 Creating a vision of a happier Life objective: To generate a sense of hope by creating a vision of what you’d like your life to look like in six months, one year, and two years’ time. We all have dreams and aspirations and working towards them, having a vision, an image creates a higher activity in reaching your goals. Its natural whenever we make a big change in our lives, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. In making the decision to stop unhelpful habits such as using drugs, alcohol or other unwanted unproductive habits such as procrastination, smoking, overspending on your personal allowance etc. You might feel excited, but also anxious about change, also frightened or sad about letting go of what is familiar. That’s normal and understandable. With all those difficult feelings of loss to maintain change in behaviour and habits also “who will I be after? “it’s hard at times during this process to get in touch with a sense of hope for success, hope for relief from the addiction, or unhealthy habits and hope for a happier future. Having a vision and support through therapy when going through this can serve as a powerful support on your road to change and recovery where needed. That’s why visualising your goals at the beginning of your process to change helps to keep to the goals set. Do you know what you want in your life? Is there anything in the way of your working toward what you want? creates a vision statement to help you “keep your eyes on the prize”, the outcome will be living a happier life. First, make a list of the things you want in your life. There are no right or wrong answers, and you don’t have to be realistic. Just go for it, whether it’s going for a job, moving to a new place, buying a house, taking a vacation, falling in love, having children, or simply having peace of mind. If you want, you can create a collage of images from magazines or download photos or images from the internet instead. Things I Want in My Life to look like. Through therapy we can work on looking at your needs, working through negative thoughts, building resilience, challenging yourself to create change while being supported. Create the life you want.
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I found this interesting article on the dangers of a diagnosis in the Guardian by Rebecca Lawrence. You can read the full article here: https://tinyurl.com/y3vytcox  I came across this interesting article by Hal Shorey on dismissing attachment and avoidance. He delivers various insights into how our conditioned pasts affect our futures and of those around us. You can read the full article here: https://bit.ly/2GjvIr1   How are your dreams these days? If they’re unusually vivid and bizarre, you’re not alone. Your housemates might not be interested in the content, but that’s OK, the internet is, with social media and online forums awash with people outlining in detail their “lockdown dreams”. Some of these are clearly symbolic of our current daytime fears – difficulty breathing, trying to scrub bugs off our bodies, being trapped. But the virus and its consequences don’t always take centre stage. Some people’s dreams have entirely different distressing themes; others are finding that they are simply dreaming more, and that the dreams are more fantastical. It’s a strange irony that as our waking hours become more monotonous, our nighttime lives seem more varied. Scientifically, what makes our dreams more or less graphic is essentially mysterious. Research suggests that the more in tune we are with our feelings during our waking hours, the more colourful (literally) and memorable are our dreams. Medications that tinker with adrenaline and noradrenaline – two neurotransmitters that mediate our levels of arousal and our response to stress – can have dramatic effects on dreams. Many patients taking beta blockers, which interfere with these neurotransmitters, notice intense new dreams or nightmares. Other drugs that interfere with noradrenaline are used, along with therapy, to treat severe nightmares. Under lockdown we have fewer opportunities to use our normal coping strategies. Are the anxieties of our collective subconscious creeping out for unfettered play at night? A more prosaic factor may be the disruption of our usual routines. It’s probably not too controversial to say that we might be finding time for a little more morning rumination during the lockdown (before, ahem, leaping out of bed to work a productive eight-hour day from home). Disrupted or altered sleep is commonly reported after any kind of stress, from perceived social sleights to natural disasters. And we don’t have to be directly affected by events for them to start weighing on our subconscious. In 1986, the Nasa Challenger space shuttle exploded in footage that was widely viewed. Interviews several weeks later showed that even among children living on the west coast of the US, in the wrong timezone to have seen the accident live, and without local personal connections, a quarter experienced repeated shuttle-related dreams. Reassuringly, 14 months after the explosion, these dreams, and other anxiety symptoms, had substantially reduced. To be clear, this is a different phenomenon from the chronic nightmares of post-traumatic stress disorder. The puzzle here is why so many of us are having such realistic and memorable dreams as this crisis develops. Scientists have tried to capture how national trauma affects sleep quality. During the first Gulf war, in 1991, nighttime missile attacks on Israel came with little warning. Sleeping was dangerous. Unsurprisingly, telephone surveys found high rates of reported sleep problems. But when researchers followed up by actually recording sleep, they couldn’t find evidence of decreased sleep quality during the conflict. The immediate effects of stress on sleep seem to be subtle, not easily captured by monitoring our brain waves or nighttime movement. What you remember on waking is a faded facsimile of the dreams you had. Dreams, particularly vivid dreams, usually happen during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. It’s a ghoulish sleep stage we shift in and out of during the night. In terms of the brain’s electrical activity, it has a lot in common with being awake. If you are purposely woken during REM sleep – a favoured trick of sleep science laboratories – you are more likely to recall your dreams. We are still in the early stages of understanding sleep, and we know even less about the science of dreams. They are as slippery to study as they are for us to understand individually, sneaking off as we wake. We think that dreams help us to cope with stress and process emotion, but this is a tricky idea to test scientifically: we don’t have a method to manipulate our dreams without affecting other aspects of sleep. When something is difficult to study in humans, neuroscientists often turn to animals. You can’t ask a rat whether it dreams of electric sheep, but you can record how much REM sleep it’s getting. Rat studies show that the effects of stress on REM sleep depend on the amygdala – a small structure buried deep in the brain that directs the emotional response to our external world. The amygdala is packed with receptors for stress hormones. What really gets our stress system going are situations that feel unpredictable and uncontrollable. And it’s loss of control that might be important for our dreams, too. In mice, short bursts of escapable stress led to increased duration of REM sleep; if the stress was of the same intensity, but inescapable, REM sleep was decreased. Coronavirus is causing financial hardship, social isolation, loss of our normal roles, and, for some, loss of loved ones. These stresses are real and present, others are feared or existential. Uncertainty and unpredictability dominate our experience. So far so normal, in the sweep of human history. What’s different about the current crisis is the additional stress of social distancing. Our bizarre dreams are the tip of the psychological iceberg. We are now, like it or not, taking part in a giant experiment into the effects of increased stress in tandem with dramatically reduced social contact. This is an opportunity to learn about how we respond to this dual assault, what factors affect how this impacts different people, and what helps us through. Stress and social isolation were problems before coronavirus bared its spikes – this crisis could transform our knowledge of how to help those who may still face social isolation when the lockdown lifts. Research efforts are under way. For example, the public can take part in the King’s College Repeated Assessment of Mental Health in Pandemics study. As for these vivid lockdown dreams, for most of us they will pass. In the meantime, normal sleep hygiene rules apply. That also means no refreshing that live coronavirus feed just before bedtime – although I’m still working on that at my end. Dr Mary-Ellen Lynall is a neuroscientist and psychiatrist at the University of Cambridge https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/12/coronavirus-stress-lockdown-dreams-vivid-scientists#maincontent  Grief is a natural response to losing someone you care about. There's no right or wrong way to grieve. Everyone’s experiences of grief are individual. The important thing is to do what feels right for you.
Grieving can be painful, but the grief and pain will lessen over time and there will come a time when you can adjust and cope without the person who has died. It’s impossible to predict how you’ll react to the death of someone you care about, even when you know what’s going to happen. You may go into shock or feel numb. You may feel disbelief and that what’s happened isn’t real. You might carry on – or try to carry on – as though nothing has happened. In the first few minutes and hours, you may go through many different feelings and emotions, and that is normal. There’s no right or wrong way to feel and react. If you’re alone at this time, you may want to ask family and friends, or a spiritual or religious leader, to come and support you. Grief is not just one feeling, but many emotions that follow on from one another. You may find your mood changes quickly, or that you feel very differently in different situations. People who are bereaved sometimes say they feel ‘up and down’.  With all the talk of the coronavirus, it is not surprising that you may start feeling anxious. When you suffer from anxiety already, something like the fear of getting ill can tip you over the edge. This virus can set off a whole range of thoughts, feelings, and reactions from panic, social withdrawal, anger, difficulty concentrating, and hypervigilance for your health. You may start avoiding social settings, suddenly worrying about getting into the lift or taking the bus to travel to work or the shops.
You may know rationally that the chances of getting the virus are negligible if following the guidance, and even then, most people recover quickly, but your mind may still go into overdrive. There are many things that you can do to manage your fears and anxieties: Stay informed We have one of the finest state health organisations in the NHS with very clear instructions on how we can remain healthy as a nation. Keep things in perspective Take a break from watching too much news coverage, it will allow you to start focusing on your life; you then start focusing on the here and now as opposed to the 'what if'. Consciously decide to have a healthy boundary to how much news you watch is an excellent first step in taking back control. Wash hands regularly Stay healthy by following the advice of sneezing into tissues and binning, and washing hands, these are all good practices at the best of times. Little things like using hand sanitiser and frequently washing your hands are all we can realistically do. Maintain Social Networks Maintain social networks and day to day arrangements, it is important in reducing anxiety. Stay active and connected to your social network. Exercise quickly reduces the physical symptoms of anxiety, while having a meaningful conversation with a friend is known to provide for your emotional needs. You need to remind yourself that there are whole teams of highly professional people who are making sure that we all remain healthy Seek Professional Support If you are feeling overwhelmed by the stress, seek support. If this is getting in the way of your everyday life, talking to a counsellor will help you gain perspective and give you ways of managing your anxiety other than just your friends and family saying you are overreacting. 
The NSPCC have flagged up an increasing incidence of reported hate crime directed at children and young people. Police forces across the UK recorded 5,349 hate crimes during the period 2016 to 2018. There has been a significant spike in children reporting hate crimes during counselling sessions following terrorist attacks in the UK, calls rose a third after the attacks in Westminster. The charity has helped to provide 2,700 counselling sessions for race and faith-based bullying in the past three years. Nearly half (48%) of the sessions were with 12 to 15-year olds, 9% were 16 to 18 years old and a staggering quarter were children aged 11 or younger. Callers to the NSPCC reported bullying and cyber-bullying, verbal abuse and racist name calling. Some reported self-harming or no longer wanting to go to school because they were worried about the abuse they face. The NSPCC have launched an ‘Understand Me’ campaign to encourage young people to speak up about and challenge racism and prejudice and to seek help. It wants the government to make it a legal requirement for social media companies to prevent online bullying in order to halt the rising number of children affected.  Therapy offers a person a reflective space away from friends, family and colleagues with a skilled professional within a safe environment. Research has shown that regardless of the therapeutic orientation, it is the relationship with the therapist that offers the potential for transformation:
The value of relating with integrity and the co-constructing of meaning that take place in the context of trust cannot be underestimated. Truth-telling is an essential facet of our humanity. Sharing our experiences in a safe non-judgmental environment where it is held and acknowledged is both cathartic and healing.  Psychosynthesis is an integrative transpersonal psychology that provides a universal framework for incorporating one’s own body, feelings attitudes and behaviour into a harmonious, synthesised whole, that incorporates all human dimensions, physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. Psychosynthesis assumes we all have multiple sub-personalities that help us to function in the world mostly without much reflection of conscious choice. The techniques include guided visualisation, daily self-reflection, role playing, drawing and dream work. Users learn to become the observer and director of their own sub-personalities, so they can function in a harmonious and balanced way.
Creativity can have positives outcomes for health and well-being. Research has found parallels between creative training processes and counselling methods. Studies has shown that personal growth, confidence and enjoyment are developed through creative training and counselling combined. This leads to improvements in functioning in relationships, communication, problem solving and capacity for divergent thinking and feeling. Divergent thinking is a central feature of creativity. Divergent thinking tends to be tentative, exploratory and orientated to multiple possibilities, including the ability to hold contradictory ideas simultaneously in one’s mind while incorporating and modifying new ones. For many clients, learning and practising divergent thinking and feeling is the beginning of positive growth and change. Rogers argues that “the mainstream of creativity appears to be the same tendency as the creative force in psychotherapy”. As such, the client and counsellor, can be co-producers of ideas along with solutions that are novel and useful by creating a new way of being for the client, which is more fulfilling and empowering and ultimately creative.  Over the years there has been considerable research into why people leave or stay in therapy. A recent study, where clients were interviewed about what influenced their decision to stay or leave therapy showed that they regularly reviewed their decision to stay. The three main influencing factors were the urgency of their need to change, how they felt about their therapist and if the process was moving them towards their goals for therapy. For many clients in the study, they were strongly influenced by the extent to which their therapist had been able to present them with a credible plan to resolve their problems.
When there is an unplanned or premature ending to therapy, it leaves a lot of questions for the therapist. I believe transparency is crucial, as is engaging with the client in where you are in reaching their goals and how they are feeling about the process and their progress. When the core conditions are in place for unconditional regard, empathy and congruence, there is the possibility to explore whether their feelings and needs are being meet or not, while challenging your own work to give each individual client the best of yourself. |
AuthorJacinta Bourke is a counsellor and psychotherapist operating in the Ealing W5 and surrounding areas. She is a member of BACP - the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. Archives
January 2021
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