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.

Why is it that those indicating the importance of understanding the underlying issues of the recent riots are vilified as apologists? Certainly the culprits of wanton vandalism, theft and murder need to be punished but unless there is an understanding of why it all happened the possibility of it being repeated remains. The cost, not to mention the devastating effect the criminal action, albeit by a very small minority has had on individuals’ lives, is enormous. Livelihoods and properties have been destroyed. Worst of all lives have been lost. The simplistic answer is to lock up all the rioters and throw away the key. Yet the prisons have the greatest number of people ‘residing at her Majesty’s pleasure’ than ever before – more than 85,000 in the UK at a cost of £40,000 per prisoner per year!

Punishment itself is no deterrent. Some say ‘prison works’ but does it? Certainly not if once incarcerated little or nothing is done to rehabilitate the inmates. If the United States were to execute one person on death row each and every day the gruesome task would take ten years to complete, yet crime figures remain high. Merely punishing people does not solve the problem. The criminals themselves may not fully understand their true motives for doing their crime, so they are likely to repeat it. It is not in society’s interest to allow the status quo to continue. Investment is needed in the provision of appropriate facilities and education to meet the needs of those who, at the moment, are unable or unwilling, for whatever reason, to help them. To do that, understanding is needed as to why such events happen.

Think of this on a personal level. We, ourselves, may be repeating an action or behaviour which isn’t in our own best interest. We will continue to do so until we have a realisation about how damaging it is to continue. In which case we may turn to someone with the expertise to help us come to the understanding we need and assist us to resolve the issue.

Like us society needs to realise there are aspects of its behaviour which are not in its own best interest.

Judging by the number of training courses for counsellors and the number of counsellors there now are, it would seem that more and more people are turning to counselling to resolve disturbing issues. The Government has also accepted that ‘talking therapies’ can be effective and advises doctors to encourage patients to engage with a therapist. However, the downside of the Government’s policy is that it appears to favour only one of the many theoretical approaches to counselling above all others, i.e. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. CBT is proscribed by the Government as it believes it to be the ‘most effective’ since it considers that a) improvements are possible in the short term and b) the process is measurable. In some instances, that may be possible, but generally the counselling process is unpredictable. Often the ‘presenting problem’ is not the underlying issue causing emotional disturbance and possible physical symptoms.

Counselling is not an easy process. Reflecting on past experiences and conditioning which may be the cause of current feelings can be painful. It can become very difficult when we are faced with challenges we may have been avoiding all of our life. When we enter into counselling we may not realise it at first but we are putting ourself into a challenging position. We are caused to reflect on our thought processes and our way of being, those aspects of our self with which we have become so comfortable. We become protective of them as we consider them to be the ‘real me’. To move on we may need to change them but it is often extremely difficult to do so. We fear the future without our ‘comfort zone’ as without it there is unexplored and consequently scary new territory to confront.

There is one solution to obviate this, we could try out the ‘new me’ and if we don’t like it we could choose to go back. However, in the experience of my own journey and that which I have experienced with clients we don’t do this. The rewards of making even relatively small changes are generally highly significant and we feel so different and so much better. A burden is lifted from our shoulders. Another benefit of making such changes is that new challenges appear less frightening. Having experienced the benefits and rewards of making change we are encouraged to do more. Life becomes more exciting as we discover new aspects of our self. The value is exponential. We have a greater sense of our ability to control our life and consequently can choose to stop the process. We are in control and are not merely ‘going with the flow’ without a paddle. We can ‘go with the flow’ but we have a greater sense of the direction in which we would like to go. We become aware that we have choice.