Healing from the heart

  The Dalai Lama has been speaking to me. A lot. He finds me through Facebook, Twitter, motivational cards, event posters and the occasional comment from a friend. He certainly has a good deal to say to me but always delivered with a chirpy smile on his face. The very epitome of grace and simplicity. You may well know the kind of posts and cards I mean: ‘When you wake each morning know the day will be a good day and banish those negative thoughts’; ‘Trust in yourself and let the light shine into the darkest places of your life’. Nice.

But I have a problem with these. In part I have a suspicion that the Dalai Lama didn’t say most of these things. Rather someone hopes the words are made powerful because they are attached to someone respected for their spirituality. My main problem is that the words seem empty. Working with a client in the depths of depression or anxiety I wonder how helpful it can be for anyone to suggest that all they need is to think happy to be happy. It belittles the challenges they face, sometimes just to get out of bed.

Friends surely mean well but I feel the power to shame in those words. Implicit in them all is that happiness is the responsibility of the individual. If you cannot cheer up you can only blame yourself for not trying hard enough, for not thinking yourself to happiness.

Perhaps, rather than sharing the supposed thoughts of the famous we just try to find our own. To know those emotions when we are with friends in pain, and to share them, straight from our hearts to their hearts. Tough, for sure, but real and real is often the most healing. 

This article first appeared in Gallery Magazine.

How fast is fast enough?

Have you noticed just how fast everything has got? Post a picture on Facebook and within seconds friends are liking and commenting. So how fast could really be said to be fast enough for us?

I was flying back from England recently with EasyJet.  In the past queuing has involved a scrum for good seats for all but the very young and Speedy-boarders. Despite allocated seating now this throng of passengers around the gate persists. Strange because we all had a seat number. Why rush? I tried to resist the urge surge forward when called but eventually joined the pushing.

We reached the stairway to the tarmac in an orderly queue. I realised that the couple in front of me were elderly and struggling a little with the stairs. My heart rate now back to normal I paused at the top to give them space to make their way down. It was then I felt the first nudge in my back. Then a second followed by an insistent third clearly trying to push me on.

The craziness of this situation suddenly struck me; EasyJet don’t require passengers to board whilst the airplane is taxiing so we were not going to miss the flight. The seats were allocated so any chance at scoring the ‘magic’ seat were also not possible; so why the rush?

In truth the need to be fast is often pointless and actually part of a wider context of living that no longer values patience. We want everything now and in trying to get it we find ourselves walking over or through others, physically but also emotionally. We may not know why we must move quickly; we just feel we must. In that, we miss others and their needs.

This blog first appeared in the September Gallery Magazine as the Therapy Jersey column pg 67

How much self is in a selfie?

My Facebook news feed is any interesting place. Interesting because some of my ‘Friends’ are redefining the term interesting with pictures of their restaurant food taken. It is packed with sunsets and sunrises and many, many pairs of feet stretching out across a sunbed and sand toward clear, blue sea. And, of course, there is a never ending stream of ambiguous three word posts as they embrace the strange concept of Vague-booking. Primary amongst all these, though, is the selfie, an image of the person taken by the person. From holidays to bars, the office to the living room, the selfie knows no bounds.

What are they trying to tell me? Are they proving that they are there in case I doubted them or are they simply ensuring that that when they look back on a special event they are included in the visual memories? If either of these were true for all selfies then that would be fine; frequently irritating, but fine. The situations, though are often not special and the selfies rather desperate looking. A pained expression that says ‘don’t forget me’ rather than the implied ‘doesn’t this look like fun I am having’. What does the selfie achieve? Do we want recognition? To affirm we are included and remembered? Or is it about validation? To let others know we’re “out there” really living – all the time?

Perhaps, as we get closer and closer to more people through social media we are actually feeling a sense of disconnect. As much as we reach out to make contact with friends and family scattered across the globe we are feeling a break in that contact. So much social media posting, sharing and liking might actually be replacing real contact with a lazy deluge of virtual engagement. 

So, within this, where is the selfie, what is the purpose? In those slightly keen, maybe even desperate eyes, staring back at me through my Facebook feed I sometimes think I notice a pleading to be seen. Not viewed, liked or shared but just seen. Buried amongst all those updates some people are feeling lost and forgotten; just one more post in a long line of posts that talk about us but do not know us. The selfie says see me, know me and maybe even meet with me because I have lost contact with you.

Not every selfie is a plea, even when stressed from the end of a selfie stick. But it could be a prompt to seek some real contact, to reach out and connect with a friend and enjoy actually knowing them.

This article first appeared in Gallery Magazine.

Would you like everything?

I mean it; would you like to be able to buy, consume everything you want? Why not? We are bombarded from all directions by people keen to tell us we are living in a consumer age. The government even suggests that we can support our struggling economy by purchasing stuff. Shop local and we re-invigorate St Helier and breathe new life into retail right across the Island. It sounds like a win-win scenario: we can buy everything we want and society is enriched and generally a good deal happier. Is there really no downside to this?

Well, yes there is. Actually it can be quite a large downside that is the beginning of a chain with the power to bring sleeplessness, anxiety and depression. Let’s take a step back. Did you follow the events of Black Friday, the day of pure consumerism and materialism that welcomes the American Thanks Giving holiday? I was struck by a short interview with a man in London holding onto his very wide screen television with the grip of Samson himself. He was asked why he had struggled so hard to secure the discount booty. His response was telling. Said through a laugh he admitted he had no idea. His family had wide screen televisions in all their rooms. Then he paused and said: ‘I guess because there was a queue and it was so cheap. I had to get it no matter what’.

Research shows that whilst we continue to chase these seemingly pointless materialistic conquests no concurrent benefits have been found for our sense of well-being. In fact the reverse may well be the truth. A never ending pursuit of ‘things’ we do not need, that clutter up our lives and deliver only short periods of pleasure, feeds a sense of disappointment. An objective that always remains out of reach to buy our way happy. Whilst materialism can drive us to mental unhappiness it can also hide low self-esteem and a lack of self-worth. We seek solutions to these in the ring of tills with little hope of success.

Next time you are confronted by a seemingly irresistible bargain consider this: what is my reason for buying it? Pleasure, need, the joy of giving or something else? If we can understand that we are one small step closer to the mental health we deserve.  

This article first appeared in Gallery Magazine.

Why do we hate fat people?

What does fat mean to you? It’s a very loaded term but one we deploy with frequency so it must have some collective definition; some meaning that makes sense to most us. That meaning, of course, is not usually a nice one. When we call someone fat we are not paying them a compliment but generally mean to wound.So what makes us so angry with people who are overweight? Why do we feel the need to shame them and point out what we see as their shortcomings? Likely the answer lies in a combination of historical representation, collective social response, and our experience of ourselves and those closest to us.Four hundred years ago, Rubens was happily representing women in a diversity of sizes and shapes. As art has turned to photography to represent the ideal, those represented have got thinner and thinner until we reach the now infamous Size Zero. Gluttony is often cited as a sin, a weakness, an inordinate desire to consume more than we need. Dig a little deeper, though and the sin is more withholding food from the needy and could be interpreted more as selfishness than simple greed. So the historical link is not as clear as it might seemThere are good health reasons for watching our weight with doctors linking specific conditions, such as Type 2 Diabetes, with a high BMI. Anything that supports our health saves money for the health service, and ultimately our taxes, and it keeps us alive for longer. Regardless though it does not explain why society wants to wade in and point a critical finger at those who appear to ignore the danger in which they are placing themselves.Society seems fairly fixed on its view. Fat people are funny, they are the butt of a plethora of gags. Gags we accept in a way that racism and sexism increasingly, and encouragingly, is not. Perhaps it the last safe bastion of cruel humour, an outlet for the final vestiges of our nastier sides.Or perhaps they represent something of ourselves that we do not want to admit. An underlying and occasional urge to eat until we can eat no longer. To sit in front of table groaning under the weight of food and just pig out. That feeling of indulgence can be the ultimate small act of selfishness. A joy in the doing and the source of such guilt when it is done. The pure greediness of it, of eating so much more than adults ever let us eat as children, is a pleasure that only hindsight can spoil.Considering these influential elements in isolation or combination perhaps goes some way to explain our loathing of fat people. However, in amongst all this projected guilt, misinterpreted teaching and archaic humour is a misunderstanding of why many people eat too much. So many of those we class as fat, those we scowl at as they tuck into a packet of crisps in front of us or ‘flaunt’ their size as they sail past us on motorised scooters, are not eating out of greed. They eat as a form of self-medication and self-soothing due to low self-esteem or any number of behavioural issues. They may do this because of traumatic events in their lives or damaged and cruel childhoods to name only two. They are not filling their faces; they are filling voids and re-enacting learned responses. So often what we hate, we misunderstand or fear in ourselves. 

Maybe consider these thoughts the next time you feel that hate welling up inside:

People are so much more than their weight

We can all punish ourselves but cope in our own way

Try seeing past the size to experience the person

Understanding is harder than condemning but so much more rewarding

This blog was first published in Gallery Magazine Jersey

I carry my past into all my futures

One of the strangest elements to social media for me is the re-emergence of people I knew many years ago through the portal of Facebook or Google+. Life seems to have flowed nicely for me as through conscious and unconscious processes I have selected the people I want traveling with me through life. There are often new people that freshen my experiences and very occasionally someone I knew in the past who reappears.

The former, though is rare. My sense is that there are reasons that friends and acquaintances have fallen out of may frame of experience. These are not often dramatic events but largely just shifts in mine or their personalities and what once brought us together is now no longer relevant. All very natural and for me, a healthy part of living and changing.

Social media, however throws much of this seemingly organic process into reverse. The passage of time has seen a gulf appear between me and these once friends that can be geographic, dependent on social circles or both. Whatever the reality we are not together and have no reason to be. So when one of these past people pops up through social media the shock can be significant. The gulf is bridged by something intangible, a portal indeed that seems to bend time and life to re-connect us in the present.

What is unique is the way this happens, combined with the ritual that surrounds it; what is accepted as good practice in response to a request to reconnect. This happened to me recently. The contact was friendly, entirely unexpected and from someone long since consigned to a box of photographs kept in the loft. The contact, though was framed as though the time apart had been months, weeks even; as though all that was required was a response from me and we would be back to our old ways, our old relationship.

My first response was instant. We were close once, but that time has gone. I am struggling to recognise you from your picture and if we have not been in touch for ten years then there is sufficient evidence that we are past friends.

Four days after receiving the post I replied. I was more than not being rude, not being dismissive but it took time for me to unravel my motivation with touching the past as though it were the present.

I thought about why I should accept this re-connection and go further to make real contact. The realisation that came to me was presaged by me eating bubble gum. Two chews, the first in 25 years, and I was a child again with friends, on bikes, playing cards in spokes and caps worn back to front. A true Proustian memory as involuntary as the term implies. The very mention of their name took me back in an instant to a past experience and connection just seemed natural.

Familiarity and the comfort that it can bring struck me hard. Forget the detail and, maybe, forget that I had memories of a good friend. The contact simply transported me back to a complete landscape that I was interested to find was now removed of all the unpleasant stuff. I had filtered out the negative aspects to that time and to our shared past experience and just remembered the good stuff, comfortably sporting some rose tinted spectacles.

I am struck that this re-connection proved to be short. We soon knew that there was nothing but memories to share in common and once these had been aired we were just two very different people. However, there were no regrets in making that contact again. The memories were polished and safe and my sense of self enlivened by the influence of the past. Ultimately, I know me to be now, in part, the result of that past and the people whose company I enjoyed as I have travelled through life.

Society's sin eaters

What is the difference between being life-threateningly overweight and life-threateningly underweight? It seems increasingly the answer to this is societal concepts of personal choice. In essence, a person with a weight fixation that causes them to deliberately starve is afflicted by a severe mental health issue that deserves time, medical resources and, crucially, the sympathy of a wider public. Someone who over eats to the point of putting their life at risk is just plain fat and lazy. No sympathy there then just tough love to get them off the couch and into the gym.

This stark difference came to the fore for me recently whilst flicking through the many niche television channels - reason enough to get myself off the sofa - when I alighted on a programme with the stated intention of getting fat people to be thin. I am no great fan of all things reality television but I must admit to moments of compulsive viewing syndrome. The point of the programme appeared to be to take a group of severely and debilitatingly overweight people and, through extreme diet and gym work, drive their weight down to some apparently random target.

I think what made me hang around with this assault on my better judgement was the frankly unbelievable use of humiliation by the team leaders to achieve the results they sought. I found myself staring at something I could not believe was happening, least of all as a television event. With growing hindsight that seems a poor excuse for perpetuating this type of toxic television by adding my viewing to their figures. However, something quite powerful hit me as the visual car crash progressed.

What say we swap our overweight participants for their reverse, people bedevilled by Anorexia for example. How would humiliation wash with the viewing public if the individuals being shouted at were required to eat more or being labelled loser, of not caring for their children and family by putting their lives at risk and, ultimately, getting all they deserve. That would be entirely unacceptable and to date I have not seen any channel attempt it.

So why in some quarters is it acceptable to shout at and humiliate people with severe obesity. The answer, I think, lies within the societal issues and not some clever evaluation of what works to normalise the balance between calories in and calories out. Our eating habits are increasingly portrayed as exemplifying the greed that dogs us by a media fragmented and frequently bereft of the resources to uncover real stories. From fat cat bankers to greedy professional footballers over consumption is the topic of the day every day.

One way to deal with this, a way that does not require us to face our own over consumption, is to castigate the people that appear to embody that excess. As we beat them verbally in cheap television programme after cheap television programme we collectively agree that they will be our whipping boys, (and girls), who will take the punishment we subconsciously feel should be ours. They are our sin eaters. Shout the loudest, humiliate the most vehemently and we show how much we hate greed.

The problem with this is two fold. We do nothing to address our deep seated concerns about a society that has lost control over its drive to acquire and consume material possessions. Critically though, we offer no real help to people with food eating disorders. The Psychotherapist, even a student one like me, then meets a client not only dealing with behaviour symptomatic of other deep seated issues but a client damaged by a society that requires they be punished for the ills of a wider public.