Monday 25 January 2016

Learning to be a Child Again

Any sports person or athlete would know that to compete successfully, you must train continuously both in order to improve fitness and to perfect skills. In sport you discover a talent, it is nurtured as you grow up, you train, you compete, you succeed and know that whatever happens you will be the best you can be. After retirement it is good to keep up some level of training, both for your physical and emotional health. It might also be that your emotional health can be maintained by coaching the next generation.

What about those of us that have never been remotely sporty? It seems to me that where as sports people and young musicians work with a natural talent and train to perfect it as they mature, whereas many of us travel in the opposite direction, at least emotionally. Children, it seems, are born with an innate ability to be OK so that provided they have nourishment, shelter and love, they can emotionally flourish.

For a child, life is simple and the world of imagination and play provide outlets for discovery, for practicing emotional skills and the discovery of healthy emotional living. Only as we grow older do relationships become more tricky as social pressures are placed on us, albeit mostly well meaning, by parents, teachers and friends. This is particularly true when we reach our teenage years. It seems that many of our life transitions present us with emotional challenges, whether it is leaving home, entering or leaving relationships, becoming a parent, redundancy, retirement, children leaving home … The list is endless.

In the same way that keeping physically fit helps to reduce the risk of illness or helps us enjoy an active physical life, there is growing evidence that some form of “emotional keep fit” could help us to enjoy better emotional health, particularly through these transitions. It could help us stave off depression or anxiety, or may help in our relationships. A bold claim but let's think about this for a moment.

Our first relationship is with ourselves with parental relationships providing the prototype for each person's unique internal model of the world. This model then goes on to determine our ability to trust, our ability to love and to be loved, how we relate to the world. It is what we use to construct our sense of self. If our parents help us to create a positive sense of self, it remains with us for life and helps us to face up to and survive the many challenges we will face through life. This is not to say that our emotional health depends on perfect parenting but, as Eric Burn pointed out, with good enough parenting we create positive life scripts and these set us on the path to an emotionally healthy path.

In reality, many of us have flawed internal models where we find the world more scary than it sometimes should be giving rise a general feelings of anxiety or powerlessness. Depression, for example, is widely regarded in psychoanalytical to arise from anger against the self and which may well have its roots in poor self image.

In counselling, a common first objective is to create a “reparative” relationship with the client to enable them to build a more positive self image. In this style of relating the client is not judged and learns not to be their own worst critic. Building a positive relationship with ourself provides the foundation for our relationships with others, with our loved ones, and with our colleagues. Not everyone needs counselling and for most of us, learning to be mindful can help us to nurture kindness towards ourselves, more create a more positive self image and to realise just how amazing our internal working model can be in guiding us through the joys and perils of life.

Think of mindfulness as a kind of emotional keep fit where you develop expert skills and being in the moment, each moment, without judging either yourself or others, and without judging the moment. We can learn to be mindful by using meditation to develop the skills of the internal observer, the part of us that can see each unique moment with wonder. However, mindfulness is not just meditation but takes the learned skill into our everyday existence so that, for example, you might find joy in the crunch of frost beneath you feet in the winter, or being fully present in a conversation with a child.

In a way, it is an attempt to return to a more child-like curiosity with the world, the curiosity that is lost as we grow older and more cynical with the world and, worst of all, with ourselves and our loved ones.

To learn more about counselling or mindfulness, please visit my website. http://www.innercalm.co.uk

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