Archive for year: 2016

Thanks to a listener who wanted some advice about getting on with siblings Ed and I found ourselves talking about our own brothers and sisters. It made me realise the stark contrast between my own upbringing and that experienced by both Ed and Rie. My own young life I described as being ‘thrown in a snake pit that needed to be survived’ while Ed and Rie had a good modicum of love and support that nurtured their early years. Even now they have good relationships with their siblings. I on the other hand have not seen my siblings for many years. The rivalries in my childhood were that I was the scapegoat and the kicking post. Rivalry was strong.

We do not choose our relations
Some spiritualist tell us that we do choose our family. I have this sneaky feeling that if I had to choose it would not have been what I got. The issue that we all have to face is, are we prepared to maintain this relationship even if they are people that we do not like. Maybe we do not really want anything to do with then. Then duty, tradition and expectation step in and we learn to put up with and tolerate the worst of relationships. I see people tolerate the most awful situation because it is ‘family’.

Do we have to make them work?
Is blood thicker than water? Well, I would say not. Family relationships are no different to any other relationship that we choose. In non-family relationships we choose who we spend time with and there is no rule that says it should be any different.

Place in the family
Each child that enters the family, at the point of birth, has a place in the family hierarchy that can potentially create rivalry. In psycho speak we talk about ‘oldest child syndrome’, ‘middle child syndrome’ youngest child syndrome’.

Oldest child
The oldest child is the first born. For them there is a disadvantage of their parents learning their skills. This child is a learning experiment that suffers all of their parent’s mistakes. There is also an advantage in that the first child will always be special as the first child and the first grand child. They may also be the first nephew or niece.

Middle child
The middle child has all the advantages of not having to face the same mistakes and lessons that the parents learned from the eldest child. In the beginning they have it easy and may be in a privileged position, that is until the next child comes along. At this point the middle child does not have the special status of the first born or the novel status of the youngest. Many middle children feel abandoned and less important than their siblings.

Youngest child
The youngest child is special. They have the equivalent of many parents as their elder siblings look after them as well as their parents, grandparents and other relatives.

The eldest child may develop the need to look after other people and take responsibility. The middle child may develop a withdrawn stance and perhaps lacking the confidence of their elder and younger siblings. The younger sibling may develop an expectation that others will always look after them and some never learn to take responsibility for themselves.

Like attracts like
Often you will find that adults are attracted to other adults who had the same familial status as themselves. That is older childen create relationships with other older children, middle with middle and younger with younger.
It seems that our position in the family affects the rest of our life. However, we know that we can change any habit that we learn as children. Some deeply embedded habits are more difficult than others to change.

Habit or choice
Over all family relationships may be seen as either habit or choice. The important thing to realise is that we do always have a choice.

Button box
We use this tool when working with clients, of any age, to understand their family relationship. I have a box within a collection of items, mainly buttons, of all different sizes and colours. We ask the client to pick an object to represent each person. They then place them on a white sheet of paper. The insight gained from understanding why each person is a certain size and colour and, most importantly why they are placed where on the paper. The story begins to emerge of the nature of the relationships in the family. The way that they are grouped and who is left out is the story, the rivalries in the family between both the siblings and the parents.

So, are you an older, middle or young sibling and how has it effected your adult life and your relationships?

Take care

Sean x

Thanks to a listener this week we are looking into our cupboards to see if there are any skeletons. The answer is that of course there are. We all have a past and we all have secrets, that is the normal state of humanity. No one will ever be completely honest and transparent. After all does your partner know about all the detentions that your served when you were at school? Of course they don’t. The only way you can truly know and understand a life is to have lived it

One issues raised by Ed is if you have done something that has led to a criminal record, or to you being put on one register or another, at what point do you tell your partner. I guess the answer to that has to be fairly early on. This is for two reasons one is that your new partner can make an informed choice about whether or not to have a relationship with you. The second is that if you leave it too late to reveal what may be seen as a hidden secret your new partner may feel that you have tried to dupe them in some way.

It is certainly true that many employees are required to undergo checks into their criminal or financial history before they can gain employment. Some employers will now do online searches in social media to check out potential employees before they are given a job.

It has become common place in the media to see celebrities undergoing investigation for their hidden skeletons and being charged or imprisoned as the contents of their cupboard is revealed. Even those that have nothing in their cupboard can be damaged by the ‘no smoke without fire’ philosophy that pervades society.

When you are honest there is now need to run
My teacher would always suggest that being honest was the stressless way to live. In honesty there is nothing to hide and nothing to worry about or to give you sleepless night. In honesty there is no need to run and no need to hide.

Can we forgive?
If people are honest about their wrong doing should that keep them tarred forever or should we be able to forgive them? This has an important impact on people’s willingness to be honest with us. Fear that people will be continually penalised for their past behaviour may lead them to hold back from being completely honest. The deal in our society is supposed to be that wrong doers or sinners pay the price for what they do which, should in theory, lead to forgiveness and if they are repentant lead to some level of redemption. This, from a mindful perspective would lead to self development.

The example below is about Leslie Grantham, the actor who played Dirty Den in the soap opera ‘East Enders’.

According to Wikipedia…

…on 3 December 1966, Grantham attempted to rob a taxi driver, Felix Reese, in Osnabrück, Lower Saxony, West Germany. A struggle between Grantham and the driver followed, and Reese died from a gunshot wound to the head. In his statement to the police following his arrest, Grantham claimed that he did not know the gun was loaded and it had gone off during the struggle, which would have resulted in a conviction for manslaughter if a jury believed this version of events. However, at his trial in 1967 he was subsequently convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. Although he had committed the murder in West Germany, he served the entirety of his imprisonment in various British prisons. This was because soldiers and officers convicted of any criminal offence that warrants a sentence of over two years are automatically transferred to Her Majesty’s Prison Service, they are also automatically dishonourably discharged…

The British public were able to allow him to move beyond his act to become a well known family star. This is a rarity in British society.

The main requirement of honesty is to be honest with yourself
Whoever you decide to be honest with, in the end, the only person who you really need to be honest with is yourself. In self honesty we can grow and develop. In mindfulness the observation of self leads to a level of honesty as we get to know who we really are.

The are some things to look out for
You can only be truly honest with others when they are first, open minded and are able to hear what you are saying or revealing without judgement, something that in psychotherapy would be described as ‘unconditional positive regard’ coned by Carl Rogers and second, those that are forgiving if forgiveness is what you require or need.

My resource of the week is, if you are suffering from skeletons to do step two of the Live In The Present Ten Steps. This is the step that deals with self forgiveness. You can find this step in the podcast archive episode 103.

Take care, be happy and be as honest as you can be to keep yourself safe. However, always be 100% honest with yourself.

Sean x

Definition:..
…a person who habitually expresses negative or pessimistic views
despite a general feeling that things were going well..

You must know them, you might even be one, Naysayers are everywhere. If the sun is shinning it is too hot, if not it is too cold, too wet, too dry, whatever it is, it is never right and it never will be. The role of the Naysayer is to tell you how bad it all is and to reinforce this negative message at every opportunity.

Who is doing it?
Try this one, go to three different places, maybe cafes, waiting rooms, bus stops, or wherever, and listen to the conversation being carried on by those around you, what do you hear? Are the people around you sharing positive or negative things? Are they counting their blessing or bemoaning their woes? Are they sharing how good their life’s are or reciting the badness in their everyday?

Are you positively or negatively dominated?
Current research suggests that for most people the average negative dominance of their thoughts and conversation is about 70%. That means that for most of us we spend about 70% of our time thinking, feeling and talking about negative things.

What are we doing this for?
If we could track back in evolutionary time we could probably find a point where it became good for our development to be negative. Perhaps it was an obsession with danger that kept us safe. Or maybe the fear of starvation made us critical of others that wasted precious resources. However it began and however it developed it is with us today and maybe is developing. It is certainly true that every person who develops and maintains the habit of negative dominance becomes a drop in the ocean of negative consciousness that affects us all.

Does it have to be this way?
We know that we are each the sum total of all that we have learned since our birth, this is our paradigm or all of the habits that we have developed throughout our life. As we learn our habits from observation we can assume that the habit of negative dominance has been passed down the generations to the point where the habit is now accepted as normal behaviour. Remember; a habit is something that requires no effort and no will power to enact, we simply just do it. It becomes who we are, how we see ourselves, it becomes normal behaviour.

Be informed not inundated
Having listened to others talking try the news broadcasts, list the positive stories and the negative stories. What is the dominance, negative or positive? Just think about it. If this is the diet of information that we are receiving every day then it is little wonder that we have negative thoughts and feelings. We need to be aware of the news, we need to be informed but we do not need to be inundated by a sea of negativity. We begin to realise that with all this negative recitation and rumination how can we ever have a positive dominance in our thoughts and feelings.

Time to change
To change you need to do two main things, 1: Stop listening to the sources of negativity and 2: start listening to the sources of positivity. This means stop listening to ever repeated news broadcasts and move away from people that you know who keep reciting negative messages.

Do you really know yourself?
Ok, last task, spend the rest of today listening to yourself. Listen to what comes out of your mouth but also to your inner thoughts and feelings. As you become aware of what is happening inside you begin to observe how your system responds to negative messages. These may be news items or come from what other people are saying.

What do you do with them? Do you grab them and play with them, reject them, get angry, sad? Just observe what you are doing and how you are handling it. Be aware of how your body responds. You might react to negative news/information with an in take of breath, with a flutter in your tummy, with a surge of anger or sadness. Whatever it is become aware of it.

As you observe, watch what you do. Do you let negativity go? Do you challenge it? How does it make you feel?

The point is that like all things positivity and negativity is a choice. Only you can decide how you respond and react to all the things that happen around you.

So back to the question at the beginning, the reason that we listen to Naysayers is because that is the habit that we have developed. In listening to negative messages we feed the Naysayer and encourage their bad behaviour. It is another case of what we feed grows and what we starve dies. If we stop giving it attention, it eventually goes away.

Take care be happy and practise being a Yaysayer rather that a Naysayer.

Sean x

This week we had a listener who wanted to look at cheating from the other side. How do you cope when you are the cheater?

Well, there will be an amount of people, male and female, who are really serial philanderers, who can’t keep their zippers or their knickers up. Those people who, no matter what, will be on the look out for a chance encounter, a chance to play away, whenever, wherever.

Before we look at the normal sexual affair I would like us to start with the idea that it may not just be sex that is an affair. It is possible to have a platonic affair that can be as damaging, if not more damaging, than a sexual affair. I do get some smug clients who will tell me that it was not really an affair because they did not have sex. In Buddhism the thought is said to the same as the act because an action is preceded by a thought, em…? Food for thought.

Reasons for cheating
In previous podcasts we have looked at the other side of the coin, from the point of view of the person who has been cheated on. What is it like to be a cheater? How do we deal with the levels of guilt? How do we rebuild our relationship? Do we need to be honest and fess up or is it better to keep it quiet?

My resource for this week is – Marina Pearson worth a visit.

Does honesty help?
When people come to see me after an affair they are often at a loss as to know what to do next. The first question is, do I tell my partner? This is a mixed bag and the decision has to be around “what will it achieve if you tell?” For many couples it is the honesty that leads to the relationship breakdown not the affair. I leave the client to make this decision, but whichever way you go will create what is likely to happen next.

Why did you do it?
This next question is often related to the first and the answer to the first may be affected by the answer to the second. Often people will talk about feeling empty or dead, that life had become boring and pointless. Sometimes people felt neglected and uncared for or maybe the communication had broken down and the couple had stopped talking.

I guess if you do not fall into the philanderer category then there will be a reason. Understanding the reason will help you understand the situation and yourself a bit better. If you can understand ‘why’ then you have a chance of sorting stuff so that it doesn’t happen again.

If you have taken the route of honesty and confession there will be a lot of repair work to do between the pair of you that will probably require some psychotherapy and couples work. If you have decided not to confess then there will be a need for some individual psychotherapy and a good look inside yourself to understand why you did what you did and then to go through the process of self-forgiveness and personal rebuild.

If you are going to sort yourself out there are a few things that you need to address. The first is that your contract has been broken.

A New Contract
It could be that you entered into an open relationship but then you would not have been having an affair. So if it was an affair then whatever agreement you previously made is over, broken and done. Even if you do not tell your partner about your infidelity you will need to complete the internal process of letting go of what was and affirming within yourself a new contract for your behaviour in the future.

Self Forgiveness
Many people beat themselves into a pit of depression. This does not help. People will visit church or even attend therapy seeking absolution and forgiveness. The strange thing is that even if you are given forgiveness from an external source it will be of little help to you if you do not forgive yourself, charity begins at home, so does forgiveness. Beating your self up will only create depression. You might find step one useful at this point where you can write the letters that you never send. To get beyond this depressive state you need to evoke the law of allowing.

The Law of Allowing
In the steps, the law of allowing tends to be focussed on looking at other people and allowing them to be what they need to be without judgement. Being able to accept who you are and what have done involves both self-love and tolerance. If your affair has become public then you might need to seek forgiveness and acceptance from other people who also might have been hurt by what you have done.

Allowing yourself to be who and what you are, to accept yourself for what you are and what you have done and even those that you might have hurt is crucial to being able to move on.

What is the lesson?
If the universe works with intelligence, and I believe that it does, then the things that happen to us do so with purpose. Throughout life the question to ask yourself is “what am I supposed to learn from this?” When you find yourself feeling shame or guilt these feelings can be debilitating, they can stop you growing. When you change your mindset why? And what is there to learn? Then you begin to move forward. When you wallow in the pit of guilt and self-disgust you are getting in your own way this is the monkey business of your ego at work. Let it go, learn and move on.

What was the benefit?
Once you get beyond beating yourself up ask yourself, what are the benefits of you doing what you did both to you and to the person that you did it with? There will have been good things and experiences that you had, including the lessons that you learned. There would have been things that you enjoyed or you would not have invested your time in doing it. There may also be benefits for the relationship that you have cheated on. Perhaps you have learned to be a better person from here on in. Over all take the positive things you have learned from the experience and move on.

When we learn we have no need to repeat the same lessons. When we fail to learn we get the same lessons over and over again. It doesn’t have to be…

“Once a cheater, always a cheater”

…at least not if you work on yourself and get the support you need to shift what has not been working for you thus far. (yourTango.com)

Take care and be happy

Sean x