Archive for month: October, 2021

When George Harrison sang “here comes the sun” it was all about the end of winter and the joy that comes as things becomes both brighter and warmer in the spring and summer. It now seems that we have too much of a good thing?

With a global climate that is getting increasingly hotter year on year we might indeed end up with it being too much of a good thing. The question of the day, indeed a question of vital importance to us all, is “is global warming real”? What do you think? I would say yes.

As far back as 1824 scientist were registering their concerns about the effects of fossil fuels and the effects that carbon dioxide was having and would have on planet Earth.  At that time no one seemed to listen to the science. Scientific research increased during the1970s and 80s. Most scientists were then predicting that our use of fossil fuels will lead to a warming of the surface of the planet and create global warming that could, in the end, become devastating for the planet and for all of human kind and every other living being on the planet. The weather events this year would suggest it is happening right now.

Well, most people seem to agree except for apparent “experts” such as Donal Trump, that well known scientist and climate expert, shouting them down calling them ‘gloom mongers’. 

The one thing that was promised to Britain with global warming and a warmer earth, was cool dry summers and warm wet winters. My experience is that is what we now have. The scorching summers of the 60s and 70s have disappeared as did the British holiday makers as they chased the sun on various package deals to Spain. The cold winters with real Christmas Day snow, often several feet thick, has become an occasional sprinkling of white. This year the staycation meant that most people stayed at home. Perhaps this could be the reinvention of the UK summer holiday. 

The fact that it is getting warmer would seem to to be beyond dispute. The question is why?, is the USA and Australia wanting to re-energise the coal industry suggesting that global warming is nothing to do with human intervention and simply one of the many cycles on Earth’s planetary activity. Just another weather event.

As I understand it we are carbon based organisms living in a carbon based world. Where we are all subject to the carbon cycle. Carbon is used to construct living matter and then when it breaks down it is released back into the atmosphere to be recycled into new growth.  

Everything is on fire

When the pages of an old book are turning yellow they are, actually burning but very slowly. The pages are slowly turning back into carbon, this is the carbon cycle. The carbon was captured in the trees that created the wood pulp that made the paper. Fire is a catalyst that increases the rate of the carbon cycle that is going on any way. Fire releases carbon and energy, in the form of heat, into the atmosphere.

The carbon based system that we live in stores carbon into the growth of vegetation or carbon is held in the natural storage of the seas. This has been, throughout creation, a natural process of living and dying. Plants and trees, that need CO2 to grow, soak it up and turn it into vegetation that is either eaten by animals and turned back CO2 when the animals die, or as leaves fall to the ground carbon is released as the leaves rot down to provide nutrients for further vegetation growth. 

Coal is the fossilised deposit of the forests of the past. As they died and were buried they were compressed into what we now call coal. The coal, just like the forest is full of carbon. This is what is released into the atmosphere when we burn it.

The natural process of growth and decay, birth and death, of carbon storage and release, has been in balance on the planet throughout time. Then the humans arrived and it all changed.  

If the carbon released into the atmosphere is greater than the planets ability to store it the system goes out of balance. The atmosphere of the earth, apart from providing the oxygen that we all breath filters out the effects of the sun. The CO2 creates a blanket in the atmosphere that increases the heat at ground level.

We human beings are having three main effects, I can see, that are contributing to global warming. The first is this issues of putting more and more CO2 into the atmosphere. The second is deforestation that has removed the planets ability to store carbon in vegetation. It is said that the forests are the lungs of the world. Right now the world if suffocating. The third effect is methane.

Methane

Described as the ‘Greenhouse gas’ is said to be more dangerous than CO2, though once in the atmosphere methane does react with oxygen to create even more CO2. The majority of methane in the atmosphere is said to come from ruminants. That is, animals that ferment vegetation as food in their gut and then both fart and burp methane. It is estimated that the 1.5 billion cows and bulls currently on farms account for 18% of all harmful greenhouse gases. That is more than the entire negative CO2 effect of the entire US economy. Apparently a vegan male can produce seven times more methane than a meat eater.

So, number one we have deforested the planet. The forests have been burned to heat humans and fuel industry. And number two, the land that has been cleared of tress is now used to raise cattle for human food consumption. Both actions become a recipe for a warmer planet. I have not even included the effects of burning oils and gas and the love affair that we have with the motor car. As I write this I have stopped doing my monthly plane flight to Qatar mainly due to Covid. When I was flying the planes were often only half full of passengers. I do not have a clue about how much fuel it takes to fly us all there, I do not know what my own carbon footprint has been on these journeys. Though I have discovered that I can do virtually everything that I did face to face thanks to Zoom and Teams etc.

There are things that we can all do to reduce our individual effect on the carbon cycle and collectively reduce global warming. Now, many people will say ‘what is the point of me doing anything, I am only one person, I can’t have much of an effect?’ And yet a lot of people doing the same thing can have a big effect.

The two biggest things that we can do immediately that will have a huge effect on global warming. The first is use less fuel. Walk rather than taking the car and cycle to work and the shops if you can. If you are going to drive try and go electric as a bike or a car. The second is stop eating meat, especially beef, and stop consuming all dairy products. Becoming veggie or, if you can, vegan has an enormous effect of your carbon footprint. The last things is recycle all that you can and where possible buy things that are not in packaging that requires recycling in the first place. Only time will tell what effect we are really having on the climate. The trouble is that by the time that we realise it, it might just be too late. 

I am veggie considering becoming vegan. I have my electric bikes. By cycling with a bit of electric support, I have reduced my carbon footprint without being sweaty at my destination and at the same time getting fitter. Sounds like a win, win. What can you do?

Take care and check your footprint

Sean x 

 

This is the time of year when kids are turning into adults and heading off to three or four years at uni. Now most year most kids can’t wait to get away. This years seems a little different after lock downs and working from home many are feeling a bit nervous of going out on their own. I have also spoken with a some who were supposed to be having a gap year and then became stuck at home with no where to go. Most years it is the parents who are seeking help with being able to let go now they are asking me how they can encourage and support their kids to leave and go to uni.

As a parent you spend years developing your family. Your kids have good bits and bad bits. There are times when you could happily strangle them all and times when you love their bones. Then when you have learned to live and even enjoy the madness that is called ‘family’ hey, they go and leave home and go off to uni and become independent. The fact that they have been leaving their junk all around the house, just like a tree shedding leaves in autumn, means nothing, you just want them back. The bird has flown and the nest is empty. Suddenly your role has changed, or maybe even come to an end. This is the time when the answer to the question ‘who are you?’ suddenly changes.

The rites of passage

The senses of the changing role of self happens to us all though it is more so for women. When a woman marries she most times changes her name and as she normally takes the part as of head of the house, often without the man even realising it, she has changed her role. Then the first child comes along and another set of changes begin and each time the answer to that question ‘who am I?’ changes. As the last child is born, as the last child goes to school, as the last child leaves school, as the last child moves on to university, as the last child leaves home. Each stage presents us with a different sense of who we are. For full-time mums the impact of these changes can be much greater.  

We live in an odd world. As primates we would be living in extended family groups. When change happened there would have been a natural stress management provided by the various relatives supporting each other. Even when your our own children had grown up there would be new young ones coming through in the extended family. In our odd little nuclear units of mum, dad and the kids aloneness and isolation can become common place as evidenced in the general rise of depression, stress and anxiety in western society. Though with covid we have seen isolation a loneliness magnified.

We the children do finally leave some of our stress comes from the fact that we do not really understand how to act in this new family situation without them. There is a confusing shift in the roles that we now play. When you have been a full on parent and your child goes off to uni. What contact do we now have with our distanced child? Questions arise..

Who contacts who?

How often do I phone, text, skype, zoom?

Do I wait for them to contact me?

Do I offer the money, resources or wait until I am asked?

What do I do with their room?

Do I keep it as a shrine, redecorate it, let’s other people stay in it….?

What about the family dynamic?

One child moving out can upset the dynamic of the entire family. In some case this can create feelings of bereavement and loss. Some families will even go though a period of mourning. Siblings may become withdrawn or upset. It may effect their performance at school. I am not being dramatic I am simply stating that changes that can effect us all.

Often both parent and child do not fully comprehend the importance of the family unit until it is no longer there. 

‘We don’t know what we’ve got ‘til its gone’.

But hold on, we always knew that this would happen, that this day would come it was just that we have chosen to ignore it. Maybe pretend that it will never happen. The awake mindful parent is preparing them self, the family and the child for their departure. Talking about it obviously helps but it the practical issues and skills that effect a child most. These might include…

Using money

Knowing how to budget and pay bills

Making a shopping list

Basic cookery skills

How to use a washing machine 

The art of ironing

The rules of engagement

Agreeing all the rules of contact and money and doing their washing should all have been discussed prior to the event. As long as they know that they can get you when they need to they will be okay. So what about you? Looking at this change….

 …who are you now?

If you have been a full on parent the chances are that you have lost the sense of who you are, what your own real needs are and what it is that you want to do with your life now.

Many couples caught up in the rush and business of raising a family lose contact with each other. Often in the silence of the empty nest two people stare across the void at each other thinking ‘Who are you?’ It may have been a long time since we really had ‘us’ time. For many of us this is the chance to get back in touch. Talking, sharing and date nights can help. The question ‘who am I’ extends to ‘who are we’ and ‘where are we going from here?’

I guess that over all empty nest syndrome just like bereavement is not an illness it is a process and the better prepared for it the better we process it when the time eventually comes.

My resource for the podcast is to look at John Bowlby’s attachment theory. Our ability to deal with endings is dependent on what happened to us when we were young and how we learned to attach and detach in our relationships. What we learned as children is played out in adulthood. The good news is that even if you do not like you current attachment styles you can re learned and re frame them so that they serve you better.

The biggest gift that we can give our children is independence and confidence. We have to learn to let them go and allow them to live and make their own mistakes.

Covid has added an extra dimension this year as many of the chicks are feeling anxious about leaving the nest. Okay, so the majority of young people still can’t wait to get back out there and party, party, party but there is a high proportion who are facing the prospect and anxiety and fear which is sad. This is a time in life that should be embraced and enjoyed.

Take care and be happy. If are a anxious potential student try and let go and enjoy the newness of the experience. If you are an anxious parent try and step back and allow your children to leave.

Sean x

The theme of this year’s World Mental Health Day, October 10^th, is ‘Mental health in an unequal world’. Equality comes when we all show each other the respect that we deserve or as I like to say…

If we all look after each other we will all be okay!

When look at mental health it is important to acknowledge that normal does not exists. In that sense we are all bonkers, just different kinds of bonkers and when we struggling it is okay to admit it and talk about it.

I think that it must be another sign of the effects of Covid but I keep talking to people who are telling me that they are having a midlife crisis. The thing is that the symptoms that they are describing are very like the effects of long Covid. Now, it could be that covid is having an effect or it could be that the general state of the world it taking it’s toll on us all. Then again it could that people are in a midlife crisis.

What on earth is a midlife crisis? What is midlife come to that?

Well, when it comes to timings, in theory at least, the midlife crisis has to be happening later these days as we are living longer. In previous generations people were lucky to live to 60 which would mean that their 30s would have been midlife. Now as we are all moving towards living to the magic 100 the 50s and 60s have become the new 30. In psychotherapy we are now suggesting that the people are about 20 years younger than the previous generations. That is, people at 60 are doing what their parents were still doing at 40. I guess the timing of a midlife crisis is a moveable feast. 

Midlife crisis is a term first coined by Elliott Jaques he suggested that it occurred somewhere between the forties to early sixties. He looked it as being points, or periods of change and transition in life. However, there seems to be little evidence that the midlife crisis in in any way a universal phenomenon and seems more to do with the industrialised and urbanised western culture rather than the agricultural societies of Africa and Asia.

I have a theory that is born out of developmental psychology in the school of analytical psychotherapy. It is this…

… at around the age 3 to 4 most of us have set our gender role and identity. By this age we understand the concepts of male, female, mother, father, brother, sister and so on and we understand where we fit into these patterns. We also have developed internal working models, or inner concepts, that enable us to make sense of our percepts, or what we perceive to be out there. A concept is like a box full of information that explains things. So in the mother box will be all the information that we have gathered about what a mother is. So, when we see those things ‘out there’ we know what they are. We have concept boxes for all things, people, roles, talents etc.

I guess it is fairly obvious that if the things that end up in the concept boxes where mixed up we may have some odd ideas. Let’s say that when we were gathering information about mothers, to fill our mother concept box, our mother was always beating us with a stick, then we are unlikely to be able perceive that woman out there is a mother unless she is carrying a stick and beating people with it. It also follows that when we grow and become a mother we might feel that beating people with sticks is a part of the deal that we have to do to be a real mother. Anyway, I digress.

After our basic concepts have been established at around the age of 4 we enter what is termed the ‘latent’ period. This is where our focus moves from being self centred to attempting build and understand relationships. This phase is also termed ‘socialisation’. It is not until we reach adolescence that the early concepts gathered at 4 years are re-examined, re-evaluated and, if required, re-built.

It is in adolescence that we challenge all the basis assumptions that we took on early in life. This also means challenging the beliefs of our society, religion, culture, family and so on. Often this includes experimentation with various version of ourself until we find one that feels comfortable that we can own into adult life. Growing your hair down to your knees, or dying it green, or hanging your face with cutlery, or getting tattooed, travelling experiencing and experimenting are all a part of the adolescent phase. It seems to me that those people who don’t go through the rebellion of adolescence, those that do not question the current order and challenge their early concepts are vulnerable to a mid life crisis.

 

When people have a mid life crisis, go ‘off the rails’ or ‘lose the plot’ or do something completely out of character are now doing the things that they would normally have done in adolescence. Their behaviour often appears out of place belonging in adolescence not in middle age. We can all be vulnerable to midlife crisis because we all, or at least most of us, failed to do all that we could have done in the adolescent phase. There is the added issues that the current circumstances may be such that we feel the need to regress to adolescence in order to deal with and survive the issues.

I am using as my resource for this podcast an article from the Telegraph ‘The six signs that you could be suffering from a midlife mental crisis’. Not too sure about the word ‘mental’ in this context. It is probably better to use the word emotional. Anyway, the six symptoms or signs identifies are…

1: Two or more weeks of low mood

2: Tearfulness

3: Irritability

4: Sense of hopelessness

5: Memory loss

6: Problems sleeping

As I said all of the above have been reported to me as symptoms of long covid. But if it isn’t long covid how can we avoid the midlife crisis?

Avoiding a midlife crisis

Most people that I see who are in a midlife crisis are those feeling stuck in their current way if life or circumstances. They are seeking change, a relief from the present issues and are looking a foe new or enlightening experience. The mother when the last child leaves home. The man in his mid fifties who still have a mortgage to pay and children at Uni who need supporting. Doing the same job for years has become Groundhog Day and you feel that you have had enough. Often it is those who have had enough, that have run out of steam, motivation and energy often driven by frustration. Over all they need some fun, excitement and new experience.

To avoid the midlife crisis make sure that you are enjoying life and experiencing new things and having some fun. When we learn to express ourself and if we are enjoying who we are and where we are, then the need to do something drastically different tends not to happen. And, if it does we can do it cooperatively with our partner, family or friends.

The trick is be happy and have fun

Sean x