There is no dark side

Popularly emotions are described as good (joy, love, hope) and bad (anger, sadness, nastiness). Emotions are not good or bad, they are informative. The only "bad" emotion is one that is either too strong or too weak to be useful, while the only "good" emotion is one that informs you correctly about the situation you perceive. It is not the emotion, in general, that is good or bad, it is the situation that generated that emotion that is good or bad.

Emotions can be split into three major types:
1) Basic / Primary
2) Simple
3) Complex

Basic or Primary emotions have been studied around the world to try to get to the biological response that all humans have in common. The studies have attempted to take out cultural bias, age of the person (for the most part), and time in human history. On average the basic emotions are described as between 5 and 8 different basic emotions. For this article, I am going to use 6 - Anger, Joy, Sadness, Disgust, Surprise and Fear.

You may notice that only one of these is seen traditionally as "good" while the other five are traditionally seen as "bad". This type cast is because on average we like to feel "joy" while we don't like to feel any of the other five basic emotions. If I could choose which basic emotion I was feeling, "joy" certainly would be the one I pick.

Liking our emotions isn't really what our emotions are for though. Our emotions are here to inform us about the world we perceive. "Perceive" is the key word here, as it isn't what we sense at all. Our senses give us raw data about the world we live in, in a timely sense, which has no bearing on the past or future. This raw sensory information is filtered, passed through a pattern recognition section of our brain (which is generated via our past experiences) to create a prediction for what is coming such that we can act now to survive.

As a slight aside, consider that everything you see and hear right now is in the past. You can not sense the present as by the time the information gets to your body (let alone your brain), the thing that has occurred has already occurred, it isn't occurring. We are always slightly behind what is going on. If we try to catch a falling ball based on the assumption that what we are sensing is happening now, we will never catch the ball because the place we move our hand to the ball has already passed. To catch that ball, we need to predict where the ball will be, not know where it has been. Then we can move our hand to where the ball will be and catch the not yet occurring event.

Now switch the ball heading towards us to a saber tooth tiger (mainly because I like saber tooth tigers). We only want to know where the tiger has been such that we can predict where it is likely to be, and for us to not be in those likely places. This keeps us alive instead of dead (when we are right).

To bring this back to emotion, one of the components of how we sort our senses is for our predictions to colour our sensory data with emotion. When we recognise a pattern from the past that hurt us, we predict that pain coming and taint the perceived current experience with the colour of fear. If we did not have that fear, we would not act to avoid the upcoming pain and we would be harmed. Seen in this light, it is clear that fear is working for our protection and safety rather than against it. This makes it "good", right?

We often concatenate (that is put together and make as one) the situation that is good with the emotion we feel that tells us it is good, or alternately, the situation that is bad and the emotion that we feel that tells it is bad. We then mistakenly try to avoid or create the emotion instead of the situation. My intention here is to separate the emotion from the situation by understanding what the emotion is trying to tell you so that you can now use that source of information to analyse the situation you are in, and make intelligent decisions to act to change that situation into the situation you want, or preserve the situation if it is the situation you want.

As described above, the basic emotions are our biological survival mechanisms. These emotions are what helped each one of your ancestors get old enough to have at least one child, which eventually led to you. They must have done a pretty good job since you are alive to read this (I apologise to any undead who are reading this blog, but I have yet to receive proof of your existence - and technically your ancestors stayed alive long enough to produce you too).

The simple emotions are the culturally generated and acceptable emotions. Not all cultures share the same specific feelings or concepts. For example, razbliuto means the "feeling for someone you used to love but no longer do", which is a single word in Russian, but is quite complex and poorly understood in English. Simple, but culturally specific. Often their are large amounts of overlap, such as guilt, shame, pity, tiredness and so on. Yet not all cultures express it the same way, or have these feelings triggered by the same stimuli.

Complex emotions involve complexity about what you feel based on what you are stimulated by, combined with distortions due to your past experiences or expected future ones. As I said, it's complex. For example, the visceral feeling of fear you have in putting your hand in the outside bin to retrieve an item you accidentally threw out, complicated by your aversion to germs and cockroaches and knowing that often they inhabit these areas. Logically there will be germs, there may be cockroaches, but neither of these pose any significant threat to you. Yet if you have fears associated with these, your prediction of their presence creates an intense feeling of frozen fear baring you from retrieving that item, thus you accept that it is gone but kick yourself for being scared and wasting resources. Often you don't analyse these complex emotions, so instead you just feel awful but don't know why.

I will go into more depth about the basic six emotions I have hinted at above and throw in shame and guilt in a future blog.

Debunking the Psychiatric Diagnosis Myth Workshop/Exercise

Introduction:
One of the greatest advances modern society has is medicine. Over the last hundred or so years we have refined the process of discovering and treating medical disorders, illnesses and disease to improve quality and longevity of life.

Materials:
Something large to write on, such as a white board, chalk board, large pad of paper or computer with overhead projector. Writing implement.

Workshop:
Ladies and Gentlemen, are there anyone here currently today who has ever been treated for asthma, diabetes, bone fractures or a heart condition? [If not, continue for a few more common ailments]

That is excellent. Would anyone like to talk to us about what prompted them to get aid? That is, what led you to seek medical treatment?

[Listen to a few stories if possible, but try not to get lost in the nitty gritty of specific stories. Write on the board "Symptoms". If someone is getting to bogged down in details, point to the word "Symptoms" and say 'can we stick to this for now?']


Thank you. Now I would like to ask you if the treating doctor suggested one or more ideas about what might be happening that caused your symptoms?

[Listen to the responses. Write on the board, under "Symptoms" the word "Formulation"]

Thank you. Did the doctor narrow down their theories to a specific cause? How did they determine this cause?

[Listen to the responses. Ask questions about diagnoses and tests if they are not volunteered. If there was no test, ask how the doctor knew that this is what caused the symptoms. Write on the board "Medical Tests" and under that "Diagnosis"]

Thank you. What treatment did you receive from this tested diagnosis?

[Listen to the responses. Write on the board "Treatment"]
Thank you. Is or did the treatment work? Is it ongoing and having a positive effect? If the treatment didn't work, did the doctors go back and review your diagnosis?


[Listen to the responses, if any]

Thank you. Now, has anyone here received treatment for a psychiatric diagnosis? Would anyone like to talk about their experiences? [Hopefully someone will volunteer to talk about their experience. If not, relate yours]


Thank you. First, what led you to seek medical assistance?

[Point to the word "Symptoms" on the board. Listen to their stories.]

Thank you. Did the doctor offer a range of possible explanations?

[Point to the board where it says "Formulation". If the individual was only given one option, ask why the doctor didn't explore further options. After all, there are different types of diabetes, different types of fractures, different types of heart condition etc. Why is there only the one formulation for this person in this situation?]


Thank you. What medical tests were performed to determine a diagnosis?

[Point to the words "Medical Tests" and "Diagnosis" when appropriate on the board. Listen to the response.
- If there were none, ask how you know if the diagnosis is right if there was no test?
- If it is a subjective mental state test (rate yourself on this scale out of X), ask if you were having a good day or a bad day when you were tested since this is known to bias results. Was a secondary subjective mental state test done?
- If it is a DSM-IV TR style "you have x out of y symptoms" show the scope of permutations this style of 'diagnosis' has. Also discuss umbrella terms. For example: Dyslexia describes a range of learning disorders which can include mixed laterality, hearing difficulties, cognition difficulties, colour blindness etc. Each have similar symptoms - the learning disorder, but each have different treatments and tests.
- If it was physical tests of exclusion (blood test shows that it is not thyroid, not mineral deficiency, not etc) then ask how they know what it is when they have only shown what it isn't.]

Thank you. What treatment was offered for the diagnosis?

[Point to the word "Treatment" on the board. Listen to the response]
Thank you. Is or did the treatment work? Is it ongoing and having a positive effect? If the treatment didn't work, did the doctors go back and review your diagnosis?

[Listen to the discussion, if any]

Thank you for your part. Now we will open up the discussion to the group. What were the key differences between the physical diagnosis and the psychiatric diagnosis? How did the medical system break down?

Disclaimer:
I am not suggesting that you dispense with a treatment plan just because no objective test was performed to prove what you were diagnosed with. The idea of this discussion is to recognise the difference between an unproven formulation and a proven diagnosis. Doctors treat formulations all the time, but they are receptive to their hypothesis being wrong. If you find your treatment isn't working, or feel you should get a review of your "diagnosis", then perhaps you should have a conversation with your doctor/psychiatrist.

Your doctor/psychiatrist has great knowledge. Understand the medical process so that you can better use them.

Understanding our experience

When an experience occurs that we do not understand and have nothing to compare it to, we humans slip into a state of survival and change. There are a number of reasons why we can not interpret the experience and many stories we can create to explain the experience. Our need to survive often leaves us vulnerable and looking for help from experts, which can de-localise our power and understanding.


An experience, in this case, can be something such as having an extreme mood (happy, sad, grief, etc), an odd perception (all the humans seem to be carrying demons on their backs, have turned into animals, the earth is actually attracted to us, not us to it, I am being of light and I must light up the dark etc), a survival of extreme pain and fear (persecution, rape, torture, bullying etc) or a physical difficulty (heat attack, diagnosis of terminal disease, kidney failure, vitamin/mineral deficiency/over load etc). Of course, there are so many more experiences that are beyond our prior expectation that we can have that it is impossible to list them all, or even to categorise them.


I am going to deviate the conversation just a little to discuss how we humans process ideas. When I receive a new idea (from someone/book/thought experiment etc), I link it to knowledge that I have via either similarity or contradiction. For example, that new thing is like this other thing, except for this and that. Or it fits between this knowledge I have and that knowledge I have. We create bridges in our knowledge with comparisons.


You can think of our knowledge pool as a jigsaw puzzle. We have pieces that fit together and create areas of knowing and areas of not. We bridge slowly into these ares of not knowing by building pieces of comparison to what we do know, piece by piece into the vacant areas. Often we are afraid of these areas because we feel blind and are not sure of what we know in these areas. We may avoid doing things so we don't have to populate the blank spots in our knowledge with pieces of jigsaw puzzle that we are unsure of. What if we don't like the picture of the world that is created with these new pieces?


Experiences expand our world by giving us knowledge, memories, ideas and so on to store. They change our world and our perception of it by increasing the understanding and stories we attribute to events. In effect, knowledge is the story pool we can use to explain how events link together.


What happens when an event happens, or knowledge is gained, that we can not link to any other? It isn't like anything, and it isn't opposite to anything, or the existence of this knowledge contradicts a large part of the puzzle we thought was sound. At this point we either become lost, or we reject the knew experience or we are forced to reject prior experiences to accept the new one.


Imagine how much of your thought process can be distracted by this amazing recreation of your knowledge pool. While this is going on, who is paying the bills, cleaning the house, cooking meals, looking after the kids, looking after the parents and so on? Also, how is your internal reorganisation being treated by those who care and love you?


There are two factors I have raised here - survival of self and survival in society.


First of all, we will often be forced to choose between reorganising our internal knowledge pool and surviving. If I have to do basic life things to keep surviving and I don't have the personal resources to spend time in working my knew experience into my knowledge jigsaw puzzle, then I may put the experience off and find some cheap and nasty coping mechanism such that I keep eating, keep my shelter and survive the day, the hour and the minute. Yet sometimes the experience can be so profound that it destabalises your efforts to maintain your life and you must address the experience over and above maintaining that status quo. For example, what if a conclusion you draw from the experience is that those who you thought were protecting and nurturing you have some very sinister and life threatening outcome in store for you? What if you are right? Your survival right now looks more like you have to run away from food, shelter and support. I appreciate to the reader that this may seem fantastic, but there are enough people who realise they are the child in a sexual molestation ring that running away is a very good thing to do. You can't just assume that your new insight is wrong and bad for you.


The second point I make is the effect your experience has on others. In the year 2000, I decided to change my life path considerably. Many people who socially interacted with me did not like the new me and some actively tried to intervene to bring back the old me. My change was relatively minor - I stopped being a prat and became a nice person. Many of my friends and associates had huge difficulties understanding where I was coming from, why I was acting differently and were quite worried about me. Imagine what they would say if my realisation was more profound than "I have become the person I didn't want to be". By profound, I mean life changing.


When we have experienced something extreme, we often find that our social supporters are scared, resist change and often do not understand what is happening to us. Quite frankly, the average Joe is not educated enough or trained in the right areas to know how to help friends who are experiencing a profound life experience. When we do not have the personal resources to process the experience, we outsource - that is, we turn to processionals.


Professionals are trained to minimise risk, categorise behaviour and to treat the categorised behaviour. Behaviour is seen as "abnormal" and put on a spectrum of "no need to act" and "treat". This is a part of containment, risk management, stabilisation and reputation protection. There are some excellent reasons why this system is in place and some fantastic instances of where it is exactly the right thing to do. It can also quite help people.


When it doesn't, it is very difficult for the person going through a profound experience to muster up the free personal resources to object to the mis-treatment. By mis-treatment, I do not refer to abuse as such, but a treatment regime that is misapplied. The person often has enough troubles surviving the experience and finding resources to process the change let alone argue against an authoritative professional who is well educated in the diagnosis of difference and oddity.


I would like to see professionals trained more in helping people understand their experience and filling in those blank spots in their knowledge jigsaw such that they can go back to running their lives independently of the professional system. I would like professionals to be trained in ways of retaining maximum personal power rather than de-localised power.I would like to see humanity and dignity returned to the system.


I appreciate that I got a bit ranty towards the end their. My apologies!

The Life Cycle of Psychiatric Diagnosis

After working with many people and speaking with many peers and consumers, I started to see a pattern for those who had been diagnosed.


I appreciate that this is going to be contentious, especially for people who either diagnose others, or have found that a diagnosis has given them a sense of identity.


This is a pathway to recovery and wellbeing beyond diagnosis. If practitioners used formulation to inform therapeutic styles rather than diagnosing to define someone, I believe that a lot of the following list could be skipped - that is, from steps 2 straight to 10. In effect, I believe that a diagnosis is much like a familiar, comforting scenic tour, which may indeed get to the final destination, but a detour that is not necessary to make.


Please keep in mind that this is a theory that has not been independently verified and no experiments or research have been done to confirm this life cycle. 


1 - The Schism (between now self and society)
The feeling of separation creates distress. The distress results in behaviours which attempt to address the distress and are often mistaken for a fault in the person rather than an attempt to  save the self and survive the situation.


2 - The Diagnosis of Behaviour
The behaviour is catalogue and compared to many others. The diagnostician is attempting to catalogue the behaviour to find a solution to the behaviour which is seen as disruptive to the person, without realising the behaviour is protective. The diagnostician often misses the underlying cause of behaviour and fails to solve the problem.


3 - The rejection of diagnosis
The diagnosed person will often reject the diagnosis for various reasons. Often this is because the diagnosis is damning, stigmatising, degrading and not helpful towards a solution. Sometimes it is because the person perceives that the diagnosis implies fault in the person, either mental weakness or physical failings in the brain or genetics. Underlying this may be the intuition that the diagnosis does not address the root cause of the behaviours.


4 - The doubt of self
As the diagnostically appropriate intervention continues, the person begins to doubt themselves — their identity, their sanity, their methods of survival. Often the questions of “what if they are right?”, “what if I am crazy?” and “they are professionals, surely they would know” enter the mind set of the person. Doubts undermine the survival mechanisms created to survive the root cause, often resulting in the person coping less. 


5 - Acceptance of diagnosis
The person accepts the diagnosis as an accurate description of not only their behaviour, but their experience as well. Typical of diagnostically appropriate interventions requires “insight” - the acceptance of the diagnosis, and this is seen as diagnostically appropriate step towards minimising damage from the “illness”.


6 - Incorporation of diagnosis into self
Often the person changes their behaviour to more closely match the diagnosis, making a better fit, and hopefully make the diagnostically appropriate intervention a better solution. Behaviours that protected the individual from the root cause are discarded for those which protect the self from the perceived dangers of the diagnosis. All actions are interpreted through the filter of the diagnosis. “I do this because I’m sick”, “I can’t change, I have no choice”, “we just have to find the right drugs” - all solutions are external to the person.


7 - Redefinition of self as diagnosis
The diagnosis no longer describes the behaviour or the illness, but now describes the person. “I am a [disorder]” is a common phrase used by the person, reinforced by others saying “s/he is a [disorder]”. The sense of self identity has become corrupted by the behaviours originally adopted to minimise damage to self from a root cause. The person becomes the “illness”. This can result in isolation from others so as not to hurt them, or an excuse to take advantage of others since “I’m sick and can’t do it myself”.


8 - The rejection of self
Eventually the diagnostically appropriate solution is shown to not work, as the behaviours just recur, get worse, or adapt to the diagnostically appropriate intervention. The person is labelled as resistant, not wanting to get better and chronic. The person looses hope and faith, often retreating into the self, or acting out in violent, dramatic ways. These can be cries for help, acts against the self or an escape from grim and frightening reality. The person enters a crisis of identity.


9 - New definition of self without diagnosis
A solution to the above crisis of identity is to separate out the diagnosis from the self. This is not a return to a previous state, as too much erosion of the original self has occurred. Rather this is an evolution beyond diagnosis, seeking to put into context all of the experiences, good and bad, since the original schism. The person has gained both bad habits from the diagnosis and mal adapted survival traits, as well as a set of coping and survival tools.


10 - Acceptance of self
Evolving past defining the self allows for an acceptance of self as an existing being. There is an acknowledgement of pain, suffering and growth. If the person is able to go from Step 1 to here, then the person can move straight on to Step 11. Otherwise the person may need to pause to heal from erosion and self harm picked up from Steps 2-9.


11 - The healing of schism
The persons tries to work out where they belong in society, in life and what brings joy, contentment and meaning. The persons learns to love themselves for who they are, not what they do, not what others want them to do and not what they expect others think they should do. The behaviours learned to survive the original schism can be let go of if they are causing ongoing difficulties, or embraced if they create ongoing joy.

Grief and loss - Simply put

Grief comes in all shapes and sizes. Actually grief is just grief, how we deal with it is the real question.


Grief is a response to loss. Simply put, it is adjusting emotional ties to someone or something that is no longer a part of your life, or is no longer in your life the same way. In effect, grief is the process of adjusting to change.


Loss is something that creates a change. For example, a change in your job - such as being fired, quitting your job, missing a promotion, getting a promotion and so on. Each affects your life, creating change. Each change opens new possibilities, as well as closing possibilities. Adjusting to the loss of possibilities- that is adjusting the emotions tied to those losses - is grief.


Loss and grief can be very subtle forces in our life. I recall the time I lost a magnet that I liked when I was a child. On average, it does not affect me unduly, but on occasion, I wonder what has become of my magnet and I grieve for it. I have also lost many other magnets in my life, but these haven't affected me as I did not form an emotional connection with them.


Emotion is the key behind grief and loss. If you don't form an emotional connection to the thing or person that changes, then the change does not affect you directly, or indirectly. As such, the change does not trigger a loss. The stronger the emotional tie, the greater the effect to your life and the more you may feel loss.


While all change means loss of some kind, this does not require a focus on that loss. If you focus only on the gains and opportunities that the change can give you, then you do not feel grief. If you only focus on the loss of opportunities, the broken emotions and missed opportunities, then you gain no joy from the change and risk being lost in a cycle of grief.


It is rare that a change evokes only one extreme of emotional consideration. Generally change evokes a mix of perspectives, which can lead to an internal contradiction in how you feel about the change. I can be happy that my grandmother is no longer in pain, but sad that she is no longer part of my life. If I am okay with this mixture of emotions, all well and good. However if I feel that I should not feel happy, because I should be "grieving" and this makes me a "bad person", then I complicate my adjustment to the change in my life.


In my next blog on grief, I will discuss the most commonly recognised text about grief - the Kübler-Ross five phases of expected loss model.

Neuroplasticity document

The Vermont Recovery page has some interesting articles. This one on Neuroplasticity is quite good. It is a downloadable PDF document.


"Neuroplasticity basically refers to the brain’s natural ability across the lifespan to form
new connections and change its structure in response to experience.  This means the brain can
change itself physically and functionally at any age to compensate for injury and disease and to
adapt to new situations or changes in the environment."


"Traditionally, the adult brain was considered relatively hard-wired and fixed, a prognosis
that  lowered expectations about the possibility of  curing the alleged brain problems that
underlie psychiatric disorders.  Thus, in the medical world, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder
have been conceptualized as life-long, incurable brain pathologies that a person can learn to
manage, but never completely  resolve.    However, these hypotheses  have always been
problematic, for longitudinal  studies have  demonstrated again and again that  a significant
amount of people diagnosed with schizophrenia completely emerge from psychiatric symptoms
and no longer use medications.
4
  These individuals pose this challenge to neurobiology:  if their
previous symptoms were in fact due to a broken brain, are their brains now fixed?"

To solve a complex maze, start at the end... Life is a complex maze

A simple maze can be solved from the beginning. You move through a few simple turns and find yourself at the exit. If the maze is more complex, it makes more sense to start at the end and track your way back to the beginning. Life is much the same.

When a problem is easy to solve, we can easily move forwards without having to have a clear idea of what the exit looks like. We make a few moves, a couple of turns in the maze of life, and we easily find the exit to our problem.We have solved it.

When life is more complex, sometimes we don't really know where we are heading, what our exit looks like, what it is we hope to achieve. At this point, we don't know anymore which turns are good, which decisions are beneficial and what to do. So, stop trying to make your way from the beginning and cheat. Look at the end you want and work backwards.

Math proofs do this too. You progress the left hand side of the equation to look more like the right, you progress the right to look more like the left. If you manage to get them meeting in the middle, you win.

Some mazes are so complex, much like life, that you need to set goal points in between the start and end. These are great steps to help you get to the end.

If you do not look at what where you want your life to go, then you may find that you are running away instead of heading towards. This can sometimes look similar. The difference is that running away means all of your present decisions are made in fear, while heading towards means your present decisions are made in hope. This can significantly shape the feel and end result of your life. Thus I recommend you consider your destination.

Loss leads to grief

Loss leads to grief, grief leads to the ... sorry, wrong blog.


This is by no means a compete guide to loss and grief.


Ok, loss is something that everyone experiences. Whenever something that we feel a connection to is gone, we experience a loss. Loss can be as simple as misplacing your car keys, to being consuming like the death of a loved one, ambiguous like the loss of a bet where you were counting on that win, or complicated like the death of a sick relative.


The common link is that something has gone that you had an emotional tie to. Without that emotional tie, you do not feel loss. This emotional tie can be quite complex. It can be a sense of belonging, love, hope and so on. The breaking of this tie can create follow on emotions, such as anger, shame/guilt or grief.


Anger is the emotion we often feel when we feel powerless or hopeless. It regains our sense of power and ability to create change around us. When we don't know how we feel, and we feel lost, we humans feel anger and we can become aggressive towards ourselves and others. That aggression often has damaging aspects of social, psychological or physical aspect. Aggression is not the only solution to anger. There are other ways of expressing your feelings of anger and better ways to regain your power.


Guilt is the emotion we feel when we think we should have acted differently and we feel responsible for the outcome. Often this subjective feeling of responsibility is inflated compared to objective reality. It is that skerric of possible truth that lays us down. We exaggerate any possible truth in our action that can mean we are responsible for the loss we have experienced. To minimise this, take a fresh look at the loss and the actions you feel lead to the loss. Did your actions alone lead to this loss? Or were others involved? Are you sharing the responsibility, or are you taking a god like credit?


Shame is the emotion we feel when we think that others consider we have done the wrong thing. In this instance, we can feel shame if we think others are judging us responsible for the loss we are experiencing. So long as we place an exaggerated emphasis on other people's possible or actual opinions of us, we are going to feel trapped by shame. To combat this, realise that people are entitled to their opinion, whether true or false. It doesn't matter what people think about you in this instance - this is a time for you to be more concerned with how you are feeling, not with how other people are feeling.


Guilt and shame can blind us to feeling the emotions we need to feel to deal with the loss. This emotion is grief. Grief comes in several flavours. The most well known is the Kübler-Ross model, commonly known as the "five stages of grief", also there is the flavour of simple grief and the bitterest flavour is complex grief.


I will spend a blog post on each of these.

Shopping for Therapists

There are many good therapists out there in the wide world, the tricky thing is how to identify them.


First, let's get you into the right mind frame. If you take your car to a mechanic and you don't like the way they treat you or your car, you don't go back to that mechanic, you find a new one. If you don't like the way the shop feels, the language of the mechanic, the attitude, you don't even leave your car there, you leave. Finding a therapist is a similar process. If you don't like what they do to your mind and body, find a new one. If you don't like the feel of their shop, find a new one.


There are circumstances where you have little choice, such as locked ward, community treatment order and other government sanctioned loss of freedom. Even still, you can go through the following questions to help you determine if the person you are working with is receptive to your benefit.


These questions have mostly been developed by Thomas Proud, a Peer worker.


1) What are your qualifications for helping me?


2) What experience have you got for helping me?


3) How many of your patients/clients have recovered their lives back?


4) Do you believe I can thrive?


5) What methods are you likely to employ in supporting my recovery?


6) Are you happy? If not, what are you doing about it? If nothing, what makes you qualified to help me?


If you like the sound of the answers you get, then this therapist may be able to help you. If you don't, it is time to move on. If you can't, perhaps you may have triggered the therapist to think about what they can and will do more so than usual.


If everyone begins to ask their therapists these questions, perhaps therapy will return to the old ways - that of a midwife of health.

Who am I?

As I write this, I find myself currently unemployed. This prompts a lot of questions about self, which launches many questions about the past, present and future.


While I was employed, there were many things I put up with because, well, that's a job, right? I grew and changed, and that growing and changing did not reflect where the organisation I was with went. I attempted to confine myself within the bounds of my job, but that can only last so long.


Don't mis-read me here - I didn't leave the job because they aren't doing cool stuff, nor simply because I changed. There were many factors. What I am referring to here is what can also be found in relationships, which, in effect, is what a job is. We grew, we changed, and it is rare for that growth and change to be in the same direction. This means compromise with change and goals. It is rare for a work place to compromise and change if you aren't in charge, which means all the compromise needs to be with you. I am reviewing my compromises and wondering what that tells me about myself.


So my questions about the past become questions about my compromises and my growth. Thanks to where I was working, I have developed a more comprehensive understanding of recovery and thriving. I saw quite early that recovery was an early stepping stone to something else - wellbeing, completeness, EleMental... I wasn't sure. I have developed my thoughts and have decided that Thriving Is It, although not as Mike Smith defines it. I'll define it more later, in another post. This post is about me.


I compromised more than I feel comfortable with. The specifics of what I compromised aren't specifically important here. What is important is that I did compromise, which is human, and it has affected me, because I try to be better than human. Compromise is a natural part of being human in a world of social interaction and difference of opinion. If none of us compromised, we would either all be exact clones, or we would kill each other on site. The world is full of people killing people due to a lack of compromise.


Yet somehow I want to hold myself better than that. I want to go beyond human, creating a dichotomy of "This is right" and "This is wrong" rather than accepting that my "This is" is allowed to be different to someone else's "This is" and we can both be right. I appreciate that this is kind of vague and hard to grasp. Perhaps an example will help. "Thou shalt not steal" is an example I gave to my daughter. An easy principle to understand, if it isn't yours, don't take it. If you do, you are wrong. Yet if my daughter is starving and my only option to feed her is to steal food, then bugger the principle, I am going to steal some food. I hold the principle of "You will care for your child" higher than my moral principle of "Thou shalt not steal". In effect, I allow that my principles can be compromised by other principles. Therefore, I must look at the context of other peoples actions rather than just judging them wrong. Even when I have looked at their context, even when I feel I can justifiably judge them wrong, I must also accept that I may not understand and could be just as wrong to judge them as I think they are wrong. Still very muddled, sorry.


In short, I want to be uncompromisable, but have to accept that I am human, I live in society with other humans, and therefore I can't be better. That shouldn't stop me from aiming to be better, but I shouldn't kick myself for not being better.


This leads to my future. Where do I want to go? Clearly compromise is a big issue and I want to work somewhere that is more closely aligned to where I have grown and evolved in my present self. I fear that this place does not exist. This is one of the reasons I stayed as long as I did where I was - my fear of not finding it this good. Better the devil you know, isn't it? Not always.


Some of my wilder futures can be ruled out at this present moment. I will stay in the state that I am in because that is where my daughter is. I will not start my own practice because I do not feel I know enough to do so and I am not sure who I would want as partners, or even if I could find viable partners, to fill up my short comings. I am not going to drive off into the sunset. Mostly because the sunset here is straight into an ocean. By the same token, although for slightly different reasons, I am not going to drive off into the sunrise either as I fear following my fathers foot steps, running away from his life rather than working with what he has.


That still leaves me with a number of uncertainties though. Will I work for a non-government organisation, or a government organisation, or a private practice? Will I be working with children, adolescents or adults? Will I stay exclusive to mental health, or dabble in substance abuse or justice? Where will I look and what will I aim for?


Which leads to the present. To know what to do now, I need to have a fair idea of what I am aiming for. Without having some level of definition of this, I find myself frozen in action as I fear shutting down an option of what is to come. Knowing who I am and where I am heading is so very important.