Kaspa

Goal-less therapy ~ goal-less life

We’ve just adopted new puppy. She’s been home for nine days and when she first arrived she spent her time either being completely awake and very lively, or completely conked out. She’s desperately cute, and we’re sleep deprived.

As anyone who has a new puppy knows, when they come home what used to be ordinary life goes out of the window.

This disruption of our ordinary schedules made me think about my attachment to plans and outcomes.

There are times when I want to be quiet and she wants to play. There I times when I want to work and she wants to play. There are times when I’m ready to play, or go out and show her the world and she is flopped over on one side and fast asleep.

We’re slowly getting to know each other’s needs and routines, and I’m learning how completely her needs cut across my plan for the day. How used to following my own agenda I’d become!

In my life I have plenty of aims and objectives: things like some writing in the morning, lunch at lunchtime, a nap in the afternoon, and a few clients each day.

In my work with clients I aim to be completely agenda-less.

When I investigate that intention more deeply I find that it isn’t completely true. My agenda is to keep my clients best interests at heart without really knowing what that looks like.

I have a general sense that healing trauma is a good thing to do. So that’s an agenda. I also know that what healing looks like is different for each person, and that healing needs to happen in the clients’ time — not in my time.

So there is an aim, and there is aimlessness. Aimlessness is often considered a negative thing in today’s world. But the aimlessness that I’m talking about includes paying attention, keeping curious and staying warm towards the client.

It’s easier to do this with clients than in my own life. With clients I have an agreed plan of when and where to meet, and for how long, and for that time my own aims and agendas can be put down. Most of the time, anyway. When my needs do make themselves known in a session I can ask them to wait until later when I can attend to them…

…and that can become useful information in the therapy process. Maybe I’ll write another article about working relationally that dives a little deeper into that another time.

My life isn’t bounded in the way a therapy session is, and sometimes I really want to do things my way. However most of the time it’s probably good for me to bring this kind of aimlessness into my own life as well — can I have the best of intentions for myself and the puppy, and everyone else —and let go of knowing what that looks like?

This letting go of knowing requires a little faith. It requires trust in something beyond my own selfish needs.

Buddhism calls this the unconditioned. Other faiths and philosophies have different names. Julien of Norwich said, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

So what is the goal of goal-less therapy? To enter into trusting that all shall be well, without knowing what that looks like, and to trust that coming into closer more compassionate relationship with ourselves is healing, without knowing where that healing may lead.

And the goal of a goal-less life? The same.

The power of working outside

“When I see how the strawberry plants have grown and spread themselves all across the veg. patch, I am reminded that the Chinese character for nature means something like ‘self-managing’. The natural world manages just fine without us. Our minds are often like this too – when we relax, the healing process begins to unfold of its own accord.”

Read more in my Counselling Directory article: The Power of Working Outside

Working with Internal Family Systems

I’ve written an article about IFS that’s been published on the Counselling Directory website. Check it out here: Working with Internal Family Systems

Is online therapy for me?

I’ve just published a new article on the counselling directory website: is online therapy for me?

Asking for help

Change for the better rarely comes from within. Left to our own devices we tend to go around in circles, thinking the same old thoughts, repeating the same old actions. We may be so stuck in these loops that we just think, “This is who I am.”

Thankfully we don’t exist in isolation, otherwise we’d be stuck.

When I think of the times when I have changed for the better in my own life, there has always been something from the outside that has made the difference.

Sometimes it was that I was deeply listened to and felt understood, and in that understanding I was able to put down a burden.

Sometimes it was that the consequences of my own foolish actions shouted so loudly I was jolted out of my usual habit patterns and into something different – into asking myself what have I done, and what could I have done differently.

When I look back across my life it is often the most difficult times that have been the greatest teachers.

Sometimes change came from taking myself to another place. When we are surrounded by the same people, the same things, and the same views, it is harder to get out of our stuck patterns.

Once I was struggling with something a friend had done and I couldn’t shake my frustration. I took this frustration walking in the hills. It was the beginning of summer and a butterfly landed on the path in front of me. At first I didn’t notice it. As my loud footsteps got nearer it flew away, just for a moment, before coming to land on the path again. This time I noticed. My friend was as fragile as this butterfly I realised, and my heart softened.

Sometimes changing our community can support healthy growth. My friends in recovery usually have to keep their distance from friends still in active addiction, for example. This kind of move on its own is not always enough and usually has to be alongside some personal reflection if it has any chance of lasting.

Asking for help from another person is one of the most powerful conditions for change, particularly if you can find someone who is not invested in any particular outcome for you, and can listen, understand and be a mirror for you.

What stops us from asking for help?

The first step is admitting that there is something we need help with. Perhaps we get a clue from how we, or from seeing the consequences of our actions but not knowing how to change them, or perhaps from other people letting us know.

We usually get stuck in the same old patterns because there is some underlying fear about what might happen if we were to do something differently. Finding someone you trust can support you to change even though change can be scary.

We may believe that it’s weak to ask for help. If we notice ourselves thinking this, or something like this, we can ask if it’s really true, or remind ourselves of where not asking for help has got us.

Places to go for help:

Ask a friend or family member
Reach out to the Samaritans hotline: 116 123
Talk to your GP
Join a supportive community
Book an appointment a therapist

If we can overcome our resistance to asking for help we are doing one of things that is most supportive of change, growth and wellbeing.

This article first appeared in All About Malvern

To sit in a place

Silhouettes 1 by Randi Hauksen. Shared under a Creative Commons License

In preparation for the Wild Therapy training I am taking this year, we have been invited to find an outside place, and to sit in it for ten to fifteen minutes every day.

Our temple – my home – sits halfway up the Malvern Hills. Our garden is tiered. On the top tier is our veg patch. The next tier is down a sloping grass path, alongside the high stone wall that holds the first one in place.

In this stone wall is an archway. Some kind of old storage place, perhaps? It goes a few feet back into the earth, a man-made cave. This is my sitting place.

This morning I noticed the cold edge of the cast iron chair against my leg. I spied a hazel catkin shaking in the wind. I noticed how quickly the clouds above me were moving, and how still the grey sky above the horizon seemed.

A pair of bullfinches was singing high up in the bare branches of a tree that I don’t know the name of. Every now and again I would see the bright flash of the males red chest.

Three dark crows joined them in the same tree. Off to one side, hidden in the holly, a blackbird was singing.

In the distance, two small birds danced in flight, shadows against the sky. Swifts, I thought at first and then later I saw two long tailed tits and wondered if that’s who I’d seeing diving and leaping earlier.

I could see our three stands of bamboo, gold, black and something else, waving without pattern in the growing wind.

Sitting like this is not a new practice for me, although going to the same place every day is. A week or so in to the practice and each day has been different. A few days ago it was snowing. Yesterday morning the pond was frozen. This morning the pond had thawed and I could see into its depths.

In the past I might have taken a notebook with me, to record what I was seeing, either in the world or in my inner processes. It has been nice to leave the book behind and just sit.

The world goes on under its power each day. All of that life goes on doing its thing whether I am sitting in the cold chair watching it or not. And my own life goes on as well of course, whether the birds are noticing me or busy with their own lives.

There are patterns, and nothing is predictable. The seasons come and go and each day’s weather is unique.

I find a great solace in watching it all unfold. For me, there is a great healing in connecting with the natural world. We are animals, of course, and creatures of the wild, even though we have created a world of order around us. I have a great trust in the power of returning to our place as one small voice in the always playing, never repeating, song of life.

We all have many inner voices

We all have different parts. There’s a part that wants to go to work, and a part that wants to stay in bed. There’s a part that wants that extra donut, and a part that doesn’t, and maybe a part that is already regretting having the first one.

We have conversations with ourselves just like the ones in this trailer for Pixar’s Inside Out:

The movie’s a pretty good place to start imagining how it is to be human. In the heads’ of the characters in Inside Out there are different emotional parts: sadness, anger, joy etc. Does anyone else remember The Numbskulls? It was a comic strip here in the UK with a similar idea, but with a different spin. In The Numbskulls there was a brain part, and ear part, an eye part and so on.

Some scientists recognise the modularity of the brain and traditional cultures speak of different parts, whether it’s having several souls, or the shamanistic work of retrieving cut off parts of a person. In their e-book Many Minds, One Self Richard C. Schwartz and Robert R. Falconer explore how different cultures and scientific models make sense of this idea that we are all made of parts.

Richard Schwartz is the creator of Internal Family Systems, or IFS, a therapeutic model based on working with parts. I’m studying his work at the moment, through his books and through some online seminars I’ve signed up to.

I’ve always worked with different parts of people in my therapy practice. For example, having different parts in conflict with each other is a common reason people come to counselling. I’m used to getting to know the different parts of a person, without judgement. Listening to what the voices have to say and learning from them can offer a way forward.

Learning about IFS has refined my ‘parts work’.

In the IFS model there can be many different parts, and some of those parts might feel the same emotion, but be triggered or active at different times. So it’s a little more complex than Inside Out suggests. The part that’s frustrated when I can’t complete a work assignment is different to the part that’s frustrated when I overeat, for example; both frustration, but both with different stories to tell.

Schwartz suggests that as well as different parts within each of us there is a place that is curious, calm and compassionate. If you have practised mindfulness meditation you might have found this place within yourself – the place from where you can see yourself and others without judgement. This ‘parts free zone’ is called the ‘self’ in IFS terminology. IFS therapy invites each of us towards this place, so that we can learn from our own parts and allow any wounded parts to heal.

It’s a powerful model, and as someone who has spent a decent amount of time watching my own processes, it makes intuitive sense to me.

If you want to learn more I’d suggest starting with Tom Holmes book Parts Work. Or come along to a therapy session with me and begin the process of getting to know your different parts, and healing the parts that need healing.

Coming out as a Body Psychotherapist

Over the last few weeks, until just recently, I’ve been experiencing some nervousness. Towards the end of last year I started getting ready to advertise as a body psychotherapist.

Why the nerves? There aren’t so many body psychotherapists around. Is it a strange thing to do, I wondered? Will people still want to come and see me or not?

A couple of days ago I added the words body psychotherapist to my advert that goes out in a local magazine and I felt better immediately. The nervousness disappeared and I began to look forward to welcoming clients who are interested in including the body in psychotherapy.

Why do I love including the body in psychotherapy? Our bodies have their own languages of feeling and processing emotion and experience.

In fact – despite only just beginning to advertise — I’ve been working in this way for a while. What does this kind of work look like?

It might be that we spend just a few moments with body experience before returning to speaking and listening. For example a client notices that they are clenching their fists, I invite them to do that more strongly and then a memory appears, or a worry, or something that needs letting go, and we talk about that.

It might be that we spend a little longer with body experience. A client and I notice they always hunch over when talking about their boss, for example. What does it feel like to hunch over like that? I wonder? How is it to hunch over more, or less?

It might be that we don’t mention the body or physical sensation at all, but that my being tuned into my own body and having some awareness of how a client is sitting or moving allows me to have more empathy for them.

This work fits so well with my mindfulness practice. Mindfulness allows us to meet ourselves from a place of curiosity and without judgement – noticing thoughts, feelings and sensation in the body. Body psychotherapy is the same, but with someone alongside you, creating the conditions the enable this kind of exploration.

Tuning into the body is like changing the channel, it can show us things we might not otherwise see, and as a channel that is often under used it’s one that I’m interested in. Of course I still use all of the other channels with my clients: words, feelings, dreams and images and so on.

The actual qualification I am about to get is in Embodied Relational Therapy. I could have put this on the print advertisement but I wasn’t sure anyone would know what it meant. I might write about what ERT means in more detail another time, but what I’ve said above gives a pretty good flavour.

I have spaces available now for new clients. Get in touch to book an initial session.

email kaspa@kaspathompson.co.uk or call 07946 715 730

Surviving Christmas and the New Year

We are moving through the longest nights. What happens at this time of year? In the run up to the longest night we put up our decorations and lights, go to parties and come together as happy families at Christmas time. Or we see others doing that and our own attempt to hold off the dark fails — the winter can be a difficult time of year. More likely we are somewhere in between, with good days and bad days: Holding off the dark with celebrations and light on some days, and other days our mood slipping into something gloomier.

What helps?

It helps to know that feelings come and go. The more deeply we examine our feelings the more obvious it becomes that they are always shifting and changing, even in small ways. When I used to fall into an awful mood one of the worst things was imagining that it would last forever – but when I really examined the evidence? What a revelation. Trusting that things will shift and change has been a comfort for me, personally, in darker times.

It helps to trust that it’s good to do good things, even if they don’t bring results straight away. Your good things will be different to my good things, but for me good things are getting outside, getting up and moving my body somehow, and making wise choices about what I eat, I read and watch. These may not lift you from the worst of moods straight away, but taking care of yourself and others is good to do regardless, and I trust that it helps lay down the conditions for better moods in the future.

As the nights become shorter, and the days become longer and we move past Christmas and into the New Year we move away from parties and to new projects and new resolutions, and the adverts on our TVs and in our magazines change from selling rich sugary foods to selling diets.

Sometimes we get a rush of new energy and plough that into the New Year, lifting ourselves up from where we were before. Sometimes we see all of those advertisements and articles about New Year’s resolutions and become disheartened as we quickly fall into old habits or discover that we don’t have any energy even to start to change.

What helps?

The same kind of things: knowing that feelings come and go, trusting that it’s good to do good things and — importantly — being realistic. There’s no point setting yourself a list of ten great things to do if you only manage a few and then become so disappointed it triggers apathy and feeling terrible. It’s much better to set a few goals that you can meet, and celebrate meeting them.

Sometimes it feels like change isn’t coming, or that the roots of disappointment run deeply. I encourage you to reach out get support. We can feel ashamed of asking for help — but the truth is no one does it on their own, and we all need to lean on other people, sometimes. Call a friend, book an appointment with a therapistor talk to a family member.

The winter can be a wonderful time of year. I’m writing this at the tail end of autumn, there are a few golden leaves left on the trees and the sun is shining brightly. Later on I’ll make a pot of soup, and I’m looking forward to seeing friends later in the week.

I trust that there will be good days, and less good days,and that it’s possible to move gracefully through them all.

If you’d like a little extra support – book a counselling session, or a mindfulness one-to-one with me, and we can explore how things are for you and how to move forward.

A version of this article appeared in All About Malvern

Autumn and Winter Well-being

This month I was asked to write about coping with the disappearing sun, for our local magazine All About Malvern. This is the article I wrote:

Worcester has disappeared into the mist that is sitting in the Severn Valley. The garden is damp from a wave of rain that passed over the hills. Soon, the sun will dip under the horizon and the dark night will come.

I’m writing this in early September, and it’s not quite evening. The days have been getting noticeably shorter recently, and I am reminded of winter days in my youth when I would walk to work in the dark, walk home in the dark and spend the day longing for natural light rather than the fluorescent glow of the department store I was working in.

As summer draws to a close I also find myself remembering those first days of sunshine this year, after the long snowy winter. The sprits of the whole town seemed to lift when the bright weather arrived.

What can we do to stay happy as the hours of light become less, the temperature cools, and the clouds roll in?

Hygge

Lots of you will have heard of Hygge. Pronounced Hue-guh, this is a Danish word that means something like cosiness. When interviewed by the BBC Susanne Nilson said, “Hygge could be families and friends getting together for a meal, with the lighting dimmed, or it could be time spent on your own reading a good book.”

Maybe we can think of Hygge as creating conditions that help us to relax: Lighting candles, or sitting around a fire (inside or outside), creating a winter evening playlist that slowly gets more and more chilled, or sharing a good meal with friends.

Getting outside

As Arthur Wainwright famously said, “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing.” Getting outside means getting vitamin D. It means moving the body, and it means you’re more likely to look at trees. All of these things are really good for you. In cold damp weather I pften feel reluctant to go up onto the hills, but every time I do I feel better afterwards.

Eating well

This summer I’ve been enjoying lots of wonderful salads and Buddha bowls for lunch. Our veg. patch needed plenty of watering but the results were amazing, and it’s been great to go outside pick something and have it on my plate minutes later. Now the earth is turning different things are coming into season, and I’ll be enjoying homemade soups with squash, leeks and other winter goodies.

Sometimes – particularly when I’m on my own – cooking can seem like a chore. But when I eat good food I always feel better.

Community

Maybe it feels easier to meet people when the weather is good, and easier to stay at home on your own on cold dark nights. But we are social beings. We each like different amounts of company, but some company is good for the soul, so host a dinner party, meet a friend for a coffee, or join a book club.

Plan something you enjoy

If the thought of a long dark winter really does lower your mood then make sure you plan some bright spots. Make a date with yourself, or a friend, and put it in your diary. Having something to look forward to in the future can make you feel better right now.

As the weather changes, and the light changes, it can be easy to fall into wishing for the autumn and winter to already be over. All of the suggestions I’ve made today are based on accepting the reality of what is, and finding ways of appreciating and making the most of what is happening right now.

Whether you are a cold weather person or a hot weather person, I hope you have an easy and enjoyable autumn and winter.