  Stress is the theme for this years Mental Health Week and there are announcements across media including a Mental Health Minute across commercial radio and the BBC performed by royals, Lady Gaga and Judy Dench.
Huge amounts of time and money have been spent on trying to get us to take stress seriously, from luxe adverts to hard legislation. But we won’t. We won’t because if we could we would but some of us are in a situation where if we were to we’d start to fall behind on the mortgage, rent or other essential payments. We won’t because we don’t have the necessary backing from managers who in turn are unsupported. The internet is absolutely heaving with research around how management can make the workplace less stressful and techniques that individuals can use to manage personal stress, and as a nation we are dropping like flies. That's because workplace stress is seen as a badge of honour and these techniques are like using a water pistol to put out a fire. We won’t because being overworked has become a virtue. A significant number of us work over 45 hours a week and Londoners work, on average, three weeks more than people who live outside of London and we’re proud of it. On average men work longer hours than women and women do countless hours more housework, childcare and emotional labour. If you’re not constantly on the go, and your children are not in several after-school clubs as well as doing homework then WHAT ARE YOU DOING? I’m proposing two things:
Increasing numbers of us have moved from stress to burnout. The difference? One can make you ill. The other can devastate you. Working conditions in the 1840’s to 60’s were horrific with 12 hour days and 7 day weeks, 5 year olds working and people sharing beds on a shift system but people got on with it because they had to. Happily, we have much better choices. We just don’t take them. Like ‘mental health’ ‘Wellbeing’ is overused to the point of meaninglessness, reduced to chocolate, bubble bath and gin for women, exercise and material acquisition for men. You might get a five minute buzz from these things but they’re not going to save you. Your boss is not going to save you. The law is not going to save you from your boss unless you are very, very rich in which case you can afford to walk away from your job. Our political landscape is heading swiftly backwards in time and we are encouraged to vote to harm ourselves. Here are 3 meaningful opportunities to avoid burnout and limit stress: 1. Join a Union. Get over any derisive feelings you may have about flat caps and whippets, ask yourself who benefits from you having those derisive feelings, and join an organisation that will represent you if you are treated badly by your employer. Whether your employer recognises a Union or not is irrelevant. If you are an employer, ask for Union input. Get over any fearful feelings you may have about three day weeks and militant wreckers and discover how Unions can make your life better and your business more robust. High staff turnover and unsafe working practices cost businesses avoidable losses. 2. Discern how status is making you anxious. It’s not unusual to not be able to tell who is very high status because their self esteem is such that they don’t care a great deal about what they look like or what car they drive. It’s genuine nonchalance not overcompensation for feeling unable to advance; their self-worth isn’t affected by their hairstyle or suit, by being seen to be having a wonderful life on social media or going out with the boys every single evening. If both of you have to work in order to cover childcare costs or to pay for two cars consider how much being employed is worth financially and in terms of status to you as individuals. Could you both work part time? Or is it important to your social standing to be seen to be employed? 3. Explore how you think about other people. There’s an element to many peoples’ personality where we are willing to suffer as long as we can cause people who are weaker than ourselves to suffer; it’s called 'Punching Down’ or ‘The Crab Bucket.’ We will embrace the identity of Hard Working Tax Payer because we hate scroungers on benefits. We would rather do without something that is in our grasp than help someone else get something. This grudging approach to life has its roots in fear and feeds on hate - and fear causes the release of adrenaline. Yes, there are lots of immigrants. Yes Islamic terrorism is real. Yes, people on benefits cost £109.8 billion. And immigrants contribute more to the economy than they take, terrorism in the UK has never been lower(while rates of domestic violence are greater) and old age pensions account for nearly half of welfare spending, benefits for working people take up almost the other half and Jobseekers Allowance is up 1% of the total. If you know these facts and still feel angry or grudging about immigrants, Muslims or people on benefits you will suffer from a kind of confusion called cognitive dissonance which is a type of stress. You can choose to make large areas of your areas less stressful just by thinking carefully, logically and with an open mind which is precisely what counselling is. Learning to think in this way, to consider complexity, to deal with nuance, to recognise that you don't know what you don't know is much harder than it sounds which is why we need people to help us. And it’s absolutely worth it. NB My levels of stress went through the roof when the comparisons graph image totally refused to be embedded in the text. After half an hour I gave up. This doesn't mean I'm a quitter and have failed and should keep going until it goes right. It means the software is playing up and it's out of my control until someone else repairs it. It means that I believe you're an adult and can cope with imperfection. And it means that my life is worth more than obsessing with something that won't work. So is yours.  A young woman left a furious note on an ambulance that was blocking her drive: “Move your fucking van. I couldn’t give a shit if the whole street collapsed.” She was taken to court, fined, and her lawyer says that she accepts her behaviour was completely unacceptable. She feels shocked at her own behaviour, suddenly realising that what she has done has actually happened. Twitter has, of course, turned on her for being so crass using the same and often worse abuse against her. Other women with the same name have been subjected to online abuse. A number of people have mistaken the picture of the female paramedic who tweeted the abusive note for the woman who left it and have filled the web with abusive comments about her looks, her sex, anything and everything about her. Inevitably, the woman's employment status seems to be of particular value to people who are vomiting up bile about her vomiting up bile. Online disinhibition is very well understood: “the lack of restraint one feels when communicating online in comparison to communicating in-person. Possible influencing factors toward online disinhibition include anonymity, invisibility, asynchronous communication, empathy deficit, in addition to individual factors like personality and culture background.” I’ve spoken with a number of people who are alarmed to discover that they feel able to harm, sometimes to even to kill, particular politicians or criminals and I’ve spoken with larger numbers of people who defend their belief that prison should be a place of focused and formal torture. Not solitary confinement but clear eyed, state-applied cruciation, often sexual. We live in desperate days. The human propensity for abject cruelty is all too well understood. Various sanctions have been put in place to temper that impulse, from religion to the appeal to enlightened self interest and whilst some of that works some of the time it seems that once again, we are living through a period of casual and global malice. How many of the people who currently feel able to pull the trigger on a politician who genuinely has caused vulnerable people to die could actually do it? In fact, I believe a larger number than usual of us could. Media has always whipped up our natural animal instinct to see everyone that isn’t us as not-quite-human, almost certainly an enemy. The process of dehumanising a person in order to make harming and killing them as easy as killing a cockroach is all too well understood. We are living in a society where significant numbers of people will send death threats to doctors and nurses in Great Ormond Street Hospital. What is missing from all of this is face-to-face human relationship. Not people screaming abuse at each other, but being in a situation where you are heard, and listened to by someone who is not threatened or shocked or appalled by what you are saying. Being heard humanises us. When we feel unheard we feel able to say anything and most of us have an ethical core that is wounded when we say or think or feel things that are harmful to others. To drown out the knowledge of the harm it does to us we increase the volume of our abuse. Therapy has always had a societal impact: a person who knows that what they say is heard is much less likely to say vicious things because they can hear themselves. In a society where hardly anyone is heard almost everyone can say things that lead to malevolence. Who listens to you? Who do you really listen to? When did you last listen to yourself? 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Porto’s has been here for nearly 30 years and has hardly changed in all that time. In a sea of gentrification it is an island of stability and perhaps because of that a number of its regulars are people with pretty full-on mental health issues. Joseph is a regular. Today he gave the women behind the counter a 5p tip (no one tips in Porto’s) and talked succinctly about the purposeful destruction of self-esteem. “You know that man who gave me £20? Straight after that the other man gave me 5p. If he’d given me the 5p before the £20 or way after I’d know he was doing it out of goodness and I’d be grateful, but he was doing it out of wickedness. Do you understand me?” “I see it with girls too, they see a beautiful woman and they say “You look so tired, are you OK?” and they know what they’re doing, they just can’t stand anyone having something they think they haven’t got.” Joseph, like so many people who can’t fit comfortably into the world, sees things all too clearly and cannot endure it. He’s homeless and so sees people as we do not like to see ourselves, in ways that social scientists have described very well. We see someone getting something, we believe they do not deserve it and we become aggressive. A man saw a mentally ill homeless person get £20 and was so infuriated that he felt the need to punish someone. He didn’t confront the giver. He didn’t confront Joseph directly. Instead, he instinctively did something immensely sophisticated. He destroyed Joseph’s feelings of warmth, pleasure and thankfulness by giving him more money. Joseph knew precisely what had happened. He explained it to me more accurately than many of my colleagues can manage. Articulate, whip smart, incredibly empathic, and teetering at the edge of his endurance all day long. The man who gave him the 5p is a respectable family man, a Hard Working Tax Payer: being another Porto’s regular I know him well. Suave, expensively dressed, edgy as fuck if he thinks he’s been insulted, and he often feels insulted. He once required service at Porto’s before a woman who was there before him and when she quietly corrected him he was dumbstruck. 5 minutes later he showily approached the woman to tell her to be more polite next time. When she reared up into his face, copying his behaviour of bashing a coin on the marble counter to get the staff’s attention he was sufficiently cowed to back off but his face showed simmering hatred. In truth, I doubt he had even been aware of the woman; he wasn’t being intentionally rude it’s just that she wasn’t important enough to him to be visible. But when she became visible, popping into existence to censure him, his – what? shock? fear? certainly an adrenaline response - led him into a situation where he has made an enemy and been shown not to be as urbane as he’d like to be. The woman later told me that she’d purposefully brought her husband to Porto’s the next day because she felt that this man functioned at a level where he would feel compelled to make her submissive unless he could see that she had a male owner who might object to his property being damaged. How tiresome all of this is, what a soap opera. The research across cultures and across species repeatedly demonstrates that our interpretations of relational interactions is little more than hormonally-driven survival behaviours, somewhat developed in childhood. Doing more than that is fantastically difficult, tiring work, something that other animals don’t seem to have much interest in. How much instinct or desire to care for individuals who are not in a family or social group do meercats, owls or chimps have? And yet that desire to do better is what has made modern civilisation possible. We watch the results of survival-driven behaviours all day long, all our lifetimes and throughout history, but the genuinely sophisticated leaps forward have been when slavery was abolished or workers are given better pay and conditions, when healthcare free at the point of need was established and universal education legislated for. There’s no doubt that national wealth would be better served by making children work, by slavery, by very low wages and long working hours and by disabled and elderly people dying as soon as they need support. We instinctively incline towards that. Over the entirety of the Second World War 67,100 UK civilians were killed. In the last 8 years the BMJ estimates that 120,000 deaths can be attributed to austerity. One of the reasons I go to Porto’s so often is for a break from bleakness, human contact mediated by financial and social tropes that keep us comfortably together, comfortably apart, knowing our own and everyone else’s place in a familiar dance. It’s very like the therapeutic relationship. I find Porto’s more comfortable than the much more polite, much more mannered and much more expensive cafes in the area. I like Porto's honesty of interaction. And sometimes, I go to the expensive places because their dishonesty briefly disguises the reality of unmediated human contact. 14/12/2017 Beyond Resilience I published this six months ago on Linkedin, and think it's worth revisiting.
10/9/2017 Longing For An End Perhaps because it’s the biggest killer of men under 50 talking about suicide has become less taboo but there’s still a lot of stigma and fear when it comes to actually talking about suicidal feelings. People fear that talking about these feelings will result in panic and chaos, that a counsellor will call the police or prevent them from leaving the room until an ambulance arrives with a mental health team and a straight jacket. Some suicidal people want something like that to happen, for someone to relieve them of all responsibility, to take control and let them rest but anxiety about how that may happen prevents them from taking a first step.
My contract has four clauses that limit confidentiality and one of them is if the client is seriously suicidal, but what does ‘seriously’ actually mean? If a client tells me that within the last few hours they’ve taken an overdose then I’ll call an ambulance whether the client says they want me to or not – the fact that they’ve told me at all suggests that some part of them wants my intervention. So far that’s never happened to me. What has happened is that a client has told me enough to make me concerned that they may actively try to kill themselves within the next few days. I’ve asked their permission to contact their GP to get them involved. I’ve done this twice, both times with the client and me in the same room and with the speakerphone on. It’s important for the client to know precisely what is happening. Both times the client saw the GP within 4 hours. They weren’t sectioned or coerced into anything and continued to come to therapy. Huge numbers of people feel more or less suicidal every day. When things seem too overwhelming, when you’re too tired and worn down, when there are too many demands and nowhere near enough resources suicide can seem to be a rational choice. The vast majority of people who feel this way don’t want to die, they dearly want to live, but to live differently from the life that they are trapped in. Poverty, pain, violence, shame, discrimination, fear, exhaustion and a long list of other circumstances can make life anguished and hopeless, compounded by the wretched fashion of positivity that boils down to ‘You are always failing.’ Suicidal feelings can be comforting, they offer a semblance of control when everything else seems frighteningly out of control. If the pain or other struggles become too much then suicide simplifies everything. It’s why prisoners are kept on suicide watch: to stop them having any control whatsoever over their own life. To remove that final aspect of control from a person who sees suicide as their last resort is a form of torture. Feelings of despair and suicidality are more than worthy of being heard, they are the heart of the matter. Sometimes they are a howl from the past when events took over and swept you away. Sometimes the present is unbearable. You know that no one ever gets over the death of a child or another dearly loved person and the idea of living with this pain seems impossible at the same time as beginning to come to terms with it can seem like a betrayal. Moving into the liminal space between life and death can be caused by cumulative smaller events: being subjected to ‘regeneration’ or being made redundant; the end of another relationship or many long years of a violent one; workplace insults and misery can wear a person down to nothing. Living with suicidal feelings can become habitual, the neurological pathways between anxiety, a sad thought, a difficult event and the solution of death become well worn and more swiftly travelled without us even realising it. Whatever the case examining these feelings and thoughts is the work of therapy. Bringing a light into these places can make them less mysterious, less alarming. Looking at them squarely can diminish their power and witnessing them honours what may have been longing to be seen for many years. No counsellor can stop a person who is determined to kill themselves. For some people life is genuinely too complex and painful to endure and no amount of care, trust, relationship, medication, voluntary or involuntary hospitalisation or anything else will ultimately prevent it. Yes, suicide often bequeathes more pain and misery, no one denies that, and there are often ways out of present agony other than death. If you can choose to die at any time, take the time to share your truth with someone who can bear it. Maytree - 020 7263 7070 MIND Samaritans 116 123 International Resources 31/8/2017 You May Not Need Therapy At All A fair number of clients describe very similar problems. They’re constantly tired, or very edgy and unable to rest; teary, stressed and not coping. What used to be small problems have become insurmountable. They’re irritable, panicky and can sometimes behave in ways that seem beyond their control leaving them feeling ashamed, stupid, defensive and angry. As well as taking these symptoms seriously in a psychological sense I’ll also ask them to visit their GP to request some blood tests. Full Blood Count (FBC) This measures your general health, including how much iron you have in your blood. Anaemia – a lack of iron – can make you feel exhausted, short of breath and cause palpitations. Shortness of breath and palpitations are also symptoms of panic attacks. Low levels of magnesium and calcium can cause panic attacks. An FBC will show if you have any underlying infections which will make you feel tired and less able to get through the day. Thyroid Function Test The symptoms of an over- or under-active thyroid are very close to the symptoms of anxiety or depression. An overactive thyroid can also result in mood swings, insomnia, persistent tiredness and weakness, and the classic symptoms of a panic attack, palpitations, nervousness and irritability. A Blood Glucose Test GP’s generally offer 2 types of blood glucose (sugar) test for people who are not showing overt signs of diabetes: the fasting glucose which shows what is happening to your glucose levels after 8 hours of not eating, and the HbA1C which shows what your average glucose levels have been over the past three months. Type 2 diabetes is increasingly common and can lurk for years before it’s diagnosed. Some of the symptoms of it are tiredness, depression, and the classic symptoms of a panic attack: anxiety, sweating, palpitations, trembling. If your blood sugar suddenly drops, as it can do in diabetes, you can also feel irritable and bad tempered. These tests are performed at the same time with just one needle and take about 20ml of blood in total. Once you and your doctor get the results you will both have a much better idea of what may be causing you to feel psychologically unwell. Even if you have a clinical diagnosis of depression, anxiety or panic disorder, get these tests done. Physical causes of symptoms are notoriously ignored in people with a mental health diagnosis. And as with any medical issue if your GP is unhelpful get a new GP. There’s an intimate link between the body and the mind and just by attending to what the body needs, whether that’s more or less thyroxin, iron or just water, we can improve and sometimes even cure what seem to be emotional problems. If you have an underlying physical problem that you don’t know about therapy can help you be more motivated to attend to your health so that you eat better food, exercise and drink water more regularly, but this will not address a problem thyroid gland, low iron or diabetes. You never know, you may be able to avoid therapy altogether! 16/8/2017 A Level Results Stress Tomorrow is the big day and I’ve yet to meet anyone waiting for their results who isn’t anxious. For young people this is an especially critical time because so much depends on it. Whether or not you get into the university that you want to. Whether or not you leave home. How you’ll compare to your peers.
The hours up to 8am tomorrow can feel unbearable but there are a few simple things you can do to manage your stress. Most importantly, move around. It doesn’t matter if the movement is housework, going to the gym, taking the dog for a walk whatever it takes to get the air moving in your lungs and to build up a bit of a sweat. Stress releases adrenaline and the purpose of adrenaline is to make your muscles more efficient for escaping or fighting. If adrenaline just hangs around in your body you will become irritable and restless. If it comes to it, just jump up and down on the spot until you get breathless. If any of that breathlessness is because you’re laughing at yourself jumping up and down on the spot, so much the better. From now on any time you feel anxious, use the adrenaline that is produced by your anxiety. The next most useful thing you can do is have a drink of water. Just water. Not juice or coke or alcohol. There’s a link between even very slight levels of dehydration and anxiety, so rule that out. And have a glass of water every hour or so. Now, spend 30 seconds breathing properly. Stand up. Plant your feet firmly on the floor. Imagine a thread pulling you gently upright from the crown of your head. Breathe in through your nose and imagine that you’re filling your lungs from your belly button upwards. Your tummy should move, then your chest, but not your shoulders. Let the air move into your body and then gently let it flow out again. Again, your tummy should move then your chest, and your shoulders shouldn’t move. The in and the out breath should take about 12 to 15 seconds. That breath is how you should be aiming to breathe all the time. From your belly button up as your breathe in. From the belly button up as you breathe out. Simply breathing like that will ensure that you’re not breathing shallowly and too quickly, in a way that can actually bring on a panic attack. If you’re breathing effectively your voice should become a little deeper. If you hear your voice getting high pitched you know that you’re not breathing effectively. Slow down. Plant your feet flat on the floor. Breathe. This kind of breathing will slow your thoughts down and help you get things in perspective. The only admin you can do between now and then is to get the email address and phone numbers of the universities you want to go to, and those of your insurance choices The UKAS Track website will freeze from 6pm today. For what it’s worth, I’d leave it alone now. You’ve already changed everything you need to. It doesn’t update at midnight and won’t be open until 8am tomorrow. UCAS’ social media team will be around from 6am and the contact centre opens at 7.30am for enquiries. There’s no point in spending any more time with the website until then. So get some things in place from now until you pick up your results. Try not to make alcohol one of them. Timetable in a couple of exercise sessions – yes, a couple! - and if you can do them with a friend so much the better. Go swimming, go for a run or a long walk. Do some sit ups, press-ups or planks. Do the washing up, cook dinner, clean the windows, walk the dog, try to make the expenditure of energy meaningful. If you can’t find anyone to do exercise with just do it by yourself. Exercise will help you sleep better tonight, so put your heart into it. Plan a good evening meal, something that has a decent amount of protein in it. Tryptophan is an amino acid, one of the building blocks of protein, that aids sleep and combats anxiety. You’ll find good levels of tryptophan in nuts, tofu, meat – especially turkey – eggs, cheese, beans, lentils and oats. Plan your breakfast around this list too. Set an alarm, right now, to remind you to breathe properly for 1 minute every waking hour. That’s a total of about 12 minutes. About 50 good breaths. Find a good distraction and immerse yourself in it. If it’s an outdoor distraction that’s great. If it’s outdoors with friends, even better. If it’s gaming, well so be it, just don’t turn into a slob. Drink water. Get away from the screen to eat a good meal. Run up and down some stairs once in a while. And stop around 10pm at the latest. Be kind to yourself. There may be some very critical voices in your head telling you that your life will come to an end if you don’t get the results you need, that you didn’t work hard enough, that you’re a disappointment to your family and to yourself. Perhaps you didn’t work hard enough. There’s nothing you can do about that now. You can determine to work harder from now on. That’s all anyone can do. When I did my A levels a friends mother wouldn’t talk to him for 3 days because he didn’t get the results she wanted him to get. We all thought she was cruel and wrong. 30+ years on, knowing all about the causes of punishing behaviours I still think she was cruel and wrong. If your family or anyone else punishes you for not getting the grades you need they too are cruel and wrong. There’s no point in punishing you. Punishment – including passive aggressive sighing “It’s OK. I know you did your best,” ie "I know you're not very clever," – is not going to alter your grades. Some families look to their children to lift them out of poverty. In countries where that is a matter of survival pressures are different but in the UK getting good grades is not a matter of life and death. Your parents may well have made sacrifices to get you through education. That’s what parents are meant to do. What people who take A levels are supposed to do is to work hard enough to get the best grades they can without driving themselves mad. Anorexia, bulimia, depression and anxiety have exploded in young people. That’s a price that’s just not worth paying for A grades. For anything at all. OK. Stand up! Breathe in and out properly twice RIGHT NOW! Then go and get a drink of water. Good luck!  Taliesin Myrddin Namkai Meche and Ricky John Best had their throats cut when they intervened to stop Jeremy Christian racially abusing two women. Another man, Micah David-Cole Fletcher, who was also attacked remains in hospital.
Christian has a long history of white supremacist behaviours and a criminal record for violent and gun crimes. This event will cost colossal amounts of money. The disruption caused to the MAX train service. The time wasted while fellow passengers couldn’t get to work or to appointments and the resulting drop in productivity and efficiency. The police call out. The paperwork that the police, train service, ambulance, ER, nursing, medical and every other service involved will have to complete. Christian’s extensive engagement with the criminal justice system from 2002 and way into the future. How much, over his lifetime? Millions of dollars? Namkai-Meche had a degree in economics and had just joined a consultancy firm. In his lifetime he would have contributed a lot of tax and, if things had continued in the same vein, he’s likely to have employed a fair number of people and would have supported jobs and services throughout his life. Ricky John Best has four children and a spouse whose lives have now been adversely affected. It may make each one of them determined and hard workers and it will also cause them enough stress to have a physical effect that will certainly affect their productivity. Micah Fletcher’s psychological and physical needs are likely to be revisited over his lifetime and are unlikely to be covered by crowdfunding. Right now, his family will need to use welfare to keep his home from being repossessed and it's likely that he will use welfare at points throughout his life. The funerals are likely to be crowdfunded as will the medical bills of the dead and critically ill people. (The first of those bills will have already been presented to the next of kin, as they are for all families of people affected by terrorist attacks in the US.) Crime is expensive. The expense needs to be balanced against the job creation and, in privatised criminal justice and healthcare systems, the profits it can make for shareholders but the research shows that the private sector tends to be immensely inefficient, financially and on other measures when it is involved in public services. Culturally, the UK has always tended more towards punishment than support, that’s just the way we are, and as a nation we’ve always been keen to make tax income work efficiently. We often get the balance wrong, preferring to punish people even when it costs much more in the long term than supporting them at the point where things begin to go wrong. But when we have chosen to stop dividing people into scroungers or strivers, when we decided to prioritise people over money we have achieved great things for ourselves, for people not yet born and for our nation. Vote wisely. 15/5/2017 #mondayoverexposure
#mondaymotivation is a twitter routine where people and organisations get all whoop whoop about how GREAT the beginning of the working week is. I work with small organisations to help create their social media strategy and know it can be useful to schedule a guaranteed-to-trend hashtag but unless it's truthful it's more than wasteful, it invites criticism.
My local college has been serving the community for a century offering excellent education in a Ward that is the joint first most deprived in London. It was recently sold to the Council in fairly strange circumstances - who are now going to demolish it to build houses. We have been promised that the College is simply relocating - and no doubt it will. Many locals have been incensed by this and their detailed research has uncovered some alarming information about what looks like financial mismanagement of some description. All this is happening at a very high level and the day to day running of the College continues. Banners have been put up outside telling us to prepare for something wonderful and the social media is always good. But their #mondaymotivation post this morning was too revealing.
Another local organisation picked up on it and, to my joy, referenced an article debunking positive psychology. Then they referenced a blog that has been digging into the Colleges finances.
“The Management Accounts up to 31 December 2016 indicate that the College will fall significantly short of its income target for the current year. The overall shortfall is expected to be in the region of £1.7 million. Governors expressed concern at the dramatic change in financial forecasts compared to what was reported to the Board in October, where the then Management Accounts forecast a year-end surplus of £256k.” Oh dear. I have no idea about what's really going on at the College but, from a psychological stance, this tweet exposes rather too much about the uncertainty and anxiety that college staff may be feeling. The image seems based on purposefully alarming carnival entrances designed to let you know that you're entering a world where the usual rules don't apply. It's menacing and sinister and if you walk through the gaping mouth you are consenting to enter a world that you have been blatantly warned about. You give your consent for anything to occur, especially things that are frightening and disturbing, like being eaten up. The features are based on something that is human but horrifically distorted. Clowns are ambiguous: they're supposed to be hilarious and they're notoriously creepy. They say one thing and mean the opposite. The origin of clowning is in satire, where the Fool was able to tell hard truths to powerful people as long as he kept entertaining them. And everyone knows the narrative of the deeply unhappy clown. I'm not going to say much about the nose on the gif other than that Freud would have a field day with it, and that my more analytical colleagues would have something to say about an unconscious reference to being conned. Positive thinking is clearly linked to denial. (Do a search for 'positive thinking denial'. The second image is of a clown with his fingers in his ears and his eyes tight shut.) Denial is a coping mechanism that allows us breathing space in which to adapt to new, unpleasant information, but refusing to accept that something is very wrong means that the world slips out of your control - like entering into a sinister carnival world. Cognitive dissonance makes the world seem confusing and threatening and, as any recovering addict will tell you, denial traps and isolates you, preventing change. Positive thinking can result in the polar opposite of what we're told it's supposed to do, as it did today for the College. Their maniacally upbeat, ambivalently simple tweet has drawn some very serious attention that is way beyond what a social media team can be expected to deal with. Organisationally, we always have to spin things to our advantage but this is a skilled and delicate job, one that requires complete awareness of reality and the avoidance of being seen to be misleading. Individually, attempting this kind of spin is more often than not denial at best, narcissism at worst. One way or another the truth shows itself, whether we know it or not. *I've not addressed the spelling mistake because it may be that the person who wrote the tweet doesn't speak English as a first language. And it adds to the post's incongruence. 29/3/2017 Positivity Or Denial? There comes a point when you have to take stock and say, “Things are bad.” The beginning of the economic downturn saw a tedious increase in ‘experts’ telling us that positivity would make everything better. Thinking about what is good rather than bad and focusing on the good stuff really can build new neural pathways and change your attitude for the better. But it won't help if you want to walk across the road with your eyes shut. Very quickly the suggestion that positivity can be helpful has turned into a demand. We live in a country where therapists are working with the DWP to make unemployed people go back to paid employment and where paid employment is suddenly perceived as a ‘positive health outcome.’ If you think that’s wonderful then you don’t care about evidence. It is unethical, counterproductive and has no basis in fact. It speaks volumes about the desperation that many therapists are feeling. Because you’re reading this it’s probable that you’re all too aware that things have been falling apart for some time. Many businesses can’t afford the materials and staff they need and so existing staff are working at the edges of their ability and capacity. Public services - the services we all use when we travel, get ill, expect an educated population or want our elderly relatives to have some kind of dignity – have been amputated. Things are falling apart. The most vulnerable amongst us have been telling us this for years. And now ordinary people who are not vulnerable are feeling it.
Cognitive dissonance is “the mental stress experienced by a person who simultaneously holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values; when performing an action that contradicts existing beliefs, ideas, or values; or when confronted with new information that contradicts existing beliefs, ideas, and values.” We all experience it from time to time but many of us are finding a home in this unbearable environment. Demands for positivity have become authoritarian, insisting that we cut a smile into our face and do little dances of joy to demonstrate team spirit or something. Anyone saying, “My life is hard” is a shirker. Anyone suggesting that motivational speeches don’t put food on the table is dismissed as unenthusiastic. People who want to care for a sick child are told that they must ‘arrange alternative childcare.’ How do you discern whether positivity indicates confidence or stupidity? Intelligence, good business strategy and the ability to avoid danger involves knowing when to cut our losses. The alternative is to continue staring at the sun, borrow unsustainable amounts of money, time and good will and crash disastrously. Things are bad for most of us right now and, as adults, we need to look at facts rather than allow our prejudices and desires to rule us. Sterling is falling and the trend is downward. A 60-hour week is no longer unusual. (If you don’t work a 60 hour week that’s a good thing not an indication that you’re lazy.) Anxiety is twice as prevalent as depression. Our children are becoming more and more distressed. If you’ve read my blog for a while you know I don’t like inspirational quotes and the pretence that everything will improve if we all just pull together and think happy thoughts. Now I’m saying that if you’re an ordinary person and you’re not feeling a bit crap that it’s likely that you’re ignoring something. |
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February 2018
CategoriesAll Abandonment Abuse Ancestors Anger Anxiety Ash Wednesday Attitude Banking Bereavement Birthday Bravery Breivik Bystander Effect Camila Batmanghelidjh Carnival Cbt Challenger Charlotte Bevan Childbirth Childhood Children Christmas Coaching Compassion Contemplation Control Counselling Culture Dalai Lama Death Death Cafe Democracy Denial Depression Domestic Violence Dying Eap Earth Day Empathy Employment Eric Klinenberg Ethics Exams Existential Failure Family Annihilation Founders Syndrome Francis Report Gay Cure Genocide George Lyward Goldman Sachs Good Death Greg Smith Grief Grieving Grooming Groupthink Happiness Hate Hungary Illness Interconnectedness Jason Mihalko Jubilee Kids Company Kitty Genovese Life Light Living Loneliness Love Mandatory Reporting Meaning Men Mental Health Mid Staffs Mindfulness Money Mothers New Year Nigella Lawson Optimism Organisational Collapse Oxford Abuse Panama Papers Panic Panic Attacks Parenthood Petruska Clarkson Pleasure Politics Positivity Post Natal Depression Power Priorities Priority Productivity Psychotherapy Ptsd Red Tent Reflection Rena Resilience Riots Rites Of Passage Ritual Robin Williams Sad Sales Savile Scared Seasonal Affective Disorder Self Care Self Preservation Self-preservation Shock Sin Singletons Sport Spring Status St David St Georges Day Stress Suarez Suicide Support Talking Terry Pratchett Time Transition Trauma True Self Truth Understanding Unemployment Valentines Day Viktor Frankl Violence Whistleblowing Who Am I Winter Blues Women Work |
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