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

Anger Management – The Theory

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anger management the theoryAnger as an emotion has had a great deal of bad press through the years. It’s one of those emotions that people shy away from and never really use to describe anyone in a positive light. Anger is, however, just another emotion. It can be very useful to us in certain circumstances. We all know and have had very memorable experiences of the “fight or flight” response that kicks in when we are under threat. Anger in those circumstances can really save our bacon. Anger also gives us the energy to change things when we are just not happy. We might need that rush of adrenaline and that “sod this, I’m going to sort it out!” kick up the backside to pull us out of unproductive situations. Why then if anger is so good, do we need anger management methods?

Like all things, when you have too much of something it can make you sick. Too much anger can……

  • destroy relationships
  • cause us to be judgmental and intolerant of others
  • get us into conflict, verbal and physical, with others
  • react in an out of proportion manner to situations
  • compromise our immune system which leads to us getting poorly more often and for longer
  • give us a banging headache
  • Result in us withdrawing from others and maybe physically harming ourselves

Having taught in schools for many years I’ve seen a lot of angry boys. And I mean a lot! I have also taught girls who have incredible difficulty managing their anger and can out anger any lad with ease. Anger is not by any means limited to males but there is no doubt in my mind that it is one of the safest emotions to express as a male around other people. I was almost tempted to write “around other males” in the last sentence but unfortunately females are complicitous in the promotion of anger in males too. My experience working with eleven to sixteen year olds is that an angry boy is seen as acceptable and kind of cool in a scary way and an angry girl is seen as slightly mad!

This gives a first clue as to where all of this anger comes from and brings us on to the Transactional Analysis concept of racket feelings.

Ian Stewart and Vann Joines book “TA Today” has a very clear definition of what a racket feeling is, they define it as;

“A familiar emotion, learned and encouraged in childhood, experienced in many different stress situations, and maladaptive as an adult means of problem solving”. (page209)

So how do certain emotions get encouraged in childhood? Let’s take little Johnny (could be little Jane too). When Johnny falls over at the age of five he cries. His mum tells him to pick himself up and carry on paying little attention. When he feels scared of going to school for the first time he gets told to “pull himself together” and not be so silly. When he plays happily with his brother he is largely ignored by his parents. When he kicks off, screams and shouts and starts throwing his toys around the room he suddenly gets a lot of attention. Multiply this by the 1825 days little Johnny has had these indirect messages from his parents and I’m sure you begin to see my point. Angry = attention.

With a racket feeling in place, it becomes difficult for us to access the authentic feeling we are really having. Back to Johnny (bless him). As an adult when Johnny feels scared he is going to be made redundant from his job he can’t do scared very well because he has not had much practise. It’s much easier to feel angry, so without even thinking about it that’s where he goes emotionally. Result = he gives his boss a mouthful and gets the sack.

When he feels sad that his relationship has broken down he’s not sure how to do sad either so he easily switches to anger. Result = he feels furious at the situation and punches a wall, breaking his hand in the process.

But how do we know whether a feeling is a racket or genuine? As I said at the beginning of my post, anger can be useful and is just as valid as any other emotion, so when does Johnny know when his anger is a racket and when it’s authentic? Here’s some ways you can tell:

  • Racket feelings come from a not OK place
  • Racket feelings don’t solve the problem
  • Racket feelings come from the Child ego state
  • Racket feelings involve a discount

“All very interesting,” I hear you say, “but how do I sort out my anger issues?” You can seek out a properly trained counsellor who can guide and support you with your anger issues. I see clients with anger issues regularly and use a step by step approach to helping with anger. But you don’t have to go to a counsellor –  Read my self help plan here and get your life back.

If you are interested in coming on my anger management course please click this link to read more about it or phone me on 07966 390857.