It’s that time of year again. We’re just in to the second week of January and many of us will have broken our New Year’s resolutions already. What’s going on, and how can we really change?

The New Year is often a time for reflection and contemplation. We look at the past year, celebrate some things and feel regret about others. We imagine some ideal self that we would like to be, and aim ourselves towards it, making promises and resolutions.

I’ll go the gym more, I’ll eat a better diet, I’ll phone my mum more often, I’ll be kinder to myself and so on and so forth.

I have a rule of thumb for myself: If it takes a small push — go for it; if it takes a big push — think again.

Why are some changes easier than others?

We are made up of a whole mix of different habit patterns and impulses. Some parts of us see the downside of old behaviours and are desperate to change. At the same time those old patterns of behaviour think they have very good reasons to keep doing what they are doing.

Internal Family Systems teaches us that whilst some parts of us might produce harmful and unhelpful effects in the short and/or long term; those parts are convinced that they have our best interests at heart.

For example, part of us wants to do more exercise in the New Year. Another part baulks at the idea and instead of going to the gym we find ourselves pulling into a fast food drive through, or into the car park of our favourite shop, or simply not leaving the house.

We’re convinced that more exercise would be good for us and yet over and over again we find we just can’t do it.

Those slightly hidden parts that are keeping us away from the gym are sure they are doing the right thing? What’s going on?

Perhaps somewhere hidden deep inside there is a part of us holding a wound around exercise. Maybe some shaming in P.E. at school, for example. Our young system learnt that the way to avoid that experience was to stay away, and those stay away parts have been busy keeping us safe ever since.

Of course the ‘stay away’ parts don’t want us to go to the gym, whilst we’re there, they think, we might get shamed again. And then the New Year comes along and we say that we are going to push past all of that so called resistance and just do it! To those parts protecting us from being shamed this feels like a great threat, so of course they push back even harder, and we find ourselves back at square one.

So what can we do?

The way forward is to respect all the different parts of our system: to respect both the impulse to change, and the protective parts that want to avoid change.

Sometimes simply noticing the protective parts is enough for them to begin to relax. We can remind them that we’re not at school any more, for example, and that we have different choices about how to respond if things do go wrong.

Sometimes we need to work with these parts a little more before they are willing to relax. This is when it’s helpful to get support from a therapist.

With your therapist alongside us we can get curious about these parts. Why are they doing what they are doing? How old do they think we are? What wounds are they protecting?

Sometimes there are just a few parts involved, and the process doesn’t take long. Sometimes there are more parts involved, or more powerful parts and we need to hang out with them for a while before they begin revealing themselves to us.

This is true for lifestyle changes like going to the gym, and it is true for addressing anxiety, depression and the effects of trauma.

When things aren’t changing as we would like it’s a sign that there are different parts involved, and the way forward is not to push through but to work with all of the parts. When all the parts involved are ready for change, then change will appear.

We come to therapy when we want to change. Sometimes we are desperate to change, and that urgency makes complete sense; we feel awful and we want to feel better, or we can see the downsides of our moods and habits and are worried about getting into more trouble.

If our whole system was ready to change, we would have already changed and we wouldn’t need to be in therapy. We are a mixture of feelings and habits – we all have many different aspects. We come into therapy and some parts of us want us to change, and some parts of us are afraid of change.

Read the full article on the Counselling Directory Website: We Have to go Slow to go Fast

I’ve just returned to personal therapy. I’m confident this is a good thing for my clients, as well as for me personally.

Being a client reminds me how it is for my own clients to be in therapy. How strange it is to come to a first session, and the nerves that come with imagining sharing the deepest parts of ourselves. How vulnerable we become.

Being a client supports me to have more empathy and understanding towards the various parts of myself, on more and more subtle levels, and this self-empathy increases my capacity to empathise and be with my clients and what they are bringing.

Being a client reminds me that we are all in the same boat. I know how it is to be wounded and to have fears and triggers. As a therapist I’m not working from a place of, “I’m all sorted” but from, “I know how it is to be human, and to support other humans like me”.

Being a client means that I am getting support for my own fears and triggers, and when my own wounded parts feel taken care of it’s much easier for me to take care of my clients, and what they are bringing to sessions.

I’m half-way through my training in Wild Therapy. You may have seen me writing about the power of working outside before (here and here). We work outside a lot on the Wild Therapy training, but it isn’t the whole story. As well as appreciating and coming into relationship with the wild out there, Wild Therapy is also about coming to appreciate the wild inside: Wild Mind.

Let’s start with a definition of wildness.

I like that one of the Chinese characters for nature means something like ‘self-leading’: left alone the natural world takes care of its needs.

A rainforest is a good example of a wild eco-system. There are many different elements that exist in relationship to one another, birds, animals, insects and trees. Some of these live off one another, but the whole system is in balance. Populations find ways of existing alongside one another without one element taking control of the whole forest.

There is no manager at the centre of the forest directing activity, and yet when all of these different elements come into good relationships with one another, something beautiful is produced.

I’m not using wildness to mean crazy, but complex, self-led and diverse. This is wildness as ecologists understand it.

How does that relate to inner wildness?

Our mind/body systems are made up of different parts. There is the sympathetic and para- sympathetic nervous system, other biological systems, and the mind itself which has many different aspects. Some aspects of the mind we are conscious of, and some which we are less conscious of. These different aspects motivate actions, and create different thoughts and feelings.

When all of these different parts are in good relationship to each other, we probably don’t notice them at all, and generally feel relaxed and at ease. When one part comes to dominate, or different parts develop oppositions to each other – we might start to notice the downsides.

An inner-critic might be predominate, for example, or the desire for quick change might be fighting with a part that wants things to stay just as they are.

One way of understanding why these parts take over so forcefully is that they have lost trust in the whole system – in the rainforest mind, so to speak.

So wild therapy is about restoring trust and it is about appreciating that there is a place for all of these different parts – that therapy is not about getting rid of anything but of bringing the whole system into balance.

Nothing gets thrown away, and ever parts finds its way into better relationships with the other parts, and them the whole system operates like a rainforest, like that Chinese word for nature ‘self-led’.

When we have a complete eco-system, a completely wild-mind, we don’t have to manage it, we don’t have to push ourselves or control ourselves, because naturally we engage in the world in a healthy, easy way.

Want to learn more? Listen to these episodes of my podcast, Rainforest Mind:

Rainforest Mind: Wild Therapy with Stephen Tame

Rainforest Mind: Embodied eco-spirituality with Allison Priestman

Going to Wild Places