Manchester Psychotherapy

Counselling in Manchester

Facebook, Twitter and the Stroke Bonanza

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facebook logoI have just rejoined Facebook again after a long time away and along with Twitter and LinkedIn it’s having a surprising effect on me. Lots of smiles!  As a naturally private individual I have thought long and hard about joining the plethora of people already involved with social media sites. Over the past few months though I have made a conscious decision to get out there and connect with more people.

There’s much debate about the ethics of participating on social media sites as a psychotherapist.  The International Transactional Analysis Association (ITAA) group on LinkedIn have been discussing this for the past few weeks and the topic has seen a range of opinions put forward on the morality of it all.

There is no doubt though that social media sites cannot be ignored.  According to social media experts Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, there are more than 200 million active users of Facebook with half of them logging on every day.  Its fastest-growing demographic of people are those in the 35 years and older category. So why are they so popular?

in TA terms Social media sites provide a constant and pretty endless source of strokes.  Eric Berne, the founder of Transactional Analysis defined a stroke simply as “a unit of recognition”.

Here’s some facts about strokes:

  • Strokes can be physical, e.g. a pat on the back, or verbal, a quick “hello” or a lengthy conversation.
  • Strokes can be conditional; “When you clean your room I think you’re fantastic”, or unconditional; “you’re fantastic”.
  • Strokes can be positive “you’re great” or negative; “you stink”.

As social animals humans crave strokes.  We will pretty much do anything for them.  If we can’t get positive strokes then negative ones will do.  For most of us, the only thing worse than being treated badly is being completely ignored.  This explains why solitary confinement is the worst punishment a prisoner can be subjected to and why children who receive no praise quickly find that behaving badly gets them attention.

Both my LinkedIn and Facebook accounts are now regularly churning out positive strokes for me and I love it!  It’s great to make contact daily with people I’ve known for years and I also love contributing ideas to discussions on LinkedIn and engaging with people I know less well. I’m finding the exchange of ideas thought provoking and can see how social media sites, with their groups and fan clubs, provide instant communities and a feeling of belonging.

In an age when real community is on the wain and relationships suffer as a result of our busy lives, social media sites can provide a stroke fix that can be a benefit to us all.  I’m pretty sure that most people are sensible enough to realise that face to face relationships are also very important and should be valued and nurtured and that can be done if people use social media sites sensibly.  In fact I would argue that sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, if used well, can enhance our face to face relationships as we communicate with our friends more frequently online.  I also acknowledge that e-safety and boundary issues do raise their heads when using social media sites, maybe this is where common sense needs to come into play?

Join me on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

What do you think about this post?  Please leave a comment if you have read it.  It doesn’t have to be super intellectual, even a “Hi!” would be great!

If you are looking for therapy in Manchester give me a ring on 07966 390857

Why Do You Do The Things You Do?

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Why do we do the things we do?I’m sat here typing this at six o’clock in the morning in my pants. This may seem odd to many people but it makes perfect sense to me. This blog post will attempt to explain why I do (some of ) the things I do, and why knowing why I do the things I do helps me. I’m hoping that for you, once you start understanding why it’s good to work with someone who knows why you do the things YOU do (or at least is able to have an educated guess), you will see the benefit of working with a therapist.

Back to my pants. Us humans are complex. Very complex. Relatively speaking, we know very little about how the human brain works and the complexities of the human psyche are astounding. What if we could have a good guess about some of the things that are going on by observation though? Just observing me sitting here in my pants might tell you a lot about the sort of person I am (sorry to keep bringing my pants up – I’m sure you have a Homer Simpson Y front type image and I’m sad to say it’s not too far from the truth these days). You could probably make a fair few educated guesses about my background, my interests, my aims in life, my energy levels and enthusiasm. By reading my work you would be able to tell things about my educational background, how and whether I like to connect to other people and whether I have a sense of humour. All this from observing me typing on my PC.

Transactional Analysis

Enter Transactional Analysis (TA). TA is one way of attempting to understand why we do the things we do. Its core parts join together to form a rough picture of who we are, where we came from and why we do the things we do. Let’s have a go at applying TA theory to me siting here typing now.

  • I seem to be able to communicate effectively and have a purpose to what I’m doing so you may argue that I am in my Adult ego state (i.e behaving in an adult way) and I have some energy in my Child ego state (that child part of me that is making silly comments about pants – there – did it again).
  • I work by providing therapy to individuals and couples. This tells you that I like to help people and make a pretty good guess (correctly) that I have spent much of my life doing this. I was probably taught it was good to help others by my parents as a child. In TA terms you might say that I have a script belief that helping others keeps me safe and gets me attention (known as strokes in TA language).
  • I am choosing to pass my time by carrying out an activity. Once more this may be a way of me getting strokes from those around me. (yep- that’s true too and why all bloggers love the readers to comment on their posts – so please comment below!)
  • Whilst you are reading this post you will start to have feelings about me. You may have decided I’m a decent chap with an odd sense of humour or even that I am a rather annoying individual who talks rubbish. Either way the feelings you have about me tell you something about how others may experience me.

Now you are starting to build up a profile of who I am, how I relate to the world, how others relate to me and why I may choose to get up at 6am and start writing about TA. You are nowhere near understanding the complexities of my psyche – but a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Why is it useful for you to find these things out about yourself?

This is where we go back to a fundamental principle of TA. We made these decisions about how we run our lives. Some of these decisions were made out of our awareness – they met our needs at the time and kept us safe when we were kids. If we made the decision then we can change the decision. Here’s an example of that. The second bullet point above points out that one of the reasons I am a therapist is that I like to help people. I didn’t just spontaneously develop that like, it’s something I learnt to do as a kid. When I helped my parents I got lots of attention. Helping = attention = confirming that I exist.

Helping others is a great thing to do but it isn’t appropriate all the time. By working with a therapist who has spotted my need to “please others” I can work out when helping is useful to me and to those I am helping and when it is not. Sometimes it may be more appropriate for me to please myself and recharge my batteries, or let others look after me for a bit. It’s important for me to get the balance right. There will also be times where it would be more appropriate for me to back off and let others look after themselves. Both adults and children need this to allow them to develop feelings of autonomy. For example, if I always did my daughters homework for her then she could interpret this “help” as a message that she is incapable of doing things for herself and her self-esteem could suffer as a result.

What I hope I have done in this post is get across the message that we do things for a reason. There are very few random acts for humans. We make mistakes, mess up and get ourselves into difficult situations because we learnt to think, feel and behave in certain ways as we grew up. A therapist’s job is to work with you to help you identify which thoughts, feelings and behaviours are still useful to you as an adult and change the things that no longer serve you. TA is one tool they can use to help this process.

want to know more about Transactional Analysis?  Download my FREE guide (RRP – £9.99) by clicking here.

Image: renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Ego states, urges and me – part 2

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ego states and transactional analysis weight lossPart one of this post introduced the idea of ego states.  I’m going to look at my super strong desire for iPhone 4s and iPads from an ego state perspective.

My Free Child ego state really wants to buy buy buy!  My Controlling Parent is saying in no uncertain terms that I am not allowed to splash the cash down the local Apple store because I can’t afford it.  My Adapted Child follows the instructions of the Controlling Parent and a conflict is set up.  This is a similar thing to what happens when we go on diets.  Carole Rayburn wrote an article in the TAJ explaining the whole sequence – I’m going to paraphrase below:

Our Controlling Parent tells us that we are too fat and we need to cut down on the cakes, sweets, chocolate and other foods that we love to eat and are bad for us.  Our Adapted Child complies but is not very happy about it.  We put up with this for a certain amount of time or until we reach a target weight.  Once we get there things shift.  Often the Rebellious Child clicks in and we go back to our pies, chocolate or crisps.  Before we know it we are back to our original weight and feel sad that we have failed, yet again to “Control” ourselves.

Carole suggests that the answer is to stop being so hard on ourselves and nurture instead.  Our Nurturing Parent needs to team up with our Child and give permission for the Adult – the sensible part of ourselves, to regulate our weight.  Our Child needs to be soothed by our Nurturing Parent and believe that they are not going to be deprived and that there is enough food to go round.  Then slowly that need to shovel food into our faces as if it’s the last ever time we will be able to have them will subside.  I’m not pretending that this is easy to do.  Research by Lister, Rosen and Wright (1985) examining a group of women using this method to lose weight showed that in the initial stages most put weight on.  It takes time for that Child part of ourselves to feel safe enough to take this new approach. This is one possible approach I would take when providing therapy to a client with these sort of issues.

In part 3 of this post, I look at an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy method for managing our urges, called Urge surfing.

Read part one of this blog post here.

References:

Lister, M. Rosen, K. and Wright,  A. (1985) ‘An Anti-diet Approach to Weight Loss in a Group Setting’. Transactional Analysis Journal 15, 69-72.

Rayburn, C.A. (1978) ‘On the Importance of Self Stroking in Weight Control’. Transactional Analysis Journal 8, No 3 227-228.

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