Aug
3
I have a Thing about control.
 photo credit: Jesse757
Not about controlling other people. (In fact, I kind of have a Thing about not controlling other people, because I hate other people trying to control me.) And not even so much about being in control of what’s happening around me, because I figured out early on that that wasn’t realistic.
My Thing is about being in control of myself.
This is why I’ve never got really drunk, for example, and in fact why I hardly ever drink at all.
I realise I’m unusual in this – at least, in how much I’m like this. But what it does is it gives me a lot of empathy for people who feel out of control, and a powerful motivation to learn techniques for getting back in control.
Which is why I do what I do. I work with people, typically stressed, busy people, who feel that their thoughts, emotions and behaviours aren’t completely under their control and who are increasingly unhappy about that. And I help them to regain that sense of control, so that they can decide on the direction of their lives and turn their attention to living their best life without being held back.
In my case, the out-of-controlness in my life has mainly been my emotions. (For other people it’s more thoughts or behaviour, but it’s all linked together somewhere down in there.) In particular, I went through an experience of several years in which I felt very out of control of my emotions.
I did my master’s degree in one year, which the university I attended let you do in that particular field, and I was involved in a lot of other things that year as well. In retrospect, I was doing too much – and it wore me down and made me emotionally vulnerable.
I fell in love, and it wasn’t reciprocated, but I had so much fear around saying anything that I didn’t find that out for a long time, and then I kept hoping, and had so much fear around saying anything that I didn’t find out again for a long time that the answer was still no, and in the meantime I’d started training for something that I wasn’t suited for or any good at, and living with too many other people, and members of my close family, in another country, were ill, and I was extremely short of money and then I got ill (from the stress), and there were times I wanted to hurl plates at my housemates I was so angry, and there were times I wanted to kill myself I was so depressed, and I started to have panic attacks whenever I was in a crowd, and the upshot was that I couldn’t work full-time for several years and carried the hurt and bitterness for many more years.
So I learned a lot about stress.
And I learned a lot, over the years that followed, about personal development and about how people work, because I wanted to understand myself and I wanted to make sure that I didn’t go down that path again.
And finally I discovered hypnotherapy. And once I figured out that it wasn’t about someone else controlling you, but about you having more control over yourself, I realised that this was what I’d been looking for.
Around the same time I started learning to meditate, which is another path to self-control. In the form I practice it, it’s about letting go of superficial thoughts (which include emotions) and allowing your true self to arise.
One day it was my turn to lead our little meditation group, and nobody else happened to turn up. So I was sitting by myself in an empty building, and fear came to visit, because I also have a Thing about being alone which is deeper and more buried than the control thing.
So I let fear go, and fear came, and I let fear go, and after about 20 minutes the timer went off and that was OK. Nothing terrible had happened because fear had come.
And the following weekend I went to a hypnotherapy conference and was more confident and gregarious than I’d ever been in my life.
photo credit: Jeremy Burgin
So my point, and I do have one, is this: If you’re feeling out of control I can completely relate to that. I mean, if I tell you I can control my skin temperature and stop my shaving cuts from bleeding and alter my heartbeat (all of which is true), it sounds like I have some kind of superpower and that I’m totally on top of things. But the reason I can do that stuff (which is a lot easier than it sounds, and also a lot less useful) is that I wanted to learn how to be in control of more important things, like fear and anger and sadness. And stress.
But enough about me. What’s your stress story? I realise you might not want to tell it publicly, so I’ve put a form below that posts, anonymously, to a place that only I will see. I look at all the responses, and I keep them in mind in everything I do, because I want to help other people feel in control of their stress too.
Jun
15
Freud famously claimed that “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”.
It isn’t, though.
photo credit: emdot
I was having a conversation the other day with Gareth of Fight Mediocrity, on his guest post for Catherine Caine (she who is awesome online and teaches others to be likewise).
He’d read my last post about replacing caffeine with meditation, and commented, “It’s not that the give up coffee message doesn’t reach me. You’ve definitely given by far the best argument I’ve seen for it. But coffee for me isn’t about the caffeine. It’s about what it represents.”
Which got me all excited and helped me to become aware of something I’d not yet fully articulated. Here’s my reply:
Exactly, and this is always the difficulty with change. Things are not just themselves, they’re what they represent to a person emotionally.
That’s what a lot of diet programs miss. Cake is not just cake. Cake is celebration and comfort and memories, and besides that it changes the state of the brain and pushes some dopamine around… There’s a lot more to it than “eat apples instead of cake”, which is why so few people make the switch.
So (in my opinion) as well as understanding the literal and scientific and rational things that are going on, it’s important to understand the emotional and symbolic things too. Not either/or but both/and.
What I do (which is how the conversation got started) is help people who want to change their behaviours, thoughts and feelings. I want to do an excellent job of that, so I’m studying health science to learn not only what behaviours are particularly worth changing, but also the ins and outs of helping people to change them.
I also read a lot in the field (as you’ll see if you follow me on Twitter). And here’s what I’m increasingly concluding: Hardly anyone ever does anything for a purely rational reason, even when we think we do.
I’m not the only person thinking this, either. There are several books around at the moment about irrationality and how to work with it. We’re finally getting over the 19th- and 20th-century myth that humans are rational and emotions are an aberration.
Ironically (I’m never sure now if I’m using that word correctly, but I think I am), we’ve come to this realisation through the application of science. It turns out that if you set out to measure human behaviour objectively and dispassionately, you discover that it’s neither objective nor dispassionate. And people don’t respond to things as what they are.
We respond to things as what they remind us of.
This is the entire reason, of course, why poetry works – also symbolism, art, literature, ritual and ceremony. This is how politics works, and marketing. (Eating burgers doesn’t make you look like, or attract people who look like, the slim, beautiful models who are holding the burgers, but that’s the association the burger advertisement creates.)
This is the reason why, when your partner says or does something small and entirely innocent that happens to remind you of that thing your mother always did, you practically tear their head off.
And this is the reason that I can help you to change your state of mind, and even your patterns of behaviour, by sitting you in a chair and talking to you, getting you to imagine things.
If you’ve been listening to me talk about my Emotional Circuit-Breaker Toolkit, you may have got the wrong impression. You may be thinking that it’s about switching off your emotions so you don’t feel them any more. Not even slightly!
What the Toolkit is about is breaking the automatic cycles of emotion that take you round and round the Emotional Hamster Wheel and keep landing you up in the same place, only worse. It’s about understanding the process of your emotions so that you can work with them and end up where you want to end up, because emotions are a good horse, but a bad rider.
photo credit: cmaccubbin
And the way I get you there is by working with imagery, metaphor and symbol, with the things you already think and know and feel. A lot of it is based on scientific research, but it’s not about turning your body and mind into a cold technology. I’m not very interested in pure theory. I think application is the really important part.
“Many thinkers and scientists want to think ‘without the heart’ in order to be objective – which is an illusion, because one can in no way think without the heart, the heart being the activating principle of thought; what one can do is to think with a humble and warm heart instead of with a pretentious and cold heart.”
- Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot.
And one can think with a wise and conscious heart rather than an unruly and impulsive heart that does things you don’t understand or like. That’s what the Toolkit is all about.
If that sounds at all interesting, then join my Beat The Rush List for the Emotional Circuit-Breaker Toolkit. Members of that list get preview material and a very substantial discount (really, if you don’t join Beat The Rush and you end up buying the Toolkit for full price, you’ll kick yourself. See what I did there?)
What in your life isn’t just itself, but what it reminds you of? Tell me in the comments.
(Update: Gareth got a post on Letting Go out of the same conversation. It’s good.)
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Jun
1
What I do – working with people as a health and personal development coach and hypnotherapist – is a personal work. I know what I know not just from academic study but also from my own experience, which is why I can help others who are going through some of the same stuff. But although I’ve been blogging here for two and a half years now, I’ve never told the full story of how I came to be doing this. Here’s that story now.
When I was young I wanted to help people, so I joined the staff of a religious organisation that had helped me while I was at university. Unfortunately, its approach to helping people was like the Greek legend of the bandit Procrustes, who had an iron bed that all travellers must lie on. If they weren’t big enough for the bed, he stretched their limbs, and if they were too big, he cut pieces off until they fitted. There was only one true way, and it turned out not to be my way.
I couldn’t use my creativity or my intuition; I had to try to be exactly like the leaders, and I wasn’t much like them at all. There were interpersonal problems, too; nobody’s fault, no malice involved, but no less painful for that. I ended up in a major stress breakdown, depressed and very ill, and took several years to get back to the point where I could even work full-time. I didn’t lose my faith, but it froze over and became a hard, rigid, rational thing. I felt safer that way.
That experience put me off working in a direct people-helping role for years. Instead, I used my skills to arrange information, first as a book editor and freelance nonfiction writer, then as a technical writer and corporate trainer, and finally as an IT consultant. I was drifting, accepting whatever job opened up for me next – but I was also collecting valuable skills. I began to get a vague sense that someday they’d all come together.
Eventually, I grew enough inside that the very straight and narrow faith I’d been following became too constricting. I realised that there must be more to it, and found myself hanging out with a group of fellow burnouts, dropouts and rebels from the mainstream, meeting in a run-down old building on the city fringe. One of their mottos was, “Thinking allowed, thinking aloud allowed”. I slowly started to rebuild and restructure my inner life, and to explore in strange new directions. During this time I also met my wife, and discovered emotional resources that I didn’t know I had.
Meanwhile, I still had very little energy a lot of the time. I started to think that some kind of personal practice might help, and eventually found a Tai Chi class at a local high school. This gentle, balanced exercise, along with improved eating patterns, started to rebuild my energy, and eventually I began to search again for a way to help other people grow and change. I took a wonderful, transformative course on creating rituals and ceremonies, and made a significant step forward in my own healing, but that wasn’t quite it. Then I found hypnotherapy.
I took a community class first of all in self-hypnosis, and even though it wasn’t well taught, it was still amazingly effective in helping me focus and moving me forward in my emotional recovery. So I enrolled in a training programme to become a hypnotherapist.
Now all my experiences and skills are drawing together, as I’ve suspected for years would eventually happen. I use my creativity and intuition to put together metaphors for healing, either in the moment in the therapy room or when I create my audio recordings and ebooks. My editing and technical writing helps me translate scientific research into practical, clear steps that ordinary people can take in their daily lives, to solve their problems and come closer to their best selves. My past explorations in symbolism, ritual and spirituality enable me to draw on centuries-old traditions of personal transformation to complement the science, and acknowledge the richness and complexity of human experience. And I use information technology to reach more people worldwide with my resources.
So that’s how I got here. I didn’t follow a map or have a guide; it took me 20 years of wandering around in the underbrush, more or less at random. The thing is, now that I’m here I can call out to other wanderers – you, perhaps – and guide them on a more direct path to their own authentic goals.
If you’re in Auckland, New Zealand you can come and see me in person, but wherever you are in the world you can connect with me over this marvellous Internet dingus. At the moment I’m putting together a reference group to help me map out what resources would benefit people most in their current life situations. If you’d like to be a part of it, my email address is in the blog sidebar, or you can leave a comment on this post. Or direct-message me on Twitter: @MRMHypno.
Thanks.
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