Learn how to relax
We are bomarded each day with distressing news.
Many of us have learned to limit our exposure when we feel particularly fragile. We might check in with the news once a day or once a week and only resume daily consumption when we feel we are sufficiently robust. For those of us who struggle with perhaps a higher resting level of anxiety, whether we are simply more prone to anxiety or have developed a habit of negative rumination, reminding ourselves of our relative safety becomes critically important.
We all know of our fight/flight/freeze response to external stressors. This natural response to threat keeps us safe but the steps that we go through in responding to stress, like everything else we do in our lives repeatedly, can quickly become a habit. We may reach a stage where we are continually on alert, with the result that our sleep suffers, we become more insular and the overthinking of negative thoughts becomes routine. It’s important and reassuring to remind ourselves that, just as we have a stress response, mediated by our sympathetic nervous system, we also have a relaxation response, mediated by the parasympathetic nervous system.
It is useful to remember that, like muscles that grow stronger the more we exercise them, the more we learn to become stressed by triggers, the stronger that response becomes. The good news is that we can counteract the negative impacts this may have on our sleep, eating, exercise, connecting with others by learning how to activate the relaxation response (the parasympathetic nervous system). There are many ways of doing this and all of them involve increasing vagal tone, the activity of the vagus nerve which is a key player in nervous system arousal.
For example, physical exercise, deep breathing, meditation, yawning, dancing, singing, hugging someone who cares for you are all ways of activating the parasympathetic response. Doing some of these throughout your day is a way of countering our response to triggering events whether these are internally or externally generated. You can find out more about learning to activate the relaxation response here.
March 2024
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We need to talk about shame
So says Brené Brown, a researcher who has spent more than twenty years researching courage, vulnerability, shame and empathy.
Shame research, she says, opened the door to her understanding of vulnerability, but it is, by its very nature, a silent epidemic. We use it to protect ourselves and, at the same time, as a source of entertainment. Shame plays a huge role in the current vogue of populism in politics, of a lot of stand-up comedy and underpins our fascination with power play and revenge dramas. Brown writes ‘we use it as a tool to parent, teach and discipline our children. Television shows promising cutthroat alliances, backstabbing, hostile confrontations, exclusion and public humiliation consistently grab the top ratings. And at the same time, we use shame to defend and entertain ourselves, we struggle to understand why the world feels so scary, why politics have turned into blood sport, why children are suffering higher levels of stress and anxiety, why popular culture appears to be sinking to all-time lows and why a growing number of us feel alone and disconnected.’
Empathy, Brown says, is the antidote to shame. In her book, I thought it was just me (but it isn’t), she sets out the relationship between shame and fear, blame and disconnection. The book centres on her research among women but shame recognises no gender boundary. At a book-signing, a man said he loved what she said about shame but was curious about why she didn't mention men. When she replied, ‘I don't study men’, he said: ‘That's convenient, because you say to reach out, tell our story, be vulnerable. But you see those books you just signed for my wife and my three daughters? They'd rather me die on top of my white horse than watch me fall down.’ Listen to her summary here. For more on men and shame, read The secret lives of men by James Hawes.
February 2024
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Willpower and New Year Resolutions
Perhaps you have already made your resolutions, and have already made headway in achieving your goals. Often though, our best intentions are thwarted.
There is conflicting evidence about willpower; some research says that willpower is a limited resource and so you have to choose carefully what you spend it on. It might be better to set yourself the task of five minutes of exercise in the morning rather than completing a marathon training programme. Other research suggests that the issue is more to do with motivation. Choosing the right goal is key, followed by strategic thinking about how you will overcome the inevitable obstacles to completing the steps you have mapped out.
Kelly McGonigal, author of The willpower instinct , has some tips to share. As well as TED talk she touches on some key points in this interview.
January 2024
What can silence offer?
I wasn’t much good at art at school. But one lesson in particular has stayed in my mind. I remember the teacher stacking a pile of chairs and stools into a ramshackle tower in the middle of the room. The task was to draw the assembly of objects. But we were to do so by focusing on, and drawing, the spaces in between the solid matter of the objects. Like a graphic version of resist dyeing.
The result didn’t look much like the objects we were supposed to draw but that was not the point of the exercise. Observing in this way gave a fresh perspective and provoked questions. How much am I influenced by where I choose to focus my attention? How does this influence the outcome? Why do I choose to observe what I observe?
Imposed silence forces creates a similar jolt. When I observe silence with closed eyes, is there really silence? I begin to hear the chatter of my mind and, if I persist long enough, get a glimpse of another self. In daily life, I am in automatic mode, seeing automatically and doing what needs to be done, automatically. But this other self, in the created silence, is unsettling; the habitual ways of seeing and hearing and responding are temporarily halted and since we cannot stop the production of thought, we get a glimpse of our preoccupations. This happens in a therapeutic setting too; what emerges when therapist and client stop talking can be surprising and, eventually, therapeutic.
December 2023
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Why talking to
strangers is good
The best things about having therapy is that the therapist offers the client empathy, non-judgmental positive regard and honesty.
The client is able to open up areas of life that had been difficult to explore with people close to them, friends and family members. This barrier, where it exists, is made higher because many of the issues that people bring to therapy concern close relationships between friends, lovers and family members. But being acknowledged, witnessed and understood does not always have to happen in a therapy setting.
A casual conversation on a long-distance flight or train ride can develop into an internal journey, a deep dive sometimes into existential questions or complex relationship issues. The very fact that the people involved are unlikely ever to meet again makes it easier somehow to talk freely. The phenomenon is so well recognised it has become a subject of research. (There is at least one report I am aware of in which taxi drivers have been trained up in listening skills.)
But the benefits of talking to strangers need not hinge on the deep and meaningful being discussed. Simply exchanging pleasantries with a barista, bank teller or shopkeeper can brighten the day. While the content of brief interchanges may be trivial, interchanges carry social meaning and value. Each person acknowledges the other in shared experience; ‘I see you and you see me’. Smile at someone and the research shows that nine times out of 10 they will smile back at you and you will instantly feel some sense of belonging. Sharing something of yourself on a journey makes you feel more connected. Talking to strangers is the simplest way to combat loneliness, build community and feel connected.
Find out more:
November 2023
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Finding perspective
One of the most powerful factors in counselling is being witnessed. I share the problem that has been weighing me down.
The counsellor, starting out with the strong desire to understand me, accompanies me on my exploration. If the counsellor isn’t quite sure of something, I am encouraged to check that their understanding matches my own. In this interplay my own understanding of my problem is deepened. In order to explain it to someone else (the counsellor) I am encouraged to tackle it from different perspectives, to find metaphors and analogies and, very often, new understanding emerges. Perhaps I still don’t have a ‘solution’, perhaps there is no solution. But those compassionate, supportive interactions along the way have made me feel less alone, less inadequate, more confident that I will arrive a satisfactory approach to tackling whatever it is that is bothering me. A problem, reframed compassionately and supportively, ends up pointing the way to something positive and fulfilling.
In listening to Daniel Pink describe his research into regret, it struck me that a similar process was at work. Pink examined some 16000 regrets from interviewees and found they fell into just four categories: foundation regrets; boldness regrets; moral regrets and connection regrets. Foundation regrets regrets about not paying attention in class, or not saving money and so on. Boldness regrets are about missed opportunities; if only I had not been so shy; if only I had taken that job offer at the time and so on. Moral regrets are about making the right moral choice at the time – I wish that I had stood up to the people bullying my best friend; I wish I hadn’t stolen from shops when I was a child and so on. Connection regrets are about relationships, quite often about relationships that we allow to wither and die. I wish I had reached out, people say. Pink remarks that quite often people stop themselves reaching out because they fear being rebuffed or feeling awkward. Yet the opposite is true; very often reaching out is welcomed and healing. But the most interesting observation Pink makes in his book: The power of regret: how looking backwards moves us forwards is that looking at regret is like looking at the mirror image of a happy life. When we learn how to process our regrets, we live a happier life.
October 2023
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Why worry?
The job of the mind is to generate thoughts, potential tools to address the task at hand. Since we are interested first in survival, many of the thoughts that our minds generate may be in response to perceived threat. I might burn my hands taking the pie out of the oven, I may drop this glass and look clumsy to my friends, I may say something that those around me find ludicrous, and so on. Since we make habits out of everything, thinking in this vein can become a habit. Enter worry.
There is a lovely poem by Laura Villareal called My worries have worries. It is at the same time whimsical and serious. In the poem she gives her worries personalities, makes a house for them, a garden and dutifully tends to their every need as a mother would her loved children. The absurdity of this is funny, yet we all seem to roll out a red carpet for our worries while we take for granted the many things that go well in our lives. The poem can be read as an invitation to distance ourselves from our worry thoughts, in much the same way as dramatherapy or any mindfulness practice encourages us to do.
The Russian spiritual teacher and philosopher, Gurdjieff said: “It is very difficult also to sacrifice one’s suffering. A man will renounce any pleasures you like but he will not give up his suffering”.
Here is Villareal’s poem to savour and reflect upon.
“MY WORRIES HAVE WORRIES
“so I built little matchstick houses
with large ceilings, a garden for them to grow
“tomatoes, cilantro, & carrots
their worry babies will eat
“but they chew on the henbit of me anyway
both my past & future entwined into disasters
“I tell them I worry about their health
that they’re not eating properly
“I mother them
the way I do anyone I love
“they ask if I love myself
I tug the sleeves of my sweater
“begin thatching a leaking roof
water their garden
at night
“I can hear them
dancing around a bonfire
“all I’ve built burned
down, a soot snowfall
“tomorrow they’ll wait for me
& I’ll reconstruct their home
anyone would do the same”
September 2023
Music and the mind
Some people claim it can immediately help, lifting them out of negativity. Others, though, claim that listening to sad music when they are sad can somehow make them feel better. Both camps agree that music seems to speak to our emotions, and that feels good.
Italian psychoanalyst, Antonio Di Benedetto encapsulates the ‘magic’ of music when he writes “… music teaches us how to listen to what we cannot say”. Listening seems to be a key element here. In his book, The power of music, Roger Kennedy draws parallels between the surface and depth listening that psychoanalysts engage with in the consulting room and the way in which we listen to music. We are, it seems, hardwired for music as studies have shown that all cultures have musics that serve similar functions and, astonishingly, babies are more sensitive to aspects of musical rhythm than adults and can also detect a one note difference in the key of a melody that adults completely miss.
A recent radio programme explores this fascinating link between music and emotion. We learn from a film music composer the integral part that music plays in creating suspense. This narrative aspect, incorporating tension, resolution and the element of surprise is also discussed at length Kennedy’s book. No wonder love songs and break up songs are eternally popular.
August 2023
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Shame and vulnerability
Who hasn’t at one time or another thought and felt they weren’t good enough? Where does this come from?
The temptation to find answers out there in the world is overwhelming. There are so many candidates: spouses, children, families, societies, cultures, religions, governments, and so on. Eventually, we look within and find that the shame we feel is linked to our ability to accept our imperfection, our vulnerability.
Researcher Brené Brown studies human connection. For Brown, our sense of self-worth is directly linked to the richness of our connections with others. And those who are best at connecting are best at embracing uncertainty and… vulnerability. According to Brown, we spend most of our time numbing our vulnerability, individually and as societies. Indeed, a substantial portion of our economy is given over to drugs and medications that help us in that endeavour.
But when you numb vulnerability, Brown says, you enter into a vicious cycle. ‘You cannot selectively numb. So when we numb those [hard feelings], we numb joy, we numb gratitude, we numb happiness. And then, we are miserable, and we are looking for purpose and meaning, and then we feel vulnerable, so then we have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin. And it becomes this dangerous cycle.’ And if we can’t numb through addiction to food or drugs, we try to make what is uncertain, certain. There follows blame, intolerance and bigotry.
The way out of this conundrum? Embrace your vulnerability. Find out more about her research in this interview on the On Being podcast.
July 2023
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How to live a happier and healthier life
The secret is in having good relationships, according to the Harvard Study of Adult Development, perhaps the longest research study ever undertaken.
It began in 1938, recruiting young men in their sophomore year at Harvard and an equal number from a socioeconomically deprived area of Boston. It’s fourth director, Robert Waldinger, says the study is now studying the children of the original cohort of 724 people – there are now more than 2,000 men and women participating in the study.
Participants are grilled about their lifestyles and aspirations. What became clear, 30 years into the study, was that the common ambitions of fame and money were not good predictors of happiness in life. Rather the warmth and quality of the relationships people made were much more important. By far the happiest people were those who had invested in their relationships with relatives and friends. They not only enjoyed better mental health but their physical health was also better than those in the study with poorer connections and who led more socially isolated lives.
This is thought to be due in part to the beneficial effects of connection on mopping up everyday stress – with no one to talk to, we tend to overthink and overthinking leads to anxiety and depression.
Waldinger’s take-home findings are as follows:
· The strength and warmth of connection is the achievement that means the most to people at the end of their lives.
· Any connection is better than none – even talking to strangers is of benefit mentally and physically.
· It’s never too late to benefit from connection; you can be in your sixties or seventies and still reap the rewards.
· Be proactive, take the initiative, reach out and smile.
· Liven up the relationships you already have – do something different.
· Strike up casual conversations – exercise that connection ‘muscle’.
· You don’t have to be extrovert, you do have to be authentic.
Listen to Robert Waldinger summarise the findings of the study here. You might also enjoy The Happiness Lab.
June 2023
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The male code and men’s mental health
Boys inherit from the culture a set of rules that purport to define masculinity. The rules may never have been explicitly expounded, yet every boy (and girl) knows them and failure to abide by them can mean expulsion from the male ‘club’ and/or humiliation and shame from women and society.
At the same time, adherence to the male code almost guarantees mental strain, relationship problems, anxiety and lack of fulfilment. Exploring, understanding and questioning the male code can be liberating, allowing men to mature emotionally and live life in rewarding, nourishing relationships.
Here are seven rules of the male code:
1. Avoid anything feminine. Just as men are associated with stereotypical traits of being ‘strong’, ‘in control’ and ‘calm’, thinking women struggle free themselves from stereotypical traits of being weak, emotional and hysterical. So, rule number one for males is to equate being strong with ignoring or suppressing emotion.
2. Never allow yourself to show emotion. Don’t express pain and avoid asking for help. This leads to emotional starvation, confusion when feelings overwhelm, and ultimately to isolation.
3. Achieve, achieve, achieve. Competing and above all, winning, becomes all important. A successful male, in other words, is a busy, achieving, winner. The stress of this is immediately apparent.
4. Relationship ‘stuff’ is for women or wusses. By all means have hobbies and extra-curricular pursuits (preferable active and outdoor) but leave the relational stuff to the females in your life. Not the greatest recipe for healthy intimate relationships.
5. Objectify women. Men may not set out to do this consciously, but the socialisation brought about by sticking to the male code rules serves this end. Women become sexual objects and any progress towards sensuality, intimacy and deep relationship falls victim.
6. Fear and hate homosexuality. Inner feelings towards other men, insecurity about their own masculinity (no doubt brought about by the belief in the male code) feeds fears and hatred of homosexuality. Having tender feelings towards other is seen as unmasculine and suspect; it threatens the rules of the club which says that the other (i.e. homosexuals) cannot be masculine.
7. Men are ‘naturally’ aggressive. The idea here is that men are instinctively, biologically, hunters and warriors and being angry is a badge that men may wear honourably; after all their job is to protect the tribe. Anger is the one emotion men are encouraged to express and is seen as part of being tough.
Understanding the impact of these rules on men’s lives and mental health is critically important for any man to develop and live a more satisfying and fulfilling life. Find out more by reading James Hawe’s excellent exploration: The Secret Lives of Men: Ten keys to unlock the mystery
May 2023
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Why learning to feel is important
Every moment of our lives, our nervous systems are trying to do the best for us. To get us out of a sticky situation, to limit damage to our minds and bodies or to take full advantage of what life has to offer us in the moment. We can think of these three modes as: activation, shut down or connection.
Think of shared time with people you love to hang out with. You feel safe and connected. Half your mental energy and awareness is not being spent on scanning your environment for danger, or running through the permutations of meaning of what someone is saying to you. Rather, you are present - ideally you are fully present - paying attention to what is going on around you and taking pleasure in the feelings of safety and connection. The part of your nervous system that responds to social engagement is activated and you feel secure. Think of this as connection.
In threatening situations, another part of the nervous system becomes activated. You know of fight or flight. This branch of the nervous system activates the muscles in your body, rationalises how your system will expend the available energy and makes your mind mentally alert. Once you are out of danger, the system can revert to the connected, safe, secure place. Think of this as activation.
At times of extreme, perhaps life-threatening stress, your body may even shut down. You are immobile, and feel mentally shut off from your surroundings. This third part of your nervous system mediates the response to life-threatening danger. Again, once the danger has passed your system re-engages with the part of the nervous system mediating activation, so that you can find the energy to reengage with your environment. Once there you can re-inhabit connection and the feelings of safety that follow.
Learning to recognise, in detail, the feelings in each of these three states is invaluable. The more ‘feeling’ words we can find to describe these states, the less fear we experience in difficult or threatening situations and the more emotionally resilient we become. Learn more about emotional regulation.
April 2023
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One anothers light
Take a moment to look back over your life. Where are the turning points? When did you do something that resulted in a significant change to a better direction for your life?
Now think of the people you have known (perhaps still know) who worked an influence, helped you to see possibilities, helped you feel that you had what it takes to achieve them. Is there a correlation between things they said or showed you and those turning points in your life?
A few well-chosen words, not necessarily of advice, can have a profound effect on how we see ourselves and our futures. This is especially true as we are growing up, in infancy, childhood, adolescence, youth. The difference between a child hearing that (a) becoming a doctor or an athlete is a long and difficult road and hearing that, (b) although it is long and difficult there are ways of obtaining support in achieving your ambition, is profound and can help to determine whether that child goes on to fulfil their potential. Even in the face of adversity the right words at the right time can imbue them with hope and determination.
We have heard of the importance of role models in teaching, business and sport for a long time. So much so that perhaps we stop hearing, rather in the same way that we stop noticing a picture on the wall until it disappears or is replaced by another. Too often the importance of everyday support and encouragement is undervalued or goes unnoticed. At one extreme our media and culture of perfectionism creates role models and ‘heroes’ seemingly just to knock them flat later on, perpetuating the myth that only the flawless should assume such roles. And since no one is perfect, then why bother?
This is why this post began with an exercise in reflection. Our own life experiences are enough to counter such myths. Whether as friend, sibling, teacher, parent or partner, you can, and do, work an influence on those around you.
March 2023
Rashid Hamidov, Unsplash
Smile more, feel happier
It’s hard sometimes to know where thoughts end and feelings begin because they are so very interrelated.
Thoughts influence feelings and feelings influence thoughts. For example, if we’re feeling anxious about attending a social event, before we know it we are remembering social events from the past that made us feel anxious. This reinforces the feelings of anxiety, perhaps generating further anxious memories. This feedback loop doesn’t only pertain to thoughts and feelings but to actions and body sensations too. Thoughts, feelings, actions and body sensations are all interconnected and influence each other, like an engine running in the background of your life. Psychologists see this interconnection as a way of describing emotion. Emotions are a snapshot of where you are on this interconnected thought-feeling-action-body sensation map.
Reflecting on this raises interesting possibilities. Have you noticed that when you feel down your body seems to behave in a depressed way; you lose the spring in your step, you hunch your shoulders and you tend to look down or away to one side. Conversely when you are happy the spring in your step magically appears, you engage with the world readily, so you look up and about and your shoulders and the rest of your body look more energised. Since our actions influence our feelings and thoughts (the interconnectedness mentioned earlier) this surely means that if we behave (act) as if we are happy, we should end up feeling happier. This is a core concept underpinning a common recommendation for depression; starting with small manageable steps try to do something physical like take a walk, smile at people you meet and slowly your feelings and thoughts begin to follow suit. Here you can find one simple example of this concept and this article further explores smiling if you want to feel happy. Try it.
February 2023
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De-cluttering and desicion-making
We hate uncertainty and, faced with having to make a decision, the pressure to get it right can be paralysing.
The subject of mindfulness has come up again and again in this blog as a way of listening to all of ourselves, welcoming in our experience without editing. Quite often, we don’t really know what we think about something, hence the uncertainty that clouds decision making. Much of the time, we live by what we think we ought to think about something. Whereas what we really think about is deeply buried.
This is beginning to sound far too mysterious, so let’s slow down a bit. Everyday life is, for most people, very busy. We rarely get the chance to really peruse the jungle of related thoughts that will spring up around a given theme. If the theme is in any way difficult – or more to the point, uncomfortable – then the motivation to clear the path through the tangle of difficult thoughts, and the difficult feelings they produce, dwindles rapidly.
When we meditate, however, we allow difficult thoughts some sunlight. We learn that we don’t have to stay with them, we can just notice them and let them go.
Why should this simple practice be beneficial. Because our tendency to fear our difficult thoughts and feelings signals to our minds that these very thoughts must be important in some way; indeed fear tends to signal to our minds that our safety or even survival may be threatened. So the more we try to avoid them, the stronger and more persistent they become. The immediate urge is to fix whatever it is that is disturbing us. But if we simply observe the thought and the feeling that comes with it, we learn that such thoughts are natural, and do not necessarily mean anything. Thoughts arise, persist for a while, then decay.
Observing this process is not easy, although a simple meditation practised regularly can make it easier. Another way of learning that we are not our thoughts is to write them down. Try to write for ten minutes about whatever is in your mind without stopping, correcting, censoring or editing. Just keep on writing for the set time. There is no need to evaluate what you have written, or even to read what you have written. The point is simply to pay attention to all of yourself rather than what our busy, doing, minds tell us is important.
You may find that regularly practising such writing, or regularly sitting to meditate, will help you to make better decisions. In a similar vein to meditation, this kind of automatic writing allows the material uppermost in the mind to be acknowledged and, to some extent, let go. In making a decision, you will be working from all that your mind and body had to offer, rather than just the likely overworked, stressed and fearful mind.
January 2023
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How to stop languishing
Experiencing periods of unrest, even when we are trying to rest, feels weird.
Sitting in front of the TV, binge-watching programmes you are not that interested in, feeling aimless, and unmotivated. Psychologist Adam Grant calls this languishing. It a sense of emptiness, stagnation and ennui and the opposite of how you are when you are operating at your best.
When you are at your very best, you are likely to be in flow; a term coined by another psychologist, Mihaly Robert Csikszentmihalyi, to describe a state of total absorption in which you lose track of time, and perhaps even your sense of self. It feels really good because you are absorbed actively in the world around you rather than a virtual world created by a TV series or video game. And rather than leaving you with a sense guilt and disappointment about muddling through your days aimlessly and joylessly, flow is the biggest predictor of optimism.
Grant says that achieving it requires mastery, mindfulness and mattering. Find out more from his TED talk.
December 2022
Learning to love yourself
Having counselling is a big deal. Thinking about the cycle of change and the time it can take to find oneself ready for this degree of introspection, reflection and commitment to change reinforces just how big a deal it is.
Many people, when asked what they want to achieve in counselling understandably express the wish for things to be as they were. They wish for a relationship that is on the rocks to revert to the happy days of mutual enjoyment and wonder. Or for a difficult loss to dissolve back into the days when it was still possible to while away the time with the deceased and much-loved parent, partner, sibling, child or friend.
The impossibility of doing this is of course unavoidably apparent. The impossibility is clear, yet seemingly manipulable. I may fantasise that I can turn back time. I may fancy that, by thinking enough about what I did or didn’t do, about what I said or didn’t say, I can forge a different present and future for myself. But my efforts, alas, do the opposite. I flounder, my nights are restive, I am continually distracted, and my work suffers.
Then perhaps come thoughts of drastic measures. A determination to change at all costs, like a desperate new year’s resolution. I will jettison unhelpful behaviours, I wish away unhelpful thoughts, as if simply thinking in this way will achieve the desired results. It is wishful thinking that gives no credence to the power of acceptance and self-compassion. Not an idiot compassion that simply lets me off the hook but real compassion, an acceptance of myself as I am, alongside due acknowledgment of my commitment to change for the better.
At these times I find it helpful to remind myself that I am the sum of every moment that I have ever lived. I am who I am, because of all that has happened to me and the ways in which I have responded to those events. I might have understood them or misunderstood them, I might avoid thinking about them or I may sit down with myself and take them into account, searching for the lessons I can learn. I might let go of unhelpful thoughts and learn a greater lesson, or I might steadfastly grasp onto a fragment of my past as onto a piece of driftwood in a sea of uncertainty.
James Fenton’s poem, The Ideal, brings home to me the importance and healing power of understanding that when I deny or try to excise some part of my experience, I damage myself. When I try, and keep trying, to understand and accept myself as I am, I learn self-compassion and that, in turn, helps me to be tolerant and compassionate towards others. And in its final line it reminds me that this is no walk in the park.
November 2022
The Ideal
This is where I came from
I passed this way.
This should not be shameful
Or hard to say.
A self is a self
It is not a screen.
A person should respect
What he has been.
This is my past
Which I shall not discard.
This is the ideal
This is hard.
Who’s knocking?
Counsellors open their doors to anyone who knocks; but who actually knocks? Inclusion is about equalising access and opportunity and eradicating discrimination and intolerance. So simple, yet so hard to achieve.
It just isn’t enough to expound equality without serious scrutiny of the barriers that might prevent that knock on the door and attempting to remove them. Mental health cannot be divorced from societal context. The mental health of people of colour is inextricably bound up with political dimensions including those of racism, culture, and social and educational status. We might ask why, for example, black Americans are 2.4 times more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia than their white counterparts. Many factors contribute to the diagnosis of schizophrenia but we should not ignore the findings of a 2021 study published by the American Journal of Psychiatry which stated that “Black Americans are marginalized and experience more trauma than white Americans because of systemic and interpersonal racism, including police brutality, which may contribute to the higher observed rates of schizophrenia.” So, there are structural factors that affect inclusion. It was no surprise, for example, that when COVID took the country by storm we learned that “the raised risk of death involving COVID-19 for people of Black ethnic background of all ages together was 2.0 times greater for males and 1.4 times greater for females compared with those of White ethnic background”.
From the publicity created by the Black lives matter movement, to the uncomfortable examination of how white privilege plays out in everyday life among professionals from many walks of life, inclusion is rightfully on our radar. Black and minority ethnic (BAME) communities are less likely to access mental health support in primary care and people from African Caribbean groups are three times more likely to be diagnosed and admitted to hospital for schizophrenia than for any other group. The stigma associated with mental illness and the cultural expectations among BAME communities for individuals to ‘be strong’ also serve as barriers to accessing mental health services.
Then there is the question of what happens when a person of colour actually walks through the door. Even when the barriers to access have been overcome, there may be others that are not immediately apparent. Let us imagine, for example, a young black man accessing counselling for the first time. It would be critically important to examine preconceptions on the part of both therapist and client. The careful mapping of common ground is crucial; understanding where the boundaries lie and a willingness to explore the territory beyond is likely to illuminate the client’s sense of place within the community, his role and degree of autonomy, and how all are influenced by cultural norms that may be very different from those expected or aspired to within the broader, largely white, European culture.
The world is now responding to the casualties of the war in Ukraine. A generation of young Ukrainians will have a particular experience of childhood trauma whose ramifications will continue to be felt for years to come. Their ability to access help, along with the abilities of refugees and asylum seekers from Afghanistan, Syria, and other zones of conflict, is in part down to our responsibility to keep ourselves informed and up to date with the changing needs of a fast-changing world.
October 2022
Why relationships are key
What if we rethink reality not in terms of objects but instead in terms of relations? Would that change the way we treat each other and the the rest of the world?
After reading a brief article by Carlo Rovelli, a Professor of Physics who spends a large part of his life studying nature of reality according to quantum physics, this doesn’t seem as far-fetched as it might at first appear. Although quantum physics has revolutionised how we think about the functioning of the sun, the colour of the sky, the nature of chemical bonds, the formation of galaxies and much more, there is something very puzzling about it. Rovelli says that while it is great at predicting how physical systems affect us it is silent on how physical systems behave. “It treats any physical system as a black box”, he writes, “if you do this to it now, it will react like that later. What happens in between? The theory simply doesn’t tell us”. This is a puzzle that some physicists have addressed by turning it on its head. What if there isn’t a gap? What if a property is nothing more than something that affects something else? This idea is at the root of the Relational Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.
Why it might be of interest to psychologists comes from what Rovelli goes on to say. He points out the striking similarity to a phrase in Plato’s The Sophist: “Anything which possesses any sort of power to affect another, or to be affected by another, if only for a single moment, however trifling the cause and however slight the effect, has real existence; and I hold that the definition of being is simply action”. He goes on to quote the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna who tells us that nothing has independent existence. Anything that exists, says Nagarjuna, exists thanks to, as a function of, or according to the perspective of something else.
This brings to mind Martin Buber’s work, I and thou, whose central idea is that we relate to the world in two distinct ways, which Buber termed I-it and I-thou. In using these terms Buber wished to distinguish between two ways of knowing; in an I-it relationship I consider myself separate from the ‘other’ whereas in the I-thou relationship I am inextricably linked to the other and, in the process of meeting the other, I cannot objectify myself or the other as separate. Rovelli goes on to say that reality is not a collection of things so much as a network of processes. “We, as individuals, exist thanks to the interactions we are involved in”. Much food for thought, not least when it comes to trying to unravel the complexities of interpersonal relationships.
September 2022
Image: Clint Adair
How to keep calm and carry on
Public speaking, sitting an exam, trauma will all trigger a stress response. Our autonomic nervous system (ANS) responds by activating the sympathetic nervous system.
This will make us breathe faster, to take in more oxygen and make our hearts beat faster so that oxygen finds its way to the muscles which need it in order to help us escape danger or fight our way out of trouble. Sometimes the system becomes hypersensitive, and we get into the habit of launching a full-scale stress response without real cause. Often, this is what happens in a panic attack.
Fortunately, the ANS also has an integrated regulator, the parasympathetic nervous system, whose activation calms us down. It’s worth learning the following four ways in which you can respond to stress when it has got the upper hand. That is, four quick ways to keep calm and carry on.
The biggest player in the regulating the parasympathetic nervous system is the vagus nerve. When the vagus nerve is doing its job we breathe more deeply and slowly, our heart rate slows down and we feel calmer. So the first step to keeping calm is to take slower, deeper breaths. Research shows that when we do this we add tone to the vagus nerve and our heart rate slows.
The second is to soften the visual focus. Some of the powerful hormones mediating the stress response in a particularly stressful situation can result in tunnel vision; the visual field is shrunk to a very narrow focus. Interestingly we can reverse the process by consciously blurring the visual focus; softening visual focus can help to trigger the relaxation response.
A third and very effective option is counted breathing. When we hold the breath and bear down (or engage the pelvic floor muscles rather like we might do in aiding the process of excretion), we increase vagal tone. To practice counted breathing, inhale slowly for a count of five, hold the breath and bear down for five, and finally exhale slowly for a count of five. Do this two or three times in a row, then breathe normally and repeat if necessary.
Finally, yawning can trigger the relaxation response. Yawning kind of mimics the holding of the breath and is usually followed by a relaxing sigh. Some people find it quite easy to simulate a yawn and find that it can actually result in real yawning and the relaxation that follows. Practising any or all of these techniques can quickly become a habit and might even prevent your anxiety rising automatically.
August 2022
Why good stories need good listeners
Photo: Alina Grubnyak
In a podcast interview of the poet Ocean Vuong, the poet focuses on our relationship with words. We know that we can never truly understand another individual, so that it becomes our responsibility to never give up on trying.
And we understand that we are fortunate if we have encountered another person who can really listen to our point of view without immediately asserting his or her own, correcting, educating or attempting to modify ours. We know intuitively how to identify the best shoulder to lean on, the best listener among our friends. I believe this above all else is what lies at the heart of the therapeutic encounter; listening carefully and spaciously to another’s words.
Vuong shed a poet’s incisive light on this type of interaction. ‘When you think about how people tell stories’, he said, ‘[they] are carried in the body, and it’s edited each time the person tells it. And so what you have, by the time someone tells a story, is a masterclass of form, technique, concision, imagery — even how to pause, which you don’t really get on the page…And this is what these women [the elders around him] were giving me. I didn’t know how valuable that gift was.’
The poet was speaking about people who perhaps knew well the moral or meaning of their stories. But this is by no means always the case. Often the meaning may be understood intuitively, or lies on the edge of awareness, and it is only when the speaker finds someone who truly listens to their story, that something extraordinary happens and meaning emerges. There was much food for thought in what Vuong had to say about the creation of meaning through listening and questioning; a distillation that could come only from an expert listener and a master in the use of words. Listen to the podcast or read the full transcript here.
July 2022
Trauma and the body
We have all heard of fight or flight, our response to threat.
Perceiving danger, our bodies produce substances that make us breathe faster, to take in more oxygen that our muscles need to help us fight our way out of danger or run away from it. This stress response is mediated by a primitive part of our brain that is concerned with survival. It collates information from our senses, from the nerves running through our limbs, assesses the likely impact of the threat and initiates a rapid response. This is how we can make a lightning-quick dash to safety to avoid a speeding vehicle, for example. Thinking our way out of such an emergency would be far too slow and we might not survive. There is a third response. If we cannot fight our way out of danger or if we are trapped and cannot move, the body will try to survive by conserving energy – it shuts down and we freeze or collapse.
This is basically what happens when we face a life-threatening situation – the textbook definition of trauma. When we return to relative safety, a different part of the brain is able to make sense of the experience, to recognise that we are no longer in danger and file the experience away in our long-term memory. It constructs a narrative, a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, which although still unpleasant does not cause us distress and may even become a stock anecdote that we recount to others.
But what happens if that other part of the brain does not do the contextualising? We are then left with frightening images, sounds and feelings that our brains cannot make sense of or understand. The images can be triggered by sights and sounds in everyday life and cause flashbacks in which we re-experience the frightening event as if it were all happening again, in real time. We may become hypervigilant, always on the alert for danger, or withdrawn and numb. Our lives may shrink to preserve what little sense of safety we are able to attain. This is gist of the picture that is post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD.
More recently, researchers have come to realise that an event need not be life-threatening to produce a PTSD-like response. It just has to be big enough, life-changing enough and the person may become trapped in a time warp, living their lives as if the traumatic event were still happening or just around the corner.
What is interesting is that whilst trauma changes the brain, it changes the body too. In his ground-breaking book The Body Keeps the Score, Physician and Traumatologist Dr Bessel Van Der Kolk recounts his journey of understanding the human response to trauma and the therapeutic gains to be made when we understand that our bodies are the physical repositories of all that we have lived through. He talks about his approach to unlocking the body’s story, and in so doing, unlocking the mind to enable us to let go of the past and to live once more in the present.
Find out more about his book from this short video.
June 2022
I connect, therefore I am
When I lived in a big city, my sense of personal space was very different compared to when I lived in a small town.
I was amazed, and taken aback, by the alacrity with which strangers talked to me and somewhat ashamed to notice the suspicion arising in my mind that they might be ‘after something’ from me other than simply demonstrating a friendly curiosity. In the city, I had grown accustomed to physical boundaries much closer to my person; and these boundaries expanded considerably when I moved away. Not only did I have more space around me, the mental ‘walls’ protecting my personal space were less rigid and certainly less tough than in the city.
This rather hypervigilant ‘city mindscape’ taught me to mind my own business, keep schtum, and certainly never make eye contact with someone else on public transport. It made for a potentially lonely life. In time, and especially alongside disability or physical illness, social and emotional isolation take on a semblance of normality.
Sometimes though, this personal isolation stems from more than cultural norms and expectations. I am thinking of loneliness and the effects that can have on our mental health. Figures from the Office for National Statistics show that five per cent of adults in England reported feeling lonely ‘often’ or ‘always’ in 2016-2017. Young adults aged 16-24 felt more lonely, more often, than older people and more women than men reported feeling lonely. COVID 19 made matters worse, but really just highlighted a problem that had always existed and which had increased as a result of physical distancing measures.
Interestingly, people reported that the quality of interaction during the first lockdown was markedly different. A quieter and mentally more spacious way of life somehow seemed to enhance real and meaningful interactions. Of course, this dissipated as we grew more accustomed to life in the pandemic and now that restrictions have been lifted social interactions have reverted to their former superficiality.
It is worth reflecting on this change and how it has affected our mental health. We are social creatures and connection with others is critically important for mental wellbeing. Although today we have, more than ever before, myriad ways of communicating the level of loneliness in our societies is on the rise, and with it the burden on mental and physical ill health. It is not only possible, but often frequently the case, that we feel alone in the real or virtual social landscape.
The philosopher Martin Buber categorised two main types of relationship: I and it, between the individual and the objects around them; and I and thou, between two individuals. In the former relationship I am distanced from the other, in my own world. In the latter I am in relationship with the other, and necessarily changed by that relationship. We can only know ourselves through relationship with others. In the words of one researcher, it is the difference between Descarte’s “I think therefore I am” and “We engage, therefore I become”.
For more on loneliness, you may be interested in these TED talks.
May 2022
Gut feelings and decision making
I’ve made lots of poor decisions, thankfully minor, but annoying nonetheless. I’m sure many people would agree they have done the same.
Perhaps it was buying something that I later felt was a wrong choice, or worse, I felt taken for a ride. For me, the poor decision often feels worse when, after the fact, I remember that at the time of making the decision I sort of knew that it was a bad one. I had a ‘gut’ feeling. My ‘intuition’ had told me something wasn’t quite right. Yet I went ahead with it anyway. This should raise questions. What is this gut feeling or intuition, and is it always right? And more generally, what is the point of having all these emotions?
Every moment our brains are processing information received from our bodies, from memories of experiences and from feelings. When we respect and listen to all of this information, we increase our chances of making a sound decision about something. When we let one or other source dominate, the picture becomes distorted and any decisions made tend to be less sound. The vagus nerve, a key player in emotional regulation, conveys information between the solar plexus and the brain, assisting us moment by moment in the myriad minute decisions of everyday life. Without this feedback, we are lost. Our rational thinking can arrive at many reasons for an against a particular course of action – with no instinct for which to give more weight or eventually decide to pursue.
Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio explains in his book, Descarte’s error, how damage to the part of the brain that processes emotion can destroy a person’s ability to make decisions. This is not to say that our emotions are always right – but they act as warnings, or guides, pointing out a general direction for further exploration. Weighing up feelings, thoughts and body sensations helps us to arrive at a more reliable assessment of a situation and the choices available to us.
For more on this topic read Descarte’s error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain and listen to Lisa Feldman Barrett’s talk.
April 2022
Who is the other?
Insecurity breeds fear and when we are frightened the automatic knee-jerk reaction is to hunt out someone to blame.
By ‘othering’ people we create an artificial boundary that offers us an illusion of safety. Those within the ‘magic circle’ are friends, those outside are foes. Bullies know this well and are experts in othering. Bullies of course have learned this mode of behaviour through bitter experience, often as children at the mercy of others more powerful.
When Russia invaded Ukraine a week ago, I was reminded of Cavafy’s poem, Waiting for the Barbarians in which the author hints that having an enemy might serve another purpose . Perhaps by creating an enemy of Ukraine and its people, Mr Putin hopes to bolster his power base at home. When he talks about the ‘de-Nazification and demilitarisation’ of Ukraine he is stoking fears in the Russian psyche that hark back to the Second World War and are by no means buried.
Othering is a very powerful behaviour, divisive and destructive. We see it in action in everyday life. Racism, sexism and all forms of discrimination rely on the creation of such artificial boundaries. If we are brave enough to look deeply, we are all guilty of this to some extent. In the first days of the invasion, for example, it was reported more than once with incredulity that this should be happening in Europe. But Mr Putin’s actions are far from unique; they have always been present and still are in many other parts of the world. But, to some extent, we are perhaps too quick to treat wars that are further away, in different cultures, as ‘other’.
When a nation suffers economic austerity, we see an increase in racism and ‘othering’. When COVID-19 emerged, some fingers were quick to point to China. When extremists committed terrorist acts in our country, ordinary Muslims were vilified. The history of any country in the world is littered with similar examples. I believe Cavafy’s final two lines bring the message home.
March 2022
Waiting for the Barbarians
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?
Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What’s the point of senators making laws now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.
Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate,
in state, wearing the crown?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader.
He’s even got a scroll to give him,
loaded with titles, with imposing names.
Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.
Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.
Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come.
And some of our men just in from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.
[By C. P. Cavafy ,Translated by Edmund Keeley]
Resisting the rabbit hole
Have you had those days when one bad thing after another seems to form an unending chain until bedtime?
It could start with something small, like an irate driver shouting or signalling something unpleasant to you. This then reminds you of other occasions on which you have been mistreated and, before you know it, you are pulled down a rabbit hole of spiralling negative thoughts. Bad news. Especially because those negative thoughts will come with negative feelings. So you end up feeling miserable and the chain reaction of negativity keeps you feeling miserable for some time.
What is interesting is that, fortunately for most of us, the positive things that occur during our days significantly outweigh the negative ones. So, how is it that we so readily lay out a red carpet for the bad that comes our way? It’s all down to survival. We are wired to take more notice of the bad than the good because, ultimately, if bad enough (that is, life threatening) paying attention to the bad might just keep us alive.
In his highly readable, informative and practical book, Hardwiring Happiness, Rick Hanson equips us with enough of the neurophysiology behind these mental behaviours to motivate us to do things differently. Better still, he gives us practical ways in which we can change our mental behaviours. With the simple acronym HEAL, Hanson provides us with a mnemonic to help us tip the balance, to take in the many positive things that we experience so that they eventually neutralise, and even erase, the negative.
HEAL stands for HAVE; ENRICH; ABSORB and LINK. Learn to be more aware of the good things that happen by taking positive action to do just this; that is the HAVE, the practical steps for which Hanson sets out in detail. Stay with the experience for a few seconds more, enrich it by noticing how it feels in your body, enjoy it. Then absorb it into your body – feel it sinking in for half a minute or so, noticing the pleasant sensations and thoughts associated with it. Finally you can link these experiences to negative ones and, in doing so, eventually prevent your store of negative memories growing larger and change the way that existing memories are remembered, thus robbing them of their emotive power.
February 2022
What’s so great about feeling rotten?
A strange question, but one that I sometimes ask people who bring their stuckness to therapy and a question worth asking whenever we feel down.
Perhaps we want to know why our latest relationship/quarrel ended in the same way that our last relationship/quarrel ended. Or how have we come to find ourselves in a job in which, yet again, we are undervalued/overworked and/or do not seem to get the respect we deserve. It is a common theme and indeed one of the main reasons that people seek therapy. Like most people, I have certainly been there, inhabiting a place in which I seem to see only prison bars. But what if I see only prison bars because they are what dominate the space directly in front of me and I have grown unaccustomed to looking elsewhere?
We seem to be hard-wired to seek certainty and to react with fear towards uncertainty. That this should be so seems fitting for living beings trying to survive in an ever-changing environment in which danger is always present in some form. Because we are extremely good at forming habits, this unsettling relationship with uncertainty also becomes a habit. And it can grow, insidiously, until it dictates our relationship with the world. One day we find ourselves asking, what happened to the youngster that was so impatient to embrace challenges and fight for the light? Or, to paraphrase the opening question, what’s so great about staying in the dark?
Part of the answer, believe it or not, is that it is familiar, however awful. If I have approached the world in a particular way for a long time, I have to accept that that approach has also made its mark on the relationships that I make with others in the world. If I am frightened of uncertainty, or lack confidence, for example, the chances are that those characteristics will also influence how I come across in relationships and therefore how others interact with me. In this way I painstakingly construct the ‘bars’ of my prison. Another part of the answer is what then follows. If I dismantle the ‘bars’, then who am I? Who do I become? How should I be with others? More uncertainty.
For more on this topic you might like to listen to Lori Gottlieb’s TED talk.
January 2022
The mind-body ‘divide’
© Jules Feiffer, 1984
We are mind-bodies or body-minds, despite living our lives like the character in Jules Feiffer’s wonderful cartoon above.
Mind and body influence one another in subtle ways, moment by moment, for every moment of our lives. The more we can notice these subtle interactions the better our wellbeing is likely to be. We can all recognise that vague and unsettling feeling when we know we have forgotten something, perhaps a half-drunk cup of tea somewhere in the house, or something we meant to do but can no longer remember. Perhaps you went upstairs for something but for the life of you, you cannot remember what it was. The old joke is that, particularly as you get older, the only way of discovering what it was would be to retrace your steps. But you know the feeling.
That feeling, niggling, unsettled, yearning for resolution, is your body communicating something. The moment whatever it was re-emerges in consciousness , the feeling magically vanishes. An entire therapy modality, called Focusing, was built on this appreciation that the body holds valuable information for us. If you have ever felt completely overwhelmed by worries, unable to concentrate on any one of the seemingly myriad thoughts crowding your brain, you will recognise how, at times like this, we seem to live entirely in our heads. We are disconnected from our bodies, and sometimes, even from the world around us.
It is as if our problem-solving, ‘doing’ mode has taken over and the result is an unhelpful, circuitous mode of thinking that leaves us feeling alone and overwhelmed. For those of you who have practised any form of mindfulness you will recognise that a key practice involves focusing attention on sensations in the body - the essential practice, for example, in the ‘body scan’ mindfulness exercise. Research has shown that simply focusing attention on the breath makes you more relaxed because it adds tone to the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is one of the longest nerves in the body, running from the brain stem to the solar plexus, and is a key player in the regulation of emotional arousal. Research has also shown that the proportion of vagus nerve fibres conveying information from the body to the brain far exceeds that conveying information from the brain to the body. Practising mindfulness actually brings mind and body back together, the dialogue between the two is re-established in consciousness and we feel instantly less uncomfortable.
Find out more about how the mind influences the body and vice versa on the BBC’s Wellbeing programme.
December 2021
Wellbeing in the pandemic
No one yet knows the full extent to which the new omicron variant will affect our lives, but it is clear that a return to the way we lived life before COVID-19 is still some way off.
It’s now more important than ever to pay attention to our wellbeing, and revisiting the idea of Five Ways to Wellbeing provides a quick check up.
We know that depression can ultimately make life so bleak that it robs the person of the will to carry on living. One by one the things that sustain life and vitality fall away. So many times a depressed person will struggle to make themselves understood - that life has no meaning seems so blatantly true to them yet others fail to see this truth. The world is changed by the depression itself, like a pair of red-tinted glasses colours everything in the world red. But what if depression was the body’s way of signalling strongly that things have to change, that whatever the messages we receive from the world around us, from social media, the newspapers, the television and popular culture may be right for some people but are not necessarily right for everyone? Reframing things in this way one can begin to understand how gradually engaging with the idea of the ‘bottom line’ important ingredients for a fulfilling life - the essence of the Five Ways to Wellbeing concept, might be a good first step to recovery.
In October 2008, the government published the results of an extensive research study, the Foresight Report on “Mental Capital and Wellbeing”. The study aimed to understand the opportunities and challenges concerning the nation’s mental health. The New Economics Foundation was tasked to come up witha user-friendly lessons taken from the report that we could all adopt easily: Five Ways to Wellbeing. Twelve years later they adapted these lessons in Five Ways to Wellbeing at a time of Social Distancing.
In a nutshell:
CONNECT with the people around you. This is particularly important if we have to go into lockdown again. However pale a shadow, connect with others however you can, by phone, video calls, messaging, email.
BE ACTIVE in a way that suits your level of ability. Walk outdoors, dance, play a game, engage in sport.
TAKE NOTICE of where you are and what you are doing. This could be mindfulness or it could be talking about how you feel with someone you are close to, growing some bulbs, feeling the cold air on your cheeks and drinking in the autumn colours.
KEEP LEARNING whether it’s a new recipe, a new language or simply reading about something that piques your interest.
GIVE of yourself. It can be big or small, from volunteering your time and skills regularly to helping someone on the street to find their way.
You will notice how many of these work well together. Going for a walk with a friend can tick three boxes at once. Think of what deep depression is like and you can quickly appreciate why the five ways to wellbeing is a powerful antidote. Depression robs the individual of each of these gems.
November 2021
Moving forward with grief
My friend lost his beloved daughter. It is sad but of course, by no means unusual. Death is a fact of life.
Haven’t most of us lost someone we love, or known someone who has lost someone they love? What was unusual was the freshness with which my friend spoke of his love for his daughter; she may be dead but it was unmistakeable how very much alive she is in my friend’s mind and how essential it is for him to give her that pride of place. He is determined not to tend to my or anyone else’s discomfort as he remembers his daughter in his everyday life.
My friend has very much come to terms with the fact that grief is not like a road sign that you see looming larger on your cross-country road trip, only to recede into insignificance and eventually disappear from your rear-view mirror. Your loved-one is with you for the whole of your life and there should be no apologies for that.
We live our lives as if death were an unpleasant meeting that we can put off attending indefinitely. When it strikes it inevitably brings the many questions we habitually avoid asking of our existence. Any death, and particularly those that are sudden and unexpected, reminds us that our own is just a matter of time. Life is best lived in awareness, and we would benefit if that awareness included the fact that death is never very far away.
For readers who are grieving, and who are fed up with being told to move on, I can recommend Dave Marteau’s The English Book of the Dead. And Nora McInerney’s observation that “We don’t move on from grief, we move forward with it.”