I am entranced by this video

The song is about the singers relationship with her father, but it elegantly describes some of the processes that some people – by no means a particularly damaged or miniscule proportion – go through in order to discover more about their problems.

Michael * came to therapy with acute symptoms of stress. His workplace was stultifying, his boss out of his depth and another member of the team was a bully. The workload was too heavy for everyone and Michael had become the earthing rod for the offices collective unhappiness. We worked together to identify the shock and shame of being stressed, addressed the office dynamics and considered why Michael might have become a scapegoat. Michael felt much better prepared to deal with the complexities of his toxic work environment and decided to remain in therapy to explore the other matters that had begun to unfold during our time together.

Most of us have lost the innate power of our imaginations by our mid teens. Our heads are stuffed with factoids that will help us become hard working taxpayers and tremendous machine parts. You don’t have to write poetry or wear a rainbow jumper to be something other than a component: part of being a whole human being is about knowing what you feel and why you feel it, and therapy is a good way of kick-starting that process.

Michael found it straightforward to remember his past but realised that he couldn’t recall how he felt about events. His memory had become almost entirely cognitive. I wondered what his younger self looked like and we began thinking about Michael as a child of around 9 – how did he dress, what did he eat, did he have a nickname, what he liked and disliked, and so on. In a short period of time this younger Michael regained his own voice and began speaking with older Michael reminding him how he felt in some detail.

Like most people who come to therapy there was nothing poisonous or horrific in Michael's past. Part of growing up is, as well has having good times, experiencing disappointments, shocks, fears, loss, unhappiness, the usual stuff of an ordinary childhood and dealing with them. For all of us there are events that stand out usually because the adults around us behaved in ways that were unhelpful.

In therapy this work is never about blame. Circumstances make people behave in certain ways, no one is perfect, and it’s useful just to consider how things happened so that we, as adults, can make better sense of them.

Remembering the difficult feelings – betrayal, abandonment, shock, bereavement, resentment, terror – can be much more difficult and so we tend to say, “Well, that happened, it’s over. Let’s move on.” In fact, those feelings remain, unacknowledged and hidden away. 

But they’re alive. And if we ignore them they begin to run us. 




I'll be writing more on this subject in my next post.

I’m writing this listening to Tallis’s  Spem In Alium while the growing spring light and warmth is bringing my garden to budding life.     

Terry Pratchett intended to die listening to this - “That’s the one where every single part of it comes together at once, where God picks you up and drops you on your head,” - in his garden drinking an excellent brandy. Apparently he died in his own bed with his family and his cat with him, and I hope he was listening to this music.

Many of my friends and acquaintances are texting, emailing and talking on Facebook about the loss of this good man, all of us feeling a bit stupid about the terrible sadness we’re experiencing. But we’ve shared a world, landscapes, lineages, lives, adventures and histories with him and with each other, and that world has now come to an end. The characters we love can now only repeat their stories, they can’t develop or mature any more. Discworld has suddenly become preserved rather than living on in a kind of real time.

The most common element on Discworld was Narrativium, which caused people to act and events to play out as they are meant to in a story. Heroes were guaranteed to win if the chances were a million to one. If a little girl walked alone through the woods she had to meet a wolf, who was forced to try and eat her. But Pratchett’s most complex characters fought the pressures of storylines that cast them as the Evil Witch, the Killer Cop, a Farmers Wife or an Unwilling Reaper and in doing so became more fully themselves and infinitely more interesting people.   

Mistress Weatherwax, Sam Vimes, Susan Sto Helit, Tiffany Aching and Death himself exerted self control, experienced pain and unhappiness in order to learn and grow and become who they were truly meant to be. None of them were interested in being nice or even particularly liked, and paradoxically became loved.   

Please take the time to listen to Spem In Alium and raise a glass to Terry Pratchett who brought good philosophy to millions of children and adults, and whose legacy is fierce, funny and full of wisdom.

Depression has been under the spotlight this week after Robin Williams’ suicide. It’s great that despair – lets call it what it is rather than a medicalised euphemism - and mental ill-health are finally coming out of the dingy little spare room closet for an airing and wonderful that people who are suffering depression are having their voices heard. Talking about how mental ill-health can feel shameful, that there is little parity of esteem (a nice, tight, catchphrase) between the care offered to people with physical illness and people with mental illness is temporarily refreshing. Politicians and policy makers are saying worthy things about how dreadful this and that are and how they’ll make things better.

They're being economical with the truth.

People with chronic illnesses, physical and emotional, are being driven to suicide by the same ministers now saying how awful depression is, something that was recognised by the DWP back in 2012. It's only going to get worse.

It’s not just people at the end of their financial tether that are killing themselves. Successful men, you are killing yourselves at a catastrophic rate.

“We have a series of assumptions about suicide that are explicit and implicit, and they make a toxic mix,” Powell says. “One is that suicide is undertaken by failures: people who have no friends, who spend all their time in their room, who have something wrong with them. Are you going to talk about people close to you who might have taken their own lives if that is what others are thinking? If you say your son has taken his own life, then that means saying he’s a failure too. But when you look at the people who do this it’s quite the reverse - it’s often true that they are admired, well-loved and talented - though they might push themselves extremely hard.”

Take a look at this article:

"The most deadly criticism one could make of modern civilization is that apart from its man-made crises and catastrophes, is not humanly interesting. . . . In the end, such a civilization can produce only a mass man: incapable of spontaneous, self-directed activities: at best patient, docile, disciplined to monotonous work to an almost pathetic degree." Lewis Mumford, 1951

Unhappy women generally medicate and endure, unhappy men kill themselves.

I’m no fan of the Good Old Days when we all lived in each others pockets and did our socialising at the communal launderette or men-only club, but when as a nation we took the decision to vote for personal prosperity people began getting more sad. Now we're reaping that whirlwind. People who bought their council houses find their adult children have nowhere to live. When we all demanded cheap washing machines it was inevitable that manufacturing was going to go abroad. When we decided to treat each other as economic units it can’t come as too much of a surprise when we are also treated not as individual people but as things that make other things function. Like a widget. 

Counselling falls into this trap too. Far too many counsellors join in the scroungers and strivers nonsense. Too many believe that success is a client returning to work, even in the face of a foundational belief that our job is to support the client in discovering their own meaning for their own life.

For a great many people depression is a sign that your life has lost any meaning. A lot of people believe that having a high status job title, two posh cars, a big house and garden owned by the bank, and some nice clothes will mean their life is complete, but if they ever attain all that life remains just as hollow and meaningless as ever.

Look to the US which is 5 or so years ahead of us. If you want that life then do nothing, it’s on its way. You may be interested to learn that the American Dream has been totally debunked: if it were true then immigrant women would be sipping champagne in a swimming pool on a Learjet.

If you’re depressed take yourself seriously. As well as going to the GP and doing all the stuff you already know helps depression, think about what you want to do with your life. It may be that you want to spend more or less time with your children. You might want to spend more time awake, relaxed and communicating with your partner or you might want to get far away from them. You might regret having got on your bike like you were told to at 18, to move far away from your family, who are getting old. You may have to sell your house and move somewhere smaller (If you move out of London this won't be a problem.) you may have to take a significant wage cut. But you really are more than your job title and bank balance.

You don’t need to come to counselling to discover this – though it can be helpful to get some support as you explore your fears, desires and options. But you do need to recognise that something is wrong, understand that you don’t have to do what’s expected of you – even if it’s just you who’s putting you under pressure – and then dare to think of what you genuinely want to do with the rest of your life.

Campaign Against Living Miserably is a charity specifically for men under pressure.

Happy St George's Day, a day to appreciate the many, many benefits we have as people living in a first-world economy. 

The World Service broadcast a particularly interesting piece last night, on how France Must Change. High unemployment, a State-bound economy in the doldrums, strikes, laughable working hours, and now – get this! – legislation that prevents employees from responding to work emails after 6pm! What an outlandish and economically naive country.

Strange then, that France is ahead of our own Hard Working, endlessly striving, entrepreneurial economy, second only to Germany in Europe and fifth in the world. In a survey out today comes the news that “Britain has the lowest quality of life of 9 major European countries." 

France has the highest quality of life.

The weather has something to do with it as does our naturally cynical nature – we expect to be treated badly and so it comes as no surprise when we’re treated badly – but here’s a chilling analysis:

“We may still be enjoying the fourth highest household income in Europe, but the high cost of living means we are living to work.”

Person Centred counselling has a useful principle called the Locus of Evaluation. It proposes that when we’re allowed to remain in touch with how we genuinely feel we can make good choices; good for ourselves and good for the people around us. This is called The Internal Locus of Evaluation. The External Locus of Evaluation develops when we’re told how we must feel and criticised for feeling differently from the people around us. We have to ignore our genuine feelings to continue to be valued. People who function from an External Locus of Evaluation continue to look to people in authority to decide how they must feel and often feel absolutely dreadful, even if they determinedly continue to believe they are content with the way things are. You can read up on the theory here.

On Sunday the Mail felt it would be profitable to send an undercover reporter to a food bank and, despite noting that the reporter was asked lots of questions about his circumstances, recount that he walked away with £40 worth of groceries, unquestioned. In the past that would simply have added to the sneering disgust of the nation but this time it resulted in £35,000 in donations to the Trussell Trust.

Times and nations are not going to change much. Against all the evidence, as a country we’re going to continue believing that the French are lazy and on the verge of economic collapse whilst we lead the world in toughness and fiscal wisdom. But, as the Daily Mail incident demonstrates, individuals are now more than ever capable of effecting change. I’d propose that the conditions that bring individuals to the point of collapse are those that we are experiencing now. We’re being told one thing – that food banks are stupidly supporting evil people to lie around laughing at the Hard Working Tax Payer – when we know something very different – that food banks are a symptom of an unequal society, that the more unequal the society the more miserable society becomes and that we have the lowest productivity in the whole of the G7. Social media is a tool that individuals use to subvert propaganda, but attending to the messages that we constantly berate ourselves with is another, more difficult matter.

It can be profoundly sad and even disturbing to understand that many of the beliefs we hold dear are nothing but empty words, to realise that the way we've lived to this point has been largely meaningless and for someone else's benefit. It takes time to understand how it happens at all, but if you find yourself wondering about this kind of thing then you're ready to explore it. There's a lot to cherish in the English (and British) way of being, we'd be foolish to reject all of it, and there's a lot that needs to be examined too.





*Written by Cecil Rhodes, who left England at the age of 9.

The majority of my clients come to me with very similar stories: “I have too much work, my boss is either very nice but doesn’t support me or is unpleasant and doesn’t support me. I’m working way over my contracted hours and achieving very little of actual value, but as long as all the boxes are ticked that’s all that matters. I like my work but the kind of stuff I’m expected to do now has really worn me down. I don’t see my family. Secretly, my children have become a burden, they get in the way of my work.”

In some cases coaching helps the client to break down what looks like an enormous pile of never ending demands into smaller, more manageable tasks and attention to relationships, and whilst this can be very valuable it is not the whole answer.

Whether we like it or not the UK is now in the grip of a fantasy approach to life where a lack of hard work is the only thing keeping you from success and the unemployed are all workshy scroungers. I read an article in Forbes yesterday that partly drove me to write this blog entry: “Mentally Strong People: The 13 Things They Avoid.” What really chilled me were the comments, 65 pages of “Thank you so much, this really made my day, this is so amazing and I can see where I need to do more work on myself.”

So many clients are being told that they have ‘the wrong attitude’. Almost always what this means is “You’re not doing what you’re told to do fast enough and you ask too many questions.”

Our concept of success makes us all feel like failures. It may be that a person has to be single-minded to increase their income but the actual facts show us, again and again, that being male, remaining in full time employment and the income of the family you're born into are better determinants of not living in poverty than either hard work or ‘attitude’.

While some of the points in the first article are valid and good advice, for a moment let's turn the rhetoric on its head. Emotionally Damaged People: 5 ways to understand them.

1. Emotionally Damaged People don’t seek insight. They have learned that their feelings – and the feelings of others – are unimportant and they're disinterested in concepts of fairness or integrity. They have been trained to ignore their feelings and to treat harsh life lessons as something to be grateful for, as a matter of personal survival in an incredibly brutal environment. When a situation turns out badly they cannot bear to examine why, or who may have been affected.

2. Emotionally Damaged People don’t care about people who are less powerful than them. They couldn’t care less about criticism or advice from people they perceive to be beneath them. If the criticism comes from people they believe to be more important than them they are trained to be grateful, even if that criticism is persecutory. They can only function in a hierarchy. And they strive to be as high up as possible in that hierarchy, whatever the cost to their family or to themselves.

3. Emotionally Damaged People ignore the costs that instability have on them and on others. Emotionally Damaged people are not interested in how bereavement, low pay, illness, children, elderly parents or anything else affects anyone. They perceive themselves and especially other people as things.

4. Emotionally Damaged People are not interested in the causes of problems or how to alter anything for the better, other than the manner in which their betters perceive them.

5. Emotionally Damaged people are desperately lonely. They've been told from childhood that they are entirely alone in the world. They know that they will not be supported by anyone and they’re not interested in supporting anyone else. If their culture includes being seen to be supporting others via charity or mentoring they will become involved in these activities in order to be seen to be compliant. They have learned that human nature punishes failure and non-compliance, even if that’s the failure to be born in a prosperous family, and the emotionally damaged person is resigned to this situation. They have learned that it is better to stand on other people than to be trodden on.




Genuinely successful people know that relationships are what matter, not status or income. Having enough money to remain healthy, pay the bills, eat and sleep well, spend time outdoors for pleasure and relaxation and with people who contribute positively to their wellbeing is important – having more is nice but not necessary.

Here’s another piece of research: 1 in 5 British workers have taken time off due to stress.

“According to the study difficult deadlines, management pressure and a lack of support are the main reasons for workplace stress and 6% and 3% of stressed workers resort to unhealthy practices to cope, smoking and drinking alcohol respectively.”

Look at your attitude. See who you're trying to please, and why, and what you genuinely want from life.

During the 1990’s I co-created a temporary community that met four times throughout a year. The camps began as a way of us getting together cheaply but we very quickly discovered that living in close relationship to the natural world with no access to electricity, gas or anything other than a standpipe for running water inevitably led us to behave in different ways with each other and with the land, and that we valued these new ways of relating.

We had to share living and sleeping space to keep warm. Even in August the nights get cold and damp so it was an easy choice between freezing in the equivalent of a kite or snuggling down on carpets in a yurt heated by a woodburner. We cooked and ate together, pooling money, sharing tasks as diverse as chopping vegetables to keeping a fire going and we learned that we had to get on with it if we were to eat before dark – something particularly important for children and our more elderly members.

Living in nature is far from romantic. Nature can be cold and wet, can seriously sunburn your children, gets dark at 6pm, rains interminably, can be incredibly painful if you walk barefoot on frost, grab the blackthorn, rose or hawthorn without care and can poke you in the eye in the dark. Learning to live comfortably with these realities leveled the field in ways that were a revelation: people who were affluent couldn’t buy someone else to do it for them academically able people couldn’t just talk or teach about how much they knew about walking on a field at night. Small people, most often women, were often better at it than people who are bigger, often men. Children who didn’t get on at school suddenly discovered they were superb at chopping wood or keeping a fire going or putting up structures, skills that had a direct impact on the wellbeing of the whole community. There was kudos and respect for people of any age who kept the site ticking along and these were almost always people who did not usually experience kudos or respect in the rest of their lives.

Children and adults learned to work as a team, to take risks, to expand every sense, to go for a walk rather than have an argument, to seek knowledge from the natural world – particularly the wisdom of knowing that we will die evidenced by bird and mammal bones – to get cold and not get a cold, to be contentedly alone in a group, to live together, to seek solitude and to slow down. All without any risk of being knocked over by a car. There were certainly dramas and we learned to factor in very structured meetings where everyone could say how they were doing and be heard by everyone else. Some of the rules that evolved from experience were to not offer advice during these meetings, and to take responsibility for ones own physical and emotional wellbeing: getting enough sleep, eating and drinking enough. From time to time people became very upset indeed and, not being told what to do, not being given advice, not being shut up and not being allowed to dominate a camp, people also moved through their own feelings to a new place of understanding for themselves.

In research terms, we know that obesity is rising as people seldom leave some kind of chair, that the behaviours of many children are becoming disturbing, that attention disorders, anxiety and depression are rapidly increasing. Anecdotally, people are becoming less creative, less positively imaginative, more risk averse and terminally bored. We have lost contact with the earth, the elements and communal life. It’s superb to have ones own front door, washing machine, cooker and fridge, but we’ve also lost neighbourliness and places where our grandparents might meet to share physical work. This is why I’m so pleased about the New Economics Foundation report suggesting that if we work a 4-day week and promote gardening this will "provide the answer to every headline problem at the moment." From low unemployment to significantly reduced mental and physical health problems, spending less time obsessing about being seen to be a Hard Working Tax Payer and focusing more on creating, nurturing and simply living as part of the natural world can only be positive.

A report has come out this morning suggesting that a shorter working week and space for growing plants and food could "provide the answer to every headline problem at the moment."

At a time when every political statement seems to be about Hard Working Tax Payers – and discounts every activity that isn’t work – this seems like Utopian nonsense. But the figures don’t bear that out.

Japan has suffered 20 years of economic decline but has kept unemployment low by having a 4-day week. They’re more interested in social cohesion than getting votes. The 4-day week in normal in Norway. Across the US, both public and private employers continue to experiment with the 4 day week finding that there are savings to be made on agency staff and utilities, that absenteeism plummets, productivity increases, morale improves. Families save money on childcare and spend more time with the kids. Parents are less exhausted and, not having to fit all the housework, social life, and shopping (never mind relaxing) into a few hours, actually enjoy that time with their children. So their kids are happier and more relaxed.

For everyone to move over to a four day week would take a huge cultural shift, but it’s been done before: football matches traditionally begin at 3pm because a five and a half day week was normal in the UK. A two-day weekend only became normal in the 1960's. The summer school holidays are so long because children had to help with the harvest. And of course, a seven-day week, for men, women and children was once brutally normal.

While the economists struggle with the figures, we can think about the ways we work and why.

If it’s about status, if you think you’re better than a person who’s unemployed or works part time, beware. Redundancy, illness and failed businesses happen all the time and the more you look down on people who are not like you the more savage your experience when you join them. If it’s about money then decide what your priorities are: if you or your children really need all that stuff could it be that the stuff is making up for less-than-good relationships? If it’s about identity then make sure you don’t get old or ill. You are so much more than your job title.

Rounded, productive, content people spend time enriching their lives, are interested in a whole range of things from breadmaking and calligraphy to philosophy and singing. Vitally, they work on developing good friendships. You need time to build relationships and while your manager may value you while you keep producing good friends will support you when your manager hands you your P45.

I’ll talk about the psychological benefits of gardening in the next blog: getting your hands dirty really can keep your head clear!

I’ve always had trouble with the phrase ‘Self Esteem.’ We all think we know what it means but try to define it in a sentence.

‘An evaluation or appraisal of ones self worth.’ ‘Valuing yourself,’ ‘How I feel about who I am.’ But how is that measured? By whom? On what scale?

The huge majority of work on the subject addresses low self esteem but we know that people, particularly young people, who have an inflated, entitled attitude to the world often have high self esteem:

“Likewise, people with high self-esteem think they make better impressions, have stronger friendships and have better romantic lives than other people, but the data don't support their self-flattering views. If anything, people who love themselves too much sometimes annoy other people by their defensive or know-it-all attitudes. Self-esteem doesn't predict who will make a good leader, and some work (including that of psychologist Robert Hogan writing in the Harvard Business Review) has found humility rather than self-esteem to be a key trait of successful leaders.”

I see people who are suffering from a lack of confidence; from years of being told they’re rubbish or from being told they are wonderful but not believing it (usually because the people telling them didn’t believe it either.) I’ve met people with brittle smiles who have been repeating affirmations about how great they are, often fed to them by other people with brittle smiles neither of whom actually believe any of it. And then there’s the pseudo-science of The Secret which blames you for being such an idiot and totally crap at manifesting high self-esteem.

(The quantum mechanics that The Secret and its offshoots has plundered is beautiful, profound and barely understood by the peer-reviewed scientists who’ve dedicated their lives to it, let alone anyone else. As with diluted understandings of Karma it’s ridiculous to suggest ‘You want and deserve your horrible life, the Sultan of Brunei wants and deserves his privileged life.’ The real message, as with so much of the self help industry is ‘This is all your fault,’ which seems calculated to keep you in need of further guidance, teaching, courses and books from people making money from it.)

Over the years, I've taught workshops on self esteem referring to the research and using tried and tested techniques but felt it was somehow missing the mark of authenticity. Eventually, I stopped teaching this workshop when I felt it put me in the same category as the brittle smilers. And there’s still something to say about how we feel about ourselves in the world.

Self-Compassion looks as if it may have some good answers:

“Dr. Kristin Neff, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin is the pioneer of self-compassion as a tool to promote psychological healing, well-being, and better relationships. She contrasts self-compassion with self-esteem in that it does not require us to elevate ourselves above other people and compete with them. While high self-esteem is generally based on evidence of superior achievement, self-compassion is a more constant personal quality, in which we value ourselves and treat ourselves kindly just because we are human.”

That’s a message I can relax with – that simply by virtue of our existence we are worthy of the same care, respect and healthy relationships as anyone else. Not because we work harder or achieved more or anything else, but just because we exist. That’s the message from counselling research too, that if the counsellor prizes the client, doesn’t judge them and is genuine in relationship with them then the chances are that therapy will work. This is an attitude not a set of techniques, and it’s a damn sight harder than chanting affirmations. I think it’s worth the effort.