Holiday Season Already?

The holiday season has started and with it, the prophecy from an aviation expert that planes will fall from the sky due to volcanic ash. This is not helpful to people who are nervous and already I had 2 clients book in last week for help with fear of flying. If this is you, or someone you know, it is a fear that can be helped. It takes a few sessions so please don’t contact me 10 days before you are due to fly – give us a chance!

On a different note, some of my blog posts in January revolved around goal setting and achieving for this year. If you haven’t reviewed things out for a while, go and take a look and have an update session. It shouldn’t take long, but it will help to get you back on track.

One of my goals this year was to submit my tax return at the beginning of the tax year and not get it to the accountant on 25 January again. Maybe this year I will be back on his Christmas card list! Anyway, it is going quite well so far. I have completed the easy parts, done most of the middling difficult bits and have not quite started on the hunting-for-information for the tough parts. And this is the crux of the matter – getting on with the things we don’t like very much.

Tasks that we don’t like rarely take as long as we expect them to. Getting started is the key because if we don’t start then we haven’t a hope of finishing and finishing is the goal. And have you noticed that unpleasant tasks have a habit of hanging over you? The black cloud of my tax return starts to hover in early April and by Christmas it’s pretty dark and dangerous. Thankfully my wonderful accountant (at Cottons by the way!) saved me from the thunder and lightning of the Revenue’s rage. This year I shall be wafting a summery parasol very shortly – and mainly because I determined my goals at the beginning of the year, wrote them down and keep checking up on progress.

Whatever your goals, get started on them. Getting started on the journey is often the hardest part because once you are on the road there tend to be signposts and rest stops which can keep you going. It’s the same for dreams, whether your dream is to weigh 6 stone less, combat a fear of flying or write a bestseller, I urge you to start, because that is the only way to the end point and realising your dream.

Enjoy the Spring

Dishonesty and Psychological Reversal

Some people reckon they never tell lies. Unlikely isn't it? The magnitude of the lie perhaps has some relevance but I am sure that we all allow untruths to creep into our lives.

Most people tell lies to save themselves or others from harm, whether emotional or physical. Some people however lie in order to harm themselves.

Why on earth would anyone do that? It's known as Pyschological Reversal. Usually the mind will do all it can to protect itself and protect the body that houses it. In a psychologically reversed individual however it will act to harm itself.

Let's take someone who engages in negative and destructive behaviours. A classic one is the overweight person who knows they are eating themselves to poor looks, a restricted lifestyle, low self-esteem, bad health and potentially early death but carries on eating regardless. This person is not acting for their best interests and has reversed that mind behaviour that acts to protect.

What a perverse thing to do! Or is it?

In a pyschologically reversed person, there are deep forces at work in the mind. Essentially, the mind believes it really is protecting the person. But the way that protection is manifested is destructive to the whole. The reversed person is usually unaware of why they are doing what they do.

One fascinating case, treated by Roy Hunter, concerns a successful and career-minded 40 year old man who was overweight. He had piled the pounds on over the last 3 years and prior to that he was a healthy weight. Whilst in a hypnotic trance it was ofund out that a few years ago, he had been propositioned by a woman at work. Attracted by her but knowing that an office affair could spell the end of his career, he turned her down. Being so focussed on his career, the mind then sought to protect this competitive aspect by over-eating, to make him unattractive and thus avoid any further propositions by any women.

The mind is a powerful thing indeed.

I write on this subject today because I have a teenage client who needs to lose about 6 to 7 stone in weight (that's 98 lb for the American readers!) This equates to about a year of focussing on weight loss. After about 6 weeks of treatment I received 3rd party information that her eating behaviours have not changed regardless that she has told me different. At our next session, I knew she was lying but ignored it. Realsing she was rumbled, she failed to show up for her next session.

This is a hard one to take for a therapist. I don't care about how difficult my client finds it. I don't care that they simply can't stop eating popcorn or having midnight feasts and secretly stuffing chocolate. I don't care that it is impossible for them to eat healthy meals on business lunches. But I REALLY care if they don't tell me this. And if they lie to me, they are harming themselves. If I know how they feel, I can help them. If they tell me their difficulties, I can help them find their way round them. If they tell me the problems I can tailor my treatment to them. But why lie to me?

There are very powerful protective forces helping my teenage client stay overweight. If only she could have trusted me that bit more, I could helped her find them and change them.

Social Conscience

I have done some interesting work recently, helping adult victims of child abuse. My clients were a young couple in their twenties, with 4 children under the age of 8, who had 3 different fathers. The children were the subject of court proceedings, with the objective of deciding whether to remove the children from the parents "under the category of neglect."

Both parents had been poorly parented themselves so they had no decent example on which to model themselves as parents. The man had been badly abused as a child. So while the court case had been adjourned, Social Services were attempting to improve the parenting skills of the couple in order that they stood a chance of keeping the children. They wanted to show the court that they had done everything possible to help the parents.

Now some would say that if they were incapbable of looking after 4 children, then the couple should lose the children and they should be taken into care and looked after properly and given a better chance in life. I will admit that I had a similar viewpoint. On closer inspection, it is not quite as simple as that. Firstly, it benefits Social Services to leave children with parents because a child in care costs a fortune. To place a single, simple child with no additional needs into any sort of care costs over £400 per week. Yes, per week! Care is VERY expensive for the taxpayer.

The second reason why Social Workers like to leave children with parents is that children in care tend to do badly throughout their lives. Most of the British prison population have been in care as children. Taking children away from parents is a marker for future social problems, which have to dealt with and paid for by the state. So the arguments for children remaining with families are quite persuasive - current cost, future cost and short and long-term wellbeing of the children.

So my role was to help these two parents come to an understanding and an acceptance of what happened to them as children. The aim was that they could move on from the trauma, enabling them to lead easier, happier lives. And Social Services aim then was to help them to learn improved parenting skills, once they had more of a blank canvas to work with. Someone who has been abused as a child has multiple problems and hang-ups that they have to deal with and they can often be quite traumatic.

The man in particular had been through a hell of a childhood and really had suffered, which was affecting him day to day. After several weeks of work, both individuals were feeling much happier and calmer. They both reported a great improvement in their relationships with each other and the children, they played with the children more and were more positive and optimistic in general.

I was absolutely thrilled. To have such a result for these people was fantastic for me and so rewarding. I saw both parents change for the better over time and I loved seeing it. Ultimately I don't know whether they will keep the children. I am just glad that I could play a small part in helping these people to enjoy their lives.

On Deprivation (and Lent)

My last post was a little spiritual, so I thought today I would follow through, go the whole hog and mention something from the Christian calendar. It is now Lent - the season of deprivation until Easter! Or is it? I have written a lot about weight loss recently and how it is better not to deprive yourself as it only leads to you craving the object of your deprivation. This of course for Christians is a little like self-flagellation. The deprivation reminds Christians of what Jesus went through for 40 days and nights in the desert without food, where surely he would have felt deprivation keenly, to say the least. So feeling deprived is what it's all about. If you don't feel deprived, you haven't chosen the right thing to go without for the 6 weeks. The idea is to feel Jesus' pain. But there is a way of doing this differently.

Many people resolve to give up something they enjoy like chocolate or alcohol but I once heard a clever sermon for Lent which provided a different twist. This minister's idea was to give up on a behaviour or an emotion that has negative consequences. To give up bitching about somebody, to give up always sniggering at the guy in the office with the appalling dress sense, to give up taking undeserved criticism, to refrain from thinking the worst, to give up always thinking that someone else could do that tedious task, when it could in fact be you.

It dovetails neatly into my work because my clients have all taken the decision to give up on an emotion or behaviour. I have been seeing very many trauma victims recently who don't want to carry the emotions around with them any more. It feels good for them to shake off the overwhelming negativity and anxiety that comes from having been abused as a child, been in a car accident, been bullied at school. They are giving up feeling bad about themselves. They are giving up on old emotions that serve no useful purpose.

But it lasts, it's not just for Lent, it won't disappear at Easter. And it isn't deprivation either.

Touching Lives

Something a little spiritual today.

Everyone we meet touches our lives in some way. Even those tiny encounters at the supermarket or petrol station have an effect. Does the assistant barely speak and gives you the change or make some discourse with you. The former could make you feel quite grumpy and wonder what is wrong in the world, especially if you meet enough of them. The person that passes the time of day with their customer may be unaware that he is the only person that that old lady has spoken to in two days. A cheerful few words and a smile could make a difference to someone like that.

So it isn't always the people with whom we have long and close relationships who have the power to touch our lives. A chance meeting or greeting can have a profound effect. Yet everyone holds that power whether they know it or not. It can be worth considering the things we say and how we act because we don't always know their consequences.

Ban the D Word

Yes, ban the "Diet" word. It seems all-pervading at this time of year. But even if you are losing weight, please don't use the D word, it is far too dispiriting, far too negative for my world.

Firstly, it's a bastardised use of the word anyway, which means to eat a specific group of foods. My dog is "on a diet" - a restrictive diet to safeguard her liver. A diabetic is often "on a diet" as is a coeliac. A weight-loss diet however, is just a diet where the food going in is less than before and less than the enrgey being expended. Simple as that.

So don't "diet", don't restrict yourself. As soon as you ban foods or eat too little, all your mind wants to do is seek out the things you tell yourself you cannot have. Have you noticed that if ever you say you have given up chocolate, all you do is crave chocolate? It's because the mind finds it dificult to process a negative.

In order to process a negative, the mind first has to understand the positive before it can twist it into "don't." So to process the command, "Don't drop it!" the mind first has to work out what "Drop it" means in order to understand that it must do the opposite. This takes time and brain power and is more difficult than it at first appears.

The person who has given up something will always notice that thing eg. chocolate and the brain will then think, "Aha, there's the thing I cannot have," thus bringing the forbidden thing to your attention and adding to the craving. Sneaky huh?

Try it with small children. Their minds are still learning how to process language so they are that bit slower than us. As soon as you tell a child, "Don't touch that," the child will touch it. It's only a less well developed cognition than our chocolate craving.

Two lessons here. Firstly, give your children positive messages eg. "Only looking at the breakable china please"

Secondly, don't give yourself deprivation type commands like "I have given up chocolate because I'm dieting" Ugh! How many negative cognitions does that sentence have in it? Tell yourself that you can eat chocolate with a meal, if you are hungry. Trust me, you will barely notice that you are eating less chocolate.

It's that "Diet" time of year

So I wrote a whole post on this topic and it disappeared from the draft. I'm not angry, really I'm not. I just have to go and scream very loudly for 20 minutes. I'll be back...