Commonsense Counselling skills which are practical and comprehensible

Skilful counselling cannot take months or years and has to be more than a safe place to talk. Skilful counselling must also surely be more than counselling techniques?

Well it can.

Two propositions

1. The majority of emotional problems are a coping strategy and response to a life that is not working - that not only does not help but actually makes the work life balance worse.
2. And what can be done is to change those emotional patterns and coping strategies – and so facilitate a virtuous (and not vicious) circle, which leads to a life that works.



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Introducing ORWED
Origins

Building blocks - mainly fixed


What you are born with - unhelpful genes
Values and expectations from early upbringing - to age 5 or thereabouts

Life Events


Stories of failure and stress –> childhood coping that embeds
Experiences of Trauma -> a further embedding of means of coping

Strategies and Feedback loop


Life's accidents and emergencies - how do you cope, adjust and make sense of it all?
And then fitting it all in the stages of life - birth, marriage, career and death - and especially before or after mid life (45)

Whirlpool of Emotion


The unravelling with emotions out of control and the inevitable reaction:

Emotional distress - called by many mental illness

Depression - rumination, leading to exhausting sleep and hopelessness


Anxieties – active flight and fight, leading to hyper vigilance and avoidance which feeds generalised anxieties, phobias and much else.


Addictions – seeking pleasure to escape, leading to obsessions, personal abuse and the risk of destruction





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So, what can be done to heal?
To clear the patterns and change the coping strategies and habits by skilful counselling in order to direct effort to create a life that is in balance and which works.

The box below is one answer – whether helping clients who are depressed, anxious addicted or angry or enduring failing relationships, low self confidence and high stress:
With suitable acknowledgement to the Giants opposite.

Cultivate an expectancy of success. By focussing on the expectation of a good outcome, the client’s own healing capacity is activated. Understand the Emotion being expressed. Human beings are emotional animals and so the emotions expressed by each client must be understood. High emotions or arousal hides the message the emotions are trying to communicate Resolve Trauma quickly. Trauma is often present in emotionally distressed people and good therapy must have the means to de-traumatise. Clear unhelpful patterns from the past. We are creatures of habit whereby emotions can easily be triggered unconsciously. This can impact on our capacity to have a balanced and satisfying life and if this is the case, then the triggering has to be cleared. See also the specific time line or the life story re-writing that sometimes needs to done. Access and build Resources and then problem solve and rehearse. Problem solving means taking effective action to get our essential needs met. Rehearsal and visualisations that enhance our capacity to take the right action can be essential to facilitate change.




Soapbox

The above is skilful counselling (I would say). What it is not is diagnosis and treatment as understood by most mental health practitioners. There is no medical model implied here - that mental distress is an illness and should be approached as one.

Detailed diagnosis is the pretence and conceit of the psychiatric profession and many modern counsellors also. That mental illness is no different from physical illness – when actually it is a million miles away. And that there is no place for skilful counselling.

For how can diagnoses serve any purpose other than to confuse and to misdirect when there are no chemical or biological markers for any mental illness? Mental distress diagnosis is no more than descriptions of behaviours? There are no specific and clearly differentiable treatments for a diagnosis once it is made – at least none that I know?

View these YouTube videos, if you doubt this


Dr Thomas Szasz on Psychiatry

Psychiatry – science or scam

Psychiatry is A Mental Disorder




Getting it off your Chest - is your opportunity to agree with me or disagree or ..... There is as much space as you need - write a webpage, invite comments. Say what you think!




There are genetic brain wiring from birth that can make life very hard for some people – those that generate extreme mood variations (it is called bipolar) and those born on the autistic spectrum. But these are a minority of sufferers of mental distress and even for these, the principles of treatment are in practice similar – namely to heal resources as best you can so a life can be led of better balance and purpose.

Do investigate this fascinating site which explores Caetextia - a new highly relevant hypothesis regarding the brain.




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Go to Expectancy in Counselling
Go to Understanding Emotions
Go to Trauma
Go to Emotional Patterns
Go to Time Lines and life story telling
Go to Resources
Return to Counselling from Skilful Counselling





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