From the Darkness To Healing Light (eBook)

Jocelyn St Clair (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
460 Seiten
Publishdrive (Verlag)
978-0-00-098440-1 (ISBN)

Infos

Abused, addicted, rejected, and silenced Jocelyn St Clair lost everything, even herself. But with radical faith, spiritual fire, and courage, she rose from the wreckage. From the Darkness to Healing Light is a defiant memoir of trauma, transformation, and fierce healing. It's not just the story of a warrior who refused to accept defeat - it's a call to rise, heal; reclaim yourself and live free.

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Chapter 1

FROM THE DARKNESS TO HEALING LIGHT

An overview of my life story

These lyrics are from a song called “Love Changes Everything” from the musical Aspects of Love by Andrew Lloyd Webber:

Love, love changes everything.

Hands and faces, earth and sky

Love, love changes everything.

How you live and how you die.

Love can make the summer fly.

Or a night seem like a lifetime.

Yes love, love changes everything

Now I tremble at your name.

Nothing in the world will ever be the same

And love has been at the centre of my journey since February 2008 when the journey that set me free from my demons began. A sometimes brutally hard journey where God’s love for me set me free from the darkness of mental and emotional illness and changed hurt into healing, despair into joy and hopelessness into hope.

It is the story of a journey from the darkness of suffering into the light of God’s love and profoundly life-changing, faith-changing and gender-changing inner healing. It is a story of how God’s love for me taught, and is still teaching, me to love myself as He loves me and is teaching me how to love the world as He loves it.

This not the tyrannical judgemental cardboard cut-out false god of the Christian church but the real Divine Spirit God.

My history is His-Story of what the real God has done for me since February 2008 when this journey began, and like all of us it is a story that tells of adult healing of deep-rooted childhood pain and suffering.

From the very start, my life was marked by uncertainty, rejection, and a search for identity and as we journey through my autobiography I will talk about that in greater depth.

As I grew up, my journey became one of parental rejection that led to self-rejection, self-hatred, and overwhelming despair. I battled depression, self-harm, and shoplifting, all while struggling through school and college.

Violent physical and verbal parental abuse pushed me into a deep, dark pit of crippling mental and emotional illness that consumed me by the time I turned eighteen.

What followed was a life of homelessness, crushing debt, violent anger, and alcohol dependency - destructive forces that not only shattered my self-worth and self-esteem but also cost me two marriages.

For forty-five years, my life spiralled further into chaos until, in February 2008, everything changed in a single, unexpected moment when my ex-wife threw me out of our marriage very suddenly and unexpectedly and with no prior warning that she was planning to leave me.

The Christian church in England that she and I went to threw me out of our church owned home and my preaching ministry into a deep, dark pit of traumatized brokenness and tears and at the bottom of that pit I found the real God waiting for me with wide-open outstretched arms.

The Divine Spirit God whose love is healing and transformational is not the tyrannical, judgmental false man-made god idol-worshipped the Christian church. This real Divine Spirit God bears absolutely no resemblance to the false Christian god I had once known.

It was at the bottom of that deep, dark pit of traumatized brokenness and tears that my journey of destruction came to an abrupt halt, and I was led onto a new path of deep and profound inner healing.

It was at the bottom of that abyss that my new life began.

‘From Darkness to Healing Light’ is my raw and brutally honest account of this transformation and how, through God’s love and a long journey of deep healing, I walked a road that changed my life, my faith, and my gender from the inside out.

Through His gentle Father like love and overwhelming grace and compassion, I found not only my true self but also the ability to love myself as He loves me.

This journey led to my transition - from a broken, angry, and violent man to the healing freedom of a trans woman named Jocelyn. This liberated me from the mental and emotional anguish that had imprisoned me for so long and ultimately became the making of me.

But my autobiography is not just about pain and struggle. It is also filled with adventure, experiences, and stories I hope that you will find compelling and fun to read.

I share tales of my teenage years in the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong and how as a 16-year-old boy I went on an epic 8,400-mile (13,440km) train ride home to England on the Trans-Siberian Express in June 1979.

On this trans-Russia adventure, I travelled with my dad from far-eastern Siberia to Moscow, through Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), and then across Belorussia, Poland, East Germany, West Germany, and Belgium on the Ost-West Express to London’s Victoria Station.

That unforgettable journey took an even more dramatic turn when dad and I were arrested by the KGB at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport - a terrifying experience at the time but one that added yet another story to my life.

I also recount my experiences founding the Balkan Aid Relief Foundation (BARF!) in 1998 with three fellow Land Rover enthusiasts.

Our charitable aid agency worked with the British contingent of SFOR, NATO’s peacekeeping force in Bosnia, following the devastating civil war. Bosnia then was then one of the world’s most dangerous countries and still effectively a war zone and every time we left the safety of the British army bases that we stayed at we put our lives at risk.

Witnessing first-hand the horror and destruction caused by civil war and hearing the horrific stories of genocide and crimes against humanity from the people who witnessed them and who they were committed against was a humbling and life-changing experience.

My story also includes a serious horse-riding accident in 2002 that left me with spinal arthritis, a condition that worsened over time, and in 2011 I became temporarily paralyzed and unable to use my legs.

Although the damage the arthritis induced paralysis remains with me to this day, I have found new ways to enjoy the outdoor activities I once loved.

Yet, despite my physical struggles, I firmly believe in what I call ‘Positive Suffering’ - the idea that suffering, when faced with a warrior-like mindset, can strengthen and transform us into better and stronger people and heal us of our hurt.

None of us hold a monopoly on suffering, but we all have the power to rise above it. Good health is a state of mind, not the state of our bodies.

I shall share my belief in the life-changing ability of positive suffering with you and hope that you will find it helpful and useful in your own journeys.

At this point it seems useful to tell you about the three fathers and the two wives that you will encounter in my story. Soooooooo:

‘My Father’, ‘God’ – this is the real God, the Divine Spirit God who I found waiting for me at the bottom of a deep, dark pit that the Christian church threw me into.

‘Dad’, ‘my dad’ – this is the man I grew up with calling my father but a DNA test in December 2024 confirmed my long-held suspicion that he is not, in fact, my biological father. So, for the bulk of this story, I will call him ‘dad’ or ‘my dad’ until the chapter about my DNA test where he becomes ‘my not dad’.

Curiously, looking at my DNA matches there is a genetic link to ‘my not dad’s family and it appears that the man I grew up with calling my father is actually a half-Uncle.

‘My real father’ – this is the man whom the DNA tests proved is (or if he is deceased then ‘was’) my real father.

Confused? – Yep – so am I!

This truth about my true parentage has been hidden from me all my life by my mother and ‘my not dad’ who, with a scandalous and uncaring injustice, have covered up the identity of my real father from the day I was born to the present.

At 62 years old, I find myself living with the reality that I don’t know my real name, I have no known identity, I have no known roots, and I have no ancestry. Because I don’t know who my real father is, and my mother and ‘my not dad’ finally cut me off and disowned me in 2008 I have no parents and no family, so I am effectively an orphan with no identity.

During her editorial read of my autobiography Karen rightly pointed out that during my story I move from my first wife to my second wife without any noticeable break but call both of them my wife ……………… OK, good point Karen.

So up until page 114 the person I call ‘my wife’ is my first wife.

Then from page 176 and the chapter titled ‘A Ray of Hope’ my second wife comes into the story and plays an important role. I call her my wife or Sue – this is not her real name, but it protects her identity and her privacy.

And from 2009 onwards Sue becomes my ex-wife.

As I tell my story, I do so, I hope, with honesty and integrity. I do not believe in writing a sickly-sweet saccharin account of my life because that serves no useful purpose.

Like far too many people, my life was once full of suffering, trauma, and mistakes.

I was angry, hurting, and mentally ill, I was manipulative, controlling, and alcohol dependent. I caused pain to those I loved, including my two wives and my family.

I was once someone who lived his life as an attention-seeking self-pitying victim but these days I have no time for people who live lives of victimhood and wallow in self-pity. Maturity, wisdom, and healing come only when we take ownership of our past, acknowledge our demons, and seek to grow beyond them.

Also, I am not going to use my autobiography as a means of blame so I will not name or shame those who have wronged me. I tell the story of all those people who have hurt me because...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 29.7.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• ISBN-10: 0-00-098440-X / 000098440X
• ISBN-13: 978-0-00-098440-1 / 9780000984401