Two Chairs Counselling

Let’s have a story today. It’s a boy meets girl story. There may or may not be a moral to this story but you’re a smart cookie so I’ll let you decide.

Boy meets girl. Boy gets girl’s phone number. Boy decides not to be a douche and actually calls girl reasonably soon after meeting her. They start dating and we’re off to the races.

Fast forward a couple of months and Boy and Girl are driving home from a party (just for the pedants out there, no one is driving drunk in this story. In fact, no one is drunk AT ALL in this story). They had a lovely time, they met new people, caught up with old people, had some great food and everyone promised “we mustn’t leave it so long next time!”

After a bit of chit chat in the car, the conversation naturally slows and they’re sitting there watching the world go by, listening to the radio…you get the idea. Boy is thinking about maybe playing a bit of Call of Duty 4 when he gets home. Girl is thinking about the party and this is where things go weird.

Girl’s thinking runs a bit like this – “That was a fun party, it was good to catch up with those friends. I hope Boy didn’t mind hanging out with my friends. He seemed like he was having a good time. I did see him checking out Jessica. I wondered what he thought of her. I wondered what they got to talking about. Maybe I should have gone over there…or got a bit closer to eavesdrop.

“I guess he wasn’t chatting to her for that long. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t flirting. The other boyfriends there seemed to like him. That’s good. Although he wasn’t as funny as some of the other guys.

“Do I think he’s funny? I’ve never really thought about it that much before…I used to laugh loads with my ex. I don’t think I laugh as much with Boy. Does that mean we’ll eventually run out of things to say?!? What do I do if that happens? I mean I fancy him! Yes, I absolutely do fancy him…but that fades eventually, doesn’t it? It’s not like he’s loaded either.

“But he does have a good job…but then he keeps talking about wanting to set up his own business. Maybe he’s actually really irresponsible with money and I haven’t seen that side of his character…I don’t even understand his business idea, it sounds like crazy nonsense to me.He’s going to end up broke. We’re going to end up broke…living in a box and stealing cat food. He obviously doesn’t consider what I want or what my needs are!

“Urgh…he flirts with all my friends and he’s totally irresponsible with money. WHAT AM I DOING???…Hang on, hang on. I know no one is perfect. It’s not like I expected a knight on a horse to come riding into my life at sunset. Although that would be nice…he doesn’t really care that much about me…he’s just killing time until some better deal comes up. Oh GOD. I hate being in this car. I hate being here. I’M SO MISERABLE.”

Girl begins crying. Boy is shocked.

Before Boy can say anything, Girl looks over at Boy and says, through sobs:

“I know you’re not a knight on a horse who’s coming to rescue me at sunset but sometimes I kind of want that…and I’m not a princess who needs to be rescued but sometimes I sort of feel that way and that if you were to sometimes just ride into my rescue then…then…*more sobbing*…

Aghast, Boy has no idea what’s happening but intuitively feels that the best thing to do here is pull over the car, give Girl a massive hug and tell her everything will be fine and that he’ll pick up something great for dinner on the way home. This seems to do the trick.

A couple of days later, Boy is at the gym with a friend. The conversation from the other day pops into his head. The whole thing still utterly baffles him and he says to his friend:

“Hey dude…has Girl ever said anything to you about a horse?”

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You pretty much can’t pick up a gossip magazine these days without hearing about some celebrity going to (or being court mandated) to go to therapy. More often than not, it’s the result of some bad behaviour that’s got them busted. I am of course thinking about Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan.

Sometimes it can come across to the casual observer as being pretty narcissistic, you might be thinking to yourself “Seriously…? You’re loaded with a huge mansion in Hollywood, what have you got to be depressed about?” But actually, the candid responses about being in therapy that some celebrities have gone on the record as saying can reveal something more profound. That everyone, no matter who they are or much successful they are can still struggle with what it means to be a person. And the interesting thing is celebrities are usually quite honest, even to the extend of being proud of it, about their therapeutic past. Here’s a mini round-up of what some celebs have said about their experiences of being in therapy -

Actress Eva Mendes: “I’m big on therapy. I’ve always said that I love talking about therapy. Why wait until something goes terrible in your life to start fixing things?”

Courtney Cox has spoken openly about the work she puts into to keeping her marriage going: “We’ve done couples therapy in the past. We’re not lazy about our marriage”

John Stamos, one of the many handsome actors to grace the ER in ER decided to go into therapy to figure out why he was still a bachelor at the age of 46: “I’m taking a hiatus from work to focus on exactly why my romances always crumble.”

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The hunt for the right office in which to see clients was not an easy one. I was shown weird shaped rooms at the end of long, dank corridors and simply couldn’t imagine a client in a distressed frame of mind finding that an uplifting experience. Eventually, I found the office I finally settled on. I still wasn’t convinced…the marble atrium was huge and imposing, would client’s think it was too much? As I was pondering this standing in the empty room, the woman next door wandered past. I’d noticed the sign by her door – Liz Hogan – Hypnotherapist. I collared her and she dispelled any worries I had. I moved in and was so thrilled to have such a nice neighbour next door to me.

What’s this got to do with your brain and food? Well, Liz has developed a highly successful programme to help with weight loss. She started telling me about it while I was stuffing a Kit Kat into my gob, and it sounded so cool I decided to interview her for the blog! Here we go:

TSD (that’s me, by the way!): So Liz, what is hypnosis and how can it help with weight loss?

LH: In essence it’s just a deep state of relaxation, it’s a very natural state that we drift in and out of all the time. It’s helpful to think of it as similar to how you feel when you drift off into a daydream. There’s absolutely nothing to be afraid of!

TSD: How is being that state helpful?

LH: When you’re more relaxed it becomes easier to access the sub-conscious mind, it’s more open to positive suggestions. When you’re nice and relaxed, positive suggestions just slide in nice and easily.

TSD: And what’s the big deal with all these positive suggestions?

LH: We all have associations with food being “good” or “bad” hanging out in our sub-conscious minds. For example, parents often say to their children “If you’re good, we’ll go and get and ice-cream”. It’s pretty easy for the sub-conscious mind to get that twisted up so that if you don’t get rewarded with the ice-cream, you were bad. Eating treats (like ice-cream, sweets…whatever) gives your sub-conscious mind the message that “I’m a good or loveable person”. The only reason your subconscious would need to be re-assured about this is if it didn’t believe it already. But when you stop giving yourself these ‘treats’, then at a subconscious level, you feel you must have been bad and you are driven to eat something forbidden just to reassure yourself that you really are good.

TSD: The sub-conscious mind sounds a bit like a small child!

LH: Not far off! The sub-conscious mind is much, MUCH more literal than the conscious mind. It doesn’t understand complex language and it doesn’t understand things in the negative. It processes about 40 pieces of information a second, whereas the conscious mind processes 4. Whatever you figuratively think about food, your sub-conscious mind literally thinks about food, like the example about. So your conscious mind knows that you’re still loveable even if you don’t get an ice-cream but your sub-conscious mind doesn’t process it that way.

TSD: So what happens in the hypnosis sessions?

LH: We have a good long chat about what’s up, what you’d like to change first of all. We start on the foods your craving so that we’re aware of what your trigger foods are. Then I pack you off with a CD and a food diary. The CD is just 20mins long so it’s easy to fit in listening to it in your day. Let’s face it, no one has time to listen to an hour long recording of hypnotic suggestions! The suggestions have been very carefully worded to deliver high-impact results, they are short but really intense. Client’s of mine who are committed to the process and make the time to listen to the recording get incredibly fast results. The statements are worded in the present tense, this helps to side-step the literal aspect of the sub-conscious. If you state something in the future, it thinks it doesn’t have to bother with it now…it’ll be happening later. With suggestions stated in the present, the sub-conscious immediately jumps on board!

TSD: So clients start seeing results pretty quickly?

LH: Yes! Obviously, it’s important to commit to the process, but clients who are ready and willing to lose the weight find their cravings disappear within days. They’re always amazed that they can be ordering a coffee in Starbucks standing in front of all those pastries and cakes and literally feel unmoved by any of it. Your triggers around foods get erased so you can be eye ball to eye ball with family sized bag of Doritos and not care, that desperate need to scoff the lot is just gone!

TSD: Wow…! That’s about all I can say!

LH: I know! It’s an incredible process. That feeling like you’re at war with yourself or battling your own mind and body just stops. That feeling of scarcity goes away, that feeling that there isn’t enough for you. Food is often very closely linked to emotions…back to the treats analogy again! So going to granny’s and getting a Mars bar forms a link in your mind between food and love. If you don’t have enough food, you don’t have enough love. The process of hypnotherapy helps to re-programme that association.

TSD: What sort of results can clients expect?

LH: You’ll feel peaceful around food, it’s not unusual for you to start losing around 3-4 pounds a week in a really effortless way. That is of course if you put the effort into listening to the CD! Motivated clients who want to change obviously do the best because open and ready to start having a healthy relationship to food. You become free to live your life without obsessing over food and your size, in a body that feels right, that you’re no longer at war with.

Liz Hogan is awesome. If you’d like to book an appointment with her to talk about kick starting your weight loss, then you’ll find more information at www.lizhogan.co.uk

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I get a lot of newsletters. I’m sure you do to. Much of the time I scan through them and either think “Oooo, interesting! I must come back to that!” and never do, or I just delete it. But I got this newsletter from the Australian Institute of Counselling Professionals and I just had to share it with you guys, because it’s a great take on relationship advice. It’s real, honest and genuine. It may not be what you want to hear, but it’s the foundation on which great, solid relationships are built. Have a read -

1. Accept personal responsibility

It may not seem like it, but this is an incredibly important choice that you can make to improve intimacy in your relationship. This means that you learn how to take responsibility for your own feelings and needs and refuse to blame your partner for not making you feel happy and secure.

It means learning to treat yourself with kindness, caring, compassion, and acceptance instead of self-judgment. Self-judgment will always make you feel unhappy and insecure, no matter how loving your partner is.

For example, instead of getting angry at your partner for the feelings of rejection you may experience when he or she is late, preoccupied and not listening to you, or not turned on sexually, you would explore your own feelings discover how you might be rejecting yourself.

When you learn how to take full, 100% responsibility for yourself, then you stop blaming your partner for your unhappiness. Since blaming your partner for your own unhappiness is the number one cause of relationship problems, learning how to take loving care of yourself is vital to a good relationship.

2. Compassion, understanding and acceptance

Treat your partner the way you would like to be treated. This is the essence of a truly spiritual life. We all yearn to be treated lovingly – with kindness, compassion, intimacy, understanding, and acceptance.  Relationships thrive when both people treat each other with a deep intimacy. While there are no guarantees, sowing intimacy often reaps intimacy in return.

If your partner is consistently angry, judgmental, uncaring and unkind, then you need to focus on what would be loving to yourself, and loving to the other, rather than reverting to anger, blame, judgment, withdrawal, resistance, or compliance. Kindness to others does not mean sacrificing yourself. Always remember that taking responsibility for yourself rather than blaming others is the most important thing you can do.

Seek further help such as counselling or coaching if your partner is still not able to treat you with kindness, or as a very last resort you may need to leave the relationship. You cannot make your partner change – you can only change yourself!

3. Be open to learning

When conflict occurs, you always have two choices regarding how to handle the conflict: you can become open to learning about yourself and your partner and discover the deeper issues of the conflict, or you can try to win, or at least not lose, through some form of controlling behaviour.

We’ve all learnt many subtle ways of trying to control others into behaving the way we want: anger, blame, judgment, niceness, compliance, caretaking, resistance, withdrawal of love, explaining, teaching, defending, lying, denying, and so on. None of these promotes healthy intimacy within the relationship and in fact they create even more conflict. Remembering to learn instead of controlling is a vital part of improving intimacy in your relationship.

For example, most people have two major fears that become activated in relationships: the fear of abandonment – of losing the other – and the fear of engulfment – of losing oneself. When these fears get activated, most people immediately protect themselves against these fears with their controlling behaviour. But if you choose to learn about your fears instead of attempting to control your partner, your fear would eventually heal. This is how we grow emotionally and spiritually – by learning instead of controlling.

4. Make sure you have regular dates

When people first fall in love, they make time for each other. Then, especially after getting married, life happens in all its busyness. Relationships need time to thrive. It is vitally important to set aside specific times to be together – to talk, play and make love. Intimacy cannot be maintained without time together.

5. Gratitude instead of complaints

Positive energy flows between two people when there is an “attitude of gratitude.” Constant complaints create a heavy, negative energy, which is not fun to be around. Practise being grateful for what you have rather than focusing on what you don’t have. Complaints create stress, while gratitude creates inner peace. Gratitude creates not only intimate, emotional relationship health, but physical health as well.

6. Fun

We all know that “work without play makes Jack a dull boy.” And so too does work without play make for dull relationships. Relationships thrive when people laugh together, play together, and when humour is a part of everyday life. Intimacy flourishes when there is lightness of being, not when everything is heavy.

7. Service

A wonderful way of creating intimacy is to do service projects together. Giving to others fills the soul and makes the heart sing. Serving moves you out of yourself and your own problems and supports a broader, more spiritual view of life.

If you and your partner agree to these 7 choices, you will be amazed at the improvement in your relationship!

Source: www.mentalhealthacademy.com.au

Related Posts - 5 Quick Ways To Improve Your Relationship

Tamarisk Saunders-Davies is the founder of Two Chairs Counselling, a niche practice that works with women who can’t escape the feeling that their lives look good on paper, but suck in real life.

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Planning a wedding can be downright painful … and all the people pleasing it often requires can zap the spirit and joy out of being a bride. Bridal stress is also pretty unique. It is essentially temporary, yet is connected to much deeper family issues and emotional challenges. It can easily be triggered by practical issues and is exacerbated by family dynamics . There is often a decision to make, or challenge to resolve, at every turn of that journey to the altar. Every little nuance — and nuisance — can put you in a momentary tizzy. It is no wonder some women get the bridal blues. Here are some of the challenges, and the tips, for brides-to-be:

1. Bridezillas are made, not born. It’s supposed to be the happiest time of your life – and you want it to be – yet planning a wedding is like working a second job as a project manager. You have to find the time to tend to a multitude of details as part of an already busy schedule while managing a plethora of people, family anxieties and demands, your groom, your emotions and an array of tricky wedding dynamics.

A bride has to include stress management, self-nurturing and time to chill out as an integral part of her wedding planning process. When you feel the stress building, take time out, go for a walk, slip into a movie, get a massage, go for a manicure, write in a journal, do something un-wedding. You have to love, honor and cherish yourself if you want to be loved, honored and cherished by someone else!
2. Everyone has something to say about your wedding – and you are not alone in feeling you can’t win! You may be showered with congratulations and gifts, but you are simultaneously bombarded with unsolicited advice, wedding horror stories you don’t want to hear, and negative vibes from well-meaning friends and relatives. People tend to see your wedding as a chance to fulfill their own needs and family dynamics erupt in every which direction because as the clan prepares to gather they begin to act out what it’s all about for them – not you! The issues are classic – mum wants it to be the wedding she never had, sister or best friend wishes it were her, your groom is afraid to stand up to his family.

A Bride has to clarify the wedding she truly wants, be assertive and set clear boundaries that no one can penetrate with words or attitudes. Learn the power of saying NO!

3. Getting married can stir up a lot of emotions. The process itself sets forth a period of growth and change that can be very confusing and nerve -wracking. Once you decide to marry you will begin the process of getting ready for marriage, and unresolved emotions about parents and family, past loves and concerns about the person you have chosen will come to the surface to be explored.

A bride can embrace the awareness that she is embarking on a journey of evolution from one part of life to another, and recognise and address the emotions and fears that arise. Trust they are natural and pay attention to any issues that might require support or counselling. It is important to stay on top of your emotions and be honest with yourself during this time. Don’t sweep things under the rug.

I’m working on creating my first product so that if you’re no where near my office…I can still be of service! It’s tentatively titled How to Survive AND Thrive While Planning Your Wedding. If you’d like to hear about it ahead of everyone else and get even get sneaky, sneaky discounts then sign up for my newsletter now.

Related Posts – Planning A Wedding, Planning A Marriage

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Social media is wonderful. It was through social media that I “met” Gabrielle Gawne-Kelnar, a Sydney, Australia based psychotherapist. I got to thinking that there are so many Australians over here in London (not to mention all sorts of other nationalities) that it would nice to invite Gabrielle to write a post on what it’s like to be away from home for an extended period of home. She’s written this lovely, philosophical piece for us. Take your time over this one, it’s very beautiful.

If you could stick a pin into a map of the world, pinpointing where you are just now, where would that be? It seems a relatively easy thing to imagine. Particularly if you’re thinking about your physical self.

But what about the other parts of you?

Where might your identity be located?

Where is your inner self?

(And how might each – the inner and the outer – impact one another?)

It’s also interesting that these qualities feel like they belong to us, somehow. That they’re ‘me’ and ‘mine’ – and definitely not ‘you’. But on another level, can self really exist without other? (Other people, other places, other times…). And what if you were transported to a different spot on the planet; another culture, another climate? What impact might that have on your internal latitudes?

I remember living abroad for a while, where it seemed everything was different and new: strange consonants in my mouth, weird customs around me, new norms to absorb. Constant reminders of how I didn’t quite belong. By being plunged into the unknown, in some ways I, myself, and the identity I’d previously known as ‘mine’, had become the ‘other.’

And, yes, there were times of feeling lost and isolated because of that. Lots of them. But there was freedom, too, in embracing that difference. In not being able to help being the ‘sore thumb’ that stuck out. Knowing that there was really no way I could contort myself to fit in. Being different was just a statement of fact (which felt like a kind of permission to just be).

How strange that we often have to travel to another place to really remember this; to really know our identity as an interwoven thing, and to sense the difference, and connectedness, between self and other. In our usual social or cultural environment, our
own little fishbowl, it can be easy to forget that. Easy to believe, instead, that our identity is fixed, or that it’s vital to meet others’ expectations of us, or to try to fit the norm of the day (mistakenly thinking that it’s the only norm there is).

So perhaps travelling or living abroad gives us a passport to other dimensions of self. Permission to see ourselves afresh in a new context. To find out who else we might be, alongside the predictable identity we’ve come to know.

So, if you could book a virtual ticket to anywhere – a plane around the globe, a slow boat down a river somewhere, a trek across the sands on a camel – where do you think you might discover the parts of yourself you’ve been apart from for too long? Or the parts you perhaps haven’t even met yet? Or the parts you’d rather deny?

What might it be like to send these aspects of yourself a postcard?
To invite them over? (Maybe even invite them in…)
To give them a legitimate space in your life and perhaps even be travelling companions for a while?

Hundreds of years ago, explorers pointed their ships at the horizons and hoped for the best as they delved into unchartered waters. Now, satellites tell us the exact path to take via GPS; every piece of the planet seemingly mapped out.

But there will always be places that only you can map. Places that will remain forever undiscovered, unchartered, if you only follow the GPS instructions or conform to a norm that the world outside has set for you. These other, inner places are wilder than that. And they’re yours to chart or to leave a mystery.

In your pocket, you have a virtual compass and an imaginary arrow (saying “You are here”).
I wonder where you might point that arrow next…
And how you might put the things that are important for you, and the parts of you that are yet undiscovered, on the map.

Gabrielle is the founder of One Life Counselling,and you can also visit her blog One Life Therapy for more of her gentle, elegant writing style.

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