I acknowledge the first nation, traditional custodians, the Ngunnawal people, upon whose ancestral lands I live and work. However, by using this site you are agreeing to our terms & conditions.
1.00 Health & happiness
In a survey of 2 million people across 80 countries, the unhappiest times in a woman's life were their forties and in men's their fifties. This consistent finding throughout the world points to long periods of unhappiness in everyone's life. It is a naturally occurring, developmental process in all peoples whether single or married; queer or straight; childless or not; in poor and good health, and in all socioeconomic levels, cultures and creeds.
Happiness does not require a good job, money, health nor coming from a "good family". Many of us postpone life until each of those is in place. Sensible hygiene and potable water; feeling useful in a social network; aware of the food/mood diet/health exercise connections, and even breathing through nose rather than mouth, are a few simple examples that enhance health and happiness without postponing anything until tomorrow.
Martin Seligman's site authentic happiness has positive mental health self-assessments. I like the brief character strengths assessment for a starter.
How long will you live to enjoy this happiness? Complete the Life Expectancy Calculator. This is one of the better questionnaires I have come across. It prints out results with a what to do to add years to your life.
Ultimately, a secure attachment is the key to health and happiness.
Suffering is a given. Suffering alone is intolerable. Emotional attachment is a primary protection against feelings of helplessness and meaninglessness (MacFarlane & Van der Kolk).
Attachment is a well spring of ease and joy at all ages and stages. Insecure or unstable attachment is a source of misery. No attachment is not a viable option for brain development or for survival.
Secure attachment soothes and comforts; offers a safe haven; promotes trust in self and other and openness to new experiences, risk taking and experimenting. It promotes affect regulation and integration (Sue Johnson 1988).
The Buddha's teaching was not detachment but rather to dwell, to reside, to embed and be embodied in the world. That is the essence of compassion, an unbroken connection with Life not its disavowal. Compassion can only occur between equals. He recommended residing in that soft spot of a poignant enormity in life, which touches us all. The Buddha was an agnostic, a doubting Thomas. He suggested that you try this way of life for yourself and see if it is as true for you as it was for him.
And then there is love. Love is a much misunderstood and misused term. Being both noun and verb it is a set of things and a set of actions. Love is not a single feeling but an emotion built from two or more feelings. Anything vital to us creates more than one feeling, and we also have feelings about our feelings (and thoughts about our feelings).
Problem 1
Misunderstanding the difference between a feeling and an emotion, may be the cause of fundamental errors in thinking about love and happiness. Ideas such as I want to feel love and feel loved are very different when discussed with the understanding that love is not a feeling but 'a label we give to a range of transient emotional experiences always complicated by past, present and future considerations. It is not correct that our partners simply and constantly feel love for us' (Levine 2007).
Misunderstanding the difference between wants and needs further confounds thinking about love - I need to love and need to feel loved with these confusions in mind, become very difficult ideas to translate into action.
Problem 2
We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious. Sebold in 'Austerlitz'.
How is your relationship with yourself today? Time to reflect on those slight inner adjustments? Aware of heart and breath rate, blood pressure, fluid and food intake; time to care for your self and then those near you; space to think through the problems of yesterday and to plan ahead? That's the first set of problems - most of us are moving too fast to reflect on how we have lived the last days or even the last few minutes.
The bulk of our decisions are made out of awareness, in the back of our mind. Our conscious mind is hundreds of milliseconds behind our decisions. We witness events unfolding that have already begun in a back room of our mind. Conscious mind plays catch up, rationalizing the decision according to a set of beliefs or explanations we have about ourselves. Sometimes our explanations do not accord with the actions.
Hence, what we say we do and what we actually do can be worlds apart.
Problem 3
The inner force that inspires fear in us is life itself. This is a fear from which no theory in the world can deliver us. It is normal, universal, and healthy. Paul Tournier
Our brains are shaped to emphasise the negative and prioritise fear. Most brains keep a map of memories skewed to losses rather than gains. Our physiological responses to threats and unpleasantness are faster, stronger and harder to inhibit than responses to opportunity and pleasure (Haidt).
Furthermore, we predict the future from the vividness and emotional impact of past events rather than on the probability of a recurrence. Many people and communities suffer from avoiding or accounting for risks that are vanishingly small whilst not attending to obvious widespread, high risk behaviours. The difficulty is that when afraid or upset we're less able to judge risk, including the risk of un-happiness.
The art of happiness thus requires out-foxing our fears and placing the pursuit of happiness to one side, obliquely.
The more connected we are to other people, the less likely fear will swallow our endeavours. A deep sense of belonging tames fear. Attachment is evolution's buffer against trauma and loss. Secure attachment is the basis of resilience. Hence feeling useful in a social network is one of the best predictors of health and long life.
In addition the quality of our actions (and non-actions) depends on the thinking that precedes it. The quality of our thinking depends on the quality of attention our thinking has received from others. Therefore, give beautiful attention to one another's thinking. Einstein's chose excellent listeners.
So, what about luck? The more skill you have, the less luck you need. Building a relationship network of luck and of good listeners is skilful and increases good fortune. Effortless luck is unreliable and expensive. Australians are hooked on it, for example, $13.3 billion gaming losses in 2001. That exceeds our total household savings. With a $3 billion spend on indigenous Australia and a couple of million on early childhood screening - no prizes for guessing which is the bigger gamble on the future health and happiness of a nation. Even mandatory screening for all new born hearing would be a significant advance.
Problem 4
The greatest problem in communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished.
Usually a person relates to another under the tacit assumption that the other shares his view of reality, that indeed there is only one reality. Watzlawick
Positive health information is accessed unequally, even or especially among health professionals. Myths, quick fixes and 'magic bullets' are more enticing than steady observation over time using a process of systematic elimination for both client and practitioner. We cannot always assume that our health practitioners or policy makers will do this elementary field study as thoroughly as we might. Our lives depend on it.
Failure to act early in the development of symptoms, crowds medical and emergency services with preventable illness and last minute, aggressive interventions that may violate whatever quality of life remains. What chance that another report, this one titled Changing Diets, Changing Minds, will alter the industrial diet of hospital, health service or school canteens or make nutrition a key component in the treatment of depression or targeting the spend on indigenous affairs.
Unrecognised food intolerances lead to significant disease risks later in life. With child behaviour and developmental problems across the whole spectrum, it is essential to consider nutrition, food intolerances or allergy first. It can save the child from intrusive and prognostically worthless interventions.
Dairy products are implicated in a large range of disease processes. Common food intolerances are to: lactose, wheat, soya, salicylates, amines (or histamine like substances) and free glutamates. With the support of a dietitian, the RPAH elimination diet interspersed with food challenges (to establish the threshold for a perceptible reaction) is the failsafe test for single or combined food intolerances.
And this is not even beginning to explore the biopsychosocial conditions that transact to maintain metabolic imbalances in individuals, families and cultural groups.
In this and many other ways, good health is a privilege of inequality that increases with social status and education.
1.1 Health defined
Health is a pattern of energy use that is sustainable.
It begins with respecting what's in the back of our minds, living in harmony with what we already know. That knowledge resides in our head, heart and guts and describes abiding truths about ourselves, our relationships and our world.
More harm is done by unhappy 'achievers' out of touch with themselves, their families and their world trying to do good, than by those simply content in themselves. The latter are the quiet ones who come to the fore after disaster and catastrophe. These maintain and re-build community rather than just talk about it or throw money at it to make themselves feels better.
Contentment is made fragile by conscious fear and by fears in the back of mind. We develop contentment from living truly and truly living. We dilute it each time and one action (or inaction) at a time that we miss that true, sweet spot in our life.
Some of us are slow learners in traveling this way. Others just skip over the question until they are grown open by disharmony, injury, loss or by sudden illness. And some just cruise through life without ever asking or caring - that life is also worth living but it could be more interesting.
1.2 Pre-occupied
It’s better to win the lottery than to break your neck, but not by as much as you’d think. . . . Within a year, lottery winners and paraplegics have both (on average) returned most of the way to their baseline levels of happiness. Haidt
Many of us know we are too busy and that this leads to downgrading or ignoring health risks that may cost us, our children, our enterprise dearly in the long term. If we continue to do or omit to do things, which we know to be awry we tend to become dispirited and disheartened.
Then we react badly to disaster, to pain and to loss as well as to sudden good fortune.
Change begins with knowledge. Knowing ourselves and walking that talk are conscious intentions - choices. We choose to know what's in the back of our minds or not. Either can become a habit.
We form and are formed by habits of thought, feeling and deed - both alone and in relationship to others. These are choices too. Each benefit from reflection. A method of self-reflection can access the wisdom and the wonder in our bodies and in our inner most self, our soul or essence. Or we can choose to just act impulsively, without reflection.
We can apply the results of self-reflection to practical new habits such as:
- learning to think in long paragraphs rather than in sound bites
- spending quality time with our partner instead of 2 minute talk clips in ad breaks
- sharing long hellos and long goodbyes with loved ones
- not feeding major life crises with excess work, community involvements or compulsive drinking
- chewing 30x instead of guzzling food when we know that cures indigestion
- nostril breathing, and so on ...
Living authentically allows the inevitable challenges of family life and in the world to be welcomed with some confidence and kindness rather than with the fear, anger and self-doubt that chokes out wisdom and connection. In neglecting what we know in our guts and in the back of our mind, we commit a crime against our wisdom and harm ourselves.
Seeking insights into health and relationship problems without actively addressing what we already know further breaches body integrity, heart's truth and our personal manifesto. Doing what we know is out of place in our life is like driving through the desert with plenty of petrol but no map and no water. That is an action/understanding imbalance - plenty of action (petrol) but no understanding (map and water).
Understanding and action go hand in hand.
Reflect on your own life and then write a personal manifesto without righteous intent, live it gracefully and review it annually. It is a guidance system for your world, a mental map. Here's a how to of personal manifestos (if link broken).
1.30 Balance
Dis-ease and dis-equilibrium start with un-lived life - principle of Ayurvedic medicine.
'To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must cultivate our personal life; and to cultivate our personal life, we must first set our hearts right.' Confucius 551-479 BC
Balance shmalance! I've got too many competing demands coming at me all the time, said one of my clients.
Especially with that velocity, the fundamental inner work remains to know ourselves in our world, to cultivate a calm mind and to come from that breath centred awareness in our significant relationships as best we can at the time.
It is a big ask when faced with anguish. In our distress, we want a quick solution when there seems too little time to understand the whole system from which the crisis draws its energy.
Pain includes the emotional response to injury. That response is persistent especially when we haven't named or claimed the injury as our own and are instead looking for others to blame or take it over.
Willfully refusing to address what we know is awry with us, denies life's feedback. That too can be painful.
The natural state of mind is equilibrium but when life is denied she will assert herself with imbalance. We then have a choice to focus on the symptoms of imbalance and travel from there to the personal and communal roots of it, or we can medicate the problem and hope it goes away.
More than 8 million packets of anti-depressants are prescribed annually in Australia. We know that meaningful relationships, appropriate nutrition and exercise are more effective for many. It's the same story with the social medication of active, healthy children (mostly boys) - sedating them with paracetamol, anti-histamines and cough mixture.
Neither the prescribing GP, the pharmacist nor the patient has the time, energy or tenderness to explore the alternative relationship, health and life skills. Pharmaceutical companies spend twice as much on drug promotion as on research and to good effect. For example, the most frequently prescribed drug for multiple sclerosis in Australia is also the least effective.
Only 30% of patients take the recommended course of anti-depressants, the majority are left without effective help. Deaths to suicide exceed our national road toll.
Couple therapy, whereby a depressed person is counseled together with their non-depressed spouse, works much better than any other form of treatment for depression (The London Depression Intervention Trial, British Journal of Psychiatry 177:95-100).
Yet it is one of the least prescribed treatment modalities.
1.31 Imbalance
'Neglecting a part of your life makes it re-appear as an inner problem, an outer anxiety or a body symptom'. Amie Mindell
Dis-equilibrium starts with the life that is denied.
Imbalance arises when we try to live another life than our own. Our own life rings true in our hearts like the sweet spot on a bell, on a tennis racket or cricket bat or those perfect spots in an oven where the cake cooks through and the roast browns on top. When we live away from our sweet spot, our life lies incomplete and unfulfilled.
However, in living close to our heart we also risk feeling it all. In the back of our minds we may want to avoid the depths of sorrow if we can grasp a life that seems fun, easier or even better than our own. Nothing wrong with wanting a better life where it opens to great good. But the promise of a life where we don't get hurt or where we can fake it; where we can buy or even lie our way out of trouble; where we can hide from the consequences or shut them out completely or just abdicate our responsibility - that's a false life.
Each can be very attractive when we are afraid of or unaware of a fear or some disquiet in the back of the mind.
Fear is persuasive and mind is an awesome servant that can bring to life only those things that confirm the fear in the back of mind. Mind will throw out real alternatives, some which might demand sustained effort and response-ability. Our conscious mind will find a reason for that decision from a store of beliefs about ourselves. More on mind on site.
Sometimes that other life is the unlived life of our parents, family or care-givers that they had wished for us or wished upon us when they sought a better life in moving countries or homes. That hopes sits in the back of our minds until it is caught living our life for us.
1.40 What brings people to seek help
Two roads diverged in a wood and I, I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference. Frost
My typical client couple over-functions in some areas and under-functions in others. For example,
- Brilliant running a business together, share leisure, do sex but cannot cooperate on the kids or money or extended family, and have a shallow and dispiriting psychological intimacy. One or both wonders: who are you, what do you want and why are you here?
- Knows each other inside out, love each other deeply, good problem solvers, give the perfect surprises, most other companionship except for an almost complete lack of shared leisure activities and/or fun in the bedroom, which causes one or both profound anguish.
- Has a mix of the above two and/or carrying an attachment wound - some primary breach of a covenant to each be there for the other at critical times and provide a safe harbour to catch the other when they fall.
- And then there's infidelity.
Typically in the under-functioning areas both have an inkling of what to do but undermine even addressing the issues, they are so painful to approach. Consequently, they live inside a fragile envelope, which cracks periodically spilling the frustration all over the relationship.
Some come broken open by trauma or major life change. Some off balance or unwell, questioning all their relationships and their life choices. Some hearts burning with frustration or bruised by disappointment. Some knowing they are grieving but not knowing why or what for.
Some sense the answer lies embodied in a place within, which they don't trust or are too busy to hear or thinking an unspoken fear or anger will take over. Better to keep it buried?
Some wanting to grow in relationship and finding that not reciprocated; noticing how the urgency of stress/work/love runs their life and feeling unable to take back control; getting a handle on past family dramas that bleed through into their current relationships; observing a self-limiting pattern in their life yet not knowing what to do about it; or feeling the loss of meaning and purpose in life.
It takes guts and tenderness to make the time for attending to the unsettling sensations of these themes in the background, more to express it and even more to live it. To offer that time and attention to a friend who is in trouble can be life changing. So who struggles giving the same kindness and attention to themselves? Just about everyone.
As much as 95% of our thoughts today run in the same vein as yesterday's. Body tends to believe all that mind holds true. Over time this repetitive, subconscious gossip has a profound effect on health for good and for ill.
Some clues to the background discussion of mind will arise from reflecting on what we say without thinking; by considering the advice we give others; by attending to our incongruous actions and inactions, and by noticing those energetic issues at the periphery of awareness that grab us, that are pre-sentient.
Meditation is just noticing what is in that fleeting attention, in our core sensations, in perceptions in the back of our mind and in our reactions to the mind's inner gossip. Meditation, contemplation or prayer mind the gap between breaths. We can notice if it is okay for us to take in appreciation from others, to welcome gratitude into our hearts.
Sometimes appreciation or recognition stops at our heart's door, yet criticisms and complaints are ushered in and rented prime space, occupying our thoughts throughout the day.
1.41 Why don't they come for help
An agency which circumspectly directs operations somewhere in my brain, has always preserved me from my own secret, systematically preventing me from drawing the obvious conclusions and embarking on the inquiries they would have suggested to me. Sebold in 'Austerlitz'.
Even in a big mess, both genders baulk at admitting the want of help and doing something about it. It is easy to find reasons not to go for help - not the least that everyone is telling you that you should - I went and saw the doc! What else do you want?!
Psychology has had a marketing problem as well - selling what's wrong with your past rather than what's right about the present, aiming for the best in you and for the future.
One guy, mid 30's remained scared about coming to a session even having broken down and wept in an introductory phone chat with me. Obviously he felt safe talking to me. When he came for a session he said he was scared to find out things about himself that he didn't like. His sister, mother and partner had been telling him for years about his problems but if he recognised them in a session, he would have a real reason to change. That scared him.
I thought to myself, as long as our mothers, grandmothers, sisters and girlfriends nag us about this stuff we can ignore our own view of it since so many others are on our case. This guy didn't want to change but he had reached an impasse with himself and he knew he had to deal with it, and he did.
Now, don't roll your eyes and think Men! I've had exactly the same conversations over the last 35 years with the ladies.
1.5 Workshop attachment and intimacy
'Kindness is the golden chain by which society is bound together.' Goethe
Intimate relationships can be a deep, broad personal and spiritual development workshop or just another must have accessory.
In the beginning, few people understand the enormity of what they join at the birth place of a committed relationship.
As a workshop, it calls all that is within us into awareness. This is not always comfortable. What you do with that calling depends on how good a friend you are to yourself, to your companions and to your community. It is ultimately about kindness.
Good friends support the intimacy workshop equally with each other, moving from the fear of what the other might do or not do, feel or not feel, to a wisdom that supports being with each other whatever it takes. This is a movement through product (doing) and into process (being) that is paradoxically ambiguous and simple - a bit like crazy wisdom or controlled folly.
Living our process is not easy in the short term, but living our masks is costly in the long term.
One of the joys working in my field is in assisting that ah ha! experience of discovering intimate self-knowledge through dialogue. We find solutions for the no go areas that spoil the delight of being by ourselves and being with another, which once found, are a self-renewing source of hope and connection in the world.
It has to begin with truly knowing oneself, examining your own life and reflecting honestly upon it and then never giving up on yourself, no matter what comes up in the progress of self-reflection.
This is differentiating yourself from another from which self care and intimacy grow.
On site is an excellent pair of articles on how to get the most from couple's therapy and how to choose a couples therapist. Recommended as a reference if you choose to work with me because I too sometimes forget to follow the basic good sense contained therein.
1.6 Relationship troubles and growing pains
'In intimate relationships, what distinguishes the survivors from the doomed are the former's long goodbyes and hellos' Gottman.
The person who cares the most will always be the most prepared to compromise. Or put another way, Any relationship is under the control of the person who cares the least. For example, a long term sexual relationship is usually controlled by the one who desires it the least.
Turning points tend to crystallize in relationships in 6 to 8 year cycles, yet relationships are built and undone one conversation at a time.
Coming home from work or school is one of the most vulnerable times in a relationship's day and it is made meaningless by giving it little time and a low priority. Simple stuff like taking five minutes to really say hello and goodbye each day and other relationship affirming rituals make a difference.
If you notice that you don't generally manage to have at least five positive interactions to one negative with your loved one, then it may be time to take your relationship in for a service (be it partnering or parenting). The research of John Gottman suggests that anything below that ratio is 'terminal for intimacy'. Here is a Gottman book and his research on why people get divorced.
Almost always both people in a troubled intimate relationship contribute equally to the stuckness and the toxicity of their issues. Just getting to equal ownership of the problem can be a break through out of the blame frame. Even admitting that we don't know why we end up in the same ugly cul de sac is one step ahead of pretending it doesn't matter or it doesn't happen.
90% of clients who come together report they benefited from 3 or fewer sessions with a relationship therapist. Gains can happen early. Respect is often the first behaviour to re-appear when each realizes the other has been doing it tough and doing their best as well.
Then returns the assumption of good will or at least the suspension of adverse assumptions about each other's motives. And then we start to grow, first by building a new a map of the other's inner world.
1.7 Couples conflict
'What ails the truth is that it is mainly uncomfortable, and often dull. The human mind seeks something more amusing, and often caressing.' H.L. Mencken
Habitual avoidance of conflict is a strong predictor of divorce.
Couples who never conflict are more likely to separate than those that do. Couples who show contempt, for example by rolling their eyes when the other speaks, are in trouble. 'It's the everyday, mindless moments that are the basis of romance in marriage.' These and other 'dull' truths can be read in this critical comparison of two relationship gurus.
Fair fighting can resolve conflict. About 60% of divorces occur in low-conflict marriages where reconciliation is still possible. These separations can be catastrophic for children unaware of the discord. Vicious fights in front of the children is self-replicating, generational divorce training - it becomes their idea of normal. However, a decision to fight fair may contain a control issue that will undermine it anyway and 'prove' that fighting fair doesn't work.
Individualistic therapy approaches to couple problems can be hazardous to an enduring relationship.
Go to more on intimate relationships on Intro 2 and on my relationship education resources.
How to mend a relationship, and how to end a relationship with love and dignity.
© 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 ZPJ Fox All Rights Reserved www.peterfox.com.au
