What happens when your name isn't truly yours? When your cultural heritage is erased? When doctors dismiss your pain? Camilla Balshaw's powerful story tackles these questions with remarkable vulnerability and wisdom.
For the first 24 years of her life, Camilla answered to "Mandy" – a name her Jamaican mother preferred over the Nigerian name her father had chosen. This dual identity became symbolic of a deeper fracture when her parents divorced and her father disappeared from her life for forty years, taking her connection to her Nigerian heritage with him.
The journey to reclaim her birth name became intertwined with reclaiming her complete identity. "I'm my mother and father's daughter," Camilla reflects, describing how she eventually integrated both cultural influences after decades of disconnection. When her father unexpectedly reached out after forty years, she made the conscious choice not just to reconnect, but to embrace her birth name and the Nigerian part of her identity that had been submerged.
Alongside this identity journey, Camilla navigated severe endometriosis that began at age ten. Her experiences highlight the dismissal many women face in healthcare settings – "Women haven't been listened to by the medical establishment for decades," she notes. Rather than surrender to bitterness, she found healing through yoga and meditation practices discovered during five transformative years living in Japan with her husband.
Camilla's memoir "Named: A Story of Reclaiming and Reclaiming Who You Are" weaves these threads together, exploring how names shape identity and belong to larger narratives about race, class, gender, and belonging. Her experience reminds us that reclaiming our authentic selves often means confronting painful histories while remaining open to unexpected healing. As one of her teachers wisely observed: "In life, when you need the most, you'll find the angels."
Join us for this inspiring conversation about identity, healing, and the courage to become fully yourself.
Book Link | Named: A Story of Names and Reclaiming Who We Are
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Presenter
Malcolm Stern has worked as a group and individual psychotherapist for more than 30 years. He was a co-founder of Alternatives at St James’s Church in London and runs groups internationally.
He is the author of Falling in Love / Staying in Love (Piatkus 2004) and Slay Your Dragons with Compassion ( Watkins 2020). He co-presented Channel 4’s relationship series, ‘Made for Each Other’ in 2003 and 2004 and sailed on the ‘Rainbow Warrior’ with Greenpeace in the 1980s. The book he is currently writing is an exploration of the shadow and its necessity in our evolutionary development.
To become equal to the dream sewn within us, our heart must break open and usually must break more than once. That’s why they say that the only heart worth having is a broken heart. For only in breaking can it open fully and reveal what is hidden within.” – Michael Meade
This is a series of podcasts based on the premise explored in Malcolm Stern’s acclaimed book of the same name, that adversity provides us with the capacity to develop previously unexplored depths and is , in effect , a crucible for self reflection and awareness. Malcolm lost his daughter Melissa to suicide in 2014. It slowly dawned on him over the following few years that he was being educated and an opportunity was being presented where new insights helped him forge a path through his grief and despair. As part of that cathartic journey, he wrote “ Slay Your Dragons with Compassion ( Watkins 2020 ) where he was able to describe some of the practices that had helped him shed light on a way through the darkness.
