Audreia Josephs is an Author, Life Coach, Intervention Strategist and Motivational Speaker who teaches the Art of Forgiveness as a way to live and as a journey of release and reconnection. With training in counselling and social work, her career has taken her across the United Kingdom where, as a workshop facilitator and coach, she spends part of her time encouraging parents and families to support their children and women in prisons. Both her professional experience and her journey have led her to develop a keen interest in the empowerment of herself and others. Her extraordinary work in and around the United Kingdom is gaining a new audience around the world.
Audreia trained as a counsellor at the University of Central England (UCE) and became a social advisor for young people with ‘Values Education for Life’. Later, she worked for Prison Link, where she established the ROSE Project to support the families of people in prison. While at Prison Link, she was asked to join the board for the ‘Action for Prisoners and Families’, a group set up through the Princess Diana Memorial Trust. Here, she served as a co-opted observer for two years and then as a trustee and director for a further four years. She has worked as a college counsellor, and she has been interviewed on local television for her work with refugees. She has also discussed various issues on Radio West Midlands. In 2004, she escorted a group of her clients to the Commonwealth Games, where she met HRH Prince Edward, The Duke of Wessex, and his wife Sophie, The Countess of Wessex, and the former US Envoy, Terry Waite.
She has also trained with the Samaritans to help and listen to vulnerable or suicidal people. As a passionate Life Coach, Audreia believes in and teaches the Art of Forgiveness through workshops and one-to-one sessions as a way of releasing resentment and reconnecting with our community and with life. She teaches how to recognize negative habits that we develop where we choose not to forgive. Her own life experiences and her professional training form the basis of her strategy. With a focus on experiencing and finding freedom through thought-provoking questions, written exercises, meditation, and sharing, she encourages her clients to open up and explore areas of life that deserve attention and forgiveness and self- love.
In this interview, Audreia shares her journey, which, although filled with the pain of abuse, rejection, betrayal, shame and disappointment has turned out to be a fairy-tale with a happily ever after. Be inspired to bounce back from adversity. Yes, you can!
Audreia, tell us about your early childhood and the dreams you had as a child.
Okay. My parents were what you would consider, Windrush. They came from Jamaica to the UK, and I am the first one that was born here in the UK in 1961. I was born on the bathroom floor; my parents separated before I was born. I didn’t meet my father until I was two years old and then again when I was thirteen. And my mother in the meantime, got on with her life. She met a new partner, but unfortunately, that partner, molested me when I was three years old, and he sexually abused me when I was eight. And in the midst of all that, because of the anger that my mother felt towards my father, I was a battered child for ten years, at her hands. Oh, I suffered broken bones and head injuries. But during that journey, I fell in love with art, so I can draw and paint, and I did that since the age of eight. And I love singing, and I love gymnastics. And because my body could contort into all kinds of different shapes I actually thought that that was going to be my future; singing, art or gymnastics. It didn’t turn out to be any of those, but I still have most of them as a hobby
Would you please tell us about your first marriage, the challenges, the divorce and how that affected your relationship with your children?
Okay, so I met my ex-husband, my children’s father, on my first job, at the age of 16. We got together, and by the time I was 18, I had my first child. His mother, she, didn’t think I was good enough. She thought that I came from an area that was beneath her and so she bullied me, and she was very disrespectful to me. So, I left my mother, who bullied me, and ended up with a mother-in-law who bullied me. At the age of 19, he was then my partner, and we decided we wanted to join a church, and as soon as we got into the church, we were told that because we had a child and we were together, we were meant to get married. So, within months we were married. So, I got married at the age of twenty. After that, I went on to have two more children. But my problem was that the church had a lot of control in my life. They would tell me about contraceptives, what clothes to wear, it was very controlling. In the meantime, I had the problem too with my mother-in-law who was still disrespecting me in front of my children. And my ex-husband, he wasn’t really a stand-up guy for me like that, and so the marriage started breaking down. I decided that I wanted to leave the marriage and the church, two big things in one, and so I got somewhere else to live. But in the interim, I wanted to take my children and that’s where my whole life started falling to pieces because he wanted to keep the children, and I wanted the children to live with me. And he said the schools are where he is and we came to an arrangement that the children will live with him and they will spend the weekends with me. And then my eldest decided that he wanted to play basketball after a while, and the middle one wanted to play football. Because my ex-husband wanted the children as well on Sundays to be at Sunday school, I had already given up the Sunday, I had only Saturday and the Saturday the boys decided that they wanted to do something else. So that was the end of me having my boys at the weekend, and going to visit them on the weekend I felt like a stranger and we started drifting and they started not showing me the respect that a mother was due and it all became really complicated.
Tell us about the experience that changed your life, from the moment you accepted the parcel to the moment when you were behind bars.
Sure. In 1993, I was in university doing a counselling degree. Because I felt that after everything I’d been through, I needed counselling and I couldn’t find a suitable counsellor, so I decided that I’d learn the skills to do it myself. And in the meantime, I was still having the boys. Fast forward down the road, I’d gone to Jamaica as a gift from family friends, who said, go to Jamaica and have a good time because you’re doing great at university. And whilst I was there, I met a group of people and was asked, can you bring this back? And the strangest thing was, in my spirit, I knew that it wasn’t the right thing to do, but somehow, I said, yes. And got on the plane back to the UK and all of a sudden, I was descended on. The customs officers pulled my case aside, pulled me aside, pulled me into a room, went through everything in my case, and it was found that I had cocaine, class A drug. I’m just there like, lost for words, and feeling like this is a movie. It was very, very surreal, and I ended up in prison, sitting in a waiting room in a cloud of smoke, and all these women were shouting. I was having my pictures taken, my fingerprints taken, having a strip search, having private parts of my body open to see if I had drugs in there, it was a nightmare. And then, being placed in a cell, where I sat on the edge of my bed with this dirty sheet, sat in a small room (I’m claustrophobic so sitting in a small cell was not good for me) and a small dirty toilet, and lights turned off, prison guards walking on the landing, opening the little shutter area, looking in. If you wanted to even wee, they could see you on the toilet. Realising that I had lost everything, even more than I had lost before. That was an absolute nightmare scenario for me.
How did being in prison impact on the relationship with your children and other close family members and friends?
Well. That is a big question. But what I lost in it all was my identity. I was just in the process of thinking that I was finding my identity and I lost it. I had lost my self-respect; I became a number. I was no longer a name. I was known as a number. That really took my identity away, and I was also given an eight-year sentence on top of that. So, I felt that I had lost my children twice, not just with the divorce, but having a mother in prison. And my boys were teenagers then and their friends knew; they were going to school, they were going to church, the pastor, he was preaching about me, and my children were sat there, they could hear all this. And their grandmother, she was saying, oh your mother was no good. And the hardest part for me was my children, the children, that hurt more than anything else. I lost my home, and I lost all my furniture, I lost everything. But my life changed while I was in there in an amazing way. I got trained by The Samaritans. Because I was already at university and I was studying this counselling degree, and getting trained by The Samaritans, I ended up becoming the person who would sit in the cells with the persons who were suicidal or self-harming. So, I was the one stopping them from killing themselves. I was trusted to do that, in the prison, as an inmate. I was also nominated by the chaplaincy to go on the race relations board, and that changed things no end because before that as a woman of colour, and you know our hair products, our skin products, there was nothing like that in that particular prison. And so, I was able to implement them bringing in hair care, skincare, packets of hair, so people started having their hair done, we could have proper skin lotion. I also implemented steel bands and theatre groups to come into the prison. So, I was making a massive change, and I actually found that amazing that I was in prison making such a making such a big change, I was on the board making various decision-making. Don’t get it wrong though, some of the officers were not happy about this as well, and every time I arranged things, they would try to do a lockdown, or they would do something, to just ruin it for us because they felt like, she’s an inmate, and that’s too much power. But as in the relationship with my family, now that was something else as well. Of course, obviously, they were disappointed, but what really surprised me in all of it was the people I thought wouldn’t support me were the people who supported me. The people who I thought would support me they didn’t support me. And there was one woman from the church that I had been in, and she came. And she was very ill, and she wanted to surprise me, she walked up the stairs, and she was unable to walk properly, and she said to me, I was determined to come and see you. When I remember that, it touches me so deeply because I didn’t know she was coming because if I knew she was coming, I would have arranged a meeting on the ground floor. But she just came, and she wanted to surprise me, and she was one of the people in the church that I thought didn’t like me. In the meantime, the pastor of the church came to see me and the thing he said to me was, this is what happens when you leave the Lord. And it was just painful. Painful. I was there for nine months before I got to see my children. Their father didn’t want them to come into the prison, and you know what? I understood it after. I understood that had it been the other way around, I wouldn’t have allowed the children to go and see him. So, I get it; I get it completely. I understand it. So, the things I used to hold a judgment about people not coming and seeing me and how I felt about it, it is entirely different now.
What is the singular most powerful lesson that you take away from that season of your life?
You cannot choose your journey. You cannot orchestrate how your life is going to be. And if we had a crystal ball, there are things that we would have said that we do not want to experience. But there are those whose lives are dependent and waiting for you maybe to make what you consider a mistake, a slip-up. For me, I recognise now that there are no mistakes. Everything is by divine ordination; everything is how it is meant to be for me. And I went in there, and in the midst of a dark situation, I was introduced to Iyanla Vanzant and Maya Angelou, because I love reading. And whilst in this dark situation, I found myself. So, the singular thing was, I found me in the strangest of places. And for me, that is so powerful that I can look at my situation and give thanks. Being grateful that in the end, I started looking at it from that perspective, like, Audreia the day you got sentenced was the day someone got diagnosed with a disease. You are going to be able to walk away from this, to be whole and do something else. But someone else had a death sentence, someone else died. And so, I looked at it from that perspective, and I was elevated.
In what ways are you reaching back and using your experience to help others?
Well, as soon as I came out, the organisation that helped me, Prison Link, I started doing voluntary work with them. They asked me to speak at their AGM, I did that, and the next day, a lady from The Birmingham City Council telephoned and gave me a job without seeing my resume. She didn’t even know if I could spell my name, and she offered me a job as a Mentoring Co-ordinator. While still at Prison Link and volunteering with them – because I was so grateful to them for bringing my children into prison to see me that I decided to do more with them. I ended up on the board, Action for Prisoners and Families. I became a director on that board. I got featured in the newspapers; I was on the radio, I escorted some young people to Commonwealth games, I met royalty. My journey just went differently. Presently I have written a book, the book that you saw was the second book that I have written. I had written a book titled, Forgiveness The Journey To Healing The Heart, which is about my journey, my story, what I’ve been through, and I wrote that in 2016. And when I was asked to be in this anthology and thought, I’m dyslexic, I wasn’t the smartest kid in the class and writing my 65,000-word book in seven weeks, shocked me and I thought was this a fluke? And so, when Dr Ava Brown asked me to be in this anthology, I thought let me see if I can do this again. So, that’s what you read, my effort in doing it a second time. And she put me in the position of speaking about my prison experience, which I didn’t want to tell the world. It was something I wanted to keep hidden, but she said, stand on your truth, and it will set you free, and I’m really grateful to her. Presently, I am on the board of directors for her Mango Girl, I’m a director for Teen Girls Networking, which we work with girls 11 – 19 and we give them the support that I wish I had as a girl. And we teach them to become entrepreneurs, authors; we teach them natural skincare, and I teach about self-confidence, self-love. I’m working with the boys as well, motivating and empowering them, I work with young people from Princes Trust. I am also doing work with ex-offenders, drug users, teaching them self-love, and forgiveness, I’m just the runaway train at this moment. I’m doing a book called, Still Doing Time, and that’s with Dr Ava Brown, and we’re doing that book with ex-offenders speaking about their experiences since leaving prison and how the world treats them. So, that’s an amazing book that I’m excited to be a part of. And I’ve just got so much happening. I am a life coach, and I speak about the art of letting it go, which is forgiveness, that’s a very big thing in my world. So, the older I get, the more I am doing. And it was just amazing when I had my book launch, and my boys were there and my middle son he sang, and it was just so touching to hear my children say how proud they are of me. Sometimes it makes us laugh together because they’re like, mum I can’t catch up with you, I know I need to get in your diary. I’m just so busy, aiming to heal the world.
How can people contact you if they would like to know more about you and what you do?
Well, my email address is audreiajosephs@gmail.com, or you can find me on Facebook, The Forgiveness Godmother and I’m also on Instagram as Audreia Josephs.
