Empathy & feeling the pain of others ...

I love this quote from the Dalai Lama.  For me, it  nicely sums up my role as a counsellor ...

'There is a phenomenological difference in experiencing pain yourself and sharing someone else’s pain and suffering. 
Your own pain is involuntary; you feel overwhelmed and have no control. 
When feeling the pain of others, there is an element of discomfort, but there also is a level of stability because you are voluntarily accepting pain. 
It gives you a sense of confidence.'

                                                                                                                                                                                              Dalai Lama

In the counselling room with clients, I aim to create an accepting and empathic space where they can share their pain, distress, confusions, discomfort etc., ... & also their joys and laughter.

It is one of the greatest privileges of my life that clients develop a sense of trust and safety with me so that they do feel able to share and experience the true level of their feelings whilst in the therapeutic relationship with me.

Providing a successfully empathic relationship to my clients means that as a counsellor, I do feel their pain.  I do experience their feelings within my own body and soul.  But as in the above quote, I am always aware that it is the pain of my clients that I am feeling, and not my own.  And it is this distinction that allows me to sit with this pain, to simply be in this pain alongside my clients, enabling them to truly experience, and hence begin to resolve or let go of, their pain.

This is one of the most powerful elements of counselling.  Counsellors are not afraid of the pains of their clients.  They will encourage and enable their clients to accept and experience the true depths of their pain ... and sit alongside them in it.  Unlike friends and family, who, understandably, don't like seeing their loved ones in pain and just want to make them feel better.  Who will dry their friends' tears instead of just allowing them to fall.  Who will tell them that 'everything will be okay,' when maybe it won't be.

Counsellors allow and empower people to truly accept and experience their feelings.  To accept that sometimes, things won't be okay ... but that the client will be in time; that they will find a way to live with things not being okay.

For me, it is a great privilege to sit alongside clients in their pain, and whilst they're in the counselling room with me, that pain is very real for me.  But to enable me to step into other peoples' pain, I have to be very self aware.  I need to know where I stop and where my clients begin; what is their 'stuff' and what's mine.

 And this comes from the ongoing process of self awareness and personal development that counsellors are encouraged to engage in.  If I took my client's pain out of the counselling room and allowed it to impact on me personally, I'd soon burn out and not be able to engage in my work. 

 I need to have a very strong sense of who I am so that I can freely enter my client's world, knowing that once that client leaves me, I am free to step fully back into my own  ...

Mindful Eating & Eating Disorders ...

Taking mindful eating a step further & introducing the idea to people experiencing eating disorders ...

The concept of ‘mindful eating’ can be very difficult for people with eating disorders to appreciate.

Very often, such individuals have lost touch with their body, other than as something to hate or try to change.  They’re often unaware of physical sensations and emotions experienced in an embodied manner; as sensations within their body.

For them, food and eating have become so detached from physiological hunger that they are no longer aware of their body's physical sustenance needs.

The anorexic has  learned to control, ignore and deny their hungers, both physiological and emotional. The bulimic switches between trying to control and deny their hungers & feeling out of control around them. The individual with binge eating disorder tends to feel out of control around their hungers and needs.

Most people with eating disorders tend to be out of touch with their body’s  physiological signs of hunger, and so they’re no longer able to eat according to their body’s hunger sensations.  They tend to create, or look for ‘rules’ around what,  when, and how, they feel they should eat.

To eat according to their body’s needs can be a frightening concept.  They worry that they won’t know when to stop.  They’ve lost trust in their own inner sensations, in their own self, to be able to regulate and satisfy their hungers.

Mindfulness can be a step towards  rediscovering this trust in self and in one’s body, and learning to eat in response to physical hunger needs.

Teaching mindfulness to clients with eating disorders

Learning mindfulness skills around food and eating can be challenging for people with eating disorders.

They’re often so out of touch with their bodies and hunger sensations that the concept can be frightening.  It’s important to remember that some people with eating disorders experience extreme fear around food, and so it’s important not to rush the learning of these ideas.

It’s often easiest to start with mindfulness around food.  Encourage people to pay attention to what they’re eating.  To look at it, to touch it, & smell it before they eat it.  And as they eat it to pay attention to any tastes, textures, smells, thoughts & feelings they’re aware of.  This encourages them to start  becoming more aware of the food that they’re eating, and to start to enjoy food again.  It’s also the first step towards getting in touch with their body’s experience of eating.

As people become comfortable with  focusing their attention on food, it’s time to encourage them to become mindful of how their body feels as they experience the food.  Encourage them to pay  attention to their body as they relearn what physiological hunger and satisfaction feels like for them.  Enabling clients to get back in touch with their body’s hunger for food can be hugely empowering.

Mindfulness can help us recognise when we’re eating in response to our body’s physical needs or for other reasons; an important distinction for us all to make ... 

Mindful Eating & Eating Mindfully ...

Following my previous entry around 'Mindfulness' ... here are some thoughts about carrying mindfulness into our eating and hunger ...

Out of touch with our appetites?

As human beings, we need food to ensure our ongoing existence.  But how many of us actually eat purely in response to our body’s physiological hunger?

In our Western society, food and eating have come to have many more meanings than just sustenance and survival.  We use food as a treat, as a reward, as a celebration, as part of an event shared with others, and for many more reasons.

But at these times … what are we really using food for?  What purpose is it serving for us on these occasions?  And just how did food come to be filled with such a   myriad of meanings?

Hunger

As human beings, we experience a physiological hunger; our body’s way of telling us when we need to eat & provide ourselves and our bodies with energy.

Many people though, appear to have lost touch with this physiological hunger and are no longer aware of their body’s physical needs.

As human beings, we also experience a number of other hungers … for love, for affection, for excitement, for growth, for belonging, and many others …

Often, these emotional hungers get confused with our physiological hunger and this can lead people down the path of using food in an attempt to satisfy these other hungers.  Hungers which can't truly be satisfied by food.

Mindful eating

Mindful eating gives us all the opportunity to pay attention to our hungers, and to become more aware of how, and when we use food.

A good starting point is to take a couple of moments to focus on noticing feelings of emptiness or fullness within your body.  Where, and how, do you experience these?  Where, and how do these change as you eat?

Before you decide to eat anything, ask yourself; “Am I hungry?”  “What am I  hungry for?”  “Is it my body that’s hungry or my soul?”  Too many people get caught up in trying to satisfy emotional hunger via food.  Food can never fill those emotional needs and hungers in our hearts and souls.

How do you know when you’ve eaten enough?  What happens in your body or mind to tell you to stop eating?  Often, we eat whilst doing other things and so aren't fully concentrating on our body’s hunger  or satiety messages.  This is where disconnection to hunger needs can begin.

To maintain a healthy weight, all we have to is eat in response to our body’s physiological needs 

…. Eat when we’re hungry, & stop when we’re satisfied … but it’s not always that easy is it?!

Mindfulness .. way of being or mind training technique?

I heard a discussion on 'BBC Breakfast' this morning about 'Mindfulness' and I found it interesting to hear it described as a 'brain training technique.' And I guess it is that, but I've always though of mindfulness as a 'way of being.'  Two different perspectives or ways of thinking about the same thing ...

For me, mindfulness is a state of peace,stillness and focus.  Of simply 'being' in the moment.  Of being aware of only what I'm experiencing in that specific moment.  A state of focused awareness as all attention is focused purely on what is happening, what I'm seeing, touching, feeling, hearing, experiencing at that moment.  No distractions from 'inner chatter', no worrying about the past or the future, or thinking about anything else.

Pure experiencing, living, being, in the moment ...

And yes, it does take practice to be mindful.  It doesn't come easily to many people, especially when we live in a world of competing distractions and demands, of multiple things to be doing and thinking about.  And all of these things just get in the us simply 'being.'

So, in this way, I can see how mindfulness can be viewed as a 'brain training technique.'  In order to be mindful, we have to train our brains to be quiet, train them to think, to focus in a different way.  We have to train them to switch off the inner chatter and all other distractions and focus all attention onto the specific moment and what is being experienced within that moment.

So; whether we think of mindfulness as a way of being or as a mind training technique, it's a very useful state / skill to develop and be able to access.

It's something I often talk to clients about.  It can help people experiencing both depression and anxiety; two different experiences in which people aren't living in the moment.  In depression, people tend to be dwelling in the past, thinking about what's happened, what could have been differently, what they wish had happened, etc., etc.  In anxiety, people are living in the future; worrying about things that might happen, that might go wrong, that might hurt them, etc., etc.

In this view, neither the past nor the future are 'real' ... they're memories of times or something that has already happened or future memories and fantasies of what might happen at some future time.  The present, and only our own present which we are currently experiencing is the only thing that is real.

Now, of course, it's useful and comforting at times, to look back on memories, to reflect and learn from experiences.  And it's also good to look ahead and create future plans, future goals to work towards.  But it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking too much about the past (either just earlier that same day, yesterday, last week, last month or years ago) or the future (projecting into the next hour, the next day, week, month, year, decade).

But if we could all spend a little more time living in the 'here and now,' experiencing our present, and being more fully aware of what we're experiencing, thinking and feeling at the precise moment at which we're experiencing, thinking and feeling it, we can only benefit.

  Living mindfully ... our mental health would improve and we'd experience life much more fully ...

Embodying the Environment ...

My Counselling Room

As a counsellor in private practice I seek to create a warm, safe, inviting environment for my clients.  I think I  manage to achieve this as I receive lots of positive comments from clients about the warmth, safety and comfort they feel when they enter, and sit in my counselling room.

Lake District

I think that our environment can have an impact on how we feel about, and within, ourselves.  As I sit here writing this, I'm aware of various environments scrolling through my mind ... the sea on both hot and cold days, hillsides in Northumberland, the Lake District and southern Italy; places I've visited on holidays and days out.  And as I pause in my memories and reconnect to them, I'm aware of how differently I experiences those places, and more significantly, how I experienced myself within them.

I was thinking about this earlier today, sitting in a room where I provide counselling away from my private practice.  I was very aware of experiencing that environment as very different from my own personal counselling room.  I didn't feel as 'at home' there ... & I know that I'm not, in the literal sense of the phrase ... but I was aware of not feeling as much a part of that room as I do when I'm in my own counselling room.

It's almost like I meld into my own counselling room; the room and myself are part of the same package.  But in this other room, I'm aware of feeling separate, very distinct; a sense of having just put myself in it.  I'm still the same person in each room, using the same skills and parts of me; yet I experience myself very differently.

I feel very much more complete, more relaxed, more completely myself in my room, surrounded by my own things.  And in that place, I feel more able to be more fully me.  I guess my own counselling room is an external extension of my inner self.

I have no external factors to consider in my own room as I do when I'm in other rooms; rooms belonging to other people, to other organisations, with their things in them instead of mine.  And much as those external factors aren't necessarily visibly present in those other rooms, I'm increasingly aware of how omnipresent they actually are for me; constraining, restricting, limiting me, trying to make me fit them & the places & people who they belong to.  They hold me hostage; in stark contrast to the completely relaxed, complete me, I am in my own room, in my own environment.

And I'm sure that this must impact on the therapeutic relationship I'm able to offer clients.

It could be argued that, as it's the relationship which is the most important therapeutic consideration, that environment shouldn't matter.  I remember believing this myself when I first began working in different venues and was able to establish effective therapeutic relationships in each of those.  And to an extent, that is true ...

But ... having not worked in other venues for a short while and only this week going back to them, I'm suddenly aware of just how much the environment I'm in impacts on me and my sense of myself.

As I'm writing, I'm increasingly recognising how the environment I'm in impacts on me.  And I guess that that's because, no matter what environment I'm in, I become a part of.  The environment and myself aren't separate; if I'm in a place, a particular environment, I'm experiencing that environment and I'm also experiencing myself within that environment.

Cullercoats Bay looking towards Tynemouth

I feel most relaxed, most 'at home' in those environments in which I feel most a part of.  Those places in which I'm not constrained by any external influences and can just simply be me ... and for me, that's in my own home, my own counselling room, and being out in nature.

I feel more content, more energetic, more at peace, more motivated, more willing to take good care of myself and nurture myself, etc., ... in short, more me.

Reflecting on this in terms of client work, people often find themselves feeling 'depressed' when they feel stuck or trapped in environments in which they're not happy; not able to be fully themselves.  For example, jobs they don't like, relationships which aren't bringing them happiness, home environments which aren't right, safe or comfortable, etc., etc.

Our environment or situation in which we find ourselves seems to have a huge impact on how we experience ourselves and how we feel about ourselves ...

www.therapywithsharon.co.uk

I've been off work on annual leave for the last couple of weeks and I had intended to spend the time working on my PhD and building my new website.  Things haven't quite gone to plan though ...

I've done hardly any PhD work ... other than presenting at a Faculty Research Seminar!

I thought I would have my website designed and built within a couple of days ... I now see how overly ambitious (or naive!?) I was being!  I've enjoyed the process but it has been extremely time consuming!  It can be very frustrating trying to line up text frames, graphics, images, etc!  I've spent so much time sat at my PC that I'm sure I've got RSI (repetitive strain injury in my right shoulder from using my mouse so much!!  The pain and burning sensations in my shoulder and the pain in the back of my neck are a bit of a give away! Ouch !!

I didn't realise when I started building this new website just how big it was going to grow!  I imagined it being a similar size to my current website ... www.sharoncoxcounselling.co.uk ... but it has already surpassed that! I chose to develop a new website because I felt that I had outgrown 'Sharon Cox Counselling.'  Mostly as a result of my PhD and everything I have experienced and learned across the last 5 years as a result, I now see that I am so much more than a counsellor.  And 'Sharon Cox Counselling' didn't seem to give me space to be all that I now am.

I'm looking ahead now to when my PhD is complete and what comes next for me.  I think this new website, www.therapywithsharon.co.uk is the start.  It's a good foundation on which I can build and continue to grow and expand.  'Therapy and Other Things with Sharon' seems to allow me the opportunity to embrace anything that feels appropriate.

And that's what I hope my website hints at.  As I've worked on it, my ideas have continued to grow and I've kept seeing new pages that should be added.  I think this website will continue to build in that way.

I've decided to publish it today, even though there are still some pages under construction.  I had thought that the pages that are complete, would have formed the complete website ... but it seems not!  As I say on the home page;

    "This is a newly published website & as such still has some pages under construction.  Please bare with me as I complete these pages as quickly as possible.  As I have developed it, it & my ideas have continued to grow.  Rather than wait for it to be completed, I have decided to publish it as it stands, allowing it to grow as it needs to … in a similar way to how I practice therapy & have conducted my research.

Being able to tolerate incompleteness, uncertainty & imperfection is a necessary stage on the journey to self acceptance, psychological individuation and self-actualisation.

It also helps me sit with, and hold my clients’ confusion, uncertainty, distress and other experiencing

I hope in this way, this website reflects a little bit of me, and how I work and live my life …

I’d also like to offer you the opportunity to help this website grow.  If there’s anything I’ve written that you don’t understand, or that you’d like me to write more about, please let me know.  If you feel that way, chances are other people will too."

Please comment here, or e-mail me with any comments or requests at:   sharon@therapywithsharon.co.uk

I look forward to hearing from you & receiving your thoughts, ideas, reflections & requests ...

Welcome to 'Therapy & Other Things with Sharon'

Welcome to my first blog post on here!

I've been writing on 'Therapy, Thought & Learning' for the last 3 years or so, but due to my professional interests expanding as I head towards the end of my PhD, I'm thinking about where I head next ...

I'm currently developing a new website, 'Therapy (& other Things) with Sharon' which will go live very soon and I wanted to ensure that my website & blog can be easily connected.

I've imported my entries from 'Therapy, Thought & Learning' into here (see below / in the archive), so that I don't lose anything I've already written.  This blog will be a continuation of my writing from there as I continue to reflect on life, therapy, and embodied experiencing ...

It's not always easy for me to find time to write regular blog posts as I try to squash in completing my PhD, my private practice, working for the NHS, my musical interests (& my life!!) but I'm going to try to write more regularly ... & hopefully that will become easier in time!

I'll look forward to sharing more of my reflections with you ... & any comments you'd like to make about anything I write will be very, very welcome ...

I'm moving ! !

Thank you everyone who has read posts on this blog over the 3 years or so it's been up and running.

As a result of my professional interests expanding, I am developing a new website, which will go live very soon ... www.therapywithsharon.co.uk

 ... To work alongside this, I have decided to begin a new blog called 'Therapy & Other Things with Sharon' which can be found at http://therapywithsharon.blogspot.co.uk/

I hope you will join me there, where I am planning to continue writing in the same vein as I have here.  I also intend to import all of my 'Therapy, Thought & Learning' posts over there ...

I look forward to hopefully seeing you soon !