Archive for category: Blog

I guess that it had to happen. The movie industry has hit another all time low and, we now have Fifty Shades the movie. I decided that it was timely to revisit the blog that I wrote at the time of the publication of the first book and reading the movie reviews it would seem that the movie would appear to be as bad as the book, hey ho, and two more to come, goodie.

Fifty Shades has a Facebook page that shows nine million likes and that makes me, and my views on Tantra, Sex, Orgasm and Meditation at least, a potential minority. My books, courses and therapy are all about people discovering themselves in the most positive way.

My working world encompasses therapy for those who are both the subject of sexual abuse and domestic violence, as well as dealing with the perpetrators. The victims are mainly women though men are also victims of sexual abuse and violence. Just as the perpetrators are mainly men, women can also be violent and sexual abusers.

For me Fifty Shades asks us all a question – “What is it that turns you on?” From where I see it we seem to be at a point in the evolution of human consciousness where we are confused between eroticism, violence and love. The neurological issue is that the centres in the brain that are activated by pleasure are also those that are activated by pain and here the confusion begins. Unless you are awake to the inner workings of your mind/brain you can create unhappiness for your self and for others.

Inside your mind/brain there are a millions of concepts. A concept is like a box full of information. It is your internal collection of facts and ideas, normally termed a paradigm that enables you to explain to yourself what you experience in the world, these are termed our percepts.

The law of perception is that you cannot have a percept without a concept. So in your head there is a dog box (Concept) that contains all that you have learned about dogs. When you see a dog (Percept) you can look in the dog box and know that what you are experiencing is a dog. You know it is not a cat because it doesn’t fit into your cat box.

Among all the concept boxes that you have there is your sex box. What is in your box? Let us say that in your experience rice pudding becomes a part of your sexual experience you may find that rice pudding has slipped into your sex box(Concept) so that you cannot feel sexy or become eroticised unless rice pudding is involved in the act (Percept).

When people attend psychotherapy the work is about removing unwanted things from concept boxes or putting missing items in. This maybe more obvious in the common problems of stress, confidence, phobias and so on, it is commonly true of your sex box.
It would seem that according to 50 shades, many people have violence, domination and submission in their sex box, nine million at least, according to Facebook!

As a therapist I would say that if you are turned on by 50 shades have a look in your own sex box and ask yourself why? If you need to dominate others why is this, where did it come from? You certainly did not come out of the womb that way, you learned that behaviour and pleasure. In the same way if you need to be sexually or physically dominated and become submissive, or if violence is related to you satisfying your sexuality, from my point of view, you probably have a problem. Perhaps a few sessions of psychotherapy would help you resolve what is, really, a disorder.

As far as the movie goes the reviews would suggest that it is as badly written, boring and wooden as the original book.

Take care

Sean x

Us Brits are not good at blowing our own trumpet. We can have real problems in understanding the difference between positive self-acceptance, which is really self-love, and arrogance or being up your own backside. Now, I think this is really sad because self-esteem is essential for so many things in life. From allowing us to be happy and successful, to having a robust immune system.

Esteem vs arrogance
There is a very simple way to understand this. People that have arrogance do actually have posi-tive self-esteem but they are looking to you to tell them that they are ok. Imagine this scenario. There is a party, a gathering of people to celebrate an event or simply a social occasion, you get the idea. There are two people that are a little different to all the rest. One is sat quietly in the cor-ner having a meaningful conversation with someone else. The other makes a grand entrance that is loud, demanding attention and getting it. Which one is the most confident and which once feels small and insignificant?

Well, people that make lots of noise, who are larger than life and, demand attention are those that need other people to tell them that they are ok. They need the attention to give themselves value and to convince themselves that they are actually worth the skin that they stand up in. The person who is quietly getting on with life in the corner has self-esteem that is within them. Their value comes from the inside out; they do not need anyone else to tell them that they are ok.

In many ways we live in a world of opposites. Those of us that need to make lots of money, to ob-tain expensive possessions, the rich and famous are those that feel the least for themselves and lack self esteem. We often make the mistake of believing the opposite. We tend to believe that those who appear successful do so because they are full of self-esteem. You will find the most in-secure people, lacking self-esteem in spades, among the rich, the famous and those that we term celebrities.

To have positive self-awareness of your skills, qualities and to be open to accept your failings and, to have the awareness to be getting better at being a human being equals positive self-esteem.

What do we teach our children?
We, as a society, whether we are parents or not, have a responsibility to teach the children around us to have value in ‘who they are’ and not in ‘what they have’. In a materialistic society it is easy to mistake possessions for personal value and real self esteem. So many programmes on TV from “the house wives of…” wherever to “Big Brother” often show us the worst kind of people, with the worst moral and ethical values assuming a sense of self importance of the cost of the possessions that they have.

How is this for good self-esteem
I had dropped off my lovely mother in law, and was driving back to the house, so I switched on the radio. It was BBC Radio 4 and a man was being interviewed. He made a clear statement that he had worked out that he needed £20K per year to live on so every penny that he earned above that he gave away to charity. “Wow, how amazing” I thought. Apparently there is a whole movement of business people in the City of London, and other areas, who do exactly the same thing. This is amazing on so many levels. The fact that these people are not shouting about it and making a big deal, they are just simply doing it, This suggests a high level of self esteem that does not require any accolades or praise from others, they just do it. The second thing is that these people realise that their self-esteem does not come from turning their money into possessions to display to oth-ers.

There are times in our society when we need to display. I can rarely attend a business meeting in shorts and a tee shirt I need to be in a suit to be seen as credible by my peers. This kind of fancy dress is playing a societal game that for me is ok, as long as it doesn’t get out of hand.

Relative deprivation
Unless we wake up to what we have and develop some gratitude for how lucky we are it is easy to feel deprived. If everyone in our street has two cars and we only have one we may begin to feel a sense of relative deprivation. Psychologically and emotionally such things can lead to symptoms of depression, GP visits and medication.

On the radio programme I was talking about before, the interviewer went on to discuss a website where you could put in your income and your circumstances and it would tell you where you ranked in the rich list of the entire world population. One shocking statistic was that if you are in Britain liv-ing on the minimum wage you are still in the top 10% of the world population in terms of monetary richness. Apparently someone Face booked this information and has been hit by a tsunami of neg-ative responses. For me this information is a wake up call to us all.

We, in the West, are very privileged, and those among us that really do have nothing or very little should be supported properly.

Anyway, I wander, self esteem comes from within. It is an expression of how we feel about our self and not about what we have or what we can display to others. If you feel deprived you may need to create more wealth, change your job, adjust your living situation and there is nothing wrong with aspiration. However, it does not matter how many material things you manage to accumulate un-less you feel good about you and who you are, you will only be miserable in comfort.

What you might benefit from most is some therapy to develop your self esteem rather than money and possessions to hide behind.

Look in the mirror every morning for the next one hundred days and say out loud to yourself “I Love You”. If you can’t do it you have little self-esteem. But, if you do it for one hundred day it will be-come a new habit that is inner self-esteem. Because, guess what, self esteem is a habit just like smoking. None of us popped out of the womb with positive or negative self esteem. The way that we feel about who we are is what we have learned to be – maybe time to change.

Be happy, think lucky and, keep looking in the mirror!

Remember, I love me, who do you love? It is real, charity begins at home. When I can love me I can also love you.

Take care

Sean x

Love is an energy that pulls things together just as hate is an energy that pushes things apart. For me love, like gravity, is the glue that holds the universe together. This attractive gravitational pull works at all levels big and small. It holds the moon around the earth and the earth around the sun. It holds the particles to the nucleus in an atom. At a social level it holds families and communities together and in intimacy it keeps couples together.

Whether we call it the law of attraction, the power of gravity or, the profundity of love, it is the infinite power that binds the whole of creation together. So, I think of love as elastic. Once we make a love bond we connect our emotional elastic to anther person. Once connected, we are pulled towards that person. If they move away we follow as the emotional elastic becomes stretched and we are pulled.

Living apart
The elastic is not dependent on distance. We may live very close to someone, in the same house and the same bed, and have little tension or pull in the elastic. We may live apart, either side of the earth and feel the exquisite feeling of the tension of love pulling us back together. The elastic of love knows no distance, but it does know vitality, health and strength.

The issues with couples is not usually the length of the elastic it is the colour or shape of the elastic, different needs create different elastic:

Physical elastic
Physical love may need a lot of physical, even sexual, contact for it to remain healthy. When people are dominated by physical need long distance relationship seldom work, unless the couple are able to anticipate the repeated honeymoon experience of coming back together after a prolonged absence as in sailors or off shore rig workers.

Sensual/Social elastic
May also require physical or sensual contact. However social media can support and maintain the social need in relationships and the idea of long distance sexual relationships, or cyber sex is no longer that uncommon. However, the sensuality of touch, from the held hand to the caressed buttock may be essential to maintain sensual elastic.

Intellectual elastic
At this point distance becomes less of an issue. Intellectual sharing of experiences, playing with ideas and concepts, the writing or reading of poetry and letters, enables the person at the other end of the elastic to become your inspiration and your muse.
I have come across many people who have maintained a loving relationship with a person they have never met and, perhaps never will meet. The extension of the pen pal, the person who writes to someone who is in prison who may never be released.

Emotional/Passionate elastic
Passion may involve physical, or emotional, contact, but the idea of ‘saying it with flowers’ or sending that expensive or seductively personalised gift can maintain and even strengthen the elastic.

Dutiful elastic
The love of rightness or to be righteous, the commitment to duty and fidelity, to being moral and correct is powerful in maintaining a strong elastic bond. This may be as true for the child sent to boarding school, the army officer, the priest, or the dutiful partner.

Intuitive/sensitive elastic
The deep intuitive emotions are about as near as we can get to unconditional love. At its best it is the clearest, purest elastic that requires nothing in return. It is the pure love of love. Its extent is limitless it power total.

Love at a distance
I guess what I am trying to say is that the ability to maintain a distant loving relationship is dependent on feeding the needs of your partner. If the elastic is well and appropriately fed it remains strong. The stronger it is the less likely it is to break.

Perhaps the question we should ask our long distance partner is, what do they need and how will they know that we love them? Once having sorted that out you should ask yourself the same questions and then see how they fit with our partners. The closer the match the better the chance of the relationship surviving.

Have a look at your love elastic and decide how it works for you.

Take care and be happy

Sean x

The Importance of Failure

We live in a world of opposites that are totally dependent on each other, one cannot exist without the other. Hot and cold, high and low, rough and smooth, light and dark, happy and sad, positive and negative, rich and poor, good and evil, the list is endless. Yet each of these symbiotic twins are relative to each other.

For example something will only seem cold if it is at a lower temperature of what we have labelled hot. Just as something will only seem hot if it is a higher temperature then what we have labelled cold. The difference between these twins is never an ‘actual’ measurement it is a ‘relative’ measurement.

Compared to the ceiling the floor is low. Compared to the sky the ceiling is low. Compared to the moon the sky is low. Compared to the Sun the moon is low. Compared to Alpha Centauri the Sun is low. It is all just the way that we look at it. Which takes me to the symbiotic twin that I want to look at, it is ‘success and Failure’. This has such a profound effect on our self esteem and our ability to function happily in our life.

Like all of these twins this is a matter of opposites. We could not have a concept of success without a concept of failure. Yet, because it is a relative relationship our experience and beliefs will vary.

My concept of success might be your concept of failure.

Let’s say your success is to have one million and for me five hundred would be my success, if you were experiencing my success you would be feeling your failure. I have often said that I see competition as a senseless waste of time. My example is that if nine people embark on the 100 metre dash only one person will experience success while eight people will experience failure.

Ed, and other competitive types tell me this is the wrong way to look at it because the eight that didn’t win the race may have succeeded in other ways. Perhaps the person who continually comes fourth managed to come third so this is a success. Or one runner improved their time and felt success. I guess that even to have competed at a high level meeting at all and to come last might be experienced as success.

Failure could be the mother of invention

I am reminded of Eddison and his quest to invent the light bulb. His problem was finding the right element that would glow without burning out that would create light. He tried over 2000 different elements before he found tungsten that worked. That is over 200 experiences of failure, or was it. I have often thought about his tenacity. At what point would I have conceded failure and given up. Was it that each element that failed spurred him on to try the next in his determination to succeed?

I suspect that it is this concept of failure that is vitally important to our achieving our success. Just as there is no up without down, and there is no success without failure. The point from which we start anything is the down point and the goal that we are aiming for is the up point. When we look up to where we want to be we are setting our goal. Achieving our goal is our success and this is often tied up with our self esteem just as not achieving our goal is our failure and leads to a loss of self esteem.

Learning from our failures

My experience, both personally and working with others, is that that the pain of failure is the spur that creates the energy that drives us towards success. A business person can learn from a bankruptcy so that it never happens again, we come out of a failed relationship with the knowledge that allows us to succeed next time, the injuries that we experience in training enable us to adapt to succeed in the race.

When failures become learning points we learn and grow

I want to challenge the concept of failure and the idea of success. In this world of twinned opposites we need to continually learn from one to achieve the other. So, I prefer to think of “failure” as an opportunity. We don’t have failures we have learning points, that, if used consciously and creatively enable us to move towards our success. In that sense there never are problems only opportunities.

Planning our success

Ok, so if we have a starting point and we have a goal we need to make the journey from one to the other. Most people set the goal too high and then don’t reach it. This is then labelled failure. To make the journey it needs to be broken down into achievable steps that create the path to success.

Forward Base you success

Forward basing is an exercise that I use with individuals, couples and teams who need to achieve a goal. You can do this right now in your kitchen, If it is a team I use a gym hall. On one wall I stick a big sheet of flip chart paper. On this I write where we are up to in the NOW. On the opposite wall I put another sheet of paper. On this I write where we want to get to, this is the GOAL.

The next job is to put sheets of paper on the floor that become the stepping stone from now to the goal. This is the plan. Each step is set at an achievable distance so that with each step there is the feeling of success. Once the steps have been set out we create a timeline along the wall, so that we have steps to take set in a time frame.

None of this is set in stone. The time frame can vary and the steps can move. If one step is not completed we go back to the previous step and either try again or adapt or change it. The point of forward basing is to create a flow on continued success that build self esteem and drives us on to our goal. When we forward base we are able to use success rather than failure as the drive towards our goal.

1. What do you consider to be your failures?
2. How can you turn these into useful learning points?
3. If you were to forward base what would you right on the NOW sheet and what would be on the goal sheet.
4. From this you can create your steps and your timeline.

Failure, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder only you can define your failures and acknowledge your successes. In my own life I have had many learning points. The only failure that I would Identify is when I didn’t attend to the learning points and needed to repeat the lesson. I also acknowledge that I have had many, many successes which makes me a happy person who feels successful.

Take care, be happy

Sean x