Archive for category: Blog

Ok, so it is New Year!  

Standing at the beginning of 2024 you, and I, will be making choices about how and what this year will be. 2023 will certainly be a year to remember and for many perhaps a year to forget. People tell me that is is as though it never happened or that with the aftermath of covid and the financial crisis one they will never forget. 

As we ride into 2024 we have the joint joys of Covid and Brexit should be slipping behind us. We now have annual vaccines that will hopefully kick the virus in the backside.  After all my fun with heart surgery I am looking forward into 2024 with feelings of hope, love, and joy. How is it for you? We need to decide what we are seeing ahead, and how…

 … you create what happens for you … 

… is all a matter of your choices. it may not feel like it but your world is full of choice. In your present moment in your ‘Now’ you are actively creating the world of your experience through the choices that you make…  

…thoughts becomes things…

…all of us, individually and collectively, are choosing what will happen for us in 2024 and how we will respond to it and feel about it. We are all doing it, though we may not realise it.

Focus for a moment on the choices before you in this coming year. Do you have any? What are they? Most importantly what is the basis of your choices? When deciding to do, or not to do, something It is important to own that in deciding not to make a decision is actually making a decision. The action of stillness is equally as powerful as the action of motion. However, when you choose to do nothing you are likely to be vulnerable to the choices that everyone else makes around you. In having your own clarity of purpose you are in the flow of your own life and, as I said, stillness is a decision as much as an action.

Choice and fear

For many of us the choice for action this year will be limited by fear. Fear of disease, debt, pain, failure, fear itself, the fear of looking stupid, ridiculed, of loss, rejection, abandonment and so on. Fear is the biggest limiting factor for any of us. Fear and anxiety are the destroyers of our happiness and to create fulfilment – those who dare win – We all need to step beyond our fears, as Susan Jeffers put it – feel the fear and do it anyway – ( a book worth reading).

If you can get hold of the idea that your thoughts become your experience, you are becoming the author of your own life. It is then you will realise that fear is actually a choice. Once you understand this you can realise that the experience of joy is the same thing. Personal joy and duty are often at odds. Do you do what you want to do or what you think you should or ought to do?

Choice and duty

Generally in psychotherapy the words “ought, should, must and can’t” are banned. Each of these words are the limiters of self expression. The call of duty may be laid upon us by our culture, religion, beliefs, as parents, children, employees, employers and so on. The trick is that if in 2024 there are things that you feel you ‘must’ do then, – act with a smile on your face –  this is known as Bhakti or, to give service without expecting anything in return. We all need a bit of Bhakti in our lives but it is always damaging when we allow a sense of duty to stunt our own self development after all – we all deserve happiness –  well we do in my script. Yet many of us chose to create negative life scripts.

There are many reason that we can find to maintain and justify our own lack of development or fulfilment our feelings of victimisation or misery, unhappiness and moaning about our life and other people that we meet, though there are alternatives. The classic is that we blame other people for how we feel. Common targets are our parents, family, friends, and most commonly partners and so on.

There are alternatives…

Choice and joy

In making your decisions for 2024 you might chose to avoid the ought, should, must and can’t and, think about the lightness of joy in life – focus on what makes you feel happy – and do more of it. Doing things that make you feel good is never a difficulty and never feels like work. When you do things that make you feel good, in the end it is you that feels happiness. How many of the things that you do in your life lead to you feeling flat, bored or unhappy. If you do more of what makes you feel good in your life you will feel happier and get better and better – happiness is a learned response – sometimes we have to practise being happy.

Choice and responsibility

The word responsibility comes from the word to respond “respond-ability”. Being responsible or “respond-able” for what you experience makes you the master of our own destiny. It does not matter from where you begin your journey, whatever your age or state of health. By being responsible for your life and taking ownership of yourself – responsibility is the key-. If I decide to be responsible for me no one else can ever be responsible for what I think or feel and, ultimately, what I do. There are many examples of people who, against the odds chose to respond to things positively.

This year some of you will be facing very difficult and tough stuff, emotionally, mentally, financially, physically, socially and so on. These may be things that you cannot avoid and you have no choice other than to face them and deal with them. However, you do have a choice as to how you respond to them…

 …none of us are effected by events, 

we are effected by our response to those events…

…living in the present and being positive about your future allows you to create a year in 2024 that you will look back on positively and perhaps with joy.

Decide to create your own experience this year. Treat your problems as challenges so whatever 2024 presents you with, smile be positive and enjoy it.

Take care

Sean x

 

It has never been a better time to talk seriously about the blame game and good will. As we approach the festive season and, in theory at least, a time of goodwill it seems that we are living in a divided world where everyone is finding reasons to blame other people for something. Globally we have all the issues of wars with Russia and the Ukraine and Israel and Palestine. In world where people seem to need to be looking for who it is that we can blame the only choice that we have is who will blame and for what will we blame then for?

The same thing happens in families. The easy targets are the ones you go for because they are easy to pick on. You can always find someone in the world, or in the family, that is behaving in ways you can disapprove of. The question for me, as a therapist is why do you need to have people to pick on? Often this is because we have unresolved inner issues that are easier to externalise onto other people rather than feel with the issue inside ourselves.

When you are the object of blame, when a person or section of society or family have singled you out for blame it does not matter what you do it will be picked on. If you say anything it will be interpreted as a problem and if you choose to say nothing you will be blamed for holding back.

These attitude make it so difficult to resolve problems. For the opposing side in a war to sit down and resolve a way forward is very difficult and often only possible with truly neutral mediation. The same is true between sections of a family and often in relationship issues/therapy where one or both sides are blaming each other. The biggest issue that I ever deal with is expectation. People see what they need to see and hear what they need to hear despite what is either said or done. Interpretation is everything.

The blame game is played to confirm what we are expecting to happen so that we can prove ourselves to be right. Expectation is very powerful. When we are proved right, or we believe that we are proved right, it makes us feel good and righteous. 

Many years ago in the 1960’s, when smoking dope was the normal, I deliberately rolled a blind joint. There was a group of us, about eight as I recall, I rolled a big spliff using nine cigarette papers. However, there was no dope in it. It was only made of tobacco. I lit it took a toke and passed it on. It went from on person to the next and did several round of the group before it finally went out. Amazingly the group got stoned on a blind joint that had no grass it at all. This little experiment of mine was to discover to what extent people’s expectation would or could effect their experience. It made me realise that unless people are very aware/awake they just experience what they expect and in so ding prove themselves right.

I have done the same thing with wine. Pretending to drink vast amounts of what is actually alcohol free wine leads the censorious and judgemental around us to belief that we are drunk when we are not. I have also repeated the experiment in giving people alcohol free gin and tonic that taste just like the real thing and again people will experience it as though they have actually drunk alcohol.

Anyway, back to the theme of this blog. If any faction sees itself as different from others and preconceived ideas of the thoughts, feels and values of other groups they can start the blame to which there will never a resolution.

Whilst it would appear that blaming other people is normal human behaviour we can actually change this. Through awareness and wake-ness, in what these day is termed mindfulness, we can start to see the world from others people’s points of view and not assume that the way that we see things is the only and the right way, we may be wrong. 

When we are honest with ourselves we can begin to see our own prejudices and in mindfulness begin to question and understand what we are really experiencing. Another person point of view may be wrong but the reasons why they come to the conclusions that they do makes real sense to them and for them they are right. Often we can do little to change another person’s point of view. However, we can change ourselves we do have choice.

Prejudices about race, religion, colour, orientation, and so on are mainly, if not always, driven by ignorance. If we never stop long enough or understand what we are experiencing and checking out what we believe to be the truth we will never, learn, grow are solve the problems of humanity.

So at this time I of goodwill and hope remember…

…If we all look after each other we will al be okay.

I hope that your preparation for the festive season is going well. Look after yourself yourself, look after each other and let’s make it a good one.

Take care 

Sean x

 

The world health organisation, ‘WHO’, has now classified internet game addiction as a recognised disease. Is it right? So what is an addiction?

We use the word ‘addiction’ to indicate an illness which is based on the behaviour of a person who is compulsively or habitually ‘addicted’ to a substance or a set of behaviours. Most behaviours that are described as addictions are seen as negative. We think of drugs or alcohol. We might even consider the workaholic. Whichever way we view it addiction is normally seen negative.

Perhaps we are all addicts

I would like to suggest another way of looking at it, we are all addicted, we are all addicts, it is just that we are often unaware of what we are addicted to. So my question is…

What is your addiction?

An addiction is simply a chemical state, that is in both our brain and our body.  We become addicted when we have learned to accept this chemistry as our ‘normal’ state of being. The chemistry come from the habits that we have practiced from the moment of our birth. We know that when someone exercises regularly their brain responds by releasing powerful endorphins. We also know that once this chemistry has been established as their normal they can become addicted to this exercise. Once this habit has been established we find that if they are unable to exercise, perhaps because of an injury, they go into withdrawal just like any other drug addict. All the symptoms of drug withdrawal are played out through their brain and body until either they either can restore the exercise and the chemistry or undergo the ‘cold turkey’ of drug withdrawal or in the extreme take prescribed medication/drugs that allow their system to feel balanced.

Any behaviour from meditation to sex, from knitting to hill walking, from laughing to crying, will have a chemical effect on our mind body system. Once these connections are established in our mind brian they become our habit and our chemical normal. The issues of anxiety, anger, depression, love and happiness may also be our addictions.

So what is your addiction?

Your chemical normal is the one that makes you feel just right. It comes from the habits that you have established throughout your life. If something happens to alter your ‘normal’ you will adopt behaviours that will return your chemistry to recreate your normal. My normal involves meditation, cooking, often running, definitely playing music, mainly guitar, certainly working with other people and always my lovely Rie and holidays away. When I am deprived of my addictions I feel withdrawal and need to act to bring my chemistry back to my normal.

Some addictions are good, as in they do not harm us or others. Bad addictions do harm us or other people. We have a choice. Once we mindfully examine our behaviours we can decide which addictions we will feed and which once we will starve and allow to wither.

We may decide that allowing our children to develop the habit of internet gaming is a good or a bad addiction. Current evidence would suggest this is a bad addiction.

One last thing to consider. It is easy to look down on other people that have different addictions to ourselves. If you are not addicted to football the sight of people shouting and screaming at a match or at the TV screen may seem very odd as does their euphoria at a win or their depression at a loss. We might feel the same when observing those that l;I’ve horse racing, have obsessions with the royal family, stamp collecting, cooking or the need to tidy and clean all the time or simply plain obsessive compulsive behaviour (disorder), OCD. These are all addictions. Our habits are addictions. We are all addicts. Though we often see our behaviours as normal and other people’s behaviour as odd and addictive.

Don’t ask your self whether or not you are an addict. Accept that you are, just like the rest of us, an addict. So, what are your addictions? If your addiction serve you and others well that’s fine. If they create problems for you or other people they may need to change. So, check your addictions.

Overall, accept who you are, accept other people without being judgemental and be happy.

Take care

Sean x

Have you ever wanted to give you a body a good clean, but from the inside? It is rebooting your entire system. A bit like when you turn your laptop off and on again and then defrag the hard drive.

Twice a year, autumn in October and spring in March I will do a 13 day mini detox. This an exclusion detox, that you can see on the site www.livesthepresent.co.uk . In the thirteen days you progressively go from a full solid diet to three days of fluid and then back up to a full diet again.

Every few years I go on a 90 day clean out. This means no alcohol, no chocolate, no caffeine, no dairy, no meat. With the no dairy goes all the cakes and pastries. Does that sound hard? for many people this is normal. 

When you have been eating a full western diet this may seem a difficult idea. Yet many people live their entire lives this way and, guess what, they are very healthy. When Fauja Singh ran the london marathon aged 102 he did it on a Punjabi farmers diet of mainly rice and lentils.

I will reduce my diet over a seven day period and have a day, or a few, on just Water with honey and lemon, often this will be warm. The lemon cleans, and the honey provides energy. Some people will have some withdrawal to begin with. So if your system is addicted to something like caffeine you may get headaches if you stop too quickly so it important to reduce things gradually.

People often fear that they will lack energy. Not true. You use between 35 and 50% of your energy just digesting the food that you would normally eat. On diets like this most people feel an increase in their energy level and even sleep better. 

Flushing your system may sound odd, this is why I do it. The tube that runs from your mouth to your bottom, the alimentary canal, gut, processes all the food that you eat. It has done so from the moment of your birth and if you have never fasted or detoxed, without a break. Just like the skin on the outside of your body the lining of you gut will be sloughing cells, so that a proportion of what comes out of your bottom will actually be your dead cells from your gut lining. 

However, because your poor old gut has been working, usually flat out 24/7, year after year not all the cells come away and you get a build up of old rubbish on the lining that reduces the efficiency of the gut wall to absorb the nutrients that your your body needs. Many people suggest that this buildup and the subsequent problems this creates lead to many diseases. By doing a few days on fluid, and that means quite a lot of fluid, so that you pee a lot, your gut gets the opportunity to flush and clean all this rubbish that would otherwise remain stuck to your gut wall. Having given the gut a clean you then have a chance to create a new diet that will serve you well.

Think about our origins as hunter gatherers. We would never have had the constant supply of food that we have now provided for us in the supermarkets. There would be days of plenty and day when the calories would have been reduced and some days when we only drank water. In these circumstances the gut had the opportunity to cleanse itself on a regular basis.

So what will I eat? Well pulses, beans, grains and nuts, plenty of protein their. Rice, potatoes and wholemeal pasta, plenty of carbs there. As much fruit and vegetable as I want, plenty of minerals and vitamins there. I make my own bread that can be moistened with good olive oil or nut butter. For breakfast a plain unsweetened muesli type mix with nut or soya milk.

Really it means flushing the system and rebooting onto unprocessed foods that are healthy and nutritious. My rule is no meat, no dairy, no alcohol, coffee, sugar and anything processed with a drastic reduction in sugar. I have to say that if you are going to try it you might need to talk with your doctor first especially if you are diabetic.

The resource for this podcast/blog is my thirteen day detox programme. This can be a good place to start, as I say twice a year. If that goes well and you enjoy it you may get to trying a thirty day and then gradually extend it to 90 days over a few years.

Game for a laugh? Have a go.

Take care 

Sean x

 

 

Last week Auntie Vera passed at the age of 96. As the last person in that age group in the family her loss has been very profound the grief intense. There is joy and happiness for the memories of what a lovely person she was set against the hurt and pain of her going. Thankfully her passing was a good one.

Dealing with the grief that follows a death is something that can never be understood unless it has been experienced directly. I see so many people who feel a sense of guilt because they are still grieving only three months after a loss when, in reality, grieving takes a long time, and sometimes may even last a lifetime.

A dictionary definition of grief is….

Intense sorrow, especially caused by someone’s death

Grief comes from a French word ‘Grever’ meaning ‘to burden’. We might, therefore, consider grief to be a burden that we carry. We have finished our grieving when we are ale to put the burden down.

I am forever surprised at how ill prepared we are to face death, both our own and of those people, family and friends around us. It is the most certain thing that faces all of us, we will all die.

The attachment of emotional elastic

In my book “what colour is your knicker elastic” I explain that the emotional connections that we make between ourselves and others is like a piece of emotional elastic. At a point of loss, when that relationship comes to an end, the emotional elastic is severed and we are hit in the face by the emotional energy that is remaining in it, unless we are prepared for it. 

The loss of a parent

We had an email from a listener this week who has been facing the death of a parent and is trying to come to terms with the hurt and the loss. I am not sure if this true for us all of us but for me the loss of those that we truly love is possibly the worst pain that there can be. The only loss greater than that of a parent is that of a partner or child. It may seem like an easy thing to say but the reality is that, at some time, most of us will face the loss of those people that we care about. The pain of this loss we call grief.

Relationships are all different and the nature of the emotional elastic will vary. It may be thick and strong or thin and week. Because of this the level of emotional rebound and grief that we experience when the elastic snaps will be very different. I have seen situations such as when someone’s mother had died. The person in this case showed little or no emotion and took the morning off to deal with it and arrange the funeral before returning to their work. Two weeks later they took a few hours off to attend the funeral and returned to their work. Their colleagues observed this and saw it as insensitive, negative and nasty. What they did not realise was that the relationship that this person had with their mother was not a good and happy one. For them childhood had been a difficult time and the lack of support they experienced from their mother had resulted in thin emotional elastic, so thin that when it snapped it had virtually no emotional effect upon them at all. In fact they described the death as a relief not a burden.

Alongside that I have also experienced the people who have been completely devastated and debilitated by the loss of their mother. They have taken weeks, and in some cases months, off work as they have attempted to recover. For them the emotional elastic was thick and strong and at the point of snapping the were hit hard by the emotion.

Learning to live with loss

When I consider the real affects of a death and the cutting of the emotional elastic phrases like…

 

…‘don’t worry you’ll get over it’ or ‘times a good healer’… 

…show a total lack of empathy and insight. 

These phrases are often used by those people who have never experienced the grief of a death, or of a significant death. The idea of getting over the loss of someone close could not be further from the truth. It would be more accurate to say that grieving is learning to cope with the new situation that you now find yourself in. Life without a parent, husband, wife, mentor, friend or child can be so completely different to all that went before. Death, loss and subsequent grief is literally life changing. 

Life will never be the same again.

Acceptance, a journey

Grief and bereavement are not a thing to get over. They are a process that must be gone through until the reality of the loss has been accepted. This is a journey that you may not want to travel and yet you will, in the end you have no choice. For some of us the journey is short, this is when the elastic is thin. Also it may be shorter if we have had time to prepare. This is what I call pre-bereavement. Perhaps there has been a long illness and a gradual ending that has prepared us for the real end. 

For some the journey may take a long time to negotiate with many obstacle to overcome and issues to face. In these cases the elastic is thick and strong. Sometimes the emotions may be so powerful that they will never be resolved and the grief may simply be something that we have to accept and live with. It is as though this loss, and perhaps others that we experience in life, have been woven into the tapestry that is our life. It has now become a part of the picture.

The unbreakable elastic

Some elastic will never break and continues to pull from the other side of the grave. I lost a child, many years ago now. Every time that day comes around it is as though it was live action all over again. I have accepted this as part of the tapestry of my life and no longer need it to be any different. It is a part of my year, it is a part of who I am.

The process of grief

In psycho talk we alway say that grief will take a minimum of two years to process. The pain of being without that special person can be hard to bear. From the death day we have to live through the first year and all the significant times, birthdays, Mother’s/Father’s Day, anniversaries, and all days of importance. 

The first of each annual event is generally the most difficult. So too are the new events, those events that the lost person will never to see such as a wedding, a new grandchild or a naming ceremony. The feelings and emotions associated with these days has to be borne and gone through. 

Avoidance is not always a good idea

A family may decide that they cannot possibly have their normal Christmas, as they have done each year, because it would just too awful with the lost person not present. The family decide to go to Honolulu or do something completely different. This seldom works because next year they simply have to face what they avoided last year. In the end all that they have done is delay our process by a year. Grief is when we need to understand that grief is a process not an amount of time.

So in psychology when we say that the minimum period of grieving is normally about two years we mean each events needs to be faced and processed. This is because from the death day we go around the year facing every special day and anniversary. After one year we come back to the death day, take a deep breath and do it all again. In most cases by the time we have completed two year cycles we are starting to normalise and accept the change and our loss. However we have to accept that some, or perhaps most, losses will never truly leave us. 

Becoming an adult

We are all, or were all, children. All of us were born of a mother and had a father. Throughout our life we are our parents child, until, that is, the moment when they pass on. In reality none of us become truly become adults until both our parents have died because up to that point we are someone’s child.  We only become adults when we are orphans. Just as this is true for us and our own parents it is equally true for our children. While we live they will always be children, we need to die to allow them to become adults. If you are in your seventies and your parents are in their nineties you may not come to adulthood until late in life.

How long should we grieve 

While grieving may take an indeterminate amount of time that may have no limit it still remains a process. Often people will feel guilty for still being upset three months after a loss. In reality the process may take several years. On average we think of two to begin to come to terms with a loss.

The three stages

Grief is often identified as having three distinct phases. These may follow the classic sequence or the phases may come and go over time.

1: Disbelief

The first stage is disbelief. “I can’t come to terms with what had actually happened” I assume that the person will come back and walk through the door, that they will ring or write.

2: Emotional letting go

As emotion is released it may come out as tears frustration sadness or depression. Even when people try to hold it in there usually comes a time when it is released.

3: Anger

Anger is a strange though powerful emotion. At some point the anger comes. We may feel anger with the doctors, the disease, God or the person who has died. When we feel guilty with the person who has died we then often feel guilty for being angry with them and we may spend sometime going round and round until it is processed. Often it is the anger that give us the energy to move on.

The wonder of birth and the wonder of death

Why do we celebrate birth and not death. In many ways we have lost touch with both birth and death. These great events, that used to take place in the home now happen in hospitals and hospices. Only a generation ago most people would have been born at home and died at home.

With the rise of the medical professional we have de-personalised the process. As we have done this we have also given away our own responsibility and participation in these processes.

Celebrating a life or mourning a death?

My vote is that we use the last funeral rites as a celebration of life, that we change our sadness into happiness and celebrate what that person’s life has achieved.

I shall stop here before this turns into a book.

Wherever you are in the cycle of life, enjoy it and plan your ending with joy.

Take care

Sean x