Change for the Better

Personal development through practical psychotherapy

Elizabeth Wilde McCormick

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526425744
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy Counselling
• Index: Psychology

This bestselling book has helped thousands of people find ways of dealing with everyday emotional difficulties, and also supported practitioners and trainee psychotherapists in their work with patients. This fifth edition features up-to- date thinking and practice from Cognitive Analytic Psychotherapy and includes new content on:

· Trauma and Complex Trauma

· Mindfulness

· Relational mapping

· Group Work.

Further updates include a new foreword, updated references, and new chapter summaries and conclusions.

Part One Change Is Possible Why Change? What is it that Changes? How to Begin the Process of Change

The new information that science has offered in recent decades makes it clear that something can be done to alleviate many social and mental health problems.

Sue Gerhardt, Why Love Matters (2004: 217)

One Change is Possible

Serenity is not freedom from the storm but peace within the storm. What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

How many times in a day do we think about change? How often when things go wrong do we wish it were different, that perhaps we were different? And how often do these wishes remain just wishes?

We might feel inside that something is wrong; we feel unhappy, lost, hopeless. Or, things go wrong outside: we don’t fit in, our jobs perish, partners leave, or we can’t rid ourselves of habits or thoughts that make us feel bad. So we try to make changes – a new look, job, partner, house – and for a while things are different. But then the same patterns arise and our hope of change fades. We might feel stuck or jinxed, and anger and helplessness begin to well up.

This book is about change. It sets out well-researched methods of identifying what we can usefully revise about learned patterns of behaviour, and suggests manageable ways to change them; and to hold onto those changes. It will provide methods for individual self-examination, for self-monitoring habitual patterns, for making personal maps to illustrate the kind of relational and thinking webs we weave that ensnare us. And it offers creative ways for changing the patterns that have become unhelpful.

• We can learn to become better observers of ourselves. And these observers can be kind rather than critical.
• We can identify the learned behaviour patterns of thinking and relating, based on our earlier need to survive, that have become unhelpful and which are redundant.
• We can then clear space for the potential of a kindly observer and healthy island within and practise different ways of expressing ourselves.

And we do this actively by:

1. Using the Psychotherapy File (see p. 273) to identify our problems, which in CAT are called traps, dilemmas and snags; and the thinking, feeling and relationship dance that accompanies them.
2. Finding creative ways to name the patterns of responses and behaviour we take for granted when they occur in daily life, and writing them down.
3. Making maps to keep close by so we can look at where we are in the pattern sequence day by day.
4. Making realistic goals for challenging and changing the sequences.
5. Writing our individual life story, and link what has happened to us with the traps, dilemmas, snags and unstable states that have become our everyday reality.
6. Finding resources to support this process of awakening and the shifts in perception that come with change as well as helpful ways to hold on to change.
7. As we begin to clear the ground of unhelpful patterns we feel more ‘real’, because for the first time, we have more space and energy. This space and energy helps us to nourish a healthy island within.

When we change problematic patterns, we change our lives.

We don’t, however, change the fundamental core of our being, the individual seed of the self with which we were born. We all have our own unique character, gifts and tendencies, as well as our genetic patterning. In early life this potential self is a bit like a seed planted into the garden of the family. Using this image, it’s easy to see that the seed’s growth and development is bound up with the nature of the soil and its environment. We cannot isolate ourselves from our context within social culture, language, family, our own biology and history. And as people travel more widely, the culture in which we were brought up may have given us messages that conflict with the environment we end up in. All of us must find ways of dealing with these early experiences in order to survive. When life challenges us through difficult feelings or habits, or when things have gone wrong, we confront aspects of ourselves we had previously taken for granted. We all carry a part of us that is compromised or wounded in some way. How we carry this wound makes the difference between a passive attitude of ‘I am a depressive, no one can help me’ and the active ‘There is a part of me that is depressed and I will address it and take care of it’. Once we engage with ourselves in this way we are more open to enjoy and use our inner world of imagination, dream and insight, and to accept ourselves, just as we are.

If we follow the idea of newborn humans being like seeds planted into the garden of life, we can imagine that each seed has to develop a ‘survival self’ in order to manage what might be the less-than-ideal conditions. Few seeds are given the ideal soil and some find themselves on stony ground. Developing a survival self, with coping tactics for adapting to a difficult, hostile or just strange environment, is always necessary, and a mark of the human capacity for adaptation. Human beings are extremely creative!

Understanding and contrasting the difference in energy and flexibility between our learned patterns for survival, with possibly restricted ways of living and relating, and the potential of a healthy self that is able to reflect, observe and transcend identification with suffering, is at the heart of psychotherapeutic work.

Throughout this book we will be looking at some of the ways in which we have become accustomed to think and feel about ourselves and other people, and how this affects our relationship with ourselves and others. We now know from neuroscience that because of our brain’s neuroplasticity, it is possible to learn new ways of responding and behaving that in time surpass the old. Once we start using strengths developed by actively thinking and reflecting, we often stimulate other changes. We find we have more inside us than we thought. We may find that the numerous threads running through our life carry more meaning, are even a gift. We begin to feel there is more in life than being on automatic, which many of us are reduced to when things are not going well.

Each of us can take up the challenge of looking at ourselves afresh: to see what things we can change and to accept those we cannot, and to know the difference. Setting aside time to ponder on what we can change, and actively working to achieve those changes, means that we free ourselves from the restrictions of the past, and that our changes are changes for the better.

This book seeks to spotlight how we live with what we feel and how we have adjusted, and what changes, if any, are needed. I would also like to add that I have met many people who seem to carry an overwhelming sense of pain and suffering for reasons that are unclear. Not everything has a linear cause. We can only bear witness to the suffering we experience in ourselves or in others, and honour its reality as it lives within the individual, and not seek to concretise or rationalise its source.

Why change?

There are really only two certainties in life. One is death, that one day we will die, and the second is that ‘everything changes’. But it is these two certainties that we often run away from, seeking escape or comfort in trying to control pleasure and pain. It’s usually when we suffer that we wonder what we can do to bring about change. Everyone seeks change for different reasons – to feel less anxious, to overcome debilitating problems like depression or phobia, to feel more in control of life, to stop making destructive relationships. Or perhaps we seek change because we feel sad or bad, unhappy or empty; because things keep on going wrong. Learning to draft a ‘road map’ of our development as a person and finding exits to those knotty attitudes that need adjustment means that we take charge. Many people speak today of feeling caught up in social and work systems that are demanding, dehumanising, even punishing. Learning who we are and claiming freedom to be who we are is not simply a short-term solution to problems, it is one of our remaining enduring freedoms. This book might be a first step toward that goal.

Are there things better left unchanged?

The myth of Pandora’s Box and the old superstition it ‘doesn’t do to meddle with things you don’t understand’ suggests that whatever we have locked away will wreak havoc once made conscious. Then there are the old adages ‘Let sleeping dogs lie’ and ‘Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t’. These are powerful messages that would stop us searching and ultimately using our power of choice. They encourage avoidance and ensure that we are limited by fear. But if we don’t find out what our ‘devils’ are, they have a habit of being projected, seen as if they were in other people who become the very devils we fear; they pop up in relationships, in dreams and they bind us into traps and dilemmas. The ‘shadow’ in Jungian psychology refers to all that is not in the light, often all that we fear and dislike. Accepting this shadow as a valid part of being whole (there is no sun without shadow; no day without night) means we are willing to see it for what it is. We have it rather than it having us.

Through the exploration of our learned patterns we are often rewarded by the gift of insight. Insight – that feeling of ‘ah, that’s how it was’ – is a leavening process through which we begin to trust that there is inside us something that understands what is going on. Just knowing rationally is not enough; we need to open up our other senses – sensing, intuiting, imagining; and then checking it out against what we have learned.

In her moving book My Father’s House, Sylvia Fraser (1989) describes how for her first forty years she split herself in two – the self that had a secret and the self that lived in the world. The secret self that had been split off leaked out via dreams, impulsive behaviour, irrational revulsions, in rages, incredible sadness and feelings of emptiness.

What is it that changes?

Human beings are not fixed, although patterns of thinking can feel very rigid and dominating. Subtle shifts in our perceptions, feelings and our thinking go on all the time simply because of ordinary living in a web of relationships. The call to homeostasis (balance) and to feel whole is strong and, as understood in Jungian psychology, is always inviting us to ‘individuate’, to become who we really are.

Two things can change. One is our attitude. We can breathe life into our experience by observing thoughtfully the hand we have been dealt, accepting that we have done the best we could with what we had at the time, without judging or getting depressed. Acceptance is a start, and it’s never too late to begin. Every day is an opportunity to witness afresh what happens inside and outside of ourselves and to develop a kindness toward all that has happened.

The other is standing back enough to make conscious revision of the unhelpful patterns we have got used to inhabiting. In reading this book you are entering a new dance of relating: listening in relation to being listened to, and heard. Over time you might find that you become more accepting and kindly to yourself and to others in relation to feeling accepted and loved.

Old patterns that are redundant can be sloughed off like a snake’s skin. We can free a space so that our natural self may start to breathe. But we cannot grow if we are living out of old ideas that need revision, that contribute to our feeling stuck. We cannot take in good things, however much they are offered, if inside we believe we are not entitled to receive them. We cannot relax or let go if we fear being persecuted or abused. And we cannot be assertive if we believe we will lose affection. In order to change and grow we must challenge the presumptions that limit our choices of how to be.

The dance of relating, with ourselves and others

Major studies of neurobiology suggest t...