingly. On this, we can depend. With you, there is peace and daily shelter. That poem was written decades after the moment I'm about to describe, but it names the territory exactly. The world outside can feel unsafe.
Winston Faircloth:Where shall we rest? Who shall protect? That question was alive in me long before I have languaged for it. What I had instead was a plan. And before I tell you about age eight, I wanna tell you about what age eight eventually produced.
Winston Faircloth:Because that sequence from a child's wound to an adult life is what the recognized movement is designed to make visible. For most of my life, I lived what I would call a dual life. Professionally, life was working, a career that went up into the right for decades, success, recognition, promotion, compensation. I had what I've described in earlier episodes as a golden touch, an ability to launch things, build things, find a way forward no matter what. That part of my life was genuinely productive, genuinely fruitful.
Winston Faircloth:Personally, though, life was not working. Multiple marriages, multiple divorces, a pattern I could feel building across the decades, but I couldn't quite name. It was not a problem with who I married. It was a pattern I carried into each one. Here's the key to the dual life and why it could go on for so long.
Winston Faircloth:For as long as one domain is working, you don't have to face what isn't. The career was my exit from the personal. As long as I could stand on that footing, as long as the golden touch was producing, I had somewhere to go that wasn't the heart of conversation. I've been productive professionally and unproductive personally, And I managed to keep those two realities from fully intersecting for most of my life. But the wall was patient.
Winston Faircloth:It waited. The first wall arrived in my personal life. Quietly over years, the weight of the pattern began to make itself known. Multiple relationships ending in the exact same way. A growing awareness, particularly as I moved into my fifties, that I was the common denominator across all of these circumstances.
Winston Faircloth:I came to understand something in that season that I want to pass on to you plainly. You cannot get trust if you don't give trust, and I had not been giving it. Not because I didn't want to, because I didn't know how, because something underneath the desire for connection was holding me at a careful distance from it. I could enter a relationship. I could invest in it.
Winston Faircloth:I could stay in it for years, But there was a depth I wasn't reaching, a layer of trust I wasn't extending. And eventually, in each case, that absence cost me the relationship. I could see a pattern. I could even begin to name it. But I still had somewhere else to stand.
Winston Faircloth:My career was working. The golden touch was still producing. And as long as that was true, I could tell myself that my personal life was something to work on eventually, a problem to address when there was time. I tried to go around the first wall. But the wall doesn't disappear when you go around it.
Winston Faircloth:It just waits. I entered a 12 step recovery program in my fifties, which helped me to begin to see some of what I've been carrying in my body and in my habits. But the deeper interior work, the work of tracing the pattern all the way back to its origin was still ahead of me because my career was still working and the exit was always available. In 2019, I left my last corporate role and launched a consulting practice. Now you've heard this story in earlier episodes.
Winston Faircloth:What I didn't say then and want to say now is what the collapse of that venture actually removed. It removed the exit. When my career stopped working, when the golden touch went quiet, when six months, eight months passed with no clients, when the coping mechanism that it always produced began producing nothing, I had nowhere left to stand. My professional footing was gone, and the personal footing had really never been there. Both walls were present this time simultaneously with no remaining exit between them.
Winston Faircloth:I've always lived kind of a dual life, productive professionally, unproductive personally. And as long as one was working, I never had to face the one that wasn't. So now when the footing for both was removed, I had nowhere to go. This is the thing I said in the last episode that I wanna say again here because I lived it. You can avoid the wall, but you can't go around it.
Winston Faircloth:You have to go through it. The first wall, the relational one, I went around it. It waited. But when the career stopped working too, the wall was still there. Both of them at the same time and no way around either one.
Winston Faircloth:That's when the real interior work began, not because I willingly chose it, but because there was finally no other direction to go. I began working with Sybil in spiritual direction. She took me through the one life maps. Week after week via Zoom, we returned to the same material from different angles. Not processing it like a coaching session, but sitting with it, noticing it, praying over it, letting what the maps were holding slowly come clearly into view.
Winston Faircloth:And what began to emerge gradually, not all at once, was the origin of everything I had been living. I was eight years old. I remember going into my dad's bedroom one day, taking his T shirt out of the hamper, holding it up. It was much larger than me and saying to myself, if I could ever fill this T shirt, no one will ever bully me like that again. I didn't really have the words for what was going on then.
Winston Faircloth:I would never have called it a vow. I was eight years old. In a child's logic, facing a world that felt unsafe, that was the solution I arrived at. Get bigger. Become untouchable.
Winston Faircloth:Protect yourself because no one else is gonna do it for you. Today, decades later, I would characterize that vow as self sufficiency. At the time, I just wanted to fill the shirt and be safe. What I've come to understand through the map work, through spiritual direction, through honest looking at what that second wall finally forced is that the vow didn't stay in that bedroom. It came along with me for decades, and it expressed itself in at least three places in my life.
Winston Faircloth:The first place was my body. I began gaining weight right after this event, and I carried that weight with some seasons of better health along the way from eight into my sixties. Food was, in a lot of ways, my way of protecting myself from intimacy, from connection, from fully being present with other people. I traced that weight gain back to the childhood trauma for years. Eventually, I entered a 12 step program in my fifties once I recognized the pattern as a spiritual problem.
Winston Faircloth:But what I didn't understand yet was a deeper layer that I had made a hidden vow of self sufficiency, and weight was one of the ways I was keeping it. The second place was in my career. I built things that didn't depend on people's reliability. I structured my work so that the outcomes were always and as much as possible in my own hands. I surrounded myself with capable people and then quietly retained control.
Winston Faircloth:The golden touch wasn't just a gift. It was armor, a way of ensuring that no circumstance, no person, no market condition could ever remove my footing again. The third place was in my relationships. That guardedness I described, the withholding, the reluctance to fully trust the people I had chosen to build a life with, that was the bow, operating in the domain it most wanted to protect. Because if the world is unsafe, the most dangerous thing is to need somebody else.
Winston Faircloth:So you stay slightly at a distance. You invest, you show up, but you hold that final piece back. When I began working through map two with Sybil, the full arc of my life story laid out across arrows, this is where the pattern first became visible. Gradually, not immediately. Over several sessions of returning to the same material from different angles, Sybil asked the same question she always asked.
Winston Faircloth:What are you noticing? And what showed up was this element of distrust. It was showing up everywhere, across every decade, across every domain of my life. A consistency that once I could see it from altitude was impossible to dismiss as coincidence. This was like the first layer, first glimmer of recognition, a vow of self sufficiency.
Winston Faircloth:The distrust of others named finally across the entire full arc of my story. I thought that was enough, that that was sufficient for recognition. I thought that naming the distrust was the work, but that was just the beginning. Civil and I continue to return to the MAP material in spiritual direction month after month. And as we did so, something else eventually came into view Because the distrust of others, there was something beneath that that I hadn't yet named, something quieter, something that had been there even longer.
Winston Faircloth:I had to go back to that childhood trauma and the scene, but from a different angle this time. Place my parents had warned me about was a playhouse in my neighborhood. They had told me not to go there. They had been crystal clear about it, and yet I went anyway. But here's what I hadn't named until the mat work held it up for me.
Winston Faircloth:Before I went there, I already had a inner knowing that I shouldn't. This inner knowing, quiet signal, some would call it a nudge, something in me said, this is not where you should be, and I overrode it. I went anyway. And afterward, I couldn't tell anyone what had happened there. Not because I lacked the words for what happened, but because I disobeyed a warning and overridden my own internal knowing, I could not bear to be found out.
Winston Faircloth:So I sealed it. I carried it in silence. And in the carrying of that silence, I made a decision I was not even conscious of making. Perhaps without words, I had decided that my own inner knowing was also not to be trusted. That's the vow behind the vow.
Winston Faircloth:The vow of self sufficiency, the distrust of others, the weight gain, the career armor, the guardedness in relationships, that was level one. Level two was this. Beneath the distrust of others was a distrust of myself, a silence I had imposed on the part of me that knew things before I had reasons for knowing them. And if you can't trust others and you can't even trust your own inner knowing, the only remaining strategy is to control outcomes through achievement or protect yourself through the body because trust has now failed twice, One outward, one inward. And the only thing left is control.
Winston Faircloth:Now the recognition of this, when this finally landed, it was not devastating. It arrived in something closer to stillness, a sense that something had finally stopped moving that had been in motion for a very long time. This is what relief feels like in the recognized movement. Not a dramatic breakthrough. It's a quiet naming.
Winston Faircloth:And in the quiet of that naming, a door begins to open. I wanna say this clearly. There was much more to uncover beyond this. A third layer that continued the interior work eventually revealed, But that layer belongs to a later part of this journey, to the release and reunite movements, so I'm not gonna open it here. Because recognize movement ends at the naming, and naming alone is enough to begin to change everything.
Winston Faircloth:In the middle of a storm, we can only see one more step. That's the one we take. Then we see the next and the one after that. It's a gradual recognition. Thankfully, it's not the full view all at once, just the next visible step and the needed faithfulness to take it.
Winston Faircloth:So today, I wanna close with the poem. This one's called still. It's from day nine ten. Life changes in an instant, this truth we all experience, setting aside our plans, taking on new roles. There is grief in change, the loss of what was and of what we hoped for.
Winston Faircloth:All we have is here and now. In the middle of the storm, we can only see one more step, and that's the one we will take, your daily bread, sufficient, complete. This day, I release my need to know and understand the unfolding steps ahead, instead trusting you alone. In the chaos and uncertainty, my rock to you I clean. For you speak, mountains moves, and as I draw near and be still.
Winston Faircloth:This day, I release my need to know and understand, trusting you alone. That line was not easy to write and is certainly not easy to live. It still isn't some mornings. But in the posture that becomes available on the other side of naming, it does show up. The need to release my need to know and understand, trusting you alone.
Winston Faircloth:When the vow is finally seen, the grip loosens, not all at once, gradually. As it was given, so it is released. So here's the question I want you to carry into the week. What have you been overriding, and how long have you been overriding it? You don't have to answer it now.
Winston Faircloth:You don't have to answer it alone. Let it stay close to you this week. What have you been overriding, and how long have you been overriding it? If today's conversation has stirred a desire in you to do this work, I'd like to walk that path with you. If you're ready to begin, visit myreuniontour.com or review the show notes for resources, including a link to schedule a conversation with me.
Winston Faircloth:It's just an honest conversation about where you are and whether this is the right season for you to begin. Thank you again for listening to the Begin Again podcast. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcast. Audible, Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, anywhere you listen, and just use the search term begin again with Winston Faircloth on your favorite podcast streaming app. Finally, if today's conversation reminded you of someone who's been carrying something in silence for a very long time and has never quite been able to say it out loud, make sure to share this episode with them.
Winston Faircloth:I'm Winston Faircloth, and you're right where you're supposed to be.