Would You Prefer to be Right or Happy?

I've been asked on occasions in my life whether I'd rather be right or happy and so I now ask this of you.  Would you prefer your world to make sense according to your beliefs even if those beliefs will lead to sadness and disharmony?  Many people would, although they might not recognise this fact.  These patterns run under the surface and are rarely completely conscious.

Or would you prefer to be happy even if this meant challenging the view you've created of the world?  Although it seems the obvious choice on paper, sometimes it can take real courage to accept this choice.

For example, imagine that you've been brought up to believe in the sanctity of marriage over everything else and yours is breaking down.  Do you stay in order to be a "good" person; responsible, reliable, someone who knows the meaning of a promise?  Or do you make the decision to go because it will give you and your spouse a better chance of finding happiness in the future in a way you'd never manage together?

There's no right or wrong choice here.  I'm just asking people to be aware of what they are choosing between.

We generally invest a lot of ourselves in our belief of how the world is.  The things we believe in strongly literally become our world.  These beliefs keep us feeling safe.  They keep a certain amount of order in a chaotic world.

When I was younger, I believed that in order to be cool, you had to have some kind of vice.  So when I initially decided to stop smoking, I had a massive contradiction going on.  I'd already stopped drinking alcohol, so smoking was my last "naughty"  habit.  I believed that by becoming sensible, I would become boring.  Luckily my desire for better health was stronger than this belief and I turned it around.  I changed my beliefs and I now feel my life is far more interesting than it was back then.

Some people believe they'll never get over an event that they experienced.   They may or may not be right but, by believing that and needing to be right, they are removing the possibility of any healing in that area.  I expect we all know someone who carries around the pain from a past event and we often wish on their behalf that they could let it go.  Carrying around pain like this weighs us down and can cloud our whole life.

On the other side, there have been instances where people's belief in their healing has helped them in getting over pain.  Sometimes our belief systems can work for us.

The key is to know when our beliefs are helping us be happy and when they are working against happiness.

Some it can be seen as a virtue to hold beliefs firm and never waver them.  However I'd like to put a contradictory view that it is often healthy to adjust our viewpoint as new information becomes available.

So, if you are the kind of person whose beliefs cause you to be weighed down, please ask yourself the question, "would you prefer to be right or happy?"

Boundaries and Their Effect on our Health

Boundaries are an interesting subject.  Some people hold their boundaries very tightly and others are too loose with theirs.  I believe the best way is to hold them firmly but with some flexibility.  If boundaries are too tight or too loose, then we can end up with health problems.

Imagine your boundaries are too loose.  You let anyone take advantage of your good nature. You find it hard to say no to people.  You allow people to turn up at your house unannounced whenever they feel like it.  You get cornered at parties by people you don’t really want an extended conversation with.  You put up with unreasonable behaviour from people because you don’t want to risk conflict.  I could find many other examples.

Now imagine your boundaries are too tight.  You don’t do anything if it hasn't been in the diary at least a week.  You don’t let anyone in emotionally.  You are rigid about not giving anything away for fear of being taken advantage of.  You find it hard to form relationships with people and can appear withdrawn or aloof.

Boundaries can be physical, emotional or behavioural.  And your boundaries might not be the same strength in each of these areas.  For example, you may be very friendly but hate hugging someone.  Or you might be emotionally withdrawn, but will offer to help people to the extent that you have no time left for yourself.

Now, we are usually born with no boundaries.  We have yet to learn about them and so as a baby, we will generally be quite happy being passed around from person to person for a hug.  Babies are generally very trusting, hence why they rely on responsible adults to keep them safe.

As we get older, we develop boundaries through experience and learning. Our parents will teach us not to talk to strangers.  They may well tell us not to give away everything we own because they're not going to buy us a whole lot of new stuff.

However, we also develop boundaries from our own life experiences.  We may find that we are taken advantage of for being too generous.  We may find that we get hurt if we're too open.  We may find that we feel uncomfortable when strangers give us a hug.

And so we start to bring our boundaries in to such a level as to keep us feeling safe.  This is an important part of development and necessary for our wellbeing.

However we also learn from our friends and from society as a whole.  Some of these things may be helpful, for example, our friends feel loved when we give them a hug. But some of them may be more destructive, for example if we think we need to be promiscuous to be cool.

What's healthy is different for different people, but usually it consists of only giving as much as you freely want to with no conditions.

Now, if we are giving too much, ie our boundaries are too loose, then our energy is likely to become depleted.  The end result of this is chronic fatigue.  I've worked with people who have lost their spark, they've lost their enthusiasm for life and they don't have motivation for even the fun stuff.

However, if we wall ourselves off from the world, only letting people in with a signed invitation in triplicate, then our hearts become closed and this will not only cause us to become isolated, but can also eventually lead to health problems.  We are naturally sociable beings, so if we're closing up and going against our nature, there is probably some kind of trauma or stress underlying it.

It's hard to change our level of boundaries.  We may feel guilty about tightening up boundaries that were too loose.  We may feel that we're becoming a bad person for not giving as much of ourselves as we did before and this might be difficult to adjust to.  However, as long as you are firm about where you stand, people will usually respect you for being clear about things.  The trouble comes when people who are used to the "old" you, struggle with adapting to the "new" you.  But this is their problem.  The important ones will work it out.

It's also quite hard to open up and loosen tight boundaries.  This can feel quite vulnerable and can feel quite risky.  However, no-one is suggesting you have to open up in one go.  It might be easier to take little steps and test the response you get at each stage.  And it may be that it's not appropriate to open up the same amount with everyone.

Again, as with many of my other blogs, I will say that it's perfectly possible to do this adjustment by yourself, but if you're finding it difficult, then a therapist can often be of help.  It's not necessary in today's society to struggle alone.

So I hope this gives you some food for thought about boundaries and the effect of not setting them at a healthy level.

Don't Give Up

I went to a funeral last Friday.  Fortunately for me, it wasn't someone I was close to, but it touched me deeply and I was acutely aware of how much the family and close friends must be suffering to lose someone they loved in such a tragic way.  The woman, who wasn't much older than myself, committed suicide after a battle with bi-polar disorder.

As I said, I didn't know her well, and therefore wouldn't presume to talk about her case and her suffering, but it does raise the issue in general about how people suffer with these conditions and how often they, sadly, don't find the help they need to deal with them and embrace their lives again.

As well as the sadness and grief I felt today, I also felt anger.  I felt the tragedy that, in today's society, people still aren't aware enough of these issues to be able to help those that suffer.   But I realise that a part of the problem with mental illness is that it's very difficult to understand what someone is going through unless you've gone through a similar situation yourself.

How can you know how someone can reach the point where they wish to take their own life if you've never felt that low?  How can you understand the bleakness that overtakes everything?  How can you even begin to imagine how someone who is well loved would think that their family would be better off without them?  How can you believe that every bit of hope has gone from them, that they don't believe things will ever get better?

Luckily for me in my story, I never lost hope, even if at times it was only a small glimmer.   The vicar at the funeral today read out a quote from Anne Frank -"Where there's hope, there's life".  And I truly believe that hope is what keeps people alive when they are in the depths of their suffering.

But as well as hope there needs to be professional support.  I know that the help I provide isn't mainstream, and I would never profess to be able to cure people of anything.  However myself and other such health professionals can provide help to ease the emotional suffering people go through.  Kinesiology and homeopathy helped me when I was going through my depression and I wouldn't be where I am today without them.

I have no issue with people who prefer to go down the mainstream route of medication but, please know that if whatever you are doing isn't working, whether mainstream or alternative, there are other options.  There are many therapies and treatments out there.  If one therapist isn't helping, try another one.  If one modality doesn't resonate with you, please try a different one.  If what was helping, stops helping, it may be time to change to something else.  Whatever happens, please don't suffer alone and please don't ever lose hope.

I know what I went through with my own depression.  I know the emotional pain I suffered. I remember countless times when I phoned my homeopath in hysteria, not knowing what to do with myself.  I remember the times I’d lie in my bed in unbearable emotional agony, not being able to find any relief. 

Back then, I didn't feel I could talk about any of this.  At the time I felt that I was probably over-reacting, or I was being weak and crap.  Because I never received a proper diagnosis of my condition,  I often questioned whether I actually had one. 

So I did the opposite, I tried to hide it.  I tried to present a positive, together front for the world.  I tried to be OK.  And because I lived alone and I was OK for a lot of the time, it worked pretty well.  I expect very few people, know what I went through.

I still find it hard to talk about this now, but this isn't about me.  I’m sure many people have gone through what I went through and suffered alone too.  This is about encouraging people to get help.  This is about encouraging people not to give up when things seem so bleak you can't see the light at the end of the tunnel.  This is about trying to prevent the suffering people go through when one person feels they have no alternative but to give up.

So please, if you or anyone you know is suffering from emotional pain of any kind, please seek help and know that you don't have to go through this alone.

The Importance of Our Relationship with Mum and Dad

The relationship we have (or had, if they have passed on) with our parents is the most important and fundamental one we'll ever have.  And I'm going to explain just why this is.

Love them or hate them, they are the people who will have influenced us the most in our life.  They are usually the first people we bond with. Or if, for whatever reason, they aren't, that is also significant.  They are the people who teach us about the world.  When we are born we have no frame of reference for how to survive on planet earth.  We scream when our needs aren't met and we sleep - that is it. Our parents teach us values and ways of behaving which they believe will stand us in good stead as we get older and have to survive on our own.

They do this with the best of intentions, but inevitably they will project their own stuff on to us.  They have to do this - it's not possible to explain to a 2 year old that there are "different ways of responding according to our personal truth".

Up until puberty, we tend to lap up our parents' teachings (unless there was some kind of abuse).  Once we hit puberty, we start to find our own individuality and this is where we push against our parents' rules.  This is necessary in order to become our own person, but it is also necessary for parents to hold the boundaries to keep us safe.  As with most things, it becomes about finding a balance and renegotiating this throughout the teenage years.

If this period of time goes smoothly (or as smoothly as anything can go when it's accompanied by buckets of hormones), we come out the other side as an adult and our relationship with our parents will have moved to become a more adult-adult relationship rather then the parent-child relationship or our younger years.

However, often things don't work out quite like that and we're left with relationship problems with our parents.  As adults, we start to see our parents' weaknesses - let's face it, none of us are perfect.  We start to identify our own values and realise how much they differ from those of our parents.  If we're still a teenager or only just out of those years, we can believe that we're right and they are wrong.  And this can continue until we resolve it.

The other thing that can happen is that we don't grow up from the parent-child relationship into the adult-adult relationship.  Sometimes this is down to the parents still treating us like a child and other times it's the child still playing out the same role because they don't know how to change or it feels unsafe to change.  Either way, this will have a massive impact on the way we see ourselves and how we behave in the rest of our life.

Regardless of how we see our relationship with our parents, that relationship will impact the way we relate to other people.  Broadly speaking, our relationship with Mum shapes our relationship with women and our relationship with Dad shapes our relationship with men.  The most obvious relationships it affects are those with a romantic partner and our children, but it will have an effect on other relationships too.

We tend to look for romantic partners who either have characteristics we liked in our parents or have the opposite characteristics of those we have issue with.  Note, I say "have issue" rather than dislike, as often we reject something which is only the symptom of an issue.  This is often what we see when young adults go out with "rebel" boyfriends or girlfriends.  If they are rebelling against the rules of their parents, a romantic partner who doesn't seem to live by rules can seem very attractive, even if deep down they like stability and predictability in their lives.

Then when we have children and we have to find a way to parent, out comes the first manual we have experience of - the manual of Mum and Dad.  On instinct, we behave the same way unless we've consciously made a decision to do something different.  The major things will be easy to change because they are the significant ones.  It's the little things we tend to do the same.  How often do you hear women say with a groan, "I'm turning into my Mum".  I'm sure men find the same thing with their Dads.

Now, this is not necessarily a bad thing if we've resolved any issues in our relationships with Mum and Dad.  If we can openly feel the love for our parents and appreciate them for all their good qualities, then turning into a version of them as we get older might not seem such a terrible thing.  But if we haven't resolve the relationships, then this might seem an awful thing.

The good news is that, like everything, our relationships can be healed.  Our parents were usually doing their best, even if we feel that the best wasn't very good.  Maybe they were coming from a dysfunctional relationship with their own parents, or were trying to adjust to society's rules of the time.  

By healing the relationships, we free us up to not only have a better relationship with Mum and Dad, but also to have better relationships with others.  Our self worth will rise and we will start to attract people on a more equal basis.   We will start to be more comfortable with who we are and we will present that to the world, rather than a mask of how we feel we ought to behave.  

And finally, we usually out-live our parents, so if you want to have a better relationship with them, start looking at healing it sooner rather than later, because once they have gone, although the relationship can still be healed, you may find you have regrets that you weren't able to share it with them.

2 + 2 = 5 Syndrome

This is a term I use to explain what we do when we make connections that end up limiting us in our lives.

Often these connections come from a stressful situation. Eg if someone harshly takes the piss out of me when I tell a joke, then I might learn that it is never safe to tell jokes.  Whereas there might be times when it isn't safe, or a good idea to tell them, it's hardly true that it is never safe.  Hence the title of this blog 2+2=5.  We over connect and come up with conclusions that aren't really true.

We would normally know that these things aren't linked.  However when we are either very young, or we encounter a situation that stresses us, we react from a different part of our brain and we can easily make these links.

We do this to protect ourselves.  It comes from the flight or fight response.  If, back in stone age times, we saw someone attacked by a wild animal, then when we see that type of animal again, we run before it gets near us.  We learn that the wild animal will harm us and that knowledge keeps us safe.

Nowadays, we don't usually encounter dangers of this type, but we've retained the mechanism for making connections.

I often treat clients who seem to think they shouldn't have made these connections, as it somehow means they weren't being very smart, but actually the opposite is true.  The more intelligent we are, the better we are at making connections, and the more likely we are to make these kind of connections when under extreme stress.

The good news is that all these connections can be taken apart at a any stage when they are no longer serving us - either with the help of a therapist, or just with good self-awareness.

Projection - What Picture Are We Creating?

I have been motivated to write about this by some comments on a Facebook status.  So often I find these discussions that show up really interesting food for thought.

The post started off with the following picture:

We often find ourselves in situations where we don't feel we're getting a great response from people. Sometimes that will happen, but how we respond to it makes a big difference.

So, firstly we need to acknowledge that we often have a desired outcome to our communication.  For example, if I said "hello" to someone, I would probably expect them to say "hello" back.  If they said "yellow" back, it would somewhat confuse me.

So the next stage would probably be for me to ask myself why they've said that.  They may be trying to be funny.  They may have misheard what I said and "yellow" might be a completely valid response to what they thought they heard.  They might have some kind of learning disability which causes them to respond in an unusual manner.  Or some other options.


So, what most people do in this situation, usually unconsciously, is ask themselves why they might have responded to a "hello" with "yellow".  This means we've missed the option of mishearing because we've already assumed the initial message got through.  We also may make other assumptions which continue to narrow down the options we get.

Maybe we decide that there is no way we'd respond in that way because to us it isn't funny, it isn't clever and it doesn't make sense.  Therefore if we were to respond that way, we would be being extremely rude.

We then project this onto the other person and deduce that they must have been being rude to us.

Then we have an area for possible conflict, especially if the other person projects back onto us their assumptions.  In a more serious example than the one above, it could escalate into a massive falling out.

People can often mis-hear of mis-understand us, or we can with them.  What might seem like a perfectly reasonable statement when it leaves the sender can be received in a very different way.

People have different values.  What might seem rude or offensive to one person, might not even register on the radar of etiquette for someone else.  This can be particularly relevant where there are cultural differences. but it's best not to assume that a similar culture means similar values.

I've found that people very rarely intend to offend.  We want harmonious relationships in our lives.  However, if we mistake our projected meaning for a correct interpretation, we are unlikely to give the other person the chance to explain or make amends.

So what is the solution to all this?  It comes down to awareness, as does so much in life.  If someone's response seems strange, consider there may be an alternative reason to the one that seems to be glaring us in the face.  The key is to catch yourself and break the unconscious pattern.  Once you realise you may be projecting, you can consider other possible reasons for their response.  The best way of resolving the situation is to ask the person what they meant by their response.  Clear, honest and open communication can go a long way to clear up misunderstandings.

So next time you feel uncomfortable, consider whether you are projecting your beliefs onto the situation.

An Inspirational Film

I went to see a film - The Dalai Lama Awakening - at The Wellbeing Centre yesterday evening.  I have to admit I was partially drawn to it because there would be interviews with the Dalai Lama himself and I am a massive admirer.

However, it was much more than that.  It was a documentary about a journey of transformation of 40 of the "big thinkers" of the world as they met with the Dalai Lama to try and solve some of the world's problems.

They came together, as you may expect, with a process, which they hoped would help them produce a plan.  There were many different types of people, each with their own ideas and inevitably the process broke down.  But what came out of the trip for each of them was a personal transformation - an opening of their hearts and a calming of the ego.

The message that came out of the film was "change the world by changing yourself".

This resonates with me because this is what I've been working on with myself on my journey.  "Be the change you want to see in the world" is how I remember it (originally said by Ghandi), but it all starts with ourselves.

In my sessions with clients, I talk to people about how we can't change those around us, only ourselves.  However, this will still make a difference as when we change, those around us change towards us.

The other key thing I learnt is the value and implication of compassion.  Now, I realise the value of it already, but not always the implication of practising it.  The film briefly touched on the Tibet issue and someone suggested imposing sanctions on China.  However after consideration, the Dalai Lama voiced concerns over how that would affect the people of China, most of whom are not guilty of oppressing anyone, and hence how compassionate it would be.

I will try to be more aware of the greater effect of my decisions.

I have to say it was an inspiring evening and a real pleasure to meet the director who's touring with the film at the moment.

If you get the chance to see it, I'd recommend going.