When your heart shouts ‘yes’, your ‘gut’ grunts ‘no’ and your head screams ‘I don’t f**king know!!’ - 3 Easy Ways to Make Hard Decisions

3 Easy Ways to Make Hard Decisions.

What should I do? This is a question that takes up a lot of headspace in a lot of people, a lot of the time. I hear it from my clients. I hear it as I ask myself the same question. “Should I relocate to the town or country?” “Should I quit my job or not?” “Should I stay with him/her or go?” “Should I invest or save?” “Should I buy the dress or the jeans?”

Decisions. Why are they often so difficult? How come we can get so tied up in knots trying to make them? For many reasons. Often our minds are filled with ‘shoulds’ about how we should be and act. In Gestalt Therapy theory we calls these ‘introjects’, cultural beliefs we have unconsciously swallowed hook, line and sinker. An example could be ‘life is a struggle’, ‘money is hard to come by’, ‘good things come to those who wait’, ‘duty before pleasure’. If we are trying to make our lives fit into those maxims then it will be difficult to make a decision when what we actually want conflicts with that.

Decision-making is also difficult because it means there is a time of uncertainty. And uncertainty breeds anxiety. Some of us are better than others at living in uncertainty but many of us control freaks freak out when we don’t know. We may grab onto the first decision that unfurls, grabbing it like it was the only sail on a boat in a hurricane. Then we implement the decision, clinging on to it for dear life, even if it kills us.

Others of us, myself included, have made angry decisions. Decisions based on a ‘f**k you’. An example is, ‘”well you didn’t appreciate my work so I’m leaving this job”. Or, “so you kissed that woman in the club, I’m leaving you f**ker!” I’m not saying these decisions are never the right ones but they can sometimes be likened to a childish tantrum. In the aftermath of the decision we start to regret it and feel worse off. Perhaps the more grown-up thing would have been to communicate our pain, disappointment or hurt directly and see if we can change our situation without having to leave it.

So how can we make effective decisions?

One Gestalt Therapy experiment I use with clients is inviting them to map out in a room their different options. For example they designate one spot in the room to represent one option. Another spot in the room symbolises another. Another spot a third, and even more depending on how many options they are deciding between. Then I ask them to stand in each spot and to visualise themselves having chosen that option. I ask them to scan their bodies to notice physical sensations such as tension, ease, excitement, numbness. I then ask them what feelings they associate with the body sensation. There will often be marked differences between the options. Finally I get them to stand at a point where they can survey all the locations in the room and check to see which they feel drawn to. Whilst trying this at home might not lead to the crystal clear ‘a-ha’ moment you are looking for it will certainly help you get a lot more clarity and less headspace taken up with the same old thoughts going around and around.

Another Gestalt experiment is called ‘Head, Heart, Belly’. You got it, I ask my client to speak from these separate parts of their body. That might sound strange but it is simply about getting in touch with that body part and then speaking in the present tense as ‘I’ from that body part. For example my heart might say, “I really want to leave this job, I hate it”. My head might say, ‘I can see reasons why and reasons why not’. My belly/gut might say, “hold on a sec, do you need to leave just yet? Is it so bad? Remember financial security is really important to you. It may be better to build up your options before leaving.”

This experiment can be really enlightening and sometimes a client will get very clear statements from the different body parts, which helps them to decide. However I for one struggle with a ‘knowing’ in the gut and I’m guessing I’m not the only one. For that reason a third technique comes from Marsha Linehan and her Dialetical Behavioural Therapy programme, originally designed for those diagnosed with having Borderline Personality Disorder but actually useful for many different client groups and even non-clients. The concept is Wise Mind, which is different from Emotional Mind and Reasonable Mind. It is a synthesis of the two and she describes it as ‘the inner wisdom that each person has’. A way to access it is to sit still and breathe. We think of our question. Then, as we breathe in we say to ourselves ‘wise’ and as we breathe out we say, ‘mind’. As we repeat this, our attention stays on the area just beneath our belly button, our gut. We do this until our answer comes. If it does not come we trust that the answer will come when it is ready. I have been surprised by ‘knowing’s bubbling up from that area.

One final thing to bear in mind, which is part of Gestalt Therapy theory and also features in Linehan’s book, is that of polarities co-existing. Rather than needing for things to be either/or, both/and is possible. Just as day exists at the same time as night (think different hemispheres), just as we can momentarily feel hatred for someone we love, just as we can want to stay up for late-night movie and want to sleep at the same time. In the same way it is possible to stay in my job and build up my freelance work. It is possible to relocate to the country and commute into the city. It is possible to buy a slightly less expensive dress and still save money. It is possible to stay with our partner and make it very clear we didn’t like the betrayal and wont’ stand for it again. Children tend to make things black and white. Someone or something is all bad or all good. When we grow up we can be left with this hangover. To embrace both poles may feel unfamiliar but it is often the more grown-up choice. A good indicator of whether we have made the right decision for us at this particular point in time is if we end up feeling balanced. Rather than our heart, gut and head screaming in different directions“I don’t know’, we are listening out of a slightly more muted and choral, ‘here we go, here we go, here we go!’

Do this on a daily basis and pretty much everything else will fall into place

Self-care

So what are you doing about self-care? I often ask my clients.  It is a common question and one that I can just as easily ask myself, aware that that I can neglect that department too. It’s a word that is bandied about a lot. It goes by other names such as self-love, self-compassion or in Gestalt therapy theory as self-support. The two simple words self-care convey something seemingly very obvious and easy to do. In the ABC of emotional health and wellbeing this is logically one of the first building blocks.  Indeed it is so obvious that it can be overlooked. Both by clients and by myself. “Self-care, yes of course I’m practicing self-care”, I might respond. But what does that actually mean?

What is self-care?

The seemingly obvious definition of this word, caring for oneself, translates into what concretely? This is when we realise that what seemed obvious actually has layers of meaning and subtlety. Some of the elements it incorporates are:

• Lack of a critical  inner voice
• Exercise
• Healthy food
• Lack of destructive behaviours such as excessive drinking, overspending
• Care of appearance

However it also relates to how much time we carve out for ourselves in our daily lives. It's about how protective and boundaried are we about our rest time, our exercise time, and our social time. It's about how mindful and boundaried are we about creating space and opportunities for fun? Are we choosing an environment for ourselves where we are happy to live?

Do we assert our boundaries when people over step the line? What do we prioritise? Do we allow work or others to take priority over our own needs? Do we guard our need for self-care as fiercely as we would guard a child’s right to that? And if we do, do we do it consistently on a daily basis on sporadically ?

A good way of thinking about this is how we would think about a young child. I imagine many of us would put a lot more energy into thinking about their wellbeing than into our own.  Self-care extends beyond caring for the physical and emotional level to the soul. What makes our hearts sing?

Why do we need self-care?

That’s a good question.  To feel at peace, balanced, lacking in anxiety and sadness. Many of our anxieties and low moods are because we are not in touch with and honouring ourselves. I often also find that when I do make space for fun and downtime I am actually more productive when back in working mode.

Why do we often struggle to practice self-care on a daily basis?

Do we expect other people to do it for us? Do we expect others to take care of us? Do we expect the glasses of wine after work or the TV to do our self-care for us? It’s not that these things can’t be part of self-care. Coming home to a glass of wine, a warm flat and watching a DVD set can be very comforting. But self-care needs to be a more active and assertive act. The issue here is taking responsibility for ourselves, which is part of growing up.

More often than not a critical voice is also at play. It tells us that we do not deserve to play, that we do not deserve to be happy. Perhaps it makes us feel guilty for being so. Perhaps we do not feel entitled to be happy. Perhaps there was no precedent for that in our up-bringing, our parents didn’t value their own needs for self-care. Maybe we are worried about coming across as lazy or indulgent.  Probably those of who do value our own needs for self-care have experienced reactions from others such as envy. ‘Oh, so you’re going to yoga now, lucky you!’. We live in a society where the puritan work ethic is still very much present.

As MD Stuart Brown says in his best-selling book, Play:

“I have gathered and analyzed thousands of case studies that I call play histories. I have found that remembering what play is all about and making it part of our daily lives are probably the most important factors in being a fulfilled human being. The ability to play is critical not only to being happy, but also to sustaining social relationships and being a creative, innovative person.”

― Stuart Brown, Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul

So go on, I invite you to do one thing consciously each day, which is an act of self-care. Whether it be taking a luxurious bath, a yoga class, a martial art class, or taking a new way home and scuffing your feet through autumnal leaves. Tell yourself that you are worth the investment. And then see what you reap. Hopefully you will see that investing in yourself has a positive impact on every aspect of your life.

The key to contentment - self approval

A common thread that runs through a lot of the issues my clients bring is validation. By validation I mean the process of being confirmed as ‘ok’, ‘acceptable’ or ‘good enough’.  For many individuals this sense of being ‘ok’ is derived from others or how we imagine others think of us. We need others to consider us interesting in order for us to feel interesting. We need others to think that we are beautiful in order to feel beautiful. We need others to think that we are intelligent in order to feel intelligent. We need others to give us permission to feel ok before we give ourselves permission to feel ok.

And what’s wrong with that you might ask? On the one hand we are social animals so of course what other people think of us is important. If we were not influenced by others’ perceptions, what that would make us? Psychopaths?

There is nothing wrong with being influenced by others. However if you imagine there is a continuum going from one extreme of needing others to validate our experience to the other extreme of not needing anyone to validate our experience, I suggest that being closer to the centre of the continuum would feel better. Firstly, if we are dependent on others’ validation in order to feel ok then we can never feel ok within ourselves. Instead we feel anxious and uncertain each time we think we have upset them.

Secondly it takes up a lot of energy to be constantly evaluating oneself on whether we are worthy of approval. It’s tiring! Not to mention how frustrating and irritating it is to strain so hard for others’ confirmation. Although often we hide these angry feelings from ourselves, they show up when our attempts to get approval from another are rejected. Then we might think, ‘how dare they not like me when I was trying so hard’. We might react to the rejection in a way that is disproportionate to the situation for example feeling furious or devastated.

Lastly, it is often a futile task. Think about the people that you find most interesting or attractive.  They often have an easy-ness about them, the ease of being ok with themselves, the ease of not having to try too hard to please. This enables them to be spontaneous and to feel excited in the moment about their encounter with you. This is what makes them attractive to others. Indeed it is precisely this element of openness and spontaneity that we lose when we are trying so hard to be validated. We may succeed in portraying a polished image however in exerting such control over ourselves we also manage to polish away qualities such as openness, vulnerability, ability to be with uncertainty and sensitivity to the environment and to others. These are qualities which we find endearing in others We’ve probably all been in the presence of people who seem to have mastered the social game and yet they do it by not allowing anyone else a word in edgeways, or by asking lots of questions without giving anything away themselves. Somehow we find ourselves glazing over or getting bored.

So how do we feel more ok with ourselves? Well I can’t offer a ‘magic wand’ cure. However the journey starts with learning to validate oneself more. In order to do this we need to get to know ourselves so that we can connect with our own signs and signals that we are doing ok.  The route to this is through our bodies. Our body sensations and emotions provide important messages about ourselves. From time to time throughout the day try asking yourself the simple question, ‘am I doing ok in this moment here and now?’ Then close your eyes and go inside to feel the answer.  Wait for the voice that may be weak that tells you that you are doing ok. Be patient and let it tell you exactly how you are doing ok in this minute. Notice the body sensations and emotions that go with it. For example a client in therapy looks at me as if seeking my approval on what she is saying. I ask her to see if she can approve of herself. She takes a moment to reflect, notices a warm steady glow in her chest, a quietness and absence of anxiety. She connects these sensations and emotions with something positive. She realises and tells herself that actually she is doing ok right now with me. She even manages to elaborate on why this is. She is self-reflecting, courageously exploring herself and taking the risk of sharing difficult material with me. Indeed therapy is hard so dammit she is doing more than just ok!

So go on, try it and let me know how you get on?

Getting Grounded

I mentioned in my previous article on social anxiety that it was important to get as grounded as possible. When we feel anxious we tend to breathe more quickly and less fully. As a result we can become heady and have physical symptoms such as feeling dizzy, spaced out or numb. Consequently we no longer feel balanced and find it difficult to get in touch with other more supportive states that counter the anxious thoughts for example excitement, curiosity or confidence. Grounding involves being more in our bodies and less in our heads.

I’m not saying that it’s as easy as getting grounded to beat anxiety. Many of my clients have, out of their awareness, chosen precisely not to feel grounded. Feeling one’s body can bring up uncomfortable emotions. Emotions originate in the body and are linked to physical sensations for example a sinking heart and disappointment, a tight chest and anxiety, a fluttering in the stomach and excitement. An individual who has experienced trauma may have ‘escaped’ to their mind or disassociated in order to avoid the harrowing experience and accompanying anxiety. This then becomes a habitual pattern.

However even those of us with no trauma that live in cities are often ungrounded due to our environment. Many of us work in offices surrounded by electronic equipment and the latest technology, spending large amounts of time interacting digitally, being constantly bombarded with news feeds, text messages, television, You Tube, emails, Twitter etc.

So getting grounded is important for all and yet it can be unfamiliar and challenging. For this reason approaching getting grounded with compassion and curiosity rather than with an, ‘I must get grounded’ attitude works best. Here is one exercise to try.

Belly breathing

In a private space, place your hand so it is gently covering your belly. Start by taking a normal breath in and then breathing out normally (not trying to do anything to the breath like extend it or deepen it). When you come to the end of the out-breath and are ready to breath in again, pause for five seconds without breathing. As you pause, push your lower belly out as far as it can go as if you had just eaten a meal that had made you feel bloated (this in itself can be difficult for those who are not comfortable with their body image). After five seconds relax your belly and breathe in. You will notice that you breathe in more deeply as you want to get more oxygen in after holding the breath. Continue doing this for three minutes and building up to ten minutes. Ideally you would do this twice a day. Clients sometimes report having tried breathing when they are feeling anxious and finding that it does nothing at all to help them in that moment. However the best way to benefit from these types of breathing exercises is to do them regularly as a way to keep general anxiety levels down. In that way we are less likely to get into a highly anxious state.

And the science shows that breathing exercises really do work. The reason being that anxiety has a direct effect on our physiology. As I am sure you are all familiar, when we are anxious our flight or flight system kicks in., our sympathetic nervous system. Our adrenal glands, located above our kidneys, start to produce more adrenaline and noradrenaline. Our heart rate increases and we experience physical symptoms of anxiety such as sweating or dizziness, amongst others. By belly breathing we activate the hypothalamus that transmits neurohormones, which cause the body to relax. Deep breathing also directly affects the kidney and adrenal area, also promoting relaxations. Deep breathing therefore activates the mechanisms that cause the body to slow down and relax, the parasympathetic nervous system. So why not give it a try? Set yourself a 30-day challenge of just three minutes a day and notice how much grounded you feel. It is also a useful exercise to do before a big moment such as a job interview or first date as it helps to counter the nervousness that can get in the way of performing your best. I’d be interested to hear what your experience with it is so drop me a line and let me know.

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.