Another brilliant article written by my friend Hazel Gale
There are moments in life when it seems as if time has slowed down just to allow everything to fall into place.
The flawless presentation;
The winning sports performance;
The date when effortless conversation simply flows…
These are the times when we can feel at our most powerful. That we’re in control. That anything is possible.
But what are we most likely to attribute these occurrences to? Is it fate? Are these the lucky days when the stars align? Or are these actually the occasions when we’re able, somehow, to mindfully select our reactions and govern our behaviour with autonomy? The latter certainly sounds the most enticing, but it can be hard to believe wholeheartedly.
We live in a world that conditions us to perceive control as something that exists outside of ourselves. We are taught to do this from an early age by the family dynamic within which we must automatically begin by taking a few orders. And also by a consumerist society that profits from our fear, angst and worry.
Hundreds of billions of pounds are spent every year by people who seek the solution to their various ailments in the form of a magic pill or miracle product. When something is wrong we automatically turn to the teacher/therapist/doctor/priest/guru/
cultural leader/shopping channel… The last place we think to look for the answer is within.
But therapy is a thing that strives to enable people to reclaim some of this power. To help a person to feel comfortable with themselves, that locus of control has to shift to the inside. Only then can we feel empowered, present, autonomous and happy. Only then can we really start to enjoy those wonderful moments of flow.
To have an internal locus of control means that we can realise that we are the only ones capable of determining our reaction to our environment. It means, ultimately, that we can choose our emotions. Of course, it also means that we must forgo the tempting (but often short-lived) sense of vindication that comes from blaming The Other for our failures.
Interestingly, if you look at the evolution of therapy itself over the last few decades, you’ll see a similar trend playing out. In the midst of the 80’s capitalist boom, a culture started to emerge where a weekly trip to the couch became something of a status symbol. The old stigma fell away and suddenly power-dressing businessmen and women started discussing their sessions of psychoanalysis over their dry martinis. This type of culture fed the ego of the individual (“it’s all about me”), but simultaneously it conveyed the message that these people were dependent on their therapists in order to feel OK.
Since then therapy has begun to grow into something quite different. It’s getting briefer and more solution-focused, and the onus appears to be shifting from the therapist to the client. Popular styles like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy involve the individual doing a considerable amount of work by themselves, and “personal-development” has gone from sounding like pie in the sky thinking to a perfectly respectable endeavour. So much so that self-help books, over the last few years, have been upgraded from flimsy paperbacks to glossy, hardback bestsellers.
A few years ago I started reading about the benefits of Expressive Writing: a therapeutic form of journaling. To me this concept was like a revelation. It seems that just the act of writing about our traumatic memories — freely and without criticism — can cause us to reprocess them. It’s as if putting our thoughts into discrete sentences, with capital letters at the beginning and full stops at the end, can enable us to counter the negative messages exposed.
I wondered how much more effective Expressive Writing could be if combined with the analytical questioning and cognitive reframing that can happen in a (modern) one-to-one therapy session. I formulated some written processes that follow the pattern of powerful therapeutic interventions while encouraging this kind of free-flowing emotional writing. These have since grown into an online course.
My initial motivation was to provide help for those people who can’t (or won’t) talk to another human being about their problems. But as the feedback started to come in I quickly realised this wasn’t just a second best option for people who don’t have access to private therapy.
The changes participants are managing to make over just a few weeks of introspection are surprisingly pronounced. Some people have reduced their anxiety/depression symptoms from as high as 95% down to 14% (measured using GAD-7 and PHQ-9 forms) without any input from me at all. This is extremely exciting.
I think that it’s because self-help processes like this actively foster our sense of autonomy that people can achieve such rapid success. Communicating the information via written and recorded material rather than in person minimises the feeling of consulting an authority, and so the person making those changes is given no other option but to take the credit for themselves.
The irony is that this is what should be going on whenever success is made via any therapy style. The power of the expert is just an illusion, change can only come from the subject. I believe that it’s the mentality inspired by our hierarchical society that tempts people to hand their rightful sense of accomplishment over to someone else. And I’d argue that many people’s need to seek therapy in the first place is probably a result of that same disempowered state of mind.
And so, whether they do so by committing to a self-development program, or through meditation, or just by genuinely congratulating themselves for making changes in private therapy, maybe those who choose to take these affirmative steps towards self-empowerment are really making a kind of rebellious statement. Perhaps the recent ascension of self-healing approaches like mindfulness meditation, and the explosion of the self-help industry speaks of more than just a wounded populous. Perhaps it’s the makings of a psychological revolution.
Hazel is a Cognitive hypnotherapist, mental coach and world champion athlete. http://www.hazelgale.co.uk
Source: Hazel Gale
https://medium.com/personal-growth/reclaiming-the-self-bb68e20dcbb0#.tex1k04s4
No comments:
Post a Comment