Manchester Psychotherapy

Counselling in Manchester

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

Five books that could change your life!

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5 books that could change your lifeThere are many books out there on therapy, self-help, counselling and personal change so how do you know which ones are worth reading and which ones are best avoided? Personal recommendations count for a lot and I often get asked what books to read. Some of the following five books have been recommended to me and I have happened upon others by luck, chance or good fortune. I see it as my turn to pass on those recommendations, or that luck, to you.

The five books listed here have changed my life for the better. That sounds dramatic but it’s true. I’ll explain how each one has changed my life during the brief review of each book.

If you click on the book picture it will take you straight to amazon if you wish to have a look at it there. I will declare upfront that I have an affiliate link set up but the link is really only there to speed things up for you and to allow me to display a graphic of the book on my site without breaching any kind of copyright.

 

Born to Win: Transactional Analysis with Gestalt Experiments This is the first book I ever read on Transactional Analysis and as such it holds a special place in my heart. It was the start of my Transactional Analysis education and it contributed greatly to me becoming a TA psychotherapist. My first therapist recommended it to me and he also introduced the concepts contained within the book to me during my therapy sessions with him. The whole process led to a paradigm shift in the way that I saw the world and stresses, anxieties and jealousies that I had had since I was a child melted away. Having therapy had such a profound impact on my life that I chose to train as a therapist from that moment on. I think this was also so I could better understand for myself just how therapy works and how I could use it to help other people’s lives change for the better.

Born to win is a well written book with clear explanations of TA theory. I still remember reading it and having those “ahhh, that’s why I do that!” moments. It’s less textbooky than TA today and there are plenty of exercises in there to encourage you to try the theory out for yourself. If you are having TA psychotherapy then understanding the theory does help. I think it sometimes speeds the achievement of your goals up because it provides a framework to hang ideas on to. This would be a great book to start that learning process off.

Achieving Emotional Literacy by Claude Steiner.  This is a special book for me because it helped me understand how to become more emotionally literate and it explains stroke theory brilliantly (a stroke is a unit of recognition, like “hello” or a wave or a kick up the backside). I have already reviewed this book more fully in a previous post so if you want to read a pretty detailed account of this book then go read that post here. Suffice to say I love this book and I see Steiner as a bit of a guru. He’s kind enough to give it away free too so now you have no excuse not to read it!

The Happiness Trap: Stop Struggling, Start Living by Russ Harris.  Speaking of guru’s, whilst being trained in TA I met a great guy trained in CBT and Acceptance and Commitment therapist working with substance abusers in Manchester. He introduced me to ACT and it fit brilliantly with my interests in TA, Buddhist philosophy and mindfulness techniques. The Happiness trap by Russ Harris was the first book I read on the subject, and of all the ACT books I have now read, most definitely the easiest to read.

The book explains how you can use Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to reduce stress, anxiety and depression. It makes really good sense and gives practical tips on managing your negative thoughts, reducing your urges to carry out unproductive behaviour and setting values based goals that you can achieve now rather than results based ones that only give temporary fixes of satisfaction. ACT techniques encourage the giving up of struggle and the acceptance of all of our feelings. This book is so well written you don’t need to have any therapy knowledge to get loads out of it.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey.  This is a book that I stumbled upon initially in audiobook form. I liked it so much I ended up buying a paper copy too so I could browse more easily through it. I deliberately mention it after “The happiness Trap” because it has many of same principles in common. Some of the best work I have ever done in creating a strong team and a vision within that team was stimulated from reading this book. It’s not a therapy book, it guides you through the process of deciding what you want in life (values based in the same way as ACT), prioritizing what really matters and explaining how you can get there.

Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples by Harville Hendrix.  Once more I have to thank my first therapist for recommending this book to me. It’s important because it has changed the way I view how a relationship should be and Imago therapy itself has given me a lot of great techniques I can use as a couples therapist with struggling couples. In my opinion, it is the book to read if you are having relationship difficulties and you want to understand why. It suggests new ways to communicate with your partner and also gives good exercises you can do together to strengthen your relationship. I go into more detail about the ideas behind Imago therapy in my post “How Imago Couples Therapy Can Transform Your Relationship” So check that out for more information.

So there they are – five books that have changed my life and can change yours if you let them. Happy reading!

Have you read any of these books? What did you think of them? What books have changed your life? Please let me know in the comment section below.

Does Therapy work?

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Does Therapy Work?Big question.  And as far as I’m concerned there is a simple answer.  Yes.  Therapy can work very effectively.   I can hear you now though, quite rightly, shouting at your monitor, “but you’re a therapist so you’re bound to say that” so let’s see if I can convince you further.

As a therapist my starting place has to be my own experience.  When I am working as a therapistI witness clients making positive changes in their lives consistently and I have also experienced these changes in my own life.  Sometimes it can take weeks for that “aha” moment to arrive, but when it does that moment can, literally, be life changing.  It was these moments, these insights into my own ways of thinking that stimulated my interest in psychotherapy.  I was able to use this knowledge to live my life differently, to develop better relationships and to change my behaviour for the better. Now, many years later, I have the privilege of being let into other people’s lives to support and guide them whilst they examine their lives and make positive change.

My next step is a quick trawl around the internet.  The website talkingcure gives many examples of where research supports the idea that therapy is effective.  Most of this research has been carried out by health services of countries around the world to see if they are getting their monies worth out of their counselling services (money is a great motivator for research!).

The following studies are just a couple of the examples included on the site:

  • Chiles et al (1999) found that psychological services reduced medical expenses in patients undergoing surgery and those with a history of over utilization.  On average, there was a 20% saving, even when the cost of providing the services was subtracted from the savings.
  • Research* showed that therapy carried out with men who batter their wives proved highly successful with 60% of men not re-offending within the thirty month follow up period and the wives of these men feeling “very safe” in 83% of cases.

Smith and Glass (1977) carried out research into the effectiveness of different types of therapy.  Results of nearly 400 controlled evaluations of psychotherapy and counselling were coded and integrated statistically. The findings provided convincing evidence of the efficacy of psychotherapy. On the average they concluded that the typical therapy client was better off than 75% of untreated individuals.  More interestingly, they found that the type of therapy received by the client had little bearing on the rate of success.  This is further evidence for the idea that it is what happens between the client and the therapist, the relationship that forms, that is the deciding factor for a successful outcome.

Martindale (1978) questions the validity of research into the effectiveness of psychotherapy and states that answering a question such as “does therapy work” is impossible as there are too many variables.  All clients are different, all therapists are different. He argues that a therapist may be effective for one client but ineffective for another.  It’s easy to see the logic of this argument and how we know which therapist is best for us will be the subject of another entry at a later date.

So where have we got to so far?  Both research and personal experience support the idea that therapy can be useful.  I appreciate that I have only given evidence of three research studies but I invite you to follow my links and check out my references for dozens of studies that conclude therapy is effective.

This does not mean however that we need to run to our nearest therapist and sign up for a course of treatment!  Going into therapy is a very personal and often very frightening step for many to take.  You take that step when you are ready to engage with the process and feel in your heart that it’s right for you.  I remember my first session even to this day.  I arrived fifteen minutes early and “cased” the joint to see if there was anyone around who would spot me going in. I seriously considered turning around and going back home!  Eventually I plucked up the courage, knocked on the door and therein began this journey.

I think that initial step of seeking emotional support from others may be more difficult for men than for women. This is backed up by the suicide figures for each sex where in 2008 where per 100000 of the UK population, 17.7 men committed suicide compared to just 5.4 women (age standardised rates taken from www.statistics.gov.uk).  Once more, I’m sure this will feature as a subject in my future writings.

So, to conclude, I would say that yes, therapy does work.  It can be an effective means to resolve problems as wide ranging as anxiety, stress, sexual identity, depression, lack of purpose, jealousy and a multitude of other issues that we can have whirling through our heads at particular times in our lives.  So when you’re ready, if you want to, pick up a phone and make that first appointment.

References

Chiles, J. et al. (1999). The impact of psychological interventions on medical cost offset: a meta-analytic review. Clinical Psychology, 6(2), 204-220.

Martindale, C. “The Therapist-as-Fixed-Effect Fallacy in Psychotherapy Research”. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 1978, Vol. 46, No. 6, 1526-1530

*Peterson, K. (July 27, 1988). Programs help men unlearn violence. USA Today, p. 1.

Smith, M. and Glass, G. “Meta-Analysis of Psychotherapy Outcome Studies”.  American Psychologist. September 1977. p752-760.