PANIC ATTACKS AND HOW TO DEAL WITH THEM

The Mad Axe Man


In this chapter I want to look at panic attacks, why we have them, what they are about, how they make us feel, and what we can do to stop them. But before going on to talk about them, I need to focus on normal body physiology, so that it makes more sense in understanding what is going on in a panic attack.

Right now ,whilst you’re reading this there are parts of your body just getting on with the normal things they do, without you consciously having anything to do with them. By this I mean, your heart is pumping blood round your body, your kidneys are sorting out waste products and your liver is doing whatever it does in life, along with all your other internal organs! You have absolutely no say in their working processes, they do it regardless of what you want. So when were healthy we never take any notice of them whatsoever, and if we’re not so healthy, we wish them to be healthier.

So as a human being, we can establish that ‘things’ are going on every minute of the day to keep us alive, and a good thing to! One of these things is the human body’s ability to react to fear. We have to have this ability or we would never be aware of any danger facing us.

The edge of the cliff - Don’t go there!
Reckless driving - Don’t got there!
The overheated chip pan - Don’t go there! Well actually do, but do it properly!
The feeling of being followed at night down the street - Oh No! Is it the mad axe man, what can I do to escape?

There are of course thousands of things that frighten us, and I can’t possibly list them all. And equally what frightens one person may not frighten another, but for the sake of this story I’m going to concentrate on the mad axe man.

So there you are, minding your own business walking somewhere, it’s dark, but you feel ok walking, as you know where you are going. The street lamps mean that it’s not that dark along the street, you are walking with confidence, head held high in the middle of the pavement, just as all the advice has told you about being safe when walking alone. So far, so good…….

But, you start to feel uncomfortable, are you being followed, you start checking over your shoulder, your pace starts increasing. At this point certain physiological changes start occurring in your body that you have no control over. These are known as the fear, fight and flight responses. These responses are there to protect you, so that if you really do need to start running hell for leather down the road, you will have more energy to do it than you would normally expect to have. You have a heightened sense of awareness, looking around you for escape routes, a neighbours front door perhaps, a shop, some other people walking up ahead, whatever. Or maybe you prepare to turn round and face the axe man and fight your way out of the situation. Don’t think I’d recommend that one myself but hey…. What do I know!

However you behave, which you won’t ever be able to decide till you are faced with that situation, as none of us know how we will react to danger, till faced with it. Best example of this, is of course, those wonderfully brave people who have been awarded the VC for valour in the face of huge personal danger. Without exception, when they have all been interviewed they didn’t know they were going to be so brave, they just ‘were’ as they seemingly had no choice within themselves when the need to help preserve life presented itself.

And other times, when we have thought that someone would cope in the face of adversity, they have fallen apart. There is no way of judging anyone’s ability to deal with fear at all. But this is a debate for someone else, as all I want to talk about is what is happening in our body when we feel in danger.

So regardless of whether the man axe man is real or imagined the changes that go on in our bodies is universal once we start to feel fear. Our bodies being the totally wonderful things that they are have a system to help us cope, and this is what happens:

First thing that helps prepare our bodies to hook into the fear, flight and fight is the realise of Adrenaline into our body. Now adrenaline is a recycled product it gets pumped out of our adrenal glands and after so long the adrenal glands demand it comes back. This means that we can only sustain terror for a limited length of time before we settle into a plateau of fear with a heightened sense of calm. Really good example of this can be seen in the film -Flight 93.

In this movie, it tells the story of the flight that on 9/11 that the hijackers were trying to fly into the White House and the bravery of the people on board, who, when faced with the certain knowledge of their deaths stopped panicking and started phoning people, to tell them they loved them and to let them know what was happening on the plane. They also managed to get the plane to crash harmlessly into a field rather than the White House so saving many, many lives. Not a film to watch without a large supply of tissues!!

However , going back to our fear of being followed, adrenaline has been realised into the body, and then several other changes follow in quick succession. We start breathing faster and more shallowly. Now, normally we breath from quite low down in our lungs. So right now, put your hands on your chest, put one at the bottom of your ribs and one just above your breasts. Now take a deep breathe in, you should feel your body move under the bottom hand. Next take a small panting type of breathe and the top hand will feel the body move under it. Well, when we are frightened we start breathing from the top part of our lungs, to take in extra oxygen into our bodies.

This oxygen has only one destination and that’s our heart. As our hearts job is to act as a pump for oxygen to keep us alive throughout our lives. Which is ironic, when we invest so much power in our hearts in terms of love. But no, it’s just a pump!

So our hearts start beating faster, to push the oxygen through our body, it does this by converting the oxygen to energy which then goes into the blood supply, cause the body is in crisis/ panic/ fear mode this blood is rushed to our legs, to help us run away, to our arms, in case we need to fight and to our brains.

The blood that wooshes up to our brains does two things, firstly to hit all our brain synapses so that are senses are heightened and we are capable of making split second decisions in potentially life and death situations.

Secondly it allows are pupils in our eyes to dilate. Normally are pupils dilate according to light and dark. Or when we are feeling extremes of emotion, like love, anger and in this case fear.

The last thing that happens, is our digestive system stops working, as the body knows that all resources are required for this emergency and the last thing it needs to be doing is digesting your fish and chip supper. Although what any of us are doing eating chips in these health conscious days ,who knows! Well except, they’re yummy of course!!

All of these changes happen within moments, we don’t even register they are happening, all we are aware of is how we are getting to get to a place of safety as soon as possible. And it’s only later when we’re all having a nice cup of hot sweet tea (ugh!) that we wonder at how we managed to run so fast, or notice the brand name on the mad axe man’s baseball cap!

These changes in our body are NORMAL and HERE TO PROTECT US!!!!
Without them the mad axe man would surely have got us, or whatever it is that we are frightened of. As we simply wouldn’t have an awareness of danger which would be totally abnormal in our bodies. However much we like risk taking! So that the, so called adrenaline junkies, who regularly through themselves out of planes or go bungee jumping ( why???) will experience these feelings as much as the person walking down the street feeling frightened. It’s just the adrenaline junkie loves the rush of these feelings and better still the feeling afterwards of having done whatever dastardly deed they have set themselves up for. If you’ve ever challenged yourself to do something outside your normal comfort zone you’ll know what I’m talking about here.

For me, a few years ago I went to Northern Ireland with my boys, we ended up at the Giants Causeway and went on a boat trip round a local bay, we saw a rope bridge very high up above us, instantly the boys wanted to go on it. Now I don’t mind heights at all , but I do have a lousy sense of balance. They were too young to go across by themselves, and we had no man in tow that I could hand responsibility over to, so I had to do it. It was utterly terrifying 70 feet above the sea on a rope bridge, with a base no wider than two planks. So with my eyes fixed on a spot across the other side I walked across, one foot in front of the other, one hand in holding so tight to the ropes. I got there, to the other side. It was to put no finer point on it, fucking terrifying.

Then I had to go back across, and do you know going back wasn’t as bad as the first time. In fact when we were waiting to go back I watched a young man bottle out of doing it by backing off the bridge after only a few yards. I know I shouldn’t have taken pleasure from this, but it strangely gave me confidence, as my two mountain goat sons had positively leapt across and I had this image in my head of me being a failure, cause I was so scared. So to see someone, who I’d assumed would fly over it, not be able to do it, made me feel a whole lot better.

On the way back across I even managed to look to the side rather than just the point in front of me. It was certainly worth the look, the coast around there is spectacular.
I’ve got a photograph of me coming back, and although it’s not stuck down in one of my photo albums, it is loosely lying in there as a reminder of accomplishing something huge for myself. Confronting a fear big time and pushing myself , admittedly for the sake of my sons, but still, damn well doing it. For a long time afterwards, and possibly still I can hold on to that experience as a way that I challenged my fear and won.

Just a small note here, there are very few mad axe men roaming round the streets generally and I’ve used this example because of that. So don’t go thinking- Oh no something else to put on the fear list!!! We do live in a world that increasingly feels more dangerous, and it is up to any of us to work out what we do to safeguard ourselves, from real or imagined threats. So, I do walk home at night, but I live in a small country town, whether I’d be quite so blasé if I lived in an inner city estate remains to be seen, and I rather suspect that I wouldn’t so easily!

Going back to these changes, that happen so fast, they happen in a great rush and they dissipate slowly, but they do dissipate, they cannot be sustained for a long time, as said previously, your adrenal glands want their stuff back!

So what has any of this to do with panic attacks, well absolutely everything!
Panic attacks are taking a normal body system and becoming frightened of it. Which if you think about it logically makes no sense. After all no-ones frightened of their liver or spleen working, it would be ludicrous. But because we feel these changes they become scary.

To recap, before we look at panic attacks more deeply, when we are frightened these are the changes that happen to our bodies to protect us in normal fear.

. Adrenaline is released.
. Breathing becomes faster and more shallow.
. The heart beats faster.
. The energised blood rushes to the legs and arms.
. The brain becomes very aware of everything around.
. Pupils dilate.
. Digestion stops temporarily.

Now to the excitement that we call panic attacks!
In panic attacks exactly the same changes take place….
That’s it, now you know. So easy to get over, right?

Well not quite, panic attacks are a dirty habit, and a bit like trying to give up smoking very to difficult to do. The first time someone has a panic attack there will be a lot of stressful things going on which lead to that very first time. Sometimes there is an event that happened which resulted in a panic attack, sometimes there are just a whole load of smaller stressful situations which result in the panic. Whatever it is, the first attack is utterly terrifying, and quite often, because the feelings being experienced feel like we think a heart attack will feel, people can end up in hospital after a 999 call. Only to be told after investigation that it’s a panic attack and there’s nothing wrong with them.
Oh well that’s alright then!
And then they have another!
Equally as frightening, and although they may accept on some level that it’s not a heart attack it still feels so scary, and they can feel so ill and out of control, that the people end up at their GPs getting help. And if they are lucky that will come in the form of counselling or CBT.

So what is going on here, well back to the normal fear, what is happening is that because there is no mad axe man or any other ‘thing’ to be frightened of, the fear becomes related to the physiological feelings that are being experienced. And the panic is because those feelings become frightening in their own right.

To explain; the feelings are released as in fear in a rush, but unlike normal fear the don’t dissipate in a straight line down they are hiccupped back up as the feelings become the thing that is frightening.



Diagram



The feelings that can be experienced are:

. Not being able to breathe properly.
. Heart pounding.
. Pain across the chest.
. Feeling very ‘spaced out’
. Feeling dizzy.
. Feeling sick.
. Feeling hot/cold/clammy.
. Having pins and needles

So going back to the normal experiences of fear:

.The breathing is fast and shallow….. Makes you fell breathless
. The heart has extra oxygen ,…. Makes your heart beat faster.
. The blood is rushing to your limbs….. Because you are not fighting or running away your muscles are full of unused energy which can cause discomfort.
. That energy has to go somewhere…… comes out in the tiny capillaries o under the skin, causing either hot/cold/ clammy feelings or possibly pins and needles.
. The digestive system has stopped ….. A feeling of nausea.
. The brain is on alert for anything …… the brain is not being used, so spaced out is the feeling associated with this one.
. The pupils dilate….. So helps with the spaced out feelings.

Depending on how severe the panic attack is, some or all of these feelings can happen.

The good news is that; no-one has ever- fainted. died, collapsed, had a heart attack, as a result of a panic attack!

Just read that sentence again several times if you have ever had a panic attack in your life. Panic attacks cannot hurt you, they are they there to protect you from the mad axe man and any other genuine frightening experiences that life throws at us.

So understanding the normality of the fear flight and fight response is the first step in learning to stop using panic attacks as a way to cope with whatever stress is going on in your life.

The other two steps involve you proving how much power our bodies have when we treat them in a particular way.

The first of these two steps is learning the emergency aid for when feelings of panic threaten to overwhelm us. This step needs to be practised at times when are feeling reasonably relaxed, watching television, doing the washing up, doing the ironing, anytime really when we are doing fairly mindless activity. The reason it needs to be done at these times is so that when we do start to feel stressed it’s not so difficult to utilise the technique. A bit like when a woman is pregnant and she goes to anti-natal glasses and gets taught relaxation strategies for the day she goes into labour.

It’s simply no good waiting till the day of delivery, to say, now what do I do to relax, it’s too bloody late, relaxation has to be practised throughout labour so that on the day of delivery the technique can be fully used as a way to control the pain every time a contraction takes place .

I have been in the very privileged position once of being asked to be a birth partner for someone I knew very well. And cause I was kept reminding her to relax, with every contraction she delivered her wonderful son with no other analgesia at all. So I know it works for other people as well as me with my second son.

So what do you need to do?

Take a deep breathe in through the nose as normal, and then very slowly breath out through your mouth as if very gently making a candle flicker. Do this for the count of three inside your head and do it between three to five times. As you do this you should feel yourself relaxing especially around the shoulders. If it helps as you breath in hunch your shoulders and then release as you breath out.

This is your first aid breathing, there are lots of other ways suggested that you control your oxygen input, but, do you really want to be in the supermarket starting to feel panicky and breathing in and out of a sodding paper bag? Would make me instantly want to panic more looking such a prat! If you do complicated yoga breathing, of which there is nothing wrong at all if you have mastered it, but if you don’t know how to do it, then working out whether your stomach is supposed to be in or out when you breath in or out again is enough to drive me also to panicking!

I have never had a fully fledged panic attack, but have come close on numerous occasions, and each time I have immediately started doing the breathing till I felt calm again, and I could carry on with whatever it was I was doing.

The second and last piece of evidence needs you to be tough on yourself, so I’d advice you get a friend or family member to help you do this. First off ,it won’t hurt you, but it might well make you feel a bit yucky for a few moments.

Sit comfortably, straight up in a chair you can easily stand up from. Get a clock with a second hand, as this experiment takes one minute to do. And then breath from the top of your chest for a whole minute, as if panting, this minute by the way, will seem extremely long, but try and stay with it. As you do this, you may become aware of sensations akin to those that you have when in a panic attack, but not as severe. At the end of the minute close your eyes stand up, then sit down and open your eyes. And describe or think about what feelings you are having. What you will be having is, the start of panic attack feelings, and everyone who does this will feel this, as this is what happens when anyone breaths badly for one minute, not just people who suffer from panic symptoms. When you stand up you may feel dizzy, but you will have not fallen over, you will not have died, had a heart attack, or fainted.

To have a fully fledged panic attack you’d need to do this for three minutes, just so you know!!

And what you have just proved is that by hyperventilating the name given to this shallow fast breathing, that you can cause physiological changes in your body….. WOW how powerful is that?
This is what you do when you are having a panic attack, nothing more or less. By putting too much oxygen in your body, that it doesn’t need you get to feel like this!!!

OK , the two things you can’t control are the release of adrenaline, but even if the adrenaline is rushing round your body telling it to panic, panic, panic, if you don’t put the oxygen in, you can’t get the other things to happen, cause they are dependant on oxygen to occur. You also can’t stop feeling potentially feeling nauseated, cause as said before, it’s a different body system, and initially when learning to control panic that system will kick in.

The problem with panic attacks is that I said at the beginning they are a dirty habit, and even though you can learn to control them, you will always be susceptible to them, just as the reformed smoker will always occasionally yearn for the after dinner cigarette!

This means that as you get better at managing your psychological health then you will need this particularly nasty way of coping less and less. Unless you stop being mindful and the stress builds up again and then ‘whoppee do’ a panic attack ensues.

It is totally possible to stop using panic as a way to deal with stuff, but only if you are prepared to look at your whole self as already discussed, if you hold on to the knowledge that the feelings are there to protect you and never to harm you.
That becoming aware of your breathing, both good and bad allows you to control your body in a way that when you are just hooked into panic attacks never seemed possible.


As an ex client said to me recently who is now undergoing psychotherapist training and is heading for an MA right now, learning about panic attacks saved her life. As without that knowledge she would never have known that she could live her life differently and move on from the deep unhappiness that she was suffering emotionally that was resulting in endless panic attacks.

Seems as good an argument as any other for beating them to me!

CHAPTER 1 SETTING THE SCENE

All we need is love.


As adults we seek to make sense of our worlds based on how our lives have gone on before. Our memories of our childhoods, our experiences as adolescents, our early adult life.

If we are very lucky, and our experiences on the whole have been safe and secure ones, then we grow up as just that. But, how many of us have had perfect lives? Not many I think. So in this book I want to try and make sense of those experiences and how we use them to shape us as adults and not always in a good way!

We can by not looking at our histories in certain ways, become victims of our histories, rather than learning from them. It is easy to see this all around us, with many people not being happy as adults, and if we bother to ask, we can find ‘stuff’ going all the way back to their childhoods, that they are still holding on to as a belief system.

Now there is nothing wrong with having belief systems, we need them to be able to make sense of what is right and wrong/ good or bad /happy or sad or whatever.
We need then to be able to know that it is wrong for example- to bottle somebody! But is it so wrong to have a few envelopes from work?

It is not my job to judge anyone else here, it is merely my job to know my belief systems, and for me to remain as ethical a human being as that works for me, and yes I have had envelopes from work…. But I promise never again boss, promise, promise!
Course if you believe that promise then just check out of the window to see if any pigs are flying past right now!

So how do we get to this place where we feel insecure, lonely, unlovable, needy to name but a few of the words I hear again and again from my clients , and if I’m honest have used a fair few times myself.

It is of course a slow evolution to this place, from when we are born onwards and to make sense of today we will have to go all the way back to the start.
So are you sitting comfortably , then I will begin….

All we want is a basically need to be loved, cherished, cared for, safe and warm. That is what we enter the world needing. It is our fundamental human need that we carry through out our lives.

Initially we get this need met through our first encounters with our mothers, especially from her breast. New born babies do not have clear vision, but very soon after birth they are able to focus on the breast (or bottle), as a source not only of life giving nourishment, but as a place of warmth and safety. The next place a new born baby learns to see his/her mothers face.

For the sake of convenience here I will use the term his, not because I’m being sexist, more to do with as I’m typing this I’m thinking of my own experiences, and I have two sons, so it feels more natural for me to think in that way. So just as well I had two of the same sex, or I d be very confused right now!

I digress, so this little baby can only communicate in the first few weeks and months of life by crying to make the people around him know that he has needs. Of course initially these needs are pretty basic, feeding, changing , burping. But what the baby also needs is to feel loved, and the other needs that I have spoken about. These needs are supplied by the people who care for the baby, with every interaction they have. The soft words of endearment, the tickling toes games, the blowing raspberries on tummies, the singing of lullabies to help get of to sleep and many more interactions performed throughout the day with the baby.

It is these actions rather than the feeding and changing that make a baby start to feel secure. Though obviously they need the others too here, just in case it wasn’t clear!
The baby starts to build up the bond with his mother. To turn his head at the sound of her voice. To smile as she interacts with him.

This stage, can by the way be very stressful for the father, as up until the birth of the baby he has been potentially the most important person in the woman’s life, and suddenly he doesn’t get a look in. As the new mum is totally preoccupied with her baby.

This happened to me, and I remember vividly my then husband getting really cross with me and our baby cause we didn’t seem to need him. I had to explain that this wasn’t about us as individuals, this was about the mother and baby’s primal instincts for survival. It wasn’t a reflection on our son loving me more, although of course he did! it was his instinctive knowledge that I was the person who was keeping him alive with breast milk. And I was very definitely the person up in the middle of the night pacing the floor trying to get him to sleep! Once my husband understood that he was able to relax a lot more and let go of his jealousy, as it wasn’t, as I said, anything to do with our individual personalities.

So to begin with this little baby is a mass of emotional and physical needs. And in the first two years of life it’s development is phenomenal, learning how to communicate with firstly baby language, which as any proud dad will tell you it’s thanks to him, as the first word a baby says is Dada. I don’t want to dampen their spirits here, but I will, it’s just easier for the baby to say D as opposed to M when they first start trying to speak!

They learn massive motor skills, no, not in how to strip down a car! In their coordination in rolling, crawling and finally walking skills.

They become more versatile in what they eat, and sometimes just plain fussy! They try and develop their hand coordination in terms of feeding themselves. And who hasn’t got fond memories of those first yoghurts that were all around the face, on the high chair, on the floor, on the dog and absolutely none in the mouth! But the joy of the toddler in having achieved something so spectacular as doing it themselves… what a milestone!

The insatiable curiosity, the need to touch everything, to taste it, to stick in ears, nose and mouth. Just exactly how did my eldest son get the ball bearing up his nose!!

Whilst all of this wonderful motor actively is going on the now toddler remains an emotional ball of needs. You cannot reason with a child under the age of two it simply isn’t going to work, however much you might want him to go to sleep!!

But at the age of two a sea change occurs, in the same way as when a woman is pregnant in the first fourteen weeks the baby is developing bits and is not a complete entity till after then. Then when everything is in place the baby needs to spend the rest of the pregnancy growing. The excitement of knowing, at week ,whatever it was, that my baby now had ears or a nose was wonderful.

So it is the same with the two year old, all their motor coordination is in place and now they have the time to start developing in another way. And this is in learning logical rational thought. And this is where the fun really starts, it’s the terrible twos!!

So baby and someone are doing the supermarket shop, and baby espies a packet of sweeties or whatever, and starts having the most amazing strop known, to have his emotional needs met and have the bloody sweets right now! No wonder we want to potentially murder our little darlings at this stage. When they first do this it takes all our emotional energy not to garrotte them, but also to get them to calm down long enough to hear us.

This is what we say, “If you are good and stop screaming/ carrying on/ throwing yourself round the floor ,then I will give you sweeties for being good.” And this is where life starts going wrong!! Cause for the first time ever the child starts to get told the value of logical rational thought.

Life changes out of all recognition, as ‘good’ behaviour becomes something to aspire too. In the same way dogs are trained, we start praising the good behaviour and trying our best to ignore the bad. After all, thumping a dog when it’s peed on the carpet when we were out, is utterly useless, the dog doesn’t understand why it’s getting hit. But if we make a big fuss of the dog when it performs in the garden, then the dog who only wants to please us learns very quickly how to ‘behave’. So it is with children, they want approval from their parents it makes them feel secure, which in turn makes them feel loved. So they start to behave in the ways of the society they life in….. How to say please and thank you, which knife and fork to use, if these are important issues for the parents.

This is the start of conditioning behaviour which here in Britain is valued particularly for the none showing of emotion, Stiff upper lip and all that!!

Now we are taught the value of not showing our feelings, something which for the last two years has been the only way we have managed to live. We start getting messages, “Don’t be a cry baby” “ Act your age” “Boys don’t cry” “ Girls don’t swear” - I must admit that last one passed me by totally. I find swearing a valuable release, just muttering Fuck under my breathe at regular intervals, works. I do have a lot more to say about swearing. and no doubt do some of it later on!

These vile messages are given to us by exasperated parents, by teachers, and by our peer group. I distinctly remember both my boys when they were both around 5/6 coming out of school and telling me of an incident at school that had upset them. And then telling me that of course they couldn’t cry. When I questioned why not, they informed me they weren’t allowed to cry. Why I asked again., the answer was, that if they cried they would be thought of as less than their mates, being a sissy, or a baby or whatever. Of course, both being still little when they got to the safety of home they were both able to cry, as I had no such rules.

It is this tyranny then we start to live by. The showing of feelings becomes more and more difficult as we get older. And yet despite our best efforts not to show them they are still there! We get to a stage where we don’t need anyone else telling us we, have our own very puritanical police force working day and night not to let anyone know what we feel.

This means that when feelings escape we despise ourselves for being weak. Unless the feelings are ones of love. We live in a world were seeing other people’s feelings is also hard. Imagine walking down the street and seeing a couple of 15 year olds necking, we’d just think - oh daft kids, we might even remember the day! Walk further down the street and see people older that ourselves snogging, or worse a same sex couple, and we are horrified at the display between them.

Now all that these people are doing is, showing the person they are with, that they care, in whatever way grabs them in the moment. We the observers are not able to cope easily with such displays of love and affection between people. “They should go that somewhere private” That’s disgusting kissing in the street at their age” We bristle with indignation at the perceived coarseness of these kissing people.

Why? Is love only something that can be shown elsewhere? Is there an age limit on being in love, a gender limit , a ethnicity issue? Answer NO, there isn’t. We are free to love who we want, when we want, and it works even better if the person we love loves us straight back!

That however is not the issue here. This is about our attitudes as observers, how it makes us feel, that level of embarrassment at witnessing something as wonderful as love or sexual attraction between others.

As human beings all we want is to be able to feel loved, and the difference between us and small babies is that over the years of our development we have learnt how to give love back. We are taught, hopefully, by our parents the value of giving and sharing with others around us.

We forget that wonder of a new relationship, the need to just touch endlessly, to kiss, to whisper endearments at whatever moment, oblivious to anyone else around us. So our feelings of love go underground, we may still love our partners but we have got over that first flush of feeling and settled down into a comfortable existence together.

Of course these feelings get blown out of the water when we have children! I can honestly say that the love I have for my sons is bigger than any other feeling in my life. I remember when my Mother tried to tell me this about me, I just used to scoff. I’m only glad that she lived long enough to see me fall in love with my baby, so that she knew that I got it too. Without hesitation, I would lay my life down for my sons. There is no-one else on the planet who will ever come close to that feeling- partners however much I love them, won’t, my sister who I adore and my niece and nephew they come pretty close, but don’t quite make that grade!

So unless you’re falling in love with a partner, or a baby then we mooch around not being in touch with those profound feelings. And even when we are experiencing those stomach turning emotions we can’t explain them.

Just try explaining what love is; is it a collection of physical symptoms, is it an emotional state…. Who knows, and who cares it’s just great to feel! Poets, playwrights, singers, story tellers have tried, and although someone may come close to describing that feeling they never totally succeed. And that’s fine cause it should be felt and not understood like a mathematical equation. So when any of us is in love we listen endlessly to love songs, that seem to be talking straight to us, to our hearts about our relationship. Equally that is true at the end of a relationship ,we get hooked into sad songs that echo our pain.

Because just like love we can not easily deal with our sadness. Whether that’s the end of a relationship or worse a death to deal with. It doesn’t matter who has died, family, friends, lovers, or even pets, the pain is terrible. I will have more to say on this later, but just wanted at this point to briefly look at it.

When we are sad, we want to let it out, to escape from it, to escape from ourselves even. And guess what we can’t, we cart ourselves around wherever we go! So we either hold our feelings in or we talk. And if we talk there comes a point were we feel that we can’t talk anymore cause no one wants to listen to us. Not that of course we ever check that out! And despite the people around us telling us they are there for us day and night we feel guilty about being needy and so we stop talking.

Then there is the third member of this triad, and the one that nowadays is seen publicly the most, and that’s anger. We use anger to protect us from feeling our pain.

It is now these combinations of feelings that govern our behaviour, as without the first we feel lost, lonely, scared, needy and all other ‘nasty’ words that we desperately try not to feel. If we’re sad then we, as said, may hide that behind anger or we may use another way to deal with the pain that we don’t want to feel, and have no choice about.

This then is what this book is about, what we feel, whether it’s the healthiest way to be, what we can do to feel differently, and how we stop running from ourselves. Therefore in so doing can find a healthier way to live a more integrated approach to the whole of us. Not just the one where we keep our feelings in a trunk under the bed wrapped in chains terrified that they will escape at any moment and frighten us!

This is about anyone of us learning that we are actually okay, even if sometimes we are needy, scared and lonely. That to be like that is human, and actually that’s what we all are, and that is very defiantly fine!

SEX AND RELATIONSHIPS

SEX starts with a kiss and ends with a headache!

Relationships are funny old things, we spend our lives when we don’t have one craving for one, then there is a honeymoon period when we are head over heels in love, moving on to warm contentment, then perhaps slow destruction , and moaning about it. Then sometimes starting the whole process again (and again, and again!!)

What we are doing when we want a relationship, is wanting to have someone to love us unconditionally as our parents hopefully did. The feeling of wanting to be safe, loved, cared for and cherished never leaves us, however old we are.

The difference between us and babies is that as adults we have learned to give back. A baby can only take, it is their survival that is dependant on such an attitude.

Once our children are old enough we start to teach them to give, as hopefully we have learnt to do. So that if we teach them right, when it comes to Christmas and Birthdays we get given thoughtful presents. If we don’t get taught this or hand it on to our children then we miss out on the joy of giving.

Who as an adult hasn’t got huge pleasure from seeing their children open their presents on Christmas morning. It was worth the wait in the toy supermarket just to get that specially requested present. Their excitement and delight is worth it.

Equally children start to learn the pleasure in not just taking but in giving back. Don’t know who enjoyed the present I was given a while back by my sons of tickets to see a long loved band, them or me. They were delighted to give me something, I was so evidently thrilled with.

But this isn’t just about presents, this is about learning to give of ourselves emotionally and to receive. To have relationships with others.

So here we are ready and trained to give, and be given back to, as we all want relationships that are equal and both partners are committed to, even if we don’t always get them!

It starts for most people in adolescence, when we develop our first crushes, the thrill of seeing the object of our desire, and the terrible/wonderfulness of if they notice us. The sheer agony of those first people we fancy, whomever they are. The endless discussion with our mates as to what every word or glance might mean. Does it mean they fancy us, what if they asked us out, do they fancy our mate more, and on and on. Driving ourselves and our friends round the bend. Just as well that they are probably doing the same with us, if we had time to listen to them! when our love interest is so much more interesting than theirs!

Eventually we do get to the stage of not being totally embarrassed every time our hearts desire goes by. We apparently start to mature, that is of course a complete lie as anyone who’s gone back to the dating game after a long time in a serious relationship will tell you, the feelings haven’t changed from adolescence when we fancy someone however old we are! We still get the pounding hearts, the endless thinking the excitement of each contact with our hearts desire.

We get asked out or do the asking, depending when we are young on which sex we are. The boys get landed generally with the task of asking, and the girls do the accepting or not. This may change with age and there is nothing wrong with the woman taking the initiative here.

Now obviously I don’t want to seen here as being prejudiced to anyone outside of a heterosexual relationship, there are two things going on for me here. The first is that I have never had a gay relationship and I do not want to insult anyone by making assumptions about how that feels. This may be considered thoughtless of me, my assumptions not the lack of gay relationship! Secondly I have to generalise, otherwise the book would take forever to get through as I talk about every single permutation. So I hope you can forgive me for just sticking to stereotypes right now.

Now that’s out of the way I’ll continue!

We may go out with one person , we may go out with many, there is no right number here, it’s just how it is. We may become sexually active quite young or late, we may have a few or several sexual partners. There is absolutely no golden rule here on what each of us should do. The only rule, and it’s an important one, is that we should do what feels right to us at the moment of doing.

This ‘moment’ of course changes as we get older and more experienced of life. And we equally must learn not to be judgemental of ourselves when we look back at our behaviour and find it wanting. Because it simply won’t do to get hooked into ‘what if/if only’ behaviour. As the old saying goes …. If I knew then what I know now. Hindsight is a glorious gift that we use to beat ourselves up good and proper!

There we are then in our relationships, we are of an age when sex is seen as appropriate by both parties, we are in love/lust/ infatuated, however you want to describe it. We simply can not get enough of one another we only have eyes for each other we are oblivious of the rest of the world. We don’t care if we kiss in public places or more, it simply doesn’t enter our heads that there is any other people on the planet! This is true of any person of any age and any sexual persuasion ( That is such a grim word that.. ) So if two people are in love you are just as likely to see 15 year olds, 59 year olds, gay couples, anyone who is lost in the world of their love.

Because of course being in love is reasonably akin to being completely mad, bonkers, barking, out of our tree or whatever. As we simply are so preoccupied with our love that we think about them almost constantly, and if anyone interrupts our reverie, we’ve hardly time to listen to them before we go back into our delightful daydream about ‘our love‘. Work, home, mates, whatever takes a back seat in our minds as we focus on the wonderfulness of the person we love.

If we are having sex with that person, then we will not be able to have enough sex, the need to be constantly intimate with one another is huge ( no pun intended) We cannot imagine a time when this might be different, surely this passion will go on for ever…
We need to be in endless contact with our love, and we live in an age of such fast changing communication, that we text, email, phone endlessly, and other thing that we are sure will never stop.

But of course it does.

After approximately seven months the first flush is starting to come to an end, not that anything outwardly may change as yet, but what does start to happen is either a growing emotional intimacy or a break up as one of this relationship is fearful of the changing intimacy.

We are beginning to know are new partners at a greater depth, we’ve done our histories, exchanged details about how wonderful each is, possibly given each other pet names, and we still have the need to talk endlessly, but what are we going to talk about if we don’t start dealing with what inside us? We are certainly not ready to talk about world affairs for any length of time, when we have each other to know and explore.

So we begin to work below the surface at what makes us tick, the emotional stuff, the inner us. As we all have a candy coat exterior and it’s only as we start to trust in a relationship that we feel safe enough to allow our inner soft centre to be known. That part of us that is scared that if our love finds that actually we are needy or jealous or insecure or anything less than perfect they may not love us anymore.

Of course they will be many relationships in our life time, that fail at this point, as the other person is not ready for that level of intimacy. Which can feel very painful to deal with if one of us has invested feelings of love in that relationship and it fails at this point. But although this may hurt and possibly hurt for some time, and I don’t want to minimise it’s impact on our feelings these short term relationships are in the big picture easier to come to terms with , before the person can move on and start the search again for Mr or Ms Right.

What I want to look more at is the relationship that survives this first hurdle, and the people in the relationship move on to start to know each other and dare I say it understand each other better. The growing emotional dependence on each other, the partner takes on the role of best friend as well as lover. And although sex may still be very important and frequent, there is a growing knowledge of what pleases each of us, and what turns us on, where our erogenous zones are.

Of course that doesn’t mean that these haven’t been discovered before, but in the initial stages of a sexual relationship we bring our entire sexual experience to this new one, so we will know what to do, but will not know exactly how to please our partner, what really works to make sex so special between us. This knowledge is learnt over time. And in a good relationship it is a totally mutual thing, in that we need to give and be giving to for both parties to feel satisfied, cherished , loved and adored.

This giving and taking is not simply related to sex, it’s related to our care of each other, our ability to share with each other. Our mutual respect and understanding of each others wants and needs.
If these are provided a relationship flourishes, and if not starts to flounder. As, if there is inequality there is no balance between people, and this can start to be resented, initially unconsciously but slowly coming into our conscious minds.

If we accept the premise of personal responsibility here, then love is no different. When we fall in love we are quite likely to hold the other person accountable for our love. In that we make the assumption that is their loving us that makes us feel good. Well to an extent that is true, but more pertinently it is our feelings inside us that are what counts.

Whomever I love may or may not love me back, if they do that is fantastic we can go ahead and get on with our relationship. But if they don’t and I still have the feelings of love, whose feelings are those? They are mine, I cannot make anyone feel something they don’t, however much I might want them to! It is my daydreaming. They are my feelings when I get close to my love. You only have to look at unrequited love, or even stalking to understand the responsibility of feelings.

No-one ever wants to be stalked, but the stalker believes erroneously that the object of their desire loves them back however ludicrous that thought might be. And so pursues that person.

Love is what we feel for others and if we are in the right place at the right time then we can get together with another person who is experiencing the same magic as we are.

Men and women, have different ways of feeling their self worth, for men it’s through sex and for women it’s through hugs and cuddles.

If a man is getting sex then he feels valued and cared for, and is more likely to be able to provide what the woman wants. If a woman gets to feel cherished through the softer hugs and kisses then she is more likely to provide sex for her partner and so the circle remains whole, going round and round.

If for some reason the circle gets broken, and the biggest event that does this is in the woman giving birth. Suddenly she no longer has time or desire for sex in the way she did pre children. The man hasn’t changed, and can find this a very difficult time, which can lead him to feel resentful and left out of the new love affair his partner is having with a baby. Which as already discussed is the maternal instinct reacting with the baby to protect and nurture the baby to allow development of that child.

What can start to happen at this point is the man asks for sex,is refused, on grounds of tiredness or exhaustion, the woman feels that the man is selfish and demanding, and not aware of how difficult life is with a small baby. The man, for his part sees that he is going out to work all day and coming home to his partner who’s done nothing all day except look after the baby and how difficult can that be!

I think I’ll just leave that last statement to allow women to scream…….

The man hasn’t lost his sex drive, the woman has and is more than likely also going through a stage of self hate with her body, as everything is not as it was before pregnancy. And unless the woman has access to a personal trainer chances are that her once pert breasts have gone south somewhat, her flat stomach is now flabbier, she may have allsorts of feelings related to her genitalia, especially if the skin tore in delivery and she has been stitched afterwards.

She may no longer feel attractive to herself, never mind her partner. She’s tired and exhausted with broken sleep, and possibly boredom, as however much we love our children they are not great conversationalists when they are tiny, and unless a woman has a social network she can feel very isolated. She simply cannot handle the pressure of her partner wanting to have sex. And is the time when she’s most likely to have a headache than want to go anywhere near her partner.

He in turn can feel resentful as he doesn’t understand what it feels like to look after this baby 24/7. Not that he doesn’t love his child, but unless he spends considerable time alone with the baby he will have no idea of the level of work required to care for a child in these early days.

So a pattern develops of neither partner getting their needs met, cause the only person getting their needs met round here is the baby. The woman is probably longing to feel cherished and cared for. But not necessarily as pre baby, but in getting time off. been given a hug, asked how she is feeling and what the man can do to help.
The man, at this stage really has to understand that for a while at least the baby comes first, but rather than resent that as a block on his sex life, he would be better placed to see his place in the survival stakes and know that his role is to care for the mother of the baby, to give her the emotional support that she needs to care for the aforementioned baby. It is suggested that a couple who spend more time kissing and cuddling than having sex are more likely to stay together.

When put like this it does sound a bit of a horror story, as these parents look after this invading object that has taken over their lives in a way that neither of them expected. But if the ladder of care is understood the relationship between the couple has a much better chance of survival than if the man is demanding his needs be met, without knowing what stress he is putting his partner through, when she has enough on her plate right now and hasn’t the energy to have sex as well. And so just ends up feeling uncared for and angry with the man at his selfishness.

Eventually if the woman values her relationship with the man, she will have to attend to her ambivalent feelings about sex and know that if her relationship is to survive then sex has to be part of agenda to help make it work.

This means that if the man has being able to resist the need to be demanding of sex in the early stages of the child’s life and has given his partner plenty of non demanding physical contact then the route back to a sex life will be easier, than if resentment in both partners is present.

Of course there are many reasons why the circle that a couple have in the start of their relationship gets broken, apart from the invasion of children. Work issues, death outside of the couple but affecting one of them, as in the death of a parent. If a relationship is strong enough then although the circle may be battered for a bit, fundamentally it stays intact and the couple can come through the stresses of life together.

However there is another big danger time, and that is when the couple have been together a long time, pre supposing they got together in their 20’s had children fairly soon after and are now heading fast up their 40’s.

When we all hit a certain age, which in my experience is somewhere between 37 and 49 years old, people start to question their lives. Is this all there is?

The knowledge that they will never be a rock star, prime minister, own a Ferrari or whatever hits hard. We start to feel dissatisfied with what we have, we want more,
we want to feel more alive than we currently do. There has to be something more, something to make us feel that we are not heading straight for death without some excitement in our lives.

We start to look around for something anything that makes us feel alive again. The two big choice of activity here are either a complete career change or an affair.

So many women hit 40ish and decide that it is their time now, the children are old enough for them to be start developing themselves, which is why University’s are full of women of a certain age retraining for a new profession.

They need this sense of personal fulfilment, being a wife and mother with a little job is no longer enough. They want more, they deserve more, they need more. So they go and get it, and start to feel more confident, are satisfied and happier about who they are.

This can cause terrible difficulties in their relationships though, as their partner may feel very threatened by these changes in their partner. Because they unconsciously are frightened of losing their partner, who obviously won’t love them anymore when they have this new dynamic qualification, that rather than discuss it, they resort to cave men mentality, or resistance to change, to give it another name.

They feel very threatened at the thought of the changes that they fear will happen inside the woman, so rather than talk it through they become argumentative with the woman putting pressure on her to stay the same, not to rock the boat, to carry on as always.

Of course there will be some women who will cave in, but they won’t be happy as a result, and no doubt will end up in therapy looking at why they are feeling so lost. As they have lost themselves for the sake of another human being and that is not healthy.

The better way is for the woman to talk through why she needs to change her life direction. To talk about her lose of self, and why she needs to find personal fulfilment. At the same time reassuring her partner that she needs this change for herself and does not mean that she wants the relationship to end.

So this allows the man to change his expectations alongside the woman’s so that change can be managed with as little threat on either side as possible. If this doesn’t happen and the man gets into cave man mentality then the relationship will be under far more stress. And for more likely to break down.

The other big activity that may take place at this time is the affair. From a stereo typical perspective this is more likely to be the male way of dealing with the lack of magic within himself. Although, as I say that I’m aware that men have to be having those relationships with someone else!

When a couple have been together for a long time they can get complacent about each other, take each other for granted, not have anything to talk about anymore. This will happen if the two people involved don’t bother to work daily on their relationship. Marriage is not just about a day floating round in a posh frock. Marriage is about valuing oneself and the other and wanting to make efforts to make it work together.

In a healthy relationship it starts with two people facing each other and being so close together that you can’t get a cigarette paper between them. In the next stage they are starting to face outwards but still joined at the hip. And as the relationship develops and matures the couple will be walking forward together but facing outwards in the same direction. Walking towards their future but still with little gap between them, so that they can still turn and face each other have share their long known intimacy together.

But when people start to take each for granted they can start to face in a different direction from their partners and the gap between them can grow. Till they feel misunderstood and uncared for in their relationship, and then when they meet someone who seems to understand them, be interested in what they have to say, find them sexually attractive, then it is extremely beguiling. Like having pixie dust thrown in their eyes, they can only focus on this new person and how they feel about them.

And so the sex saga starts again!

However this rather cynical view of relationships isn’t true of all. But is true is that we don’t stand still. If that was the case we’d all still be eating baby food and never have moved on to discover curry! So it is with relationships, they constantly change as we do as individuals, and a healthy partnership is one in which the other is allowed to be as they are, without us having to impose our way as being the only way forward.

If we have a personal self worth and our partner has the same and we learn to communicate with each other, then change can be accommodated as part of the contract we have with each other, rather than threat.

All relationships will go through difficult times, they cannot do anything else, what makes or breaks them is each person involved wanting to stay together and making the effort to keep talking when it gets tough. Be willing to give to the other physically and emotionally to maintain the strength of the relationship through communication on all the levels we are capable of as human beings.

PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY?

YOUR FAULT I FEEL LIKE THIS, or is it?

Who makes us feel things, normally we hold other people responsible for our feelings, but is this accurate? Do others really make us feel things? If they are nice to us does it make us happy. If they are nasty and we get upset, is it their fault?

We live in a blame society, it’s always someone else’s fault, rarely ours. It is so easy to blame others for being mean to us, making us unhappy.

I want to offer a different view of this, one which when embraced is life changing. One that says we are alone responsible for our feelings and not others. And depending on how we feel at any moment, is then how we react to others, not the other way round.

So lets for a moment pretend that you are not reading this but your in my therapy room and I ask you to cry, right now. Now you’ve come into see me because you are troubled about whatever. You’ve come to get help cause you can’t see the wood for the trees. You’ve come into the therapy room feeling a little sad, but not weepy and suddenly this therapist is demanding that you cry to order. So are you going to do it?
The answer is no, in fact if I say this to you, you are more likely to smile at such a ridiculous idea that you can cry to order.

Now supposing you were still in this therapy session and you were upset and had started crying and I as your therapist suddenly demanded that you stop crying. Would you stop, answer no! You would feel terrible that the therapist that you were expecting to have some empathy and kindness towards you was suddenly being mean and unpleasant when you are upset.

As a therapist I know an awful lot about feelings, I know when people are sad, angry, anxious, depressed and every other emotion going. I understand how when people come to therapy that sometimes they sit down and the flood gates open and they tell me things that they have never told anyone in their lives before. And other times they come and tell me a version of what is going on but they hide their feelings. I know this, I have the gift of being able to feel their feelings when they are present in the room and not being expressed. Sometimes I will just notice them and say nothing, and other times I will ask the person what they are hiding.

BUT I CANNOT make anyone feel what is not theirs. If I was that powerful I’d be leading some quirky religious group by now or something equally dangerous. You cry because you feel like crying. You stop crying when you are ready, not because I’m some omnipotent control freak, that has the power to make you.

You are in control of your feelings in the therapy room, and for that matter in every area of your lives. It’s just in coming to therapy you are using my area of expertise of 20 + years standing and I’m good at what I do. So it is inevitable that in making the decision to come to therapy that I will find out about you. Cause that’s why you are there, even if sometimes it may take a while to see that.

But I haven’t just used this example to blow my own trumpet!
What I really want to look at is how we are responsible for our own feelings.

So let me use another example, suppose we are sitting having a coffee and I suddenly tell you I don’t like your top and it looks awful on you.
I’ll come back to my behaviour in a minute.
Now if you are having a good day, you’ll look me in the eye and tell me it’s none of my business what you wear and your not particularly interested in my views , as you like the top, and don’t need my rudeness.
Or, if you’re having a bad day, you may hear my comment and it just adds to your feelings of low self esteem. And you might think…. “Oh no, I can’t even get my top right, I’m such a failure.”

To go back to my comment, what I have been is rude and unpleasant to you. It is up to you how you will interrupt my rudeness. I do not have the power to make your top awful. I may not like it, as if it’s any of my business, and I have no right to just be mean to you.

So here is the subtle, but life changing shift. Your feelings are already in you. Your experiences as they happen to you, influence your feelings but will not alter your feelings unless you let them.

You are responsible for your feelings and no-one else.

Of course on one level that makes perfect sense, but we are so used to blaming other people for the way we feel that I just need to labour my point for a bit.

Lets change the direction for a moment.

Consider what if anything you had for breakfast this morning, now ask the first person you meet next, what they had for theirs. Now chances are that you won’t have had the same thing at all. So one of you might have had toast and the other cereals. It really doesn’t matter what, but the question to ask, who is right?….. Answer no-one, or both of you. There is no right answer. You had what was right for you, we’re not looking here at the nutritional value of your breakfast, just your right to choose to eat whatever it was.

Everyone has free will over their choice of food, this lesson is quickly learnt when children reach a certain age and start only eating what they want and not what we necessarily want them to eat! But generally we manage to accommodate these choices, and now live in a world where the evening meal can be as different as there are members of the household.

But there isn’t a right choice and that is my point here.

What sort of music, movies, books are you entertained by? Do the people around you share your tastes? Is it ok if they don’t? Of course.

We have no problems with our choices in this way, we allow our fellow man their rights to eat what they like, vote for whom they think is correct, have whichever religious view makes sense to them, all without a feeling of threat inside us. That is unless they are ramming their particular views down our throats as the only right ones. That is bullying and that will be dealt with in another chapter.

Were it goes wrong is in relation to feelings. And this started the minute we wanted to be part of something when we were small. So before school most children at some stage tell their parents that they are going to marry them, live together always or whatever. Then when they start school, the child wants to belong to a new gang, that is one made up of their school mates. They need that sense of belonging. One of the ways this is achieved is by wearing the same clothes, watching the same television programmes, liking the same things. So that there is a loss of individuality and a gaining of gang mentality. There is a need to belong.

This need shows itself in conforming to the rest of the gang. It doesn’t matter if this gang are little girls or adolescent males. They will all have a need to be like one another. And to be able to spot people outside of their gang. So if the little girl doesn’t have the latest toy, or right clothes or the adolescent male wearing their badge of gang membership, then those people without will not be allowed in.

There is nothing worse than feeling outside, and if you watch any play ground you can watch children inside and outside the groups, and what they do to try and belong.

As adults we let go of some of these behaviours, but not all. We no longer have to have the correct trainers/ clothes/ watch TV, but we do get hooked into is our feelings being wrong. Especially if we are in relationships where are views are criticised or belittled. We feel that we don’t know what we feel, if someone is telling us in a more authortive way that they are right, and we are wrong.

So it is no wonder that we feel that our knowledge of our own feelings is suspect.
And that we don’t trust our own feelings.

But our feelings ARE right for us and for us alone. Go back to my breakfast example, it’s your choice what you eat, healthily or not. Why would something even deeper inside you like your feelings not be your choice as well?

No -one can make you feel anything.

If someone says something nasty to you, it’s how you feel inside that will make you respond to the comment not the comment having the power to make you feel.

This of course does not just apply to nasty comments, it also relates to good situations, of which the most dramatic is falling in love.

We meet that certain someone, and all at once we are giddy with feelings, we can’t stop thinking about that person, dream about them, spend hours talking to each other and all the other things that happen at a start of any relationship.

But is it there loving us that is causing our feelings or is it the feelings inside ourselves. I would argue that it is our feelings. It is our dreaming, our thinking, our needs to be with the other. Obviously if the feelings are reciprocated then there is a full blown love affair going on. But if the other does not feel as we do then there is a case of unrequited love, which at it’s most pathological can turn into stalking.

The stalker firmly believes that the person they are stalking loves them as much as they love the victim. They project a whole set of feelings on to the victim that the victim does not feel at all. Potentially making the victim’s life a complete misery.

This then illustrates how are feelings are own, because no-one ever wants to suffer at the hands of a stalker. But what is the difference between them and us when we fall in love? …. Nothing except the other person also feeling the same way as we do, if we are lucky!

~~~~~

What we do with our feelings apart from not own them, is blame other people for them. So we not only have conflict within ourselves about what we feel ,we also are cross with others for making us feel like this.

This does not make any sense at all.

We tell people all the time you make me cross/sad/upset or whatever. They in turn do it back to us, and then before we know it we have a full blown row on our hands.

There is a way we can see this behaviour in action. Have you ever seen a Pantomime?
Assuming you have, then you will know that you are sitting back in your seat enjoying the performance and at some point the Dame comes out and yells “Oh no he didn’t” and we all yell back “oh yes he did” This yelling continues for a few moments with us all getting more and more excited and sitting closer to the edge of our seats joining in, until there’s a big theatrical bang and the genie appears or whatever.

This is just so exciting and we collapse back in our seats laughing at the enjoyment of it all.

What this echoes is how we behave in an argument with our nearest and dearest. We start off discussing something, but we disagree with each other, and so feelings start to raise and we start to lose the content of our original discussion as we start slagging each other off… “ you make me sick” “ you stupid cow” I could go on with various expressions, but we all know what we say and how mean we can get towards the person we are rowing with. So the insults are hurled until both of you are totally furious with each other and then instead of the theatrical bang you will have your own version. The end of your row could be someone gets hit, you don’t speak for a week, someone storms out of the house, someone throws their dinner at the wall. Whatever you do you will do it every single time! Just like the Pantomime.

You have successfully blamed someone for how you feel, as they have you, and now you can spend happy hours feeling resentful at their horrible behaviour towards you. And of course you’re completely justified, as they were so horrid to you…

Um , can you?…. I don’t think you can. If people start to take responsibility for their own feelings, then blaming someone else for how we feel isn’t going to work.
Try saying some normal throw away lines that you might use in an argument - you make me sick- you make me really cross- you make me feel like a banana.
OK the last one is to illustrate my point here.

I can say- I feel sad/ cross /like a banana but I cannot blame someone else for those feelings, as the one about the banana is abject nonsense, but then so are the others!
No-one has the power over your feelings unless you believe that they have. If you accept the power of your own emotions as being yours then no-one can deny them.
Cause how do you know I don’t feel like a banana?

To change these destructive ways of behaving is very difficult, but not impossible.
So lets go back to the argument you were having, think of it as climbing a ladder up to the top and your end result. And, what you do is you take a step of the ladder into the unknown and instead of using the words - “You make me….” Try saying -”I feel….”
It stops the row in its tracks. Cause the person you are arguing with cannot do their normal rejoinder of “don’t you tell me…. You make me….” There is nothing to say those words back to as you are owning how the situation is making you feel, and not verbally abusing whomever you are rowing with.

Doing this takes a great deal of practise, and you may not have that many rows! So the other way that this personal responsibility is incorporated into our lives is by learning to use the magic word as often as possible. The magic word is, of course, I.

By learning to say I, then you are taking responsibility for yourself, for your feelings/ emotions and choice of breakfast. And in so doing you liberate yourself from the tyranny of powerlessness that happens when you don’t feel in control of your own self.

To be able to do this then allows you to make your own decisions about everything you do. Which doesn’t mean that you go to the other extreme and become belligerent and demanding. You only have power over yourself, no-one else.

Therefore you can start to make more balanced choices rather than being passive/ victim or aggressive/bully, instead you can be assertive /self assured.
Knowing that you have rights and those rights are as important as anyone else’s rights. But they are no more important than anyone else’s.

Just remember no-one can make you cry/ love them/ hate them/ sad. It’s your call, not theirs as to how you respond and feel.

PASSIVE, AGGRESIVE AND ASSERTIVE BEHAVIOUR

Do you want to go to the cinema?

One of the main ribbons through this writing is the idea that we can either be a victim of our history’s, or a product, and this next chapter endeavours to show you how you can change one for the other.

Dependant on how we present ourselves to others depends on how we get treated.
What do I mean by this?

Well there are certain ways of behaving which result in the treatment we receive as people, insofar, as if we are passive we get walked over, aggressive people find it difficult to get on with others and assertive people who respect themselves and others get to feel ok.

So what do I mean by that last paragraph? To answer it I’m going to focus in depth on all three behaviours and then bring it all back together about choices.

Passive behaviour, comes about through a lack of self esteem and sometimes self loathing. The people who are passive feel they have no control over situations and they are always at the beck and call of others who are able to be more demanding.

Women are particularly good at this, they start out as their parents daughter, become their husbands wives and end up as their children’s mother, only to have become resentful at some point about the loss of themselves.

Being passive means that we have no personal power, we deny ourselves our rights as human beings. In that, I mean that we as members of society have the same human rights as anyone else. We may have different incomes, be more or less attractive than someone else, be in more or less important jobs than others. All of these ‘qualities’ are not what I’m talking about, as everyone can be passive, it is not the privilege of the rich and famous, or poor and broke!

At the end of this chapter I will list some human rights and look at how they can be truly owned.

How does a passive person present themselves?

Well imagine that one of your friends asks you if you want to go to the cinema, being passive you won’t have any strong views, you’ll answer this in an, if you like response. But not in a powerful way, more as in ‘I don’t want to make a decision , cause if I do and it isn’t what you want then you might not be friends’ way with me.
At the same time as answering in this way your body language will also be reflecting your passivity.

You will be a bit hunched up, a bit humble, a bit fidgety as if you can’t own what you really feel, and generally you will present as being a bit sad and possibly pathetic. You may fiddle with your hands, and if you really get into being passive, almost wringing them with feelings of desperation at having to make something as awful as a decision.
You will feel trapped, like a rabbit in a car headlights, ‘Oh why have I got to decide, can’t you make the decision for me’ will be how you’ re presenting. Obviously you want to spend time with your friends, but when your being passive it is so much easier when they tell you what to do.

Wives and mothers do this a lot. When we first get married, we want to prove that we are as good as our husband’s mothers, not consciously but on a subliminal level. So we set about looking after his every whim and need, food on the table, house clean, healthy sex life, listening to him talking about whatever, almost to the point of forgetting that we might also have something to say.

I really enjoy reading those books from the 1950s about how to behave when our husbands come home from a hard day at the office, the sort of thing, where it suggests that putting a clean apron on, a pretty ribbon in your hair and some fresh lipstick will make him pleased to come home to you. The when he gets through the door, that you don’t interrupt whilst he tells you about his day as it’s your job to make him fell that home is a sanctuary…… Yeah right!

As daughters, we may have had to put up with being endlessly devalued and never being able to do anything right, so subsequently are confidence suffers massively. We may be so used to being told what to do by whomever, that when we get the opportunity to make our own decisions it fills us with such a sense of panic that it feels easier to not be the person to make decisions, and to behave in such a way as others make choices around us.

As mothers, we do it as it’s such hard work training our children, that half the time it is easier to go and clean their rooms for them rather than wait for them to do it. How strange is that? They’ll never clean their rooms when they know you are daft enough to do it, they are not stupid.

So whilst we are being the perfect wife and mother we are letting go of our self esteem, if supposing we had any in the first place. To begin with these roles are very satisfying, they give a sense of purpose, an identity, a feeling of security as we are important in these roles.

But ultimately they stop working, as relationships go through the ups and downs that are normal in a long term relationship, whether that is with a partner or our children. In particular this can be very painful in relation to our children as they grow and start to make their own lives outside of us. Whether through leaving home for college, or work or just using home as a sleeping place in their hectic social lives.

We no longer know our children, gone are the days when we could choose what they should wear, what they liked to eat, whether or not they could have a sleep over or whatever. This can make us feel very redundant, as for years we have put our life and soul into being there for them. We love them more than anyone else in the world and yet they still want to leave home.

It is these things that can start to make us feel we have lost our way and don’t know how to make decisions anymore. Obviously there are many, many more reasons why people become passive, but this is just to give a flavour of some contributory factors.
This is not about being critical of this behaviour, more a way forward to choice a different option to help anyone feel better about themselves, because one thing is sure that the people I have worked with over the last 20 years who are being passive don’t actually like themselves very much. The feelings of self hate, low self esteem, lack of confidence are huge and probably more apparent in this group than any other I have worked with.

Aggression, now this is fairly easily understood just from the name itself.
People who are aggressive are taking power away from others, as they know best what is right for anyone else at any give moment.

They too, have a particular body language, their chests are pushed out, a lot of the time when they speak to us their arms are folded across their chest , but not in a cowering way as in passivity, but, in a don’t mess with me way. They may use tactics like standing over others to impose their way through the use of their power in their physicality. They may point a lot, emphasising a point so that the passive person they are talking to, knows that they the aggressor means business. Interestingly you can’t really have aggressive people if you don’t have passive people in the first place for the aggressors to bully.

On many levels being aggressive is seen as a good thing in our society. It is how businesses want their employees to be especially in relation to business competitors.
Just watching how the people who work in the stock exchange on the floor, shouting out above others to be heard, trying to make the better deal, to do better than their rivals shows how valuable aggression is. Companies would collapse very fast if they didn’t have the staff who were prepared to work with a dog eat dog attitude.

But that sort of aggression is not what I’m talking about, I’m talking about the person who wants to impose their way at all costs on another human being. At it’s very worst this is where physical and mental abuse are used in a relationship.

The belittling of another human being, the constant criticism, the humiliation of another person, all of these tactics are used by the aggressor to strangely make then feel better about themselves.

Insofar, that quite often the aggressor doesn’t like themselves much, but couldn’t possibly own that feeling. So they find a victim to carry their pain for them, as they criticise someone else, the person they are having a go at is far too busy hating themselves to notice the aggressor feeling insecure.

For anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of being bullied will know, whether they started off strong and have had the stuffing knocked out of them over time. Or if they came into this relationship full of self hate to start with.

In this instance it is easier to stereotype. So we have the woman, who starts a relationship with all the needs to be perfect in all areas of life to her new partner. She wants desperately to please, it makes her feel good. She doesn’t necessarily question the unfairness of the work distribution in the home. She just wants to be seen as good.
And so good she is.

Quite possibly her partner is having a hard time at work, maybe he’s a bit wary of the boss, and feels he doesn’t have any power at work. This is making him unhappy, but being a typical stereotype male he isn’t going to discuss his feelings with anyone. He doesn’t want to loose face at work by looking emasculated, so he bottles up his feelings, and brings them home.

And what do you know, there’s his sweet and little partner there waiting for him, and he gives her all his aggression, both barrels of it. Because by this time in his head he has turned his pain into being someone else’s responsibility. It’s not his fault. But he may not be able to say it’s the bosses either, and so it becomes his sweet partners, and suddenly it’s as if she had known that he wanted his white shirt ready for him, when she has only washed his blue deliberately where all this anger erupts. He lets go of that rage on her, whether verbally, or with his fists. It’s her bloody fault, she should have known about the shirt.

What this does is validate the man’s feelings of power and masculinity, as he’s proved it’s no longer his fault. He stops thinking about his lack of confidence at work as he’s now got this other human being carrying his pain for him. And every time that he comes close to being aware of those feelings inside himself he immediately launches an attack on his partner, to stave off any uncomfortable emotions in himself, and to maintain the status quo of passive /aggressive balance which keeps him feeling safe.

This of course is not right, and I will come back to it, but first need to say something about assertion.

Assertion, is the ability to feel that one has rights, but so does everyone else. It is a place of being comfortable in your own skin. Where we know that we will do things for others, but only if we are giving back to. Not necessarily in the same way but that there is an equality in the relationship that allows both people to mutually respect each other, and not be overawed by others, or worse, superior to others. This is a place where there is no power struggle going on, there doesn’t need to be one.
People who are assertive, have confidence about themselves, have a reasonable self esteem, and who don’t hate themselves.

To be assertive is not about having better looks, more money, or a good job. These things are on the whole external. Although obviously we are born with our looks but in this day and age there are many things we can do to change those, from the application of make-up to plastic surgery. More money, comes more often than not from the job we do, and no-one has to stay stuck in a bad job, we live in a world of expanding horizons and education.

Assertion is not these things, it is an inner feeling, of being okay in the world we live in. A feeling of not being perfect, but also not being any worse than anyone else.
It is the experience of wanting to help others but not at a cost of our self worth.
Those that are assertive do not need to bully others, as they have no problem with self esteem so don’t need anyone else to carry their pain, they are content within their own skin.
But also being happy in our own skin doesn’t mean that we can’t ever use make-up of surgery to feel even better about ourselves. We live so much in a society of youth being all important and age being very undervalued. But there is a balance of self esteem versus self hate that the assertive person will look at before needing to make decisions about such things.

The liberation of no longer colouring my hair two years ago has been astonishing, I had been dying it since I was 16 and I stopped and it’s okay. But equally I wouldn’t ever go to work without full make up on, that would not be okay. So it’s treading that fine line between what feels right to us. The important issue here is that it’s our individual choice as to how to behave, obviously within the strictures of the society we live in. It is not however, okay in assertion terms if we make decisions based on what other people want of us, that strays into passive /aggressive roles.

To illustrate how simple and effective assertion is I’ll tell you a story about an ex client, who’s given me permission to use this story.

This client was a university teacher, and was very passive so for some time we worked on her learning assertion techniques. At some point she felt able to start putting into practise these techniques.

Every Monday when she got to work her colleague would put her diary on my clients desk for her to fill in, now my client wasn’t her secretary and she was very resentful at this weekly expectation. So the day came when she picked up the diary and put it back on the colleagues desk , but she didn’t say anything, so although she’d done something assertive it wasn’t quite right. Later on that week the colleague asked if my client was going to the canteen and if so could she get her a cream egg. Now my none assertive client in the past would have done that but gone of muttering under her breath about being a slave or some such thing. This time she didn’t, what she did was say, that if she went and got the cream egg then her colleague could make her a cup of coffee on her return. RESULT! Assertion, equality, self confidence, and a feeling of self worth., that doing something so simple was so life changing as my client has never looked back from this point.

Passive- Aggression, that story above also illustrates something called passive -aggression. That is when someone does or acts in a passive way, but on doing so feels a massive amount of aggression inside themselves. The client going off to the canteen muttering to herself, but feeling unable to challenge the other person.
This is not a healthy place to be, well neither is passivity actually.
Feeling downtrodden and unheard is soul destroying and destructive, so what can be done to change?



If we go back to the example of the cinema to illustrate the different reactions.

Do you want to go to the cinema?

Passive
1.Unsure
2.Scared of saying no
3. Frightened of loosing friends
4. Feeling resentment , if that not what you want to do.
5. Feeling unheard
6. Body language showing an ’inward’ attitude.
7. Body language showing an inability to be confident.
8. No confidence.
9. Low self esteem.
10.Self hate that not able to say what really wants to do.

Aggression.

1. Angry attitude.
2. Belittling others.
3. Scathing comments about their choice of activity.
4. Knowing better what everyone else should do.
5. Body language being threatening.
6. Deep inside, having low self esteem, but never ever admitting it..
7. Blaming others when things go wrong.
8. A confidence obtained at others expense.
9. An inability to know or care about what others think, at least outwardly


Assertive

1.Being able to say yes or no, without it being threatening to self or others.
2.Being able to give to others without feeling that won’t get something back.
3. Body language, relaxed and comfortable.
4. Equality in relationships.
5. Not doubting that friendships will still be around if you don’t go to the cinema.
6. Having self confidence and self worth.
7. Liking who you are.


So if you’re assertive and you get asked to the cinema, and it doesn’t fit in with your plans, the correct approach could be along the lines of maybe suggesting, that you couldn’t go that tonight, but as you’d love to see your friend why don’t you meet for a quick drink and go to the cinema next week. So you’re needs are met, your friend is not rejected and her needs can be taken into account at a time that works better for you.

Rather than passively agreeing to go when it doesn’t fit into your plans at all and you getting into a spiral of feeling that you are trapped and powerless, which in turn increases the passive aggressive feelings inside you. And you feel more and more unable to say no to anyone and your self worth gets further crushed.

Now if your going for aggression here then chances are you’ll turn down the invitation rather forcibly, unless you get your way, whatever that is. And strangely you may start to find you don’t get as many invitations as others. So even though passive people are thoroughly aggravating to you, they get more invites that you do, cause they at least are kind to the people around them even if they are victims in your eyes.

Returning to the human rights from earlier, these are just conditions of behaviour that we are all entitled to whether we are Prime Minister, milkman or just little old you!
They are such things as;

I have the right to say yes and no for myself.
I have the right to express my opinions and beliefs
I have the right to deal with others without being dependant on then for approval
I have the right to decline responsibility for other people’s problems.
I have the right to have needs and to decide that those needs are as important as other people’s needs.
I have the right to be listened to and taken seriously.

I’m sure that if you just give yourselves a moment here then you can think of many more.

So how to actually start to change.

1.First of all you have to become totally aware of these patterns of passive behaviour, with or without the passive -aggressive element.
2.You have to start sitting, metaphorically, on your own shoulder and notice how you are responding to everyone around you.
3.What sort of responses are you making.
4.Start to identify which of the behaviours it is.
5.How do your responses make you feel inside, is that okay or not?
6.Take time out to think quietly how you could have responded in an assertive way, one of the best places to do this is when in the bath as you can really give yourself time to consider all the discussion you could have had.
7.Slowly bring these ‘bath’ thoughts into your conscious mind on a daily basis, so that at least in your head you know what the response should have been.
8.When your ready try saying the assertive response out loud to someone. Making sure that the first few times you are assertive it’s with someone safe..
9. Become assertive with the people in your life who give you the most trouble!


Now obviously if you have been bullied for a while, that is going to feel very threatening not only to you in doing it, but it’s not going to be well received by the aggressor, who has an investment in keeping you in your place. So it’s worth having a conversation prior to your doing this about how their behaviour makes you feel and what you need to do to feel better about yourself. You are not out to change them here, just yourself.. And if you start to respect yourself and no longer treat yourself like an old dish cloth then slowly other people will stop feel threatened by this new confident you and slowly stop the need to bully you.

If of course they don’t stop, then the question you must ask is why are you still with them, what are you getting out of the relationship?
Woman who are in abusive relationships only stop being in them when they start to value themselves, however hard it is for them to get out of them.

We deserve to value ourselves, as if we don’t, why would anyone else think well of us. Woman who go back to abusive partners are doing it because they don’t think enough of themselves and they are still attracted to men who validate their lack of self esteem. Start to like yourself and you will no longer be attracted to men who operate in this way. The advert on the television that uses the line, because you are worth it, sums it up, you are worth so much and shouldn’t you only be around people who agree with you and not those that belittle you?

It has to start with you, learn to love yourself, you really are fabulous.
Look in a mirror every day and say to your reflection- you are ok. I’m not talking here about what you look like, or whether you’re having a bad hair day. I’m talking about your inner self, that person who needs to prove nothing to anyone, except yourself.
It’s not conceit it’s self worth to do this. Don’t be afraid, people will love you whomever you are, but they will particularly love you, if you love yourself first. I know, I’m one of the most assertive people I know nowadays, and I have a great number of friends who love and care for me because of who I am and not because I’m trapped into trying to please them all the time.

It takes time to change, and it’s difficult, but it’s about choices. You can be different if you give yourself permission to be different. Being a victim is so not a good place.
And you never know, being assertive may just be better than the downtrodden place you’ve been living, for however long.

What have you got to loose…. Nothing.
What have you got to gain……Self respect
Your choice!