Hello all,
Just a quick note that some of my FAQ’s are now answered in brief YouTube videos.
What do you think of this?
Are video blogs more useful for you, or do you prefer the text blogs?
Or perhaps both, the video one to let you know, and text one for you to look up later?
Love to hear your comments!
My FAQ page is linked here:
To quote Aristotle: “Anyone can become angry – that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way – that is not easy.”
This is made all the harder by the way perceived threats cause an “amygdala hijack”, and release strong hormones – which we experience as strong emotions – which inhibit rational thinking, leading instead to black-and-white thinking.
In the 1970 there was a fashion to encourage unhappy people to “get their anger out”- perhaps as a reaction against the controlling narrative of psychoanalysis. However, all research on anger management shows that hitting pillows, shouting, and otherwise getting into an angrier and angrier state, only serves to make a person more unhappy and dysfunctional, even though it appears in the short term to cause satisfying exhaustion.
Indeed, some people develop an addiction to anger, enjoying the feeling of certainty (black-and-white thinking) and the emotional high it gives them.
As a therapeutic technique, it was a disaster.123 56
Brad Bushman did some detailed experiments on this, and reached this conclusion: 4
If you think catharsis is good, you are more likely to seek it out when you get pissed. When you vent, you stay angry and are more likely to keep doing aggressive things so you can keep venting.
It’s drug-like, because there are brain chemicals and other behavioral reinforcements at work. If you get accustomed to blowing off steam, you become dependent on it.
The more effective approach is to just stop. Take your anger off of the stove. Let it go from a boil to a simmer to a lukewarm state where you no longer want to sink your teeth into the side of buffalo.
Instead, effective anger management skills connect with how the mind/body system actually works. We can learn to recognise when we are starting to lose our temper, and learn how to withdraw from an emotionally explosive situation before that emotion has hijacked our rational mind. It takes about 20-30 minutes doing something calming to give enough time for the stress hormones to wash out of the system – but in this time, it is important to avoid rehearsing our response, or to justify the anger, because this will just pump it up again. (But it is important to get back to the person and talk to them, calmly, to prevent it from festering, which would also undermine the relationship.)
It is also worth remembering that most arguments are not really about right and wrong, they are really about ‘my needs’ vs ‘your needs’, and when we can appreciate that, we can negotiate so that both sets of needs are met, or a reasonable compromise is found.
1 Tavris, C (1982) Anger the Missunderstood Emotion, Simon & Schuster.
2 https://slate.com/technology/2022/03/venting-makes-you-feel-worse-psychology-research.html
3 https://www.verywellmind.com/how-you-vent-anger-may-not-be-good-for-bpd-425393
4 Brad Bushman, Roy Baymeister and Angela Stack
5 https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/design-your-path/201108/anger-management-the-five-ws-healthy-venting
6 https://www.theladders.com/career-advice/this-is-how-to-overcome-anger-5-powerful-secrets-from-mindfulness
It seems that we humans have a profound mental need for attention – giving, receiving, or exchanging. (1)
This is a fundamental part of who we are, social animals, who can only succeed as a member of a group.
And I think that we hunger for attention not just as one abstract thing, but rather, the many separate parts of our lives have separate attention needs – e.g. family, personal, professional, peer, etc. Some parts could be having our attention needs fully met, but we could still have a need for attention in other parts of our life.
So, when do you find yourself responding very quickly when someone provides attention to a specific part of your life?
…that implies you have a particular need for attention to that, or from them, or with them.
Perhaps take some time to think of the absolute best way to get that attention need met?
We don’t want to be like the older lady who buys clothes she doesn’t really need, for too much, from the friendly tailor – because the tailor pays attention to her.
…let alone like the client refused by Milton Erickson – the younger daughter who spent years unable to get over grief of her husband dying … until her more popular older sister moved out of state, leaving her as the only sister that their mother had to talk to. (She wasn’t pretending, or even exaggerating – her subconscious noticed that she got more attention from her mother when she expressed her grief, so those neural pathways got reinforced, and so she felt that grief more & more. Our subconscious can and sometimes does throw an adult’s mind under the proverbial bus, to get attention to them, hence their family, i.e. for the benefit of any children they might have. Or sometimes, just because the subconscious isn’t clever enough to work out the correct thing to do.)
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1 – Human Givens – Joe Griffin & Ivan Tyrrell, HG Publishing, 2013
If you are anything like me, then you have had at least some bad eating habits in your life…
And you might have heard that lots of diets work – until they don’t – and then the person puts back on all the weight they lost, sometimes more?
This confused me a lot as well.
But last month I was fortunate enough to attend a training course on “Weight-loss – a Mindset Approach”. This explained how we have got into habits of eating – sometimes inherited from our stone-age ancestors – othertimes, it is childhood experiences that have linked eating in general, and sweet foods in particular, with other comforting memories.
It is these habits that take over, when we are distracted, or when our rational minds have run out of energy. (There is strong evidence that rational thinking is such an intensive activity, that we can only do it a limited number of times each day.)
So, this “Mindset Approach” to weight-loss is all about understanding how these habits form, using our conscious mind to design new desired habits, and then using a variety of techniques – including hypnosis of course – to teach these new habits to our subconsious. This is fantastic, of course, because we then don’t need to use any “willpower” to “resist” any bad habits – a futile activity, since we all get tired and/or distracted eventually – but instead, we have over-written our bad habits with better ones. And then, when our habits kick in – when we are tired, frustrated, or at the end of a long day – then it is these new, better, habits with engage, and we do the right thing!
I’ve just started running these sessions with initial subjects, but am now able to take bookings – the program is 3 sessions, each 2 weeks apart, and includes a meditation/hypnosis MP3, reminder notes, and some simple “homework”, just to bring conscious awareness to your goals and strategies.
(When there is a lot of interest, I’ll be able to run this as a group session for up to 6 clients, since it is a common goal and set of techniques for everyone involved.)
I’ve just completed a CPD with Dr Rachel Gillibrand on Psychoneuroimmunology, explaining how our state of mind impacts our immune reponse.
There is, nowadays, a lot of evidence that stress, even including neutral or even positive changes to one’s life, lead to a significant degradation of the immune system. So, therapy to reduce stress – to make a new situation feel normal – would serve to restore the immune system to the pre-stress level. But how exactly does this happen?
Firstly, if the interaction between our amygdala and hippocampus evaluates that a situation either matches a dangerous previous experience, or fails to match a safe previous experience, then that generates stress.
The hippocampus contains behaviour templates that describe what to do in different situations: in the case of illness, it then signals the hypothalamus, which in turn sends messages to the thyroid and other parts of the body.
(And we note that the behavioral templates in the hippocampus can be updated with metaphorical stories, especially in trance.)
All being well, the responses of the immune system (to both injury and illness) should send a signal to the amygdala, that leads to this response calming down over time.
However, problems can occur if the mind is in a negative world-view, (potentially, this being compounded by the injury or disease itself,) leading to the perception (by the brain) that the illness is worse than it actually is, leading to an overly agressive or overly systained immune reaction.
In summary: the immune response uses the behavioral templates stored in the hippocampus, and that is what can be reprogrammed by hypnotherapy, so any conditions relating to the response of the immune system – either too much, or not enough – are conditions which can be effected by hypnotherapy.
Hello all,
I’ve just got back from a vacation in the Phillipines – including my first time zip-lining! – and this month is packed with training courses for me.
On 9th May I have a course on Psychotherapy for Fertility issues, which is so important to understand and get right.
On the 14th May I have a course on Alchohol and Hypnotherapy, which relates to the earlier one on “Weightloss – a mindset approach”, and which promisses to be fascinating. (Alchohol being one of the few medically addictive drugs, in addition to being one of the most common, of course.)
Finally, on the 22nd May, I have a course on PsychoNeuroImmunology – how out mental state interacts with our immune system. It is so important to understand how our mindset can cause our immune system to both under-react and over-react to disease, allergens, etc.
I’ll keep you all posted once I’ve done the courses!
Sometimes we have traumatic events in our past – e.g. witnessing a car accident, or discovering that your home had been broken into – and whenever something happens which reminds ourselves of them, then we may find ourselves consumed with anxiety, or low mood and feelings of helplessness, or anger.
Whilst these are the sort of thing we address in therapy, there are some techniques which can be taught to a client, for them to use on their own whenever the need arises. The Havening technique is one of these, combining some elements from EMDR and some elements from NLP. It is not something you can do in the middle of a conversation, but you can do it in quiet social situations, in addition to when you are alone.
Whenever the problem memory arrises, and the unwanted emotional reaction starts to kick in, then goal is to interrupt the the pattern with a specific arm movement – this puts the brain into a delta wave state, and generate positive neurotransmitters e.g. serotonin. You also engage in bilateral eye movements (which can be done which your eyelids closed) to engage both sides of the brain, and resets the nervous system using the vestibular system (eyes, ears). Deep breathing calms the body down, by taking in more oxygen. Finally, you can either count (which engages the left prefrontal cortex) or engage in internal positive self-talk, (e.g. “I can let this go now”, etc.) as desired.
This requires the arms crossed with your palms cupping your upper arms, so as to give your arms a hug.
Last Friday I had an amazing CPD course about treating PTSD, run by Andy Workman, author of “Cavemen and Polar Bears“, and a former police officer himself.
One of the great advantages of the Solution Focused Approach is that we don’t need the client to relive the initial experience, because we know that so-doing can cause the limbic system to think the event is happening again, and hence make the trauma worse.
The course reminded us that the symptoms of PTSD have been recorded throughout history – Homer describing the trauma suffered by Achilles at Troy, and Odysseus experiencing flashbacks and Survivors Guilt on the voyage back. Herodotus writing about Epizelus at the battle of Marathon, experiencing “hysterical blindness” from the trauma. The great hero Ajax hallucinating (due to PTSD) a herd of cows as enemy soldiers, killing them, and then committing suicide out of shame. In the Mahabharata, the war between Pandavas and Kauravas describes the symptoms of PTSD in graphic detail. Many of Shakespeare’s plays include incredibly accurate descriptions of PTSD. Charles Dickens wrote about his PTSD following a major train accident.
And the great tragedy has been the mistaken belief that nothing can ever go wrong with the mind. The false belief that, in the human mind, “software bugs aren’t real bugs” – but the attitudes of our society are slowly improving.
In addition to the participants and responders to disasters, PTSD can also be suffered by the survivors and witnesses to such events,
…and it is also worth pointing out that there is a very wide range of responses to PTSD – active, hypervigilance, but they can also be avoidant, detached, or disinterested responses.
Alcohol etc. make treatment and recover a lot more difficult, as you might expect.
The metaphor used is “snakes and ladders”
The key point is to work with “what do you want to do in life now“?
We don’t need to work with the traumatic event – indeed, doing do is often counter-productive. Instead, we look at “what are you currently unable to do, that you want to be able to do?”
We then Rewind and Reframe current behaviour, to help them have a better life in the here and now.
I’m very pleased to announce that I am now in Waterlooville Community Center twice a month, 1st and 3rd Saturday, 10:30 – 12:00 https://www.facebook.com/waterloovillecommunitycentre
This may be for initial consultations with individual clients, but it is also a chance for me to meet new people and answer any questions they might have. People often have questions about psychotherapy, and hypnotherapy, and we can learn so much from even a brief chat, can’t we?
I don’t know how you feel, but in previous years, I’ve not been able to motivate myself to go to the gym and get fit, even though I knew it would be in my best interests. I even knew that it would make me feel great!
But this year, I’ve been getting lots of confidence boosting hypnosis from my collegues as we practiced together on the course, and I’ve also been listening to some motivational hypnosis recordings for excersise, for having my best body, and guess what? I’ve just joined the local gym, and signed up for coaches!
And it that works on me, then it should work on almost anyone!
So my best wishes to you all, may you feel free to imagine how much better you can make your life, and have the confidence to act on that!