The Significance Delusion

Unlocking Our Thinking for Our Children's Future

Gillian Bridge

• Publisher: Crown House Publishing
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781785831089
• eBook ISBN: 9781785831324
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

We have never had it better so why aren't we happy?;The Significance Delusion explains why humans are so peculiarly vulnerable to mental disorders and social problems, and how understanding the backstory can help you learn the real value of life Today we have everything that previous generations could ever have dreamed of. So why is it that so many people continue to go through life unhappy and unfulfilled, with millions more young people now facing mental health issues? Does it have something to do with the way our brains have developed? Could it be that humans are just essentially delusional;Now a compelling and insightful new book, The Significance Delusion, draws upon scientific research, ideas, facts and real-life anecdotes to explore the human obsession with meaning. It takes readers on a journey through time, history and the mysterious labyrinth that is the brain, to explore what it really takes for us (and our children) to thrive and survive as individuals and as a society, and even learn the meaning of life.;The author, Gillian Bridge, is a psycholinguistic consultant and expert in empowering people to get the most from their brain, whatever the challenge. The common link in her previous work as a teacher, a lecturer, an addiction therapist, an executive coach and a resilience consultant has been the way brain development and the use of language affect any individual's behaviour and communication. By understanding brain function and how it makes us behave the way we do, Gillian's work enables all people, whether they clearly need help or not, to gain better control of their lives;There are three interweaving strands throughout The Significance Delusion: brain matters, child-rearing matters and self-versus-community matters. By exploring these matters in a challenging, quirky and often humorous way, the book will not only help you answer some age-old questions about yourself (Who am I? What am I? How am I?), but also understand how to better promote the future mental and physical well-being of our children, for the benefit of them individually and society as a whole.;The Significance Delusion provides practical behavioural strategies to improve quality of life, making it a fascinating and invaluable book for parents, teachers, people working in social care, policy makers and anybody else who simply wants to understand themselves, or their relationships better.

Chapter 1

Is Life Enough?

Do you leap blithely out of bed and celebrate the dawning of the new day? Do you turn on the news and find yourself humming ‘What a Wonderful World’? Does satisfaction, like an Andrex puppy, run riot through your workplace?

I ask, because I’d love to meet someone who felt able to say ‘yes’ to all of those questions. That would be something of a first for me, and as a cynical old thing I could do with the morale boost. I sometimes feel that if I were an alien anthropologist, just landed here to take soundings on the earth’s viability as a place to colonise, I’d be advising my leader to think twice before committing to the project:

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Well, yes, it’s got all we need to support life, for survival …

Al, I can hear a ‘but’ coming. What’s your problem?

Well … but, the humans seem to be in a bit of a mess. Plenty of them and all that, but somehow not quite, how can I put it? Thriving. Even in the places where there’s enough of everything to go around, like food, shelter, clothing, education; it just seems that it’s never enough.

Al, tell me more. Give me some facts, some evidence.

Okay, take these news reports I’ve been reading:

Desire for happiness that only leads to woe

Unborn child feels a mother’s stress

Face up to it: children are in the grip of National Attention Deficit Disorder

Top head slams hothousing

British parents are too intrusive and ‘baby’ their children, says MP

Babies of obese mothers at risk of heart disease

Britain’s health has fallen further behind other Western nations, says Lancet report

Loneliness in old age ‘deadlier than obesity’

Guilt of the balancing act mothers

Buggy children are unable to walk at three

Children ‘are growing more miserable’

Too soft pupils will get toughened up

Student mental ill health is ‘under treated’

One in ten young ‘can’t cope with life’

I don’t know about you, Leader, but that last one just about scares the coprolite out of me. Ten per cent of the species likely to fail to function? Why risk it?

Al, you’ve got a point. Let’s fire up the rockets.

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It’s all getting quite depressing. If we take that last report (which was produced by the Prince’s Trust in 2015) a bit more seriously, we can see that we’re on target for it to get even more depressing, because, based on the UK government’s population projections, by 2020 we will have 1.3 million non-coping unhappy youngsters in our midst.

This is not only about how we parent our young and how badly wrong we seem to be getting it. Heaven knows, parents get it in the neck quite enough already. This is about how we all live our lives; it’s about things that run through the warp and the weft of every single human life lived.

It’s a species thing. It’s about why there really is something funny about our species, something that, if we weren’t quite so successful at surviving, should surely make us non-viable.

This book is about that strange anomaly and explains how that anomaly lies behind so many of our modern problems. It leads, almost inevitably, to consider our contemporary tsunami of discontent – which includes:

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STRESS

respect ADDICTION yearning religiosity

OVER-CONSUMPTION

INTERNET FIXATION fear of death obsessions

sentimentality ANXIETY

hypochondria Munchausen syndrome emptiness

despair DEPRESSION

emotional confusion authority issues AUTISM

identity issues texting obsession

POSSESSION ENVY perfectionism over achievement guilt

EATING/WEIGHT ISSUES power/megalomania

NOVELTY/THRILL SEEKING

restlessness RELATIONSHIP ISSUES commitment

issues SEX ISSUES

status envy loss of motivation shame envy

CO-DEPENDENCY control issues

genealogy ‘special and different’ therapy/counselling

fixation emotional desperation UNDEPENDABILITY

ceremony and ritual fixation BOREDOM SELF-DOUBT

procrastination COMMUNICATION DIFFICULTIES

demotivation

FAME SEEKING Facebook and ‘phoney’ friendships

THOUGHTLESSNESS

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These are some of the most common and troubling concerns that people suffer from today, even though not one of them can be said to have any measurable or quantifiable existence in what we call reality. These concerns and troubles have their primary and most powerful and disturbing existence deep within our own heads.

What’s in it for you?

Well, first, you’ll find out a lot about what it means to be human in this book, including the implications of some of the most recent and ground-breaking research into those very heads where so many of our troubles are located. And then you will find explanations for those problems that you might be experiencing, together with a whole raft of solutions for them. At the same time, you will have to hand a masterwork on resilience that will fit you with the skills to help bring up a whole generation of more fully rounded and functional human beings. What’s not to find helpful and fascinating?

Am I, in fact, an alien anthropologist? Not quite. But I’m enough of an outsider to have a useful perspective, and enough of an insider to know what I’m dealing with. Having spent years working with some of the most extreme forms of human behaviour, I have a very usef...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1: Is Life Enough?
• 2: Bounded in a Nutshell
• 3: Who Loves Ya, Baby?
• 4: Kaleidoscope People
• 5: The ‘I’ of the Storm – Fifty Shades of Me
• 6: The Lost Girl and the Bamboo Man
• 7: Sharing the Delusion
• 8: New Values and New Shibboleths
• 9: Significant Other
• 10: Do As You Would Be Done By
• 11: Principles in Practice
• 12: The Practice
• 13: Mental Health
• 14: Belonging to a Wider Whole
• 15: Life Itself
• Conclusion
• Appendix A: Addiction
• Appendix B: The Autistic Spectrum
• Bibliography and Further Reading
• Index
• Copyright