Category: therapy

One thing you can do to improve your mental health

This is a piece about songlines, and about maps, and about one thing you can do to improve your mental health.

A couple of weeks ago I was walking through a valley on the edge of the Forest of Bowland. I crossed over the river Roeburn at the bottom of the valley, and the woodland opened out into a meadow. There were a few fruit trees here, and some wildflowers scattered through the grasses. Later in the woodland I was struck by the elm flowers on young elm trees, by the bluebells and by the ferns. Birdsong filled my ears, along with the buzzing sounds of bees, wasps and hoverflies.

I was following a human trail. It was crisscrossed with the trails of other animals — deer, I guess and maybe foxes and badgers.

Humans see in one range of colours, birds and animals in another, insects in another. My view of the forest is from nearly six feet above the ground, a badger’s view is just a few inches from the ground, and the smells are much more significant. All of our experiences of the forest are very different.

A badger’s map of the forest is very different to mine. I want to know where the fences and gates are, and which way the paths go. A badger’s map is about food, and sniffing out the territory of other animals.

Naturalist Charles Foster experimented with a badger’s map of the woods. He slept on the ground, wore a blindfold and learnt to recognise the different smells on the forest floor. Even then his map of the woods would have been subtly different, I’m sure.

And what of a tree’s map of the woods? What does a tree notice? They respond to the seasons, to chemicals that other trees emit, to stress…

Songlines are the songs handed down through Australian aboriginal communities that mark the journeys of the creator gods. The songs are maps, very different to our own, and vast tracts of Australia can be navigated using them. We all have different ways of seeing the world.

What has this got to do with mental health?

The more able we are able to appreciate that others have different experiences, and ways of seeing the world to our own, the more likely we are to have good mental health.

The more we can see that we are not at the centre of the world, the more likely we are to have good mental health.

Good mental health is about landing in reality, and reality is complex. The more we can appreciate that there are many (human and other than human) ways of experiencing the world, the more likely we are to have good mental health, and the more likely we are to behave in ways which are better for the whole plant. And behaving in ways which are good for the whole planet tends to support good mental health.

So that one thing you can do? Begin to appreciate the many different ways of seeing the world.

The magic ingredient of therapy

There are lots of wonderful techniques that we learnt in therapy training: different ways of reflecting what you have said, different ways of asking you questions and teasing out the issues that you bring to therapy, using feelings in the body, or using the natural world as a resource.

These are all great. And there is one special ingredient that makes a big difference as to whether these work or not. In fact if all you have is this special ingredient therapy can still be a powerful healing experience. What is this magic ingredient? It is the being-ness of the therapist. The aliveness.

Of course, I am a therapist, and I’m writing this on my own therapy site, and in some ways it seems audacious to talk about my own quality of beingness or aliveness. In this culture we are much better at being self-deprecating than we are at celebrating our good qualities. However, it’s such an important part of what heals and transforms that it would be remiss not to talk about it.

What is aliveness? It can manifest as relaxed spaciousness, or as vibrancy and energy. It is being alive to ourselves — noting the currents of our own moods and feelings; it is aliveness to the other — being able to make space for another person in a way that is free from judgment and responsive to their needs; and it is being alive to the world — taking part in events and meeting moments in a fearless way.

Ultimately it is what we come to therapy to receive.

We often come to therapy thinking about what we want to get rid of, rather than thinking about what we want to get from the experience in positive terms. We might want to move through grief, or find a way of getting out of depression, or reduce our anxiety. As we work on these issues in therapy our aliveness increases.

This has become even clearer to me as I spend time in groups with other therapists as part of my training. Looking back to my time in groups when I first trained, I can see that I often relied on my cleverness and on working things out. These are great qualities and the amount of calculating and working out that I was doing was restricting my relationships with others in the groups. Why? Because that calculating and working out was being used in the service of protecting me from my hidden fears about being in groups.

I’m grateful for that part of me, because it allowed me to be in those groups and learn things. And one of the things that I learnt was that it was enough to be myself. In fact it was more than enough: the more training I do and the more groups I take part in I keep learning that that the more I can be myself the more helpful to the group that is. When I am less fearful and more alive, the aliveness of the whole group increases.

The same is true in one to one therapy. The healing relationship comes from my depth of being myself, my lack of fear of my own feelings and my faith in the process —all of the more subtle qualities that I have receive from years of training, and from years of Buddhist practice.

When people come to me for therapy, I set an intention to be the most alive I can be, and I feel alive.

Come and see me for therapy and you will receive some of my fearlessness about being human, some of my faith in the value of us being ourselves, and some of my aliveness.

Book an initial session now.

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

The Importance of Being Yourself

You can hear a lot about selflessness in psychological and spiritual circles “just do what is needed for the other person” or “selflessness means putting your own feelings aside”.

There is a danger in all of this that we disappear. Not in the good way that the ‘extinguishing’ of nirvana implies, but that we hide ourselves away deep in the shadow because we don’t fit the image of spiritual behaviour that is vaunted in our communities.

We feel something negative, and quickly supress it and lock it away.

In Sunday school we used to sing, “Envy, jealousy, malice, pride – they must never in my heart abide.” I was having all of these feelings. There was no permission to feel them – so away they went. Slowly, I got smaller and smaller. But this was the smallness of a black hole, massively dense.

Where do these dangerous ideals come from? I think spiritually mature people often do put their own feelings to one side, they genuinely let go of resentment, if it arises at all. Dwelling in faith and gratitude they look like these descriptions of saints that are given to us.

I’m just not sure pretending to be a saint really works.

It doesn’t work for the person pretending because all of that supressed stuff has to come out sometime, somewhere. And it doesn’t work for the people around them because real spiritual maturity and personal growth comes out of being in relationship with a real person.

A person who is at ease with themselves has access to all sorts of responses and reactions, they can be creative, spontaneous and lively, and they retain their own character. A person who is at ease with themselves can be genuinely adaptable and flexible. A person who is at ease with themselves accepts encounter and conflict and difference as part of the complex pattern of life.

We might call such a person fully alive.

Being in relationship to a person who is fully alive allows us to find our own edges, and to experience joy and playfulness. It is the perfect condition for becoming fully alive ourselves.

In my spiritual practice, I call people who are fully alive Buddhas. In my therapy practice, I would say the more fully alive the therapist, the better, and also that therapy is relational: in a good therapy session both the client and the therapist become more fully alive.

To more creative living

This year I have been noticing when and how I keep myself from the world. I bury my head in a science fiction novel, or binge watch Marvel series on Netflix. I scroll through news headlines or my Facebook feed.

It’s a habit that keeps me safe. It keeps me out of the possibility of conflict and disappointment. If I’m not meeting people, or doing anything, I can’t let anyone down or upset anyone. It keeps me safe and it limits me. When I’m reading someone else’s words, or watching someone else’s creation I’m not been creative myself. It keeps me in a holding pattern, which is okay, but time passes…

I have hairs growing out of my nose and out of my ears, and suddenly being forty years old seems like a real possibility rather than something that happens to other people.  I still can’t finger-pick the Ukulele and I haven’t progressed on the piano at all in the last ten years — I still bash out the same 12 bar blues in C when I sit in front of a keyboard. I have bursts of writing poetry and then retreat back into my dreamy holding state.

I don’t want to discount how much I do engage with the world. Every year I do a little more. Every year it’s a little easier to talk to people. Lots of things that used to be difficult are easy.

And yet — as we slide towards the New Year — I notice this holding pattern more and more.

Many of the wounds that clients come to me to have healed are around contact. They feel too distant from the world, or too close to it and end up feeling mergey or in conflict.

What do I mean by contact? Both emotional and physical touch. Were we held when we cried as infants? Were we held too closely and not allowed to explore the world? Were our own feelings and experiences seen and heard, or were we unseen, or did other people’s feelings override our own?

If we are neglected or overwhelmed with contact at key times we take on certain habit patterns to keep us safe. I took on this holding pattern — this retreating into other worlds.

Much of my work as a therapist is providing the right kind of contact to allow my clients to shift from their own holding patterns into more creative ones. Sometimes this means I provide spaciousness, sometimes closeness. Often we move between the two.

In my own life my therapy training, my relationship with my teacher and my spiritual practice support me and allow me to experiment with moving out of my holding pattern and into more creative ones. I test the waters; putting one toe and then a whole foot into the shifting stream of life. When it feels like too much I come back to the shore. Sometimes, these days, I feel like I am swimming. Sometimes I have a hand, or an arm, or my whole torso on the bank.

Moving into new things often provokes our defensive habit patterns into a strong response at first. They are used to keeping us safe, and — from the point of view of the habit pattern — it’s like watching a child ride their bike without stabilisers for the first time, scary. They want to pull us back into safety.

It takes time to learn to dance. Time and trust in the process. I have my own trust in the process, and I think my clients borrow this trust, from time to time.

Together we move towards creativity, towards spontaneity and liveliness, and to appropriate spaciousness.

 

 

 

 

 

The Dharma of the sliced thumb

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It was Thursday evening. I was still recovering from a heavy cold. It had lodged itself in my chest, and although my head was clear and my voice returned I had developed a cough which a friend euphemistically called ‘productive’…

I was tired from the virus, and from a busy, long weekend in which we hosted twenty something people for our annual Bodhi gathering: four days of practice, teaching, ceremony and digging cars out of the snowy car park.

I was sorting through the day’s post when I saw my new bank card. I signed the back, and following the instructions reached for the scissors to cut the old one up. The first cut went well – clean through the card. The second cut went less well – I sliced in to my thumb.

It was a new experience. I’d never cut into my own thumb with scissors before.

It’s healing nicely now.

When I showed off the wound on Saturday, after leading our Buddhist practice session, Alex asked me how it happened.

“I was cutting my old debit card and I was tired”, I said.

“Why would you do that if you were tired?” he asked.

Good question.

I think the answer is the reason that gets us into trouble most often: because I thought I was something other than I was.

I thought I was more awake than I was, and I suffered the consequences. When we think that we are better, or worse than we are we act in ways that are likely to have unforeseen, negative, consequences.

It’s this same thought that traps us in guilt as well. After the mistake we still keep trying to pretend we’re not the sort of person who would have done that, and yet we did do it.

Being a person is hard sometimes. We are not always the person that we want to be. We are more frail, or tired, or less skilled than we would like (or sometimes we are more capable than feels comfortable). It is in the gap between how we see ourselves and how we actually are that all sorts of difficulties appear.

A great deal of therapy and spiritual practice is about closing this gap, and coming to terms with what it means to be human.

Sometimes we are loving, kind creative and produce wonderful things. Sometimes we cut into our thumbs.