Counselling in Wokingham – Photographs

Posted on March 18, 2012 by

Paul Cockayne – 07791 970406 – paulcockayne3@gmail.com

This blog is intended to give you a flavour of how I work as a counsellor. You can find more information about me by clicking one of the links above.

Some of us have “good memories” and can recall a lot of details about the past, others of us have “bad memories” and can remember very little of certain periods of our life. I have a pet theory that memory is related to how we process things at the time they happen, or soon afterwards. For example, if you are someone who reflects a lot about your experiences you are likely to remember them better in years to come. If, on the other hand, your tendency is to park things and move on, your memories of the past will be much less vivid.

Whether you are someone with a good memory, or a bad one – and whatever the reasons for that might be, you may find yourself feeling that you want to remember more about certain periods of your life. It is sometimes useful to look back to childhood to understand yourself better. For example, if you are trying to overcome a fear of flying, it might be useful to talk about your experience of flying, to recall your feelings, and how others you were with behaved towards you. It is probably relevant to recall when your fear of flying first started. It may be useful to broaden the topic, to talk about other forms of transport and whether you feel the same or differently about them; it may also be useful to think about other situations that you find difficult to see if there is a link with flying that is important.

Such exploration can be a useful part of counselling, but it all depends on you being able to recall past events; on your having a good memory. Suppose you haven’t? Is it possible to bring back memories or, is it the case that memories, once forgotten, are gone forever? I don’t have a clear-cut answer to these questions, but certainly one thing that can help to bring back memories, or to add more clarity to “fuzzy” memories, is to look at old photographs.

There are different ways of approaching this. One is to get a bunch of photos and flick through them quite quickly, without putting much, or any, conscious thought into the process. The idea of this is to “wake up” some memories – to get that part of the brain that stores memories moving. Repeating the “flicking-through” process each day, maybe with the same photos, maybe with different ones, often starts things moving. You may find that certain photos stick in your mind, or that certain events come back to you, which you can then explore in more detail.

Rather than flicking through the photos quickly, you may prefer a more ordered approach. Some people find it useful to arrange photos chronologically – and you may want to write down key events in your life as you do this. You may also want to a pick a photo that seems interesting and important, and absorb yourself in it for a while, perhaps 5 to 10 minutes, looking at it in great detail. Look at the people, who are they? What are they thinking and feeling? What was happening for each of them at the time the photo was taken? What are they wearing? Where are they? Why are they there? What are your memories of that place? What objects are in the picture? What ornaments or furniture can you see? What are people carrying? What is the weather like? Who is not in the picture?

There is nothing magic here – looking at photos is simply a way to blow cobwebs off your memory – to get some rusty parts of your brain moving again. And the hope is, of course, that the memories give you a better understanding of the past; and that makes it easier to shape the future the way you want it.

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Counselling in Wokingham – Double-Decker Buses

Posted on March 11, 2012 by

Paul Cockayne – 07791 970406 – paulcockayne3@gmail.com

This blog is intended to give you a flavour of how I work as a counsellor. You can find more information about me by clicking one of the links above.

If you find that you have got in someone’s way, or inadvertently pushed in front of them, you will probably say “Excuse me” or apologise in some way. Do you do the same if you get in someone’s way in conversation; if you interrupt them?

Being interrupted can be quite a hurtful thing; you can feel that you are not being listened to, that the listener feels you don’t matter, or that they are finding you boring. To interrupt you it must mean that what they want to say is more important, in their opinion, than what you are saying, and while it might feel like that to them, it may not, of course, feel the same to you.

I was talking to a couple recently about this; we were exploring a particular incident when the man interrupted his girlfriend to tell her that she had a smear of jam on her face. She felt quite hurt; she felt ignored, that he wasn’t interested in what he was saying, that she occupied just a small place in his world, that she was low down his priority list – and that on top of all that, he was criticising her appearance!

Her boyfriend explained that his motives in the interruption were none of these. He said it had felt to him a bit as if they were having a conversation in the street and he observed that behind his girlfriend’s back, a double-decker bus was careering towards her, out of control. Should he listen attentively while she finished what she was saying – or rather, failed to finish what she was saying because she was run over by the double-decker bus? Or should he interrupt to say that, interesting as he is finding her conversation, she might like to move out of the path of the onrushing vehicle?

He was concerned that she might go to work still with the jam on her cheek, and so wanted to save her that embarrassment. In retrospect, he acknowledged that the jam on his girlfriend’s cheek was not going to cause her an injury in the next ten seconds; he could have waited before pointing it out, there was no great urgency to interrupt. And she recognised that her feelings of hurt, the anger she felt about being interrupted, were out of proportion to the incident; that it would have been helpful if she could have put those feelings on hold rather than just to conclusions about her boyfriend’s motive in interrupting her.

So people may interrupt us for different reasons; and sometimes maybe it is because we are talking too much, boring our audience, or repeating ourselves. If you are someone who talks a lot, it might be that sometimes your partner feels that the only way to get a turn to speak is to interrupt. And sometimes we may feel like interrupting when it is inappropriate, before your partner has finished what they are saying.

Counselling can help by slowing these conversations down and giving you time to understand each other, rather than guessing at your partner’s motives. It can give you a safe environment, free from double-decker buses.

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Counselling in Wokingham – How Important Are You?

Posted on March 4, 2012 by

Paul Cockayne – 07791 970406 – paulcockayne3@gmail.com
This blog is intended to give you a flavour of how I work as a counsellor. You can find more information about me by clicking one of the links above.

Suppose I asked you to draw up a list of the people who are important to you, and to rank them, putting the most important people at the top, and the less important at the bottom. There are various ways you might make your decision on the ranking – one way you might think about this is to ask yourself who you would rescue from a burning building – suppose that all the people on your list were trapped inside – who would you pull out first? Or you might think about who you give most time and attention to, or who you would miss most if they weren’t around.

You might also add other things to your list. Work, for instance, might feature, or hobbies, or study. You can’t exactly rescue a round of golf from a burning building but it may be something that is important to you – more important than some (or all!) the people in your life.

If you have a trusted friend, relative or partner, it can be interesting to ask them to write down their ideas of your priority list – who or what do they think are most important to you? In comparing their list with yours, there are likely to be differences, and these differences are interesting; one reason for them is that we don’t necessarily show outwardly what we feel inwardly. What I mean by this is that we may feel that our kids are the most important people in our life, but we may not show that to others. We may feel deeply attached to our kids without giving them a lot of time, or physical affection, or the other things that are noticeable to others.

In itself, the exercise of drawing up a list is thought provoking; and comparing it to someone else’s list even more so. The next step is to put yourself on the list. How important are you? Are there people you would help before you help yourself? Are you top of the list? Are you at the bottom? Do you feel, as one of my clients recently suggested, that you don’t deserve to be on the list at all? And what’s the opinion of your trusted friend on this?

So, you have your list. It’s not cast in stone, of course; it will change over time, but it is also something that you can think about changing yourself. Maybe, when you look at it, you think that you are a bit too high on the list. Then you can think about playing with the kids a bit more, ringing your mum more often, giving your partner more hugs, spending less time at the gym. Or maybe you’re right down at the bottom of the list, or not on it at all. Then maybe you should allow yourself to sit down and read once in a while, or go for a walk on a sunny day, or go away for a weekend occasionally.

The key thing is to find the right balance – for yourself, and for those who are most important to you.

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Counselling in Wokingham – Naked Problems

Posted on February 26, 2012 by

A Naked Problem

Paul Cockayne – 07791 970406 – paulcockayne3@gmail.com

This blog is intended to give you a flavour of how I work as a counsellor. You can find more information about me by clicking one of the links above.

Counselling is a serious business; at times it can be upsetting or distressing; it may make you angry and certainly it is likely to challenge you.  On the other hand, counselling is not totally humourless and indeed humour can be an important part of counselling.

A well-known technique that can help us in dealing with people we find intimidating is to imagine them naked.  This technique is useful, I think, because it makes that person seem ridiculous and vulnerable themselves – and in general bullies are very insecure and vulnerable people.  In picturing a naked bully, then, we can diminish the power they have over us, so that it is easier to shrug off their threat, or even to laugh at them.

We can do similar things with other issues that may seem really difficult.  We can’t exactly imagine them naked, but we can certainly look at them in a different way. Sometimes it can feel like our problems are bigger than we are, that they engulf us, and leave us powerless.  If we can look at the problem from a different angle, as something we can look at from a distance, we can start to reduce the hold it has over us.  It can to visualise the problem; at first it may look dark and threatening, like a monster, perhaps.  But having visualised it, we can start to control its appearance; just as we can mentally strip a bully naked, we can also make our problems look ridiculous, and that makes them much easier to deal with.

Couples can potentially do something similar, though there is a trap here.  It is one thing to laugh at your own problems, but quite another to laugh at your partner’s problems – that can seem patronising and dismissive.  So it’s important not to make light of your partner’s problems – they need to find a way to do that themselves.

But in a relationship, problems are most often shared; both of the couple contribute to them.  So it is important that you are able to see your problems as joint problems, that you both share in.  For instance “we argue about little things that are not worth arguing about”; “Fred talks and talks and Gladys goes quiet”; “Fred is too hard on the kids and Gladys too soft – and we try to compensate for each other”.  In having shared problems, you can step away from them together and look at them from a distance; you can laugh at them together; you can help each other to do it differently.

Counselling can help us to do this – to take a step away, to look at the problems differently, maybe to laugh at them.  All these things can help up to feel that we are bigger than the problems, that we can deal with them, that we have control over them, not the other way around.

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Counselling in Wokingham – Meeting Yourself

Posted on February 19, 2012 by

Paul Cockayne – 07791 970406 – paulcockayne3@gmail.com

This blog is intended to give you a flavour of how I work as a counsellor. You can find more information about me by clicking one of the links above.

What I would it be like to meet yourself?  Do you think the two of you would get on well together?  Or would you dislike each other?  Would you find yourself interesting company, or a crashing bore?  Would you rub along OK together, or would it be an overly competitive relationship?

To imagine that you meet yourself, or someone with similar character traits to yourself can be an interesting party game to play, but at a deeper level, it can also be quite enlightening.  It is, of course the case that others see us differently to how we see ourselves, and this is commonly represented in the “Johari Window” (see diagram).

This model divides our self-knowledge into four areas :-

  • The Public Self is known both to me and to others.  This is the face we show every day; for most of us this is the largest of the four areas.
  • The Private Self is known to me but not to others.  For all of us, there are things we would do, say or think in private that we would not wish others to know about.
  • The Hidden Self is known to others but not to me.  This may sound strange at first, but you can probably think of examples relating to yourself – maybe people have said things about you that you don’t agree with; have others commented that you are strange, bossy, shy, flirtatious, confident, optimistic?  Do you see yourself in the same way?
  • The Unknown Self is known neither to you nor to others.  You might not be able to identify anything that fits into this part of the window.  But then, by definition, you wouldn’t be able to, would you?

The model itself is thought-provoking, but like all models is a simplificiation; in fact we have different Johari Windows in different situations – things that my partner knows about me will be different from what my boss knows; the public self I show to my parents will be different from that which I show to my friends; and every one of my friends and relations will have different opinions about me, so my hidden self will vary from one relationship to the next.

Thinking about that meeting with yourself is one way to explore this window, and the process of counselling will often change the relative sizes of the windows.  Commonly, you will discover things about yourself that you were not wholly aware of, so that the horizontal line moves down the window; your “self consciousness” increases.  It may also be that the vertical line moves; you may find it becomes easier to express your feelings, so that the vertical line moves to the right.  Or you may come to counselling wanting to change some behaviours, for instance to be less “needy”, so that the vertical line moves to the left.  By exploring and understanding yourself  – by mentally meeting yourself in counselling – you can increase your understanding and so change some of the choices you make.

Footnote: The story goes that the name “Johari” is not one with mystical significance, but was devised by the co-creators of the model, whose first names were Joe and Harry!

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The Perfect Parents

Posted on February 12, 2012 by

Paul Cockayne – 07791 970406 – paulcockayne3@gmail.com
This blog is intended to give you a flavour of how I work as a counsellor. You can find more information about me by clicking one of the links above.
In talking to clients, both couples and individuals, the question of parenting often comes up. We want, of course, to do the best for our children, and sometimes people feel bad if they are less than perfect – they can feel that they are letting their kids down if they make mistakes. This can be a very personal thing – you may feel that your own parents let you down when you were young, and so be determined that you won’t let your own kids down in the same way. Or you may feel that you had a fantastic childhood and that your own parents were wonderful – and then feel that you want to just as well, or even better, as a parent yourself.
For most of us, of course, it will be a mix of these two things. Some things that our own parents did will seem sensible, and we will want to replicate them; other things we will see as less good and we will want to do these things differently. But typically, in thinking about what sort of parent we want to be, we will look at our own childhood and think about how our own parents’ actions affected us as a kid. And of course, if we are co-parenting, there are compromises to be made with our partner’s model of what they want to be like as parents; it’s no good if you work against each other – often kids play on this, of course).
So, we build up an idea of how we want to be, but sometimes we set ourselves impossibly high standards, starting out with the intention of being a perfect parent. In fact, I think the idea of a “perfect parent” is a contradiction. What sort of lessons are we teaching our kids if we actually achieve perfection? Part of what we all need to learn in growing up is that people all make mistakes – nobody is perfect – and that admitting to our mistakes, apologising for them, and forgiving mistakes in others – all these things are part of being an adult – and all these things it is important for kids to observe, to experience, and to practice themselves.
So, instead of aiming for perfection, I like to talk about being a “good enough” parent. We cannot devote ourselves 100% to our children – we need to look after ourselves as well; indeed, if we don’t look after ourselves, it’s going to be much harder to look after our kids. And kids need to learn that they’re not the centre of the universe, that sometimes you need space and time, and sometimes they need to look after themselves. So it’s healthy to make mistakes sometimes, and to say sorry for them. It’s sensible to put yourself first sometimes, and then say “no” to the kids. And if you were to achieve perfection as a parent, think what a strain that would put your kids under when they become parents – the poor things would be doomed to failure, wouldn’t they?

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Counselling in Wokingham – A Question of Style

Posted on February 5, 2012 by

Paul Cockayne – 07791 970406 – paulcockayne3@gmail.com
This blog is intended to give you a flavour of how I work as a counsellor. You can find more information about me by clicking one of the links above.

In working with clients, whether couples or individuals, I try to be flexible in terms of the style I adopt, matching it to your needs as a client. The best approach for you is something that we will work out together, during counselling.

Sometimes we will need to work to a deadline – maybe because of a planned house move, or a pregnancy, or because you have limited funds. In such cases I will help you to prioritise and focus on specific objectives that are likely to be achievable in the timeframe we have. For example, I worked recently with a couple who were expecting a baby in a few months. They decided to concentrate on improving their communication, leaving other issues aside for the time being. After four sessions, they felt that things had changed enough that they could finish counselling and use the communication skills they had developed to work on other aspects of the relationship at home.

In other cases counselling is open-ended but you may still want to work in a structured way, to talk about specific topics for a week or two weeks each for instance. It may be that you want to focus on managing anger, or want help to give up smoking. Or maybe you want to try to understand why a relationship has come to an end. Given a very specific objective such as one of these, it is possible to work in quite a focussed way. Having said that, because we are complicated beings, all sorts of different things might affect our behaviours, and the things that happen to us. So there will be times when it is sensible to explore “round the edges” of problems – maybe spending some time talking about family upbringing, for example.

At the other end of the scale, some people may want to use counselling just as a place to come and talk, to get support through a difficult period, maybe grieving for a loved one or getting through a difficult divorce. For those people counselling is just a safe place to release tension and to be able to voice thoughts in a non-judgmental environment. It may well be that their thoughts are very confused and muddled, and attempts to work in a structured way will not work at all. Over time, talking about the confusion of thoughts generally helps to clarify things for clients. It may take some time, especially if there is a lot of history, or particularly traumatic experiences, but the process of talking about events, thoughts and feelings genuinely helps to put them into perspective.

Whatever the situation, the style of counselling we adopt will be something we discuss and agree together. I will make sure that, during counselling, we frequently review the progress we are making and whether you feel the approach we are taking is the best one – or whether you think it’s time for a change of style.

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