Yes, Our Parents Probably Screwed us Up a Little—Don’t Skip the Therapy.

Edited and first published by Elephant Journal.

“They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.”

~ Philip Larkin, “This Be The Verse”

Some clients arrive for their first therapy session skeptical, worried, or downright reluctant to talk about their childhoods.

I assure them I have no interest in getting them to do something they don’t want. Nevertheless, if they are willing, then I am curious—exploring their childhoods helps me to understand their concerns more fully. What they say is often something along the lines of:

“It feels indulgent, like I’m feeling sorry for myself when other people have had it so much worse.”

“That was then and this is now, and I don’t see how dwelling on the past can help me today.”

“I had a very happy childhood, and I don’t want to blame my parents.”

You probably don’t want to talk about your childhood because it fucked you up. And unprocessed childhood stuff can manifest as:

Negative Core Beliefs

The reasons given above are telling in themselves. Deeming oneself as “indulgent” suggests we have a critical inner voice. I could challenge you by asking, “What’s the problem with being ‘indulgent’ in your personal therapy session? What would that mean—to be seen as indulgent?”

Often, if we pursue the line of inquiry, it comes back to a fear of being somehow “wrong” or “unlikeable.” Childhood is often the time when these types of negative core beliefs are picked up.

Emotional Crises

Not wanting to dwell on the past might also mean we want to avoid difficult feelings. However, the fact that we are experiencing mental health issues in the present suggests that these difficult feelings, although avoided, are still around in a different form.

It is also highly likely that we use that same defence mechanism—of minimising our feelings by not dwelling on the past—in the present, too. We get angry but don’t say anything. We feel hurt but keep quiet. We feel scared but put on a brave face. This leads to a car-crash of emotions that pop up in unwieldy ways, such as panic attacks, violent outbursts, or floods of tears at inappropriate moments.

Self-Blame

The phrase, “I had a very happy childhood” coming from a client who is evidently suffering would make any good therapist’s ears prick up. It suggests a black and white, childlike way of categorising experiences as either very happy or very unhappy, with no room for grey areas.

What did you do, as a child, with experiences that didn’t fit into that category of “very happy?” After all, we cannot have been very happy all of the time, even with the best of parents.

Often, we have a strong sense that talking about our parents in a less than flattering way is wrong and makes us a “bad” daughter or son. We feel guilty for criticising our parents. We do not differentiate between our parents who may have had the best of intentions, and their behaviours, which may not always have been helpful, and could have been downright hurtful. We prefer to blame ourselves.

But if we don’t talk about it, we will likely remain fucked up.

According to Dr. Jeffrey Young, who devised Schema Therapy, our parents are responsible for providing: 1) nurturance, including reassurance, attention, affection, warmth, and companionship, 2) empathy,including understanding, interest, self-disclosure, and mutual sharing of feelings, and 3) protection,including strength, direction, and guidance.

Even in a household where the children grew into reasonably functional adults, they may have experienced parenting deficits.

I’ve worked with many clients who are very successful in several areas of life but suffer a highly critical inner voice, lack of self-esteem, high anxiety levels, or relationship black holes.

When exploring their childhoods, they discover that even if their parents meant well, something was missing in the quality of their relationships.

Perhaps nothing less than achieving 100 percent in school was acceptable, and the child would end up feeling “not good enough” if they came home with 95 percent. Maybe either or both parents found it difficult to express their own vulnerability, so the child grew up with no model about how to express emotions.

Perhaps one of the parents had a volatile temper so that even if their child felt protected most of the time, at other times they felt petrified around them. It may have been that one or both parents were so preoccupied with their own career that their child felt like an obligation on their to-do list rather than a person who they were genuinely interested to know.

So, here’s the thing: we need to talk about it.

It is only by recognising these relational deficits that we can identify where our negative core beliefs have come from and start to disentangle ourselves from them.

As adults, we now have the intellectual maturity—and perhaps the help of an outside therapist’s perspective—to recognise that just because our parent didn’t spend time with us, that didn’t mean we were unlovable. Just because our parent never seemed happy with anything less than 100 percent, that was their “stuff” and not ours, and did not make us “not good enough.” Just because our parent had a terrible temper and would say horrible stuff to us, that had absolutely nothing to do with us.

It’s about recognising that however we behaved as kids, our parents were the adults who were supposed to protect, nurture, and guide us. They could have loved us dearly and had the best of intentions, but this doesn’t mean we always felt like they were doing their job.

By identifying their behaviours rather than blaming them, and by challenging the negative core beliefs we unthinkingly picked up, we can also learn not to condemn ourselves in the here and now. We have less need to put up a front to others. We can be more open. We are more likely to put ourselves out there and recover more quickly when we fall.

To stop playing unhealthy patterns on repeat.

Sigmund Freud first coined the term “repetition compulsion.”

This refers to doing something over and over again due to an unfinished and subconscious experience from childhood that wants to be completed, or processed.

For example, if as a young child, we experienced feelings of abandonment, grief, loss, shock, and rage when one of our parents left the family home, what happened to these feelings? Let’s say we were under five. We might have cried or behaved differently, maybe stopped talking, become more withdrawn, or started wetting the bed. However, since we weren’t able to articulate our inner state so that an adult could sit down with us and help us to understand our feelings, our only way of coping was to suppress them.

And what if the person who evoked strong, difficult, and overwhelming feelings is also our main caregiver? The sarcastic mother’s cutting words chill her little girl’s heart, who, yearning for love, buries her shame to be her momma’s “good girl.” Children, terrorised by their violent father’s drinking binge, “forget” about their overwhelming powerlessness and helplessness when their dad apologises and says he’ll never do it again.

These feelings need to be processed just as rain drops need to fall, just as a pendulum needs to swing, just as an apple tree needs to grow apples.

This is what Gestalt Therapy theory calls “organismic regulation.” When we keep playing the same old unhealthy patterns, like falling in love with unavailable partners who abandon us, or marrying abusive partners where we feel trapped and powerless, or dating arseholes who treat us badly—those are our buried feelings stomping up and down, waving red-faced and screaming, “Wake the fuck up! Grab this opportunity to heal so you can start doing life differently.”

For this to happen, we need to talk about your childhood.

To feel more at peace in the present:

Coming back to those overwhelmingly difficult childhood feelings that were not processed, what happens when a current situation provokes the same feeling? How can we allow ourselves to feel it if we’ve never learned how? How can we get angry with someone when we’ve never learned how to “do” anger?

Some might reply that they don’t need to feel anger, but anger is a perfectly valid emotion and is as worthy and equal as any other emotion. It’s how we express it that can be problematic, not the emotion itself.

According to Gestalt Therapy theory, the function of emotions is to act as messengers. They let us know what it is we need and want from others and from ourselves. Once we know that, we can do something about it. So, if we do not acknowledge all of our emotions, we have a bit of a problem. It means that we limp through life without getting what we need. Depression and anxiety, among other symptoms, are the consequences of that lack of support.

Say, as a child, we didn’t allow ourselves to feel abandonment rage because it wasn’t acknowledged by anyone. It feels overwhelming and scary, so we bury it.

Then, our abandonment stuff gets triggered by a partner who says he is going on holiday with his family rather than us. The anger is there but we don’t allow ourselves to feel it. We feel anxious instead. Or we start to numb ourselves and withdraw from the relationship. Or we start to make cutting comments and become passive-aggressive.

We do anything rather than allow ourselves to feel anger, as that just feels way too risky. Thus, we don’t get to say, “I feel annoyed that you’re going on holiday with your family. It makes me think I’m not that important to you.”

Being able to say this could open up dialogue to find some kind of compromise or at least be assured that you are important to your partner. Taking the risk of expressing anger and having it well received gives you the new experience that expressing anger is okay. By not expressing it, you are playing by the old rules that you learned as a child—that getting angry got you nowhere, it was futile, and it tended to boomerang back onto you.

This goes for other feelings too. For example, and without wanting to oversimplify, buried shame can lead to perfectionism and being hyper-critical. Buried fear might manifest as obsessive compulsive disorder and controlling behaviour. Suppressed grief is often linked to depression.

The idea of allowing these feelings is scary because they were scary when we were children. However, taking the risk of allowing them in the present leads to feeling all the other “child-like” feelings that might have also been suppressed. such as joy, excitement, courage, and a sense of empowerment.

“Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can”

So, like Philip Larkin, I suggest you get the hell out of misery as early as you can and to do that, let’s sit down and talk!
~

 
Author: Alexandra Schlotterbeck
Image: simpleinsomnia/Flickr; Xavier Sotomayor/Unsplash
Editor: Catherine Monkman
Copy Editor: Travis May
Social Editor: Callie Rushton

From Stress-y to Sexy – The #1 Way to Bed Anxiety. Hint: It’s in your rhythm baby!

Sighing, panting, gasping...yawning.

Our breathing changes as our thoughts, feelings and behaviour change.  As we become worried, excited, elated, depressed or aroused, our breathing becomes shorter, jerkier, longer, deeper, shallower or smoother. What if the reverse were true? What if our breathing could change our thoughts, feelings and behaviour? What if breathing the right way meant more personal excellence and less anxiety and anger?  

Anxiety shows up in many ways from the more well-known symptoms like tight chest and throat, sweating, increased heart rate, nausea to the less obvious such as memory loss, insomnia and many others. It’s part of life, and yet for some of us it has too much of a hold.

The Kama Sutra of breathing…. backed by neuroscience!

I have taken this material from Dr Alan Watkins’ Ted Talk on You Tube called ‘How To Be Brilliant Every Day’. It's important to view part 1 and 2. I’ve used it with clients who have found it very helpful. Some are sceptical about breathing exercises to reduce anxiety. They say that in the middle of an anxiety attack the last thing they remember is breathing techniques. Others say that the usual breathing exercises prescribed make them more anxious because they worry about getting the technique right. Some others have tried breathing techniques and doubt they work as they have simply not found them effective. So why not give it a twirl? What have you go to lose?

My Lips Don’t lie

Firstly, Dr Watkins explains the neuroscience behind the technique which may help convince you. Secondly, the technique is easy to follow and you can download a free App in order to do so. Lastly, breathing exercises are most effective when done regularly, even if only 3 minutes three times per day. In this way, the baseline level of anxiety is kept lower which means an anxiety attack is less likely. The exercises thus act in a preventative way. So, it’s not really fair to write off breathing until you have tried doing it regularly.

Coherent breathing is useful not just to reduce anxiety but to increase any type of performance be it sports, business, academic performance, relationship, sexual. He explains that It’s not our thoughts that affect our feelings but our feelings that affect our thoughts. That’s why, when someone tells you not to worry when you are anxious, it’s like trying to use a garden hose to put out a raging forest fire.

Wild thing, you make my heart sing

Let’s imagine we have different layers. The bottom layer is our physiology. This is our heart beating, breathing, gut peristalsis etc. It is experienced as a stream of data.  Next level up are our emotions. E-motions are energy in motion, the energy of our physiology. Next layer up are our feelings. Feelings are the awareness in our minds of our emotions. Lastly come our thoughts.

When our physiology is out of whack we lobotomise ourselves. When our reptilian brain senses a threat, it goes into fight, flight or freeze. This is great when there is a real threat but the trouble is, our body gets it wrong. If we’ve suffered some kind of trauma in the past, our body can react as if we are in threat and go into a full-blown anxiety attack when we are tucked up in bed watching Netflix with a cup of cocoa.

In order to achieve brilliance every day we need to be able to tune in to the emotions and control them.

How do we do that?

Keep my heart rate coherent, baby.

The more the distance between each heart beat varies over time, the more incoherent our thinking and behaviour becomes.  We start to produce more cortisol which is associated with anxiety, anger and frustration.

Steady on…and breathe

 We need to aim for stable variance by taking rhythmic breaths. Within a minute our frontal lobes start working better and we become more perceptive, insightful and good at problem solving. This is where coherent differs from yoga or other breathing exercises which may focus on deep breathing or belly breathing. Here it doesn’t matter how deep or large the breathing. It doesn’t even matter what the ratio is. All that matters is that you breathe:

·      rhythmically

·      smoothly

·      focusing on your heart

It doesn’t matter how fast you are doing it, so long as you are doing it rhythmically. Dr Watkins says the reason to focus on the heart area is that not only does it get you out of your head but the heart is also the locus of passion, excitement and motivation so these get promoted.

That’s it, you've got it! ;)

Breathe

Rhythmically and

Evenly

Through the

Heart

Everyday

If you want an app to help with it then go to:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/coherent-breathing-assistant/id1121704122?mt=8

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rrr.macoherencecardiaque&hl=en_GB

What if I’m going crazy? What if it's contaminated? What if I lose her? - How to Be Free of OCD

OCD refers to obsessive compulsive thoughts and behaviour. These can include obsessive thoughts around four types of vulnerabilities which are: 1) health and illness, 2) danger, 3) poverty and 4) losing control.  Specifically, we can think obsessively about sex, death, relationships and contamination, amongst others. We may behave compulsively by cleaning, checking and double-checking or repeatedly asking our partner the same question. We also tend to avoid certain situations which make us feel particularly anxious. On a physical level, it is common to experience a tightness in our chests, shallow breathing, sweaty palms, palpitations, dizziness or brain fog when in the grips of obsessive and compulsive thoughts and behaviours. We may also generally feel low in mood, lonely, empty and tired because of our condition. 

What If?

Underlying the specific nature of the thoughts and behavour is the ‘what if’ question. For example, ‘what if I didn’t lock the door on my way out?’ Or, ‘what if the food I am eating is contaminated?’ Or, ‘what if I picked up the knife and tried to stab someone else (or myself) and what if this means that I am going crazy? In his highly acclaimed book, ‘Freedom from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: A Personalised Recovery Program for Living with Uncertainty, Dr Jonathan Grayson explains that regardless of what the specific nature of the OCD is, the bottom line is the difficulty living with uncertainty. He goes on to say that whilst we all struggle with uncertainty to an extent, particularly around the existential uncertainties in life such as birth, death, life changes etc., those with OCD find uncertainty and the resulting anxiety, particularly difficult to manage. This is at the core of the disorder, regardless of the specific thoughts and behaviours. Indeed, it is common for the nature of the OCD to change over a lifetime. One might start with obsessive thoughts about killing oneself or another and then move on to obsessive thoughts about whether we really love our partner. It is common for OCD symptoms to disappear for months to years or to at least subside and feel more manageable and then to reappear or worsen at life transitions such as graduation, changing profession, getting married, having children or retiring. We can imagine the present subject or subjects of our OCD as the current actors on the stage whilst the difficulty with uncertainty, the backdrop to the scene, remains the same. The scenes and the actors come and go but it is the backdrop, the difficultly with uncertainty which does not change. I use this metaphor because in terms of treatment it can feel tempting to want to ‘talk out’ the OCD. Often this might lead to feeling better temporarily, however since the underlying issue is around uncertainty and no therapist can give us 100% assurance on a ‘what if’ question, it is far more fruitful initially to focus on the difficulty with uncertainty.

Why do some individuals find uncertainty so difficult?

Clinical research shows that there can be neurological differences in some OCD sufferers. To simplify greatly, this means that there are some neural pathways going from the orbital frontal cortex to the cingulate gyrus, to the thalamus and back to the orbital frontal cortexwhich act as a negative feedback loop. See this explanation from the BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/mind/articles/disorders/causesofocd.shtml

These parts of the brain are responsible for OCD like behaviour. When one of these parts is not working properly then we can have OCD symptoms. Other research suggests that OCD is linked to a  low level of serotonin. For this reason it is worthwhile considering the option of taking an SSRI or anti-anxiety medication, particularly if therapy alone does not help or if there is also low mood, dysthymia or depression. In my experience, clients are often wary of becoming reliant or medication or think that they should be able to ’sort their problems out on their own’. I suggest that taking medication should be discussed with a psychiatrist but can been viewed as an additional support. Sometimes we feel too overwhelmed with our OCD symptoms to be able to engage in therapy. In these cases, medication can help take the edge off, particularly since starting therapy can sometimes temporarily increase our anxiety and worsen our symptoms. However in my clinical experience, whilst medication can improve symptoms, it is not enough to stop them and this is why therapy is also necessary.

What is the treatment for OCD? 

Exploration of Adverse Childhood Experiences

Whilst some argue that OCD is purely a biological matter, I have found that all OCD clients have experienced significant circumstances in their childhood where there was a backdrop of uncertainty and a feeling of not being in control. Sometimes it takes bit of exploration to identify this. Many of us feel very protective of our parents. We might feel guilty exploring childhood difficulties with a therapist, as if we are betraying our parents. It is also fairly common not to remember too much about our childhood or to emphasise how we were so lucky and had such a good childhood. The fact is that however good our childhood was, we all experienced some hurts, upsets, minor traumas or full-blown trauma along the way. This is simply because our parents are human and no human is perfect. Even the most well -meaning parents may have unintentionally negatively impacted their child or children. Whether it is because they parented in the same way as they were parented so thought that their behaviour was normal. Or because they were not fully available to their child due to overworking, depression, alcoholism or OCD, amongst others. In fact it is common for an OCD sufferer to have a parent who also struggles. Sometimes the parental wounding can simply be because you have different temperaments. For example, an outgoing mother with a shy introverted child might unintentionally wound the child when she insists that they sing in front of the whole family at every family gathering. 

Schema Therapy

A common theme in childhood experience of OCD sufferers is having felt ‘not good enough’ or insignificant. Perhaps there was conflict in the marital home and the child was not given the attention they needed. Perhaps one had to compete with other siblings who demanded more of our parents’ attention due to special needs. Maybe we were bullied at school and didn’t tell anyone so didn’t get the support we needed. Perhaps we had a parent with a volatile temper and felt as if we were constantly living on egg shells. We might at times have felt alone, insignificant and lacking the reassurance and empathy we needed from one of our key care givers. Dr Jeffrey Young created Schema Therapy which is an effective tool for uncovering childhood situations which have left an unhealthy mark on our psyche. Schema Therapy also provides a treatment model for how to heal these schema. Schema is the name coined to refer tothe particular type of difficult childhood circumstances we experienced that still impact us in an unhelpful way today. These do not need to be ‘ Big T’ traumas. Often ongoing and seemly low-grade traumas such as a parent being preoccupied with depression can have just as damaging an effect.  There are around 18 different schema and the one which relates to OCD is the Vulnerability to Harm and Illness schema.

Gestalt Therapy 

Gestalt therapy posits that anxiety is the feeling of excitement when we are not allowing ourselves to fully breathe. The Gestalt definition of excitement refers to the whole range of outward going and forceful e-motions including not only excitement but all types of anger from feeling irked, irritated, annoyed, frustrated, angry, enraged, hateful, spiteful, malicious, vindictive and murderous, to name but a few. In my experience, clients with OCD often have a difficult relationship with anger. They believe that anger is a ‘bad’ emotion and that it is unhealthy. They may try to bypass their anger. Either we don't feel anger at all or we bottle it up or get angry with ‘the world’, current affairs or  public transport services, for example. We find it difficult to own and express anger assertively and directly to another, usually a significant other. We might be passive-aggressive or deflect our anger by getting irate with the shopkeeper who short-changed us rather than our partner who pissed us off. We fear that expressing anger directly is risky and that we may end up losing the person we love if we do so. We have normally learned early in our childhood that getting angry is risky. We may instead internalise our angry feelings and become angry with ourselves. A common denominator in all OCD clients I have worked with is the very critical inner voice. Often clients are accompanied by a constant narrative about just how terrible, incompetent or ridiculous they are for having OCD symptoms. They blame and get frustrated with themselves. This then causes us to feel even worse about ourselves and never resolves our OCD. Therefore an important part of therapy is exploring how we learned that expressing anger was risky, how we can learn to express it appropriately, and how we can develop a more compassionate voice to ourselves.  Often this  includes experiential work where we look at where the misplaced anger really belongs and where we fight back against the original person who made us feel bad as a child.

CBT

This is clinically proven to be effective in the treatment of OCD. It is premised on the idea that our thoughts affect our feelings which then affect our behaviours. For example a thought such as ‘what if I were to pick up that knife and cut my wrists?’ leads to a feeling of anxiety and a behaviour of eliminating all knives from the house. If we can challenge our thought and replace it with something more helpful then we don’t feel anxious and we are ok with knives in the house. Challenging the thoughts and beliefs entails firstly logging them to see what kind of unhelpful inner talk we have, and then analysing them for cognitive distortions such as catastrophic thinking, ‘black and white thinking’, fortune telling, amongst others. See this link for a full list and explanation of thinking errors. We also look for the evidence to suggest our thought has significance. For example is there any evidence which supports the idea I might cut my wrists? Have I ever done that before? Probably not. The second part of CBT is the behavioural part where we start to expose ourselves to situations and thoughts that are difficult for us until they no longer affect us. For example we tolerate eating with a fork that might be contaminated and when we do it enough times, we realise we can handle the uncertainty and the anxiety that accompanies it and it is no longer a big deal for us.

Mindfulness

To oversimplify, this is holding the knowing that all our experiences are temporary and often momentary. By reframing how we view our symptoms, we give them less power. For example, think about how different it feels to say to yourself, ‘In this moment I am feeling anxious’ or ‘right now i am having a thought that the spoon may be contaminated’ rather than simply focussing on how anxious you feel or how dirty the spoon might be. Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) has also been clinically proven to be effective for working with mental health disorders including depression and OCD. A great resource to learn more about mindfulness is Tara Brach's website.

Sensorimotor Therapy

Dr Pat Ogden, co-author of Sensorimotor Therapy offers an alternative to the CBT approach. The idea is that we can alter the faulty neural pathways that lead to OCD and anxiety by introducing somatic interventions. Dr Ogden describes the building blocks of experience which include 1)our thoughts, 2)emotions, 3)body sensations, 4) movements and 5) remembered images, smells or sounds that may come to mind as we focus on these. If we can change one of the building blocks in our well-trodden neural path then we can break the path and behave differently.  This might mean having the ‘what if’ thought but not allowing it to take hold. One of the ways we can break the old pattern is by working directly with our bodies. For example making the opposite movement that our body wants to make when we are feeling anxious such as lowering our shoulders and standing straight rather than raising our shoulders and hunching over. Somatic interventions are also offered for the client to try which help to reduce anxiety. Learning techniques to master anxiety gives us a sense of mastery and can give us the confidence to engage in the next steps of therapy.

I believe that having expertise of all these approaches means that the client and I have a highly equipped tool box for tackling OCD. Some clients are ready to get started with CBT straight away and others find this more difficult in which case we may start with exploring key schema, mindfulness and anxiety management techniques until they feel ready to start CBT. Others respond well to the benefits of a containing and nurturing therapeutic relationship and a Gestalt Therapy approach.

3 Steps to Beating Social Anxiety

I have many clients and potential clients approaching me, wanting to resolve their social anxiety. They describe difficulties in certain social situations, feeling unable to interact with others without experiencing heightened self-consciousness, uncomfortable feelings and accompanying physical symptoms. These can include feeling nervous, stammering, wanting to run away and be alone, sweating, dizziness, feeling numb and palpitations, amongst many others.

Social anxiety is the inner voice that tells us, whilst we are in, or are contemplating being in a social situation, that we are not good enough, not interesting enough, that others are judging us negatively. It can be accompanied by shyness however we can have social anxiety without being shy. This critical inner voice can become so insistent and powerful that it builds a wall between the other/s and us, and we are no longer fully present and available to engage freely with them. Rather than focussing on the interaction we become fixed on our critical voice, which is disapproving of our behaviour. We start to feel a whole host of emotions including anxiety. As a result we feel more and more ungrounded until we are overwhelmed and the only option is to flee.

Social anxiety can lead to avoiding or struggling in certain social situations. These vary according to the individual. Some avoid one-to-one relationships, others avoid group scenarios, for some it manifests at work and stops them applying for roles with more responsibility or a higher profile which includes public speaking.

Why is it? The socially anxious individual considers themselves deficient in certain social situations. Therefore the basic self-belief is, ‘I’m not good enough’. At the heart of this issue is non self-acceptance. Ultimately the key to change is to be in better relationship to oneself: self-acceptance.  This is a theme that is widely talked touted in spiritual and self-help books. I imagine that it is certainly not new to the reader.  But what does that mean? It sounds so simple and yet seems so difficult for many of us to truly understand or put into practice.

Firstly it can help to consider and become more aware of how it is that we have such a harsh relationship with ourselves. I sometimes invite clients to advise an imaginary friend who shares the same social anxiety issues that they have. They speak to their ‘friend’ in a much gentler and more forgiving way than they do to themselves.

In Gestalt therapy we talk about ‘introjects’. These are beliefs that we have taken to be true due to hearing them voiced by our carers when we were too young to analyse them objectively and then perhaps reject them.  ‘You bad girl’ could be one such belief. ‘You ugly thing’ could be another. These are extreme examples however these parental messages can also be implicit. A parent ignoring us when we are angry in order to teach us a lesson, a parent who becomes anxious when we act vivaciously. We deduce from these situations that what we did was ‘not ok’. As a child the next step from that is that “I am not ok’. Children also often pick up these messages about themselves when parents separate or when the family is undergoing huge stress and transition or when a parent becomes less available due to sickness, depression or addictions, amongst other things.

Once we have increased our understanding of the origins of the critical voice then we can start to become more aware of it in our daily life. When we catch our critical voice calling us ‘fat’, ‘lazy’ or ‘stupid’ we observe it. We don’t give ourselves a hard time about it, that’s just being critical about our critical voice (which defeats the purpose!). According to the foundational text of Gestalt therapy theory ‘awareness is like the glow of a coal which comes from its own combustion’ (PHG, 1951:75) i.e. awareness alone is enough to cause change. Therefore simply by noticing our critical voice and how insidious it is, we are already setting in motion a change. After a period of of simply increasing awareness, we can move on to challenging the critical voice. If it accuses you of being lazy how might you reframe that? How would you respond to a friend that described himself or herself as lazy for not preparing for a job interview? You would probably look for other explanations. Maybe their fear of getting things wrong has got in the way of job preparation. Or maybe they don’t really want the job and doing the interview because they think they should, that it’s the kind of job they ought to be doing rather than a job they enjoy. Or perhaps they simply do not have the time as they are also working full-time, running a household and looking after two young children. I invite you to try and speak to yourself from that place of compassion, looking for the good in you rather than what is not good enough. It won’t be easy and it won’t happen every time or even at all to begin with. However it is the first step towards building a better relationship with yourself. And remember, if you do catch yourself repeatedly slipping up then that does not matter at all, just don’t give yourself a hard time about it!

A second way to tackle social anxiety is to become aware of how we ‘project’ our critical voice on to others. Projection is a natural phenomenon common to most of us. It simply means ‘‘a process of disowning an aspect of myself which is then co-created as a relational experience’ (Joyce and Sills, 2010, p115)’ It comes in handy for appreciating the arts such as a painting or a piece of music. It is also necessary for empathy. Through projection we can step into the others’ experience and imagine how they are feeling based on how we might feel in a similar circumstance. However projection is less helpful when we imagine that others are criticising us the way we criticise ourselves. Clients often say, ‘well that’s terrible that I project onto others’. They start to become critical of themselves. I always react with ‘ouch’ when I hear them say that. Firstly I explain that projection occurs at a subconscious level therefore we are not aware that we are projecting. Secondly, giving oneself a hard time about a natural mechanism is simply allowing the critical voice to stamp all over us again. An awareness experiment I suggest instead is a tried and tested Gestalt technique called ‘I notice, I imagine, I feel’. I ask my client to look at an image or if they are up to it, myself and to state what they notice. The aim is to simply state what is noticed such as ‘I notice brown hair’, ‘I notice a leather jacket’, ‘I notice lines on the forehead’. Often individuals doing this exercise say things like ‘I notice she looks happy’ or, ‘I notice she seems strict’, and I point out that this is no longer noticing but imagining. I then ask them as a second step to go with their imagination and say what they notice and imagine. For example ‘I notice the sleeping cat and I imagine it is dreaming’, or ‘I notice the lines in his forehead and I imagine he is angry’. The last step of the exercise is to state the feeling that occurs. For example, ‘I notice the lines in his forehead and I imagine he is angry and I feel worried’. Here we can clearly see how it is easy to imagine all kinds of things about the other based on what we notice, our subjective reality. Individuals who suffer from social anxiety will often imagine that others are viewing them negatively and this experiment is helpful for becoming aware of the projection process and challenging those assumptions.

A third way to beat social anxiety is to feel as grounded as possible. What does grounded mean ask some of my clients. That is a good question in itself and can mean different things to different people. What does it mean to you? There is definitely a link with having a sense of one’s body. The opposite of grounded is feeling light-headed, spaced out, insubstantial. When we are feeling anxious, tight chested and breathless then we are not grounded. When we feel dizzy or have numb or tingling fingers that can accompany anxiety then we are not grounded.  When we are grounded we feel calm and we are often in touch with the feeling of our feet in contact with the ground. Our toes may feel warm and tingly. When we are grounded we breathe lower down in our bellies. When we are grounded we feel balanced.  Some exercises to get grounded include belly breathing, shaking, and body awareness mindfulness exercises, amongst others. I will describe these more in another article.

Conclusion

Just as I have had many clients approach me wanting to resolve their social anxiety, I have had many clients leave therapy with their social anxiety a ‘non-issue’.  Of course there is no magic wand and I am not saying that all it takes is to read and engage with this article.  Each person has their own story with their own particular circumstances that have led to social anxiety. Nevertheless in my experience at the core of social anxiety is always the inability to accept oneself. I’m not saying it is an easy task to change this and it can take time. Often the support of a therapist is necessary. However as we start our journey we find lots of other hidden treasures along the way.

Joyce, P. & Sills, C. (2010). Skills in Gestalt Counselling & Psychotherapy. London: Sage.

Perls. F, Hefferline, R, Goodman, P, (2009). Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality. London: Souvenir Press Ltd.