This is a time of year when relationships can get strained. It can happen for a variety of reasons. It may be that we are thrust together as a family with the pressure that we ‘should’ be happy and joyful and we’re disappointed that it doesn’t turn out as we ‘expected’ (See January 16, 2011). It may be that merely being together for a longer period of time than usual allows any irritations normally overlooked to become unbearable. Perhaps we then vent our frustration with sometimes disastrous effect. It’s not only family relationships that sometimes falter and it may not happen only at Christmas and New Year. Relationships with work colleagues, bosses and our friends can sometimes become difficult. Perhaps we can’t work out why it is happening. We might look for reasons or excuses or we might ‘blame’ the person with whom we are having difficulty relating. If we resort to the latter we are putting our self in the position of victim. We are saying they are doing something to me which I don’t like. It’s their fault! We absolve our self of all responsibility. The bad news is that, at best, this will be only fifty per cent correct. We need to acknowledge and accept our responsibility in the situation.

How do we so that? Where do we start? Well we first need to look at the primary relationship – the one we have with our self. Sounds stupid? Well it isn’t. It’s the one relationship we are most likely to take for granted and unless we’ve spent time on introspection – done a bit of ‘naval gazing’ – we won’t understand. We perhaps assume that it’s something we can’t do anything about. We might even have the attitude – ‘This is the way I am – if you don’t like it you can lump it!’ or, perhaps, ‘My father/mother was like this and so was his father/mother before him/her. If it was good enough for them it’s good enough for me’! One wonders how their spouses felt about it. Perhaps they kept quiet and live(d) in fear of upsetting them or perhaps not. We also need to look at how like our parents we are. Can you hear one or other of your parents as you speak to your children? Are you repeating the behaviours of your parents? Perhaps you are ‘parental’ towards other adults. (See Blog June 24 2011) It’s OK if our behaviours are positive and in our own best interest but we need to be aware of the possibility of our passing on negative behaviours (See ‘Mirror Image’ Blog 11/09/10 and Philip Larkin’s Poem – ‘This be the Verse’ http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178055). We need to gain an understanding of our self and raise our self awareness. Being defensive about our behaviour when it is challenged is often a knee jerk reaction and an indication that we have insecurity about it. We’re perhaps not sure our self about it. In which case we need to check it out and get an understanding of it. We then have a choice. If it’s in our best interest we can adopt it as our own rather than something we’ve ‘inherited’ from one or other of our parents, but if it isn’t we can dump it. Either way whenever we are challenged in a similar way again we will respond with confidence and in a positive manner.

We have been influenced so much by our parents initially and then by other significant adults, organisations media etc.. We are all different – even children of the same parents. Do you have brothers and sisters? Are they older, younger, are you the oldest or youngest or somewhere in between? Were you an only child? Each will have quite different perspectives of their parents and, as a result, life in general. Were your parents able to express their love and affection towards you? How was it expressed? Were there plenty of hugs and kisses or were you left to your own devices? Perhaps your parents had difficulty in expressing emotion and gave you material things as a substitute. Did you feel loved? Did you feel valued and appreciated? Did you get what you needed? We need to be realistic about the parenting we experienced, to be honest about it, not in order to beat our parents up but to recognise that they were doing the best they could knowing what they knew. Then, we need to recognise the aspects of our experiences which could have been better or with which we could have done without. It is impossible for parents to give their children everything they need so it is important to recognise what you didn’t get but would have liked to have had. It’s not too late you can now give it to yourself and to your children. You can learn to love, appreciate and value yourself.

The better we understand our self the better we understand others. As a result there will be changes and then we may be amazed to see that others whom we know well or meet also appear to change. It may be that they appear to change because we now see them differently or it may be that they change their attitude towards us in response to the ‘new me’ or, it may be a combination of both. Whatever our perspective of life it will change and the horizon will broaden. This concept isn’t new, Socrates the Greek philosopher (c. 469 BC – 399 BC) spoke of the concept of ‘knowing oneself’. If you are interested in finding out more you can find a very clear and simple explanation at – http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/army/rotc_self-aware.pdf

What does the Government know about counselling? Is it through ignorance that it considers only one theoretical approach to be effective or are there other reasons?

Joint Statement Issued by Professors Mick Cooper and Robert Elliott (both Unicersity of Strathclyde), William B.Styles (Miami Uniiversity) and Art Bohart (Saybrook Graduate School)

CBT superiority is a myth

The government, the public and even many health officials have been sold a version of the scientific evidence that is not based in fact, but is instead based on a logical error. This is how it works: 1) More academic researchers subscribe to a CBT approach than any other. 2) These researchers get more research grants and publish more studies on the effectiveness of CBT. 3) This greater number of studies is used to imply that CBT is more effective.

This is a classic example of the logical fallacy known as ‘argument from ignorance’, i.e. the absence of evidence is taken as evidence of absence.

Although CBT advocates rarely make this claim so boldly, their continual emphasis on the amount of evidence is misunderstood by the public, other health care workers, and government officials, a misunderstanding that they allow to stand without correction. The result is a widespread belief that no one takes responsibility for; in other words, a myth.

Research points to three facts

This situation has direct negative consequences for other well-developed psychotherapies, such as person-centred and psychodynamic, which have smaller evidence bases than CBT. These approaches are themselves supported by substantial, although smaller, bodies of research. The accumulated scientific evidence clearly points to three facts: 1) People show large changes over the course of psychotherapy, changes that are generally maintained after the end of therapy. 2) People who get therapy show substantially more change than people who don’t get therapy, regardless of the type of therapy they get. 3) When established therapies are compared to one another in scientifically valid studies, the most common result is that both therapies are equally effective. A case in point is person centred and related therapies (PCTs): in a meta analysis of more than 80 studies, to be presented by Robert Elliott and Beth Freire at the Norwich conference, PCTs were shown to be as effective as other forms of psychotherapy, including CBT.

In view of these and other data, it is scientifically irresponsible to continue to imply and act as though CBTs are more effective, as has been done in justifying the expenditure of £173m to train CBT therapists throughout England. Such claims harm the public by restricting patient choice and discourage some psychologically distressed people from seeking treatment.

We urge our CBT colleagues and government officials to refrain from acting on this harmful myth and to broaden the scope of the Improving Access to Psychological Treatments (IAPT) project to include other effective forms of psychotherapy and counselling.

Issued at the Conference of the World Association for Person-Centered Psychotherapies and Counseling held at the University of East Anglia, UK, from 6-10 July 2008.

Have you broken any of your New Year resolutions yet? I haven’t! Ner ner ni ner ner! I used to make them but it became so depressing. First there were so many I could make and then there were the shoulds, musts, oughts and got tos which are so parental and non-pc (Person-centred) which went along with them. So they were doomed to failure from the start. Nowadays I’m aware of the behaviour patterns which I would like to change in my life (there are probably a few more that others wish I would change) and it is up to me if I make them. So, I know I have a choice. I could choose to make a change or I could choose not to. The question is “What’s in my best interest?” If I think it is in my best interest to change I’ll endeavour to do so but, being human it’s not certain that I will. But, if I don’t make a change, at least I won’t have the guilt of having failed because I will have chosen not to change.

This poem was “previously published as a Poetry on Loan postcard”. “Poetry on Loan is an Arts Council funded organisation whose purpose is to promote contemporary poetry through public libraries in the West Midlands.”

Feeling Low?

Breathe in. Create a snapshot; visualise
the faces of those people who have said
Chin up, it could be worse. Include in shot
the Cheer up! It might never happen lot,

those who know exactly what you need and,
of course, the pull yourself together team.
Bring into frame the smiling kindly crew
who mention people far worse off than you.

Zoom out to show all heads impaled on spikes
(a little way outside the city walls).
Add crows to peck at eyes – should people doubt
the depth and darkness of your mood. Now smile.

Breathe out.

Emma Purshouse 2011

You might also choose to see a counsellor!

Emma is a very good friend and obviously a very talented poet.

David Cameron has described the riots which took place in the streets of English cites in August as being – ‘about behaviour’, ‘people showing indifference to right and wrong’, ‘people with a twisted moral code’, ‘people with a complete absence of self-restraint’. He has reaffirmed his belief that the riots were symptomatic of moral decline in Britain and suggested they were gang led.

He is quoted as saying, ‘Now, I know, as soon as I use words like behaviour and moral people will say what gives politicians the right to lecture us? Of course we’re not perfect. But politicians shying away from speaking the truth about behaviour, about morality has actually helped to cause the social problems we see around us. We have been too unwilling for too long to talk about what is right and what is wrong …. and sometimes there are just human reasons. We’re not perfect beings ourselves and we don’t want to look like hypocrites’. “The greed and thuggery we saw during the riots did not come out of nowhere,” he said. “There are deep problems in our society that have been growing for a long time: a decline in responsibility, a rise in selfishness, a growing sense that individual rights come before anything else.”

Tony Blair said the riots were primarily caused by a minority of disaffected and alienated young people who were outside the social mainstream and who constituted “an absolutely specific problem that requires deeply specific solutions”. He added, the rioting was mainly caused by “a group of young, alienated, disaffected youth who are outside the social mainstream and who live in a culture at odds with any canons of proper behaviour”. He said that his government developed specific policies to deal with these people and that they required intervention “literally family by family and at an early stage, even before any criminality had occurred”.

Yet is there much difference between these riotous activities and the following?

Almost all the glass of the lights and 468 windows of Peckwater Quad Christ Church were smashed, along with the blinds and doors of the building.

Police arrested all 17 of the members of the ‘gang’ for wrecking the cellar of a 15th Century pub by smashing more than a dozen bottles of wine into its walls.

After damage to a country house the perpetrators received an Anti-Social Behaviour Contract from the Thames Valley Police.

The ‘gang’ walked through Oxford when one threw a plant pot through the window of a restaurant. The burglar alarm was activated and police descended with sniffer dogs. Six of the group were collared and spent the night at Cowley police station before being released without charge.

The ‘gang’ enjoyed a famously explosive dinner at the White Hart near Oxford in 2005. “All the food and plates had been thrown everywhere and they were jumping on top of each other on the table like kids in a playground,” recalled the pub’s landlord Ian Rogers.

On one occasion the ‘gang’ hired a string band to play at a garden party and ended up smashing up all the instruments, including a Stradivarius.

This brand of self-destruction led to headlines worldwide, and was even reported in the New York Times, which described students as being guilty of committing an orgie (sic) of destruction that went into the early hours of the morning.

However, these are not the activities of a gang of the suburbs of London or any other large city in the UK but they are those of the Bullingdon Club. A club comprised of selected students of Oxford University. Young men who have enjoyed a privileged upbringing and expensive education (around 60% are ex-Eton scholars – the rest went to really posh public schools), they are largely solid high-achievers who see this kind of thing as a ‘social networking experience’. The cost of buying the Club’s uniform, at around £2,000-£3,000, clearly indicates the members are extremely wealthy.

The reasons given for the causes of the riots – social deprivation, financial hardship, poor education etc – do not apply to members of the Bullingdon Club. So what is the explanation? Mr Cameron, one of four people who escaped a night in the Cowley police cells after the ‘plant pot incident’, has refused to comment, saying merely: “Like many people, I did things when I was young that I should not have done, and that I regret.”

Clearly riotous behaviour is not restricted by social class and therefore the investigations into the August riots perhaps needs to consider the activities of the Bullingdon Club to gain a more complete picture of what motivates young people, in particular, to behave in an anti-social manner.