Who am I?

Thoughtful
Sweet
Insecure
Shy


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Resilience

Sometimes I do requests. (I agreed to a brief one)

Resilience is a word as we know that is used in common everyday language. It also refers to a specific psychological concept. One definition I found was:

The ability to maintain or regain mental health despite experiencing adversity.


How some people can with stand adversity without developing negative physical or mental health outcomes. Desensitisation is one part of resilience but it includes much more. For example the ability to self soothe. A person who can self soothe is going to be more resilient than the person who can not.



The concept of resilience is of particular importance in the training of military personnel. Part of their training is to desensitise them so they become more resilient. To do that they must be abused or assaulted in some form which is how they will naturally desensitise.

But desensitisation is a tricky little sucker because you have to do it in the right amount. Look at this graph



As desensitisation increases so does resilience but a point is reached at the top of the graph where further desensitisation results in a drop in resilience. When you have too much desensitisation for too long, one ends up with PTSD which we know can happen to combat veterans. They fail to resensitize on the return home.

On the other side is being hypersensitized when one has not desensitised enough and thus the resilience is down again. In the previous post this is where I would put many Australian children because they are overly protected from things like the Gaddafi death video.

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Developing resilience in children

Since the images and video of the death of Col. Gadaffi have been out so have all the moaners and groaners in Australia.

Its not necessary to show the video
Its not newsworthy to show images of a dead and dying Gadaffi
We need regulation on this (The last thing we need in Australia is more regulations!)

And then finally someone plays the trump card of all cards and says:

“What about the children?”

Meaning that what if the children see such pictures?

and I think, yes what indeed about the children.


Let children be confronted with problem situations.



I know one way to get the moaners and groaners, moaning and groaning and getting the regulators sharpening their pencils and salivating at the prospect of making even more regulations.

When children see the video of Gadaffi being killed then as a psychologist I can say that they will be a bit more, wait for it.....

desensitised to violence!!

OMG (x10)!!

I can now hear those electric pencil sharpeners whizzing and whirring at a frantic pace now.



That is an interesting phrase

Children desensitising to violence.

I’ll tell you what I will do. I will say the same thing but with different words.

By watching that video of Gadaffi dying children will have an opportunity to develop their psychological resilience.

Now that sounds much better. Not desensitising to violence but developing resilience!

Desensitizing to violence and developing resilience are the same thing.

Now all the huffers and puffers will be chortling that developing resilience is a very good thing and we want our children to develop their resilience and become resilient. That is a very good sounding thing indeed they will pronounce.

A central part of a child developing psychological resilience is to desensitise to repugnant images such as people being killed. Not to become a cold, hard machine but to desensitise to violence at a healthy level.

If you don’t regularly desensitise then one becomes hypersensitized. If we completely sanitise a child’s world then it can never develop resilience to the unsanitary. If we remove all repugnant images, from the severe to the mild, from children then they are going to become hypersensitized to them. And I am afraid to say that in Australia we have done precisely that. In Australia we are a group of hypersensitized wooses when it comes to images and videos of the demise of Mr Gadaffi.



I have said this before here.


Australians are nation of neurotic necrophobics. By sanitising our lives of seeing death on TV and so forth we have become hypersensitized to it and now have a national phobia about seeing dead people.

You have to let children see such things or they wont desensitise to them and will become hypersensitized to them. I am not suggesting you sit children down in front of a TV to watch violence for an hour or so but be realistic about what they see in day to day activity on the TV, the internet, newspapers and so forth.

Then yes you deal with it a clear and effective way. If I was watching TV with my young children and the Gadaffi death video came on this is a summation of the dialogue that would happen. It would probably be longer than this but this gives the general idea.


Developing resilience


Children: What’s happening there daddy?

Father: That man is a called Mr Gadaffi and he is hurt.

C: Who is he?

F: He is the president of a country that is near the pyramids like you drew pictures of at school

C: What are those people doing?

F: They are probably going to kill Mr Gadaffi because he has been a bad man. He hurt lots and lots of people and those people are angry at him. Its called revenge, like when your sister hits you and then you want to hit her back.

C: Why are they all shouting?

F: Because they are very excited and angry at catching him hiding. That red stuff on his head is blood.

C: How did he get that?

F: He has probably been shot with a gun. When people get shot blood comes out. If you get shot in the leg, or bum (to which there are snickers and giggles because daddy said a rude word) or head blood comes out. It looks a bit scary doesn’t it?

C: Yes it is a bit scary.

F: Oh well these things happen and if you treat people nice they are nice back to you.

Maybe more on feelings and thoughts about the thing and then that is about that. Problem solved and the children have had a chance to develop a bit of resilience. It is OK to say words to children like kill, shot in head and blood. It’s not going to traumatise them for life. More importantly its how the adult in the dialogue above does it in an open and clear way without a fear or horror about the whole thing. If the children see the father handle it in an OK way then the children will see it for what it is and have their questions answered as well.

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Strengthening the Adult ego state

Today is Saturday and that means laundry washing day for me. Hey I am a regular kind of guy! As I embarked on this most OCD of all OCD tasks I discovered that my laundry powder had run out so I went to the supermarket to buy a new box of clothes washing laundry powder.

When I got there I was confronted with this wall of different types of laundry powder boxes all different shapes and sizes and colours all claiming different sorts of things. I thought

“S**t, all I want is a box of washing powder and I am going to have to make 30 decisions to end up with the one I want”.

Now I know what home work exercises to give my clients who are tormented with indecisiveness. To hone their decision making skills just go and buy some laundry powder.



So I started the process and decided on the size I want and the kind of money I want to spend. The rule of thumb with this kind of product in the supermarket is never buy the cheapest as the quality is crap. Also never buy the most expensive as they use the psychology that people will assume it is the best quality when it is no better than the average priced brand.

On a side note sometimes people ask me about how to pick a therapist, to which there is no easy answer but there is one thing I tell them not to do. Never pick the one with the biggest and most expensive advertisement. Now if one is choosing a plumber or an accountant it may be OK to pick the most expensive advert. But in choosing a therapist there is something not just right about the one with the most expensive advert. I can’t articulate why it’s just an intuitive conclusion. Having been in the counselling industry for 30 years, to me there is just something wrong with a therapist who presents self in the biggest advert.

However back to the topic at hand. I finally reached the point where I had decided on two possible items to buy. One was called Bam and the other was called Blast. That was my choice - Bam or Blast. Who thinks up these names? Some psychologist would have done a PHD on this. Someone would have received a doctorate for a study on the marketing psychology of laundry powder and concluded that names like Bam and Blast are the ones that would sell. Hey it worked on me!


OCD



Also as I pondered this decision one is confronted with a paradox. There are questions one muses over such as what does my life mean and who am I? And then I realise I am in a supermarket pondering on which product to buy - Bam or Blast!

So I made my decision and Blast it was. However there was still one decision to go. What scent do I want - lemon or frangipani? Do I want to smell like a lemon or smell like a flower when I wear my clothes? Last time I chose lemon because it seemed more manly to smell like a lemon as compared to a flower. But this time I chose frangipani because of late I have been developing my feminine side.



Today I have been walking around smelling like a flower. And after all that decision making I feel like I have to have a valium and have a lie down.

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Insomnia

One could diagram the state of sleep as such:



The Parent and Adult ego states are decommissioned and one is left with the Free Child alone. That is why sometimes dreams are referred to as the windows to the soul. It is truly a way to see into the unconscious and the primal needs of the person.

With the two ego states decommissioned the FC is allowed to roam free and create what ever it wants which is what it does with dreams. It provides such a rich source of psychological material but many disagree on what it means and what is the best way to use it with clients. There are many, many different varieties of dream work.


To have good sleep the adult woman has to somehow psychologically get like the girl.



However getting into the state of sleep that is diagrammed above involves an interesting psychological process and this is why some have difficulty with insomnia. The way people talk about sleep states it fairly well. People are said to FALL asleep. People do not run into sleep or jump into sleep but they fall asleep.

People have to kind of surrender into sleep. It is a letting go process. To decommission the Parent and Adult and access pure FC involves the person giving into or surrendering to sleep, like letting self fall. Some have a lot of trouble doing this because it means they have to let go and trust. Letting go of the conscious and surrendering to the unconscious if frightening for some and hence they experience insomnia.

The same applies for the experience of love. People do not run into love or drive their car into love instead they FALL in love. To understand and experience this people have to do the same kind of surrender or submission that is required for the sleep state. Those who say they do not know what love is, can be because they are too frightened to do this letting go and falling process. Hence they can never experience the Free Child as it is shown in the diagram above and hence never have a true experiential understanding of love.



Finally sex also requires a similar psychological state, especially for the male. Some men who have difficulty obtaining or maintaining an erection, can be because they have difficulty with the same letting go process. If they cannot decommission the Adult and Parent ego states adequately enough that can lead to sexual difficulties as described.

The diagram shows a very child like state. When each of us are born we are psychologically like this. So in one way it is such a natural state to be in. However to release our control and indeed our very way of understanding and viewing the world is difficult for some. Also it seems safe to say that when people fall they quickly and instinctually reach out and try and grab onto something. To fall asleep one has to trust the fall process such that they do not instinctually grab onto their Parent or Adult ego state.

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The dream I had last nite

I was outside in the street. I didn’t recognise where. I suddenly realised that I could fly and kind of just floated up in the air and I could fly around. (Flying has been a theme in many of my dreams over the years. I don’t know what it means but it’s probably important). Other people where there and saw me and tried to fly but they couldn’t.



That felt kind of good. Like a special feeling and I was enjoying the flying anyway. I was flying around and suddenly realised there were electric power lines nearby and I got frightened. I might touch them and die. I kept flying but was scared of the power lines and the dream ended. Maybe there is some danger in my life at the moment that interferes in my enjoyment of life.

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What the judge said

Comment made by the British Medical Association judges on the high commendation awarded to the book - Working with suicidal individuals.






JKP report on award.

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