 I had to stagger in to work today, feeling like hell and dosed up on Lemsip. If you’re self employed, as I am, you’ll be aware of the pressure to choose between staying in bed and paying some bills, and today I just had to get on with it.
That said, I was also able to come home two hours later and sleep, then continue to do a little bit of work from the comfort of my sofa. That’s a blessing. For the previous two days I’ve done nothing at all even though there’s a never ending ‘must do’ list. There always is. A few days away from it won’t kill anyone. One of the questions I ask most of my clients is, “What’s the worst that will happen if you don’t go in to work?” Their response is usually to smile, look sheepish and say something along the lines of “Nothing much.” The pressure to keep attending work is astonishing. Just having your body in the office seems to be the single most important aspect of employment, rather than any work you might do. One of my clients* left his employer after a review where he was told his work was, ‘Exceptional, we can’t fault it,’ but he mustn’t listen to the radio on headphones. Why? Because his employers need for control was poisonous. For this client, after finally realising that he was being bullied every day handing in his notice a couple of days later was the right thing to do. He had the backing of his family and enough savings to see him through 6 weeks of job seeking. For him, it was worth visiting his GP to get signed off, taking a week or so to rest and recover from an absurd work environment, and then get on with finding a new job. The ideal way of dealing with a job you hate is to find a new one while letting your current employer pay your wage. What makes that difficult for many people is that they won’t admit that their employer is toxic. We tend to bitch and moan about work without doing anything about it, whether that’s looking for new employment or talking to a Union, and wait until something so preposterous happens that things begin to spiral out of control. I’ve had a number of clients who’ve denied anything was wrong until they’ve been assaulted at work. Denial is not just a river in Africa. *Identifying details have been changed. 21/3/2015 What Will Make You Say, 'Enough'? Back in July ’14 I wrote about compulsory therapy for people with mental illness on benefits. This policy idea was not based on any research – which demonstrates that making people go to counselling is counterproductive – it was a kite-flying exercise to test public opinion: just how much cruelty are we prepared to accept?
Something similar was floated last month this time seeing if the public will accept enforced major surgery. Just like the compulsory therapy business forcing obese people to have surgery perversely ignores all the research: “ . . . any mandated program should have a strong evidence base for success. Unfortunately, diet and lifestyle interventions have restricted, often transient, benefits due to biological adaptations, that act to sustain high bodyweight. It is therefore important to ask whether requiring people to participate in weight-loss programmes, despite a high likelihood of failure, is acceptable from the point of view of an individual, provider, or society. Although there is some success with pharmacological treatments for obesity, the only treatment for obesity that has been proven to be successful for substantial long-term weight loss and improved quality of life in a high proportion of people is bariatric surgery." "It is not fair to ask hardworking taxpayers to fund the benefits of people who refuse to accept the support and treatment that could help them get back to a life of work." This is the standard announcement to persuade people who pay tax (and many who don't earn enough to pay tax) to agree with policies that provably worsen medical problems. We all know people who pay tax and don’t work hard. Sometimes it’s us. Whenever I hear “Hard Working Tax Payer” I hear the Shadow echo, “Idiot” because that’s how this term is in fact being used. At the end of Downfall, a dramatisation of the last days of Hitler’s life, a boy is shown returning home to find his mother lynched by the Greifkommando. This paramilitary group murdered ‘cowards and traitors’ – old men, children, women – to create a climate of terrified compliance. In the film a civilian in a typically Bavarian hat is part of the Greifkommando: he’s not a soldier, he won’t be court martialed or shot if he doesn’t murder people, he’s just along for the pleasure of instilling terror and, if he gets the chance, killing people weaker than himself. He uses his righteous love of country as justification. Some of us succumb easier than others to this psychopathy. We can’t deal with complexity. Immigrants are bad: it used to be that immigrant simply meant non-white but now we’ve broadened the term to include people from Eastern Europe. People on benefits have always been sneered at but now the disabled are also Scroungers. We can’t cope with the fact that the highest proportion of benefits - 47% - go to pensioners so we ignore that. We’re comfortable with Them and Us where They are something to be despised and therefore so much easier to devastate. This is simply human nature. Germans didn't suddenly go bonkers in 1938, any more than Rwandans, American settlers (AKA the British) Cambodians, former Yugoslavians, Turks or any other group of people who lost their sense of humanity. Part of all of us, myself included, loves to hate. Our job is to resist that, to retain our empathy and intellect. Because apart from anything else it might be you who is cut from the herd next. Once again, our attitudes are being assessed to see just how far down that road Hard Working Tax Payers have gone. Are you happy to force someone to have major surgery? Are you?
20/7/2014
Can Compulsory Therapy Ever Work?
Psychiatry has often been used as a tool of state control. People who have been inconvenient or low status or cost too much to care for have been brutalised for centuries, so last weeks 'kite flying' announcement that people who are unemployed and mentally ill may be forced to attend some kind of therapy or have their benefits stopped has precedent.
Throwing an idea out without a formed policy behind it is called 'kite flying' because the people proposing it want to see how such an idea might fly. Will we rejoice that unemployed people are being further required to perform more hoop jumping or will we boggle at what a ludicrous bit of nonsense this is? Ethically, it's a non-starter. When we begin compelling adults to have medical procedures we enter the world of ethical committees and High Courts: particularly because psychiatry has been used to abuse people compulsion in it is treated with enormous caution. This is not to say that it doesn't occur but when it's used it's almost always in a situation that is considered life threatening. People who are not sectioned but who are so depressed or anxious that they cannot work are not a threat to themselves or others. We have evidence of what happens when we put a government agency - ATOS - between a patient and their GP. The suicide rate increases and the financial cost of appeals outweighs any savings made. The emotional cost to patients and their families is often catastrophic. There's no reason to believe this new scheme will be any different. Therapeutically, counsellors know that a person who has been sent to therapy by a spouse, employer or parent is unlikely to do well. Therapy should never be a punishment or way of controlling someone, it has to be freely chosen. Yes, offenders are often compelled to attend therapy and what happens is that a majority learn the language of contrition rather than positively learning much about their motivations and their effect on victims. So we know that compelled therapy is ineffective. We can also add that if this dreadful idea was ever to be implemented it would be limited to six or so sessions, which is barely enough for someone who is mildly unhappy let alone someone with a mental health diagnosis. The waiting list - already enormous for NHS and most agency therapy - would make it unmanageable and we can guess that, just as with CBT, many of the people trained for this project would not actually be therapists at all, but technicians on a budget and under pressure. So what might the purpose of this dreadful scheme be? Would people compelled to have therapy be removed from the official numbers of the unemployed? This is what happens to people who are compelled to join other unemployment schemes so that the numbers of unemployed and particularly long term unemployed fall, on paper. If ministers wanted to help people with mental illness back to work they need to give appropriate funding to existing mental health services and reopen the services that closed because of reduced funding. But we live in a period of time when it's not quite acceptable to throw stones at the mentally ill, yet we are encouraged to pour scorn on them if they are also unemployed. If the public mood likes the idea of punishing people who are so profoundly unwell that they have resigned themselves to living on around £100 a week then this will no doubt happen. At the very best, it will offer therapy to people who have not been able to access it. At worst it will offer dreadful non-therapy from ill-trained, ill-motivated non-therapists. This idea slunk off in shame in 2009: there's no good reason why, 5 years later, it shouldn't slink off to die.
28/4/2014
"I Just Don't Have The Time!" I had to sit down to listen carefully to a radio programme this morning, discussing this news. A growing number of school age children are still wearing nappies.
The assumption is that that it is underclass parents, people who can barely drag themselves from their filthy pits to tend to their almost-inhuman offspring, who are responsible for this epic neglect. Those people who called in to the radio programme to talk about their personal experience of this phenomenon felt they don’t have enough time because they're at work. The research suggests their attitude isn't limited to people who call radio programmes. They work all week and on their days off they don’t have the energy to commit to this very basic task. They can’t bear the thought of having to clean up the inevitable and quite normal mistakes that occur during toilet training so they don’t bother. Helping their child move from an infant stage to that of an appropriately independent and capable child takes a couple of weeks, and these parents can't spare that time. Quite obviously, the majority of parents from every background manage to toilet train their children. I’d propose that a parent who cannot manage to care for their children should have Social Service involvement whatever their background – the excuse that you’re too tired after work to bother with your own children is preposterous. There are any number of employers who would happily work their employees into the ground and resent any workplace legislation that gets in the way of making a profit. I’m suggesting that if an employee feels under such profound pressure that they cannot take time off work to toilet train their child then something is dangerously out of balance. Dangerously. Even the DWP doesn’t insist that a lone parent work until their youngest child is 7 years old. But there’s so much greater status in being employed rather than being a single parent on the dole. At what point does caring about your status become more important than caring for your child?
3/12/2013
Let's Talk About Attitude 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.
8/10/2013
All Work and No Joy I went to lunch with a friend this afternoon and talked about how much more sane she felt having left her work. Marian used to work for a large organisation moving terribly important bits of paper around, something that added very little to the sum of joy or convenience to the world. When she joined the organisation she had to opt out of the Working Time Directive which would limit her working week to an average of 48 hours. Predictably, she began experiencing racing thoughts, became anxious, started having panic attacks, felt paranoid (although her employers really were out to get her.) got insomnia, began drinking too much alcohol in order to regulate her mood and sleep, lost friends, got exhausted and crashed. Her ex-employer provides a GP something Marian believed to be altruistic until she realised that this GP was contracted to let HR know about staff ailments. And so Marian was unable to see an actual GP rather than a sinister informant for some weeks, and then, not surprisingly, was signed off work for 3 weeks.
To cut a depressingly common story short, her life was made hell and so she left. There's something punitive and smug about employers who, in the 21st century, believe their staff should work more than 48 hours a week. Is their company so disfunctional, so incompetent, that people have to work this many hours? And yet an increasing number of people are buying into this nonsense. There's been a very sharp increase in the numbers of people I'm seeing who are suffering not so much workplace stress as workplace abuse, being asked to sign away their lives and privacy to organisations that bleat loudly about how awful The State is and then behave like a Statist dictatorship. The rhetoric around Hard Working Tax Payers has become pathetic. If hard work is the route to success then the recent immigrant with three low status jobs or the pensioner who can't afford to give up work should be living the high life. The LSE agrees. I'm seeing people on the verge of serious mental illness because their employer treats them like a disposable machine part. This has a lot to do with status - somehow it's become high status to work like a donkey as long as money is thrown at you. Let me say this clearly: having lots of money doesn't make you better than anyone else. Time and again, it's been proven to make people behave very badly. I tried to find an image to illustrate this blog and searched images for "Hard Working Tax Payer." Endless snarky pictures about how the poor are milking tax payers came up. There are a growing number of people who are very content to punch down, to hate and fear people who are vulnerable, and they're useful to people and organisations who like to keep employees hard at work. But it's poison to the soul. If you want to be happy then behave like a human being. Spend time with your friends and family. Get some sunlight in the fresh air - if you can't spend an hour a day outdoors then your life is way out of balance. When you leave work, leave work. Get some exercise, not a three minute blast in the gym but a pleasant run or walk. Do something that you enjoy and give yourself enough time to enjoy it. And for goodness sake, do something meaningfully useful for someone who can't pay you. It may be that you lose status if you stop commuting (in conditions that are illegal to transport cattle) to your ace job and take up something less exciting closer to home. You may have to move house if you take a lower-stress job but that's much better than making an emergency sale when you're thrown away because you can't handle the pressure. Yes, you won't be working in the same glossy environment, but you will be able to take a leisurely lunch with a friend, soak up a bit of autumn sunlight and think about how much more human you've become.
10/10/2012
In Favour Of The Four Day Week 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!
21/1/2012
Anxiety, Panic, Confusion, Economy. Everywhere you look there are projects and news reports, opinion pieces and political rhetoric about getting people into employment. Everyone must be employed whether they’re disabled or exhausted or with a national average reading age of 7. The world wide recession has nothing to do with one in 4 young people being unemployed or overall unemployment being at its highest for nearly 20 years: if you’re unemployed it’s your own fault.
The US, which is feeling the recession far more acutely than we are, is experiencing an explosion of panic disorder and anxiety has overtaken depression 2 to 1: 18 % of the population – 40 million people – have been diagnosed with it. My colleagues and I have noted a corresponding increase in the numbers of people we’re seeing who are very anxious rather than depressed and we wonder if the economic climate has anything to do with it. We’re told that to be unemployed is to be a benefit scrounger, and many of us still earning face daily anxiety about becoming unemployed. Cognitive dissonance is the unpleasant state of believing things that conflict with each other and is most powerful – most uncomfortable – when it is about our own self image: “I am a good person and I shoplift/ drink too much/ endlessly gossip about my friends.” Many people seem to be thinking: “I am a good person because I am employed and my job is constantly at risk so if I lose it I will become a bad person.” They know this is nonsense but it’s very real and has two major effects on the people experiencing it. They learn to put even more distance between themselves and the unemployed, and anxiety about becoming unemployed can go stratospheric. Both these cognitions tend to be unconscious. The cure for cognitive dissonance is rationality. John* told me that he was proud to be called aggressive at work, proud that he could intimidate his staff into working harder. All he needed from me was techniques to cope with his panic attacks. He wanted to be cured within three sessions. Happily, there was clearly a part of John that didn’t demand this and we spent some weeks together rationalising that despite bullying his staff his sections’ productivity was decreasing and he was on the verge of collapse 4 or five times a week whilst at work. Perhaps something needed to change. More weeks were spent exploring what those changes might be and John became increasingly visible as a sensitive, caring, worried man with a family he felt totally responsible for. Over time John was able to show more of himself to his fed-up subordinates who became less fed up and started to work as an effective team with John as their team leader rather than a martinet. John’s panic attacks reduced and continue to reduce with some of those techniques he wanted, and a pleasant side effect is that family life is happier too. Mary* appeared calculating, obsessive and nasty at the same time as not being able to do anything about her situation because it was everyone else’s fault. After decades of hard work she now found herself unemployed, something that wasn’t her fault unlike all those lazy bastards out there. But no one would employ her because she was a working class white woman and Black, Eastern European or Asian people had taken all the jobs. She’d come to see me because her GP could find no cause for her dizziness and breathlessness and had suggested antidepressants or counselling. She could have had 6 free sessions at the GP practice but she’s always paid her way. Mary’s entire identity was tied up with being a hard working taxpayer and now that she wasn't employed and didn't pay income tax (though she, like every other unemployed person, does pay VAT and National Insurance) the foundation of who she was had disappeared and she was profoundly shamed and humiliated to join the ranks of people she’d sneered at all her life. Mary spent weeks venting her spleen and then something suddenly snapped: “I’m a horrible person.” Actually, Mary was, like all other racist, classist, prejudiced people, fearful and very hurt by her own hatred. Hearing herself say vicious things week after week without having to defend her opinions or being backed up had shocked her. She nearly fainted, she felt nauseous and towards the end of that session she felt euphoric. I encourage every client to take 5 minutes in the Lighthouse garden before returning to everyday life and Mary took an hour. From that point Mary was able to begin rebuilding her life, understanding the difference between work, employment and activity, becoming a respected volunteer, asking interesting questions about who her friends were, and why, and who she might really want to be. We are more than our job descriptions. It can be surprisingly difficult to really understand that. *Names and identifying details have been changed. |
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July 2020
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 COVID 19 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 Fear 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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