Musings

It’s been snowing here.

The already rutted and grit stained street is covered with a fresh clean blanket of white powder.

It’s been cold here for a few weeks now which is unusual in a time of globally warmed, wet and windy winters.

If you would believe the news and bus stop conversation you would think that the snow was a terrible thing, the worst thing that could possibly happen.

Personally I love it!

I had a snow starved childhood. The closest we usually got to a white Christmas on the North Wales coast was if it was misty! Now when I see snow I’m pleased, I love the crunch of it underfoot, the quiet of its falling and its dazzling whiteness.

I realise from many practical points of view it’s a real pain in the neck. Paths are slippery, driving is difficult and it’s cold. I still love it.

I love it because it throws everything into sharp relief, it covers up the annoying little details of the world and shows the overall shape of the world.

I love it because of the clarity of a deep blue sunny winter’s day.  It’s a different view of the familiar.

I love it because it’s a challenge, you have to get kitted up to go out, you can’t just go out as you please. You need to be prepared. When you are out in it, it can be so much fun. Walks with friends are wonderful, sledging is exciting and convivial (how many people do you see sledging alone?)

I love it because it brings out the big kid in me

I love the contrast between the seasons. A vivid demonstration of the majestic, passage of time. A chance to reflect on what has been and what is to come.

All these feelings are important to me

• seeing the big picture
• clarity of vision
• challenge
• shared enjoyment.
• fun
• a chance to reflect.

To me this is the value of snow.

I think we often fall into the trap about thinking about things rather than considering what feelings are produced by the things. These feelings or values are quite personal, I’m quite prepared to believe that no-one else will have the same set of associations with snow that I do.

Maybe your feelings are mixed about snow, parts of the experience you enjoy and others you don’t.

I can even imagine that many people will have a lot of negative associations with snow (after all I am living in Britain).

What are the feelings that go with things? Everything elicits its own emotional reactions. What emotional reactions are important to you? What do you want to feel more of what do you want to feel less of or even avoid?

Feelings that are important to us, our values, guide our behaviour, provide our motivations or deterrents. Sometimes they can be straight forward and positive, as is my reaction to snow. At other times they can be conflicted or even hostile. However we feel about what’s important to us will play itself out over time in our behaviour and our experience. The funny thing is that these emotional responses are not fixed in stone, you can change them if you want to, clarify them, resolve conflicts within and between them and be more conscious.

If you want to become clearer and more conscious of what is important to you, you can attend the Aligning Your Values workshop that I am running at the beginning of February in Gateshead.

Now, it’s started snowing again, the sun has gone behind a cloud, flakes are spiralling down and I feel unreasonably happy.

I just read a short article Fear of Apples by Seth Godin. He suggests that there are two reasons that people might not be taking advantage of a product or service.

… Whatever you sell, there are two big reasons people aren’t buying it:

1. They don’t know about it.

2. They’re afraid of it.

If you can get over those two, then you get the chance to prove that they need it and it’s a good value. But as long as people are afraid of what you sell, you’re stuck.

People are afraid of tax accountants, iPods, chiropractors, non-profits, insurance brokers and fancy hotels. They’re afraid of anything with too many choices, too many opportunities to look foolish or to waste time or money.

This got me thinking about the various ways that people may be afraid of approaching a therapist to solve a problem and to improve their lives

Fear of the process

If you have never been to a therapist before, the chances are you will assume it’s going to be like something you’ve seen at the movies or on TV.

Perhaps lying on a couch with a bearded guy with a Viennese accent sitting in an old leather armchair asking you to tell him about your potty training.

Maybe it’s going to be like One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest with Nurse Ratchett at full power, or worse.

Perhaps it will be a lot of talking, re-hashing old hurts and working your way through a couple of  boxes of paper tissues during each session.

There are so many different kinds of therapies each with their own style and form that it would be impossible for anyone to know, without previous experience, what to expect.

Fear of judgment

If you have a problem and you are contemplating therapy, then it’s quite common to think: “It’s just me that has the problem. All the ‘normal’ people will think I’m mad”. That somehow you are different from all the ‘normal’ people who don’t have this problem.

It can be easy to imagine that you might be the only one who thinks or feels this way. No one else has ever had that kind of thought or feeling or done those things. It might even be possible that you think you are mad. In fact most of my clients at one point or another will say: “You will think I’m mad but …”,  and I’ve never had any reason to agree with any of them about this, and they wouldn’t have been the first people to think they were the first person to think this way.

Fear of being taken advantage of.

Private therapy is not the cheap option for most people. You might well be afraid that a short term expense is going to turn into a long drawn out process that costs a lot of money. Especially if your idea of therapy is that it will involve months or even years of talking and very slow progress.

What is there to stop the therapist leading you on for their own benefit?

What if it’s worse than being financially abused?

You don’t have to wait too long to find an article in the media about how a doctor, nurse, health care professional or therapist has taken advantage of a client’s trust and misused them. How do you know you can trust the therapist to be ethical?

If the issue you want help with is getting over some abuse in childhood or later and you are thinking of coming to see someone of the same gender as the abuser it’s not hard to imagine how difficult that might be.

Fear of exposure

For most clients therapy is an expedition into unknown and frightening territory and they don’t know whether they can trust their guide’s integrity or competence. How can you tell if someone is a worthy guide before you have even met them.

What if on this journey you have to bring your darkness into the light and the therapist sees it? If all your fears and closely held secrets are brought into the light what will the therapist think?

Fear of failure

Many people feel stupid or inadequate having to bring a problem to a therapist. To have a problem for any length of time you’ve probably been struggling with your attempts to sort it out. At least those attempts have been in private. What if this therapy thing doesn’t work? Will going to a therapist be just another opportunity to fail?

Maybe it is worse than that if you have been to many therapists and had no relief then each subsequent attempt to change may amplify the fear that you won’t be able to change. You might even begin to think “nothing I do works”. In this case seeing someone else might be an opportunity for a further loss of hope.

Fear of success
On the face of it this fear is surprising, surely you are going to a therapist to get better. What if it does work? What if I do change?

How will I cope with being a different person and how will those around me cope? If my family and friends are used to me being one way and might even prefer it that way, how will they cope?

It might even feel that it’s safer to stay with an unhappy situation than risk the uncertainty of a new and better life.

It takes courage to bring your fear and share it with a stranger.
- Karen Ellis, Psychological Therapist.

With all those potential fears ranged against them it’s a miracle that anyone picks up the courage to seek help from a mental health professional in either the private or public sector. It can take a lot of courage to approach someone for help with painful difficulties.

However, it’s important to remember that if you have had enough courage to go through everything you have been through up to now, and you probably have enough to spare to go through the process of getting better.

I have not ceased being fearful, but I have ceased to let fear control me.
I have accepted fear as a part of life -
specifically the fear of change, the fear of the unknown;
and I have gone ahead despite the pounding in my heart that says:
turn back, turn back, you’ll die if you venture too far.
- Erica Jong, author.

This peach of an article about the responsibilities and attitudes of therapists is courtesy of Bill O’Hanlon, www.billohanlon.com

1. We admit we are powerful enough to induce the sense of pathology in those with whom we work. We resolve to stop imposing our beliefs on others. We give our theories up to a lower power.

2. We vow to really listen to and acknowledge the feelings and points of view of the people with whom we work without closing down the possibilities for change for them in the future.

3. We resolve to treat each person as an individual and tailor our treatment to individual needs, perceptions and goals rather than try to fit them into pre-conceived models.

4. We resolve to confront and break through our denial about people’s strengths, abilities and health. We recognize that not everything people say and do has a pathological motive. We have decided not to label others in a way that disqualifies, invalidates of discourages them. We will studiously avoid hardening of the categories.

5. We recognize that humor can help break the cycle of hopelessness. People are grim enough when they are suffering without therapy adding to their sense of grimness. We vow to be sincere and never serious.

6. We are committed to bringing ourselves and our humanity into the therapeutic encounter rather than remaining distant professional doing techniques and methods on “our patients.”

Let me hear an amen!

I highly recommend Bill O’Hanlon’s newsletter it’s worth every pixel.

“May all your problems last as long as your New Year’s resolutions.”

Joey Adams

It’s the season of New Year’s Resolutions. Perhaps prodded by optimism or guilt we decide to undertake a worthy project for the New Year: loosing weight, taking up exercise, learning French, being nicer to our in-laws.

I’ve got more than a few candidates for New Year’s Resolutions things I should, or could do, but rather than throw a dice or stick a pin in the list I decided to explore what is important to me. I thought that if I could get a clearer picture of my values then I would be able to make to make good choices for my New Year Resolutions and decisions in general.

Values or what we consider important are powerful influences on our lives.

Because they are associated with worth, meaning and desire, values are a primary source of motivation in people’s lives. When people’s values are met or matched, they feel a sense of satisfaction, harmony or rapport. When their values are not met, people often feel dissatisfied, incongruent or violated.

Robert Dilts

Goals are the tangible expression of our values. For example if one of our values is health then we will be motivated to maintain an exercise program or diet so that we experience that value.

There are a huge range of possible values, health, justice, peace of mind, excitement, honesty etc, etc. We collect them over our lives consciously or unconsciously. The constellation of values we live by are unique to us.

If we are lucky we get a set of values that mesh well together and help lead us to happy and fulfilled lives. If not, there are three ways in which our system of values may not be serving us.

1. Unconscious values: For most of us our values are out of our awareness. In effect we are being drawn to certain behaviours and  making decisions on values we don’t know exist.
2. Out of date values: Many of our values were established during our early childhood, we may have absorbed them from our caregivers or through our experience of education. They may be hopelessly out of date yet still exerting an influence.
3. Out of order values: Values exist in a hierarchy the values at the top of hierarchy will dominate over the values lower down. For example if you value your safety over excitement then you are unlikely to drive at 70 mph in thick fog. The ranking and relative importance of these values may be out of date and almost certainly out of awareness. So we may end up ’supporting’ a value that is way past it’s sell by date.

So how can you find out what your system of values is? One way (there are many) is based on an exercise from the book NLP The New Technology of Achievement by Steve Andreas and Charles Faulkner.

1. Think of some goals, interests, loves and desires.
   Make a list of some of the goals you are pursuing now. For each of them in turn look into the future and imagine that the goals have been fulfilled.

   Pick what seem to be the most important 3, 4 or 5 of those goals from your list

2. Determine your values and principles
   In whatever way you find enjoyable hold the successful fulfillment of that goal has been realised. In your imagination step into that scene, noticing what you see, hear and feel.

   Do this for each goal in turn, as you experience it ask yourself: What do I value about this goal?The answer may be one or more values. Make a note of each one. Use the words that come to mind to describe the values.

3. List your values and principles
   Make a combined list of your values and principles. From the rough list there may be items that are common across your different goals. There may also be goals that seem quite similar, if there is a word or phrase that sums them up feel free to use that.

Note: You may need some time to complete this exercise, it’s not the kind of thing that can be rushed off in a couple of minutes

Example:

One of my goals for 2009 is to be a part of more NLP and EFT trainings. I chose this goal as one of the examples for the exercise.

Here are my answers (in no particular order) to the question “What do I value about this goal?”:

• To help people help themselves
• Help people be able to help others
• Enjoyment of learning
• Enjoyment of teaching
• Having fun
• To do some good in the world

That’s a small part of the overall list of what’s important to me.

In the next article in this series ‘Sorting the wheat from the chaff‘ I’ll explore how to sort the list into the order of their importance, how to identify and resolve conflicts of values and how to find out which values really belong to us.

According to my sniffling and coughing friends there’s a ‘bug going around’. The thought of something being contagious does not make people cheerful in the normal run of things. That might be about to change.

In the British Medical Journal there’s an article that demonstrates that happiness is also contagious and spreads through social groups.

People who are surrounded by many happy people and those who are central in the network are more likely to become happy in the future. … clusters of happiness result from the spread of happiness and not just a tendency for people to associate with similar individuals. A friend who lives within a mile and who becomes happy increases the probability that a person is happy by 25% . Similar effects are seen in coresident spouses (8%), siblings who live within a mile (14%), and next door neighbours (34%).

In the conclusion they note:

People’s happiness depends on the happiness of others with whom they are connected. This provides further justification for seeing happiness, like health, as a collective phenomenon.

It’s official, happiness is contagious!

What’s more if you spread some happiness around and the people around you become happier presumably some of their increased happiness will return to you in a virtuous circle.

I think now might be a very good time for an outbreak of happiness.

Perhaps some promiscuous smiling or unprovoked laughter might be a way to start things off. Thankfully this is one of those conditions where it’s much better to be fully infected than just a carrier without symptoms.

I look forward to the day when my friends tell me there’s a ‘hug going round’.

Tip: If you want to cultivate the full blown disease then be careful to stay away from episodes of Eastenders or copies of the Daily Mail.

In NLP we are committed to respecting and communicating in ways that work for our clients, students or colleagues.

In North Vancouver they seem to be promoting the same principles across species.

I suspect the author is a keen fan of the Gary Larson cartoons which explore these themes in great depth.