Paddy Rafter, author of The 48 Acts of Life

Kilkenny’s Paddy Rafter is a musician, singer, former college lecturer and racehorse trainer, husband, and father.

Paddy has lived a life of addiction and trauma from an early age, and this has led him to many dark places. In the very depths of profound suffering, he fought to find a way out of the hell in which he constantly lived.

Now, he says he discovered a new way to live and to experience the world in peace and happiness. Using this knowledge and experience that he has garnered over a lifetime he desires to share this with all, so that nobody else should suffer alone, in pain and silence, but use this new way to freedom and joy.

Paddy Rafter in concert

With his life as a singer, musician, racehorse trainer and painter running in parallel with one that was bloated with trauma, addiction and times spent in mental health units, Paddy Rafter finally discovered his true self.

In his book – The 48 Acts – he shares with readers how the very same steps he took, can help you. Here is a glimpse into Paddy’s book…

It must have been a hard decision to share your backstory in this book?

I didn't want to come out and share my own personal experiences, but I felt the only way that I could be authentic was to share.

Sharing with readers my backstory, which is filled with abandonment, rejection, bullying and the first signs of mental health issues being displayed during a breakdown, aged ten was very important before imparting the process that I undertook to rediscover my true self.

I have a personal understanding of what it is like to live a life afflicted by trauma and addiction. My own experiences have taken me to dark places, feeling alone, hopeless, and misunderstood. As I fought to escape my own form of hell, I discovered a new way of life which allowed me to discover true peace and happiness.

It is through resilience and determination that I could put my demons behind me, and I believe through that honesty it makes the book a compelling read.

What inspired you to write this book?

Before lockdown I had dealt with many issues and felt that there was very little hope in real terms for an ongoing way of dealing with life’s problems.

Okay, there is intervention if you need drastic action. There’s counsellors, psychiatrists, psychotherapists, and hospitals. However, there was very little real help for the ‘average’ person who is struggling.

Everybody is struggling in ways; we all have our issues. Most people suffer in silence, or they say nothing. So, they don't reach out and we are finding it becoming exponentially worse. People are finding it so difficult to deal with problems in this world in the modern world. It’s really shocking.

I think from an altruistic point of view I wanted to give back something. This was my whole reason for writing the book, I felt compelled.

Do you think people are suffering more from depression due to the pandemic and the lockdowns?

No, I think it's been coming for a while. I think the lockdowns exacerbated and highlighted it.

What brought it to its height is the advent of social media i.e. the ease of which people can be manipulated on the one hand and bullied on the other hand.

Also, people are becoming more isolated, especially with younger people who are spending three to four hours every day on social media.

One of the consequences is that it's easier to feel you need to conform, that you need to look like a celebrity or sports personality. This conformity issue has become enormous, and the younger people are not able for depression.

Society as a whole has developed a maladaptive way of behaving. In a nutshell your ‘average’ person is sitting at home and just can’t cope with all the world’s problems coming up on their phones. They become addicted to their news feed and the media machine just keeps feeding it to us.

How can you help the reader?

People use the term mental health; I prefer the term mental wellness. We shouldn’t say we want to deal with our mental health, we should say instead ‘I want to be mentally well’.

I take the readers step-by-step through the 48 Acts principles that changed how I related to anxiety, depression, addiction, and coercive control. This book is all about jettisoning any previously held and damaging programming; and for readers to then do the work and take charge in order to unleash their own radically improved reality.

My methodology is about putting the ball firmly in the court of the reader. If I have got well, then you can also. I have the belief that we all have the capacity to make change.

The 48 Acts shares with readers the process that enabled me to literally come back from a life of teetering on the edge of despair, to live a fulfilling, authentic and valued life today.

Why were you keen to find your own course past your worries and anxieties?

I have been to over 50 doctors and specialists since the age of ten years old. I need to find a course that would work for me. So after years of extensive research and talking to others with similar issues, I devised this course. 

With negativity surrounding so many of us on a daily basis, the modern world is a hotbed of addiction, abuse, depression and anxiety. But there is a way you can heal and recover from the issues which are holding you back. 

The 48 Acts is a guide to happiness and contentment, setting out how we can not only improve our lives for ourselves but for society as a whole.

What’s different from your 48 acts to a better life than other self-help books?

Things that overwhelm me, overwhelm others too. From my enormous contacts with people who suffer from anxiety, depression, addictions, bad relationships, I decided to concentrate on those four areas.  

I wanted to bring this knowledge and experience together in a book designed to help others leave behind their lives of suffering, pain, and isolation to find freedom and joy.

We are all on a continuum. On one end of this continuum are the people whose lives are greatly impacted by addiction, anxiety, obesity, depression, coercive controlling relationships, and then on the other end of the same continuum are the people who feel left out, who cannot understand why they are so unhappy, even though they appear to have everything.

If you feel you are in a rut, if you feel a failure, if you feel disappointed in that you have not achieved your potential or life has been unkind to you, you are not alone.

If you feel that you are not who you wanted to be, if you feel unloved or unloving, dissatisfied, and cynical and if you feel you are less than you hoped that you would be, then this is the book for you.

But it’s also a book for all of us with the ideas it contains. We are all there somewhere. We are all lost here somewhere.

Published by International Institute Publishing, The 48 Acts: Live your life in a better, deeper way is available in Kindle format on Amazon. Paddy Rafter will launch The 48 Acts in the Set Theatre, John’s Street on Wednesday, December 6 at 7.30pm. All are welcome.