y guest today Join Up Dots free podcast interview is a fascinating lady who has had more than a bit of life's rubbish thrown in her direction.   In fact the first words you will see when you visit her website are "I smashed myself against the walls of life so often I should have died. I survived, then thrived, and lived to tell the tale."   In fact her words are so much more powerful than I could write, so in her own words.    "Life threw some pretty nasty curve balls at me as a young woman, sent to boarding school at the age of eleven, never to live at home again and the victim of a serious sexual assault as a teenager; what seemed like an inevitable decline into drugs and alcohol defined most of my 20’s. I lived a double life, one of a successful young woman (having started the first of many profitable businesses at the age of 21). The other, a woman in deep pain, relentlessly trashing my body as the worthless object the rape had taught me it was.   I had a burning desire to live and an inexhaustible appetite for self-harm and self-sabotage. For a decade it was touch and go which side was going to win. I started reaching for self-help books in my late teens and spent hours with counselors, trying to find a way through the torment that seemed to be my life. Each year I would take two steps forward and one back, some years it was three steps back.   I never gave up, I believed it was possible to be happy and whole and have relentlessly pursued this vision for the last thirty years."   And certainly now it appears that she is fighting back in life and encouraging the world to have the belief that life is there to be lived and savoured.   And with her platform "Belief School" going from strength to strength it appears that she has learnt the greatest lesson of all.   The more you give to the world the more you gain yourself.   So does she look back on her life and is glad that those things happened, as it allows her to connect with more people on a deeply personal level?   And is there a big dot in her life that turned her life around and lead her on the path that she is on today?   Well lets find out as we bring onto the show to start joining up dots the one and only Paula Gosney.