Hello there, listeners, old and new. It's Therapy Natters time, a chance to listen to two psychotherapists who want to share what they know and see if your world can feel slightly better than it did half an hour ago. I'm Richard Nicholls and with me is Fiona Biddle. Hello again. Fiona, are you well on this lovely day?
Yes, I'm very well thank you, full of Vim and vigor.
That's good for a Friday, cause it's Friday for us. This comes out on a Wednesday, but we record on
Good place. Yes.
a good place today
Literally and figuratively.
Nice. Good, good, good. I'm in a play these next few days. It was our first night last night. We're doing it again tonight and again on Saturday for our final night. And
I did seriously consider coming to see it.
no
I did. I did. I did.
quite a drive.
Well,
That's quite a long way for a little Am Dram
you are worth it. But, now my aunts come to visit, so I couldn't come to stay. So we went to, we went to the real theater last night, but I suspect yours would've been better cuz the one I saw wasn't very good.
Oh, are you allowed to say what you saw?
I don't see why not. It was Miles Jupp in the Lavender Hill Mob, and I love Miles Jupp. And I saw him afterwards. He walked past and he gave me a lovely smile. But I really just didn't enjoy the play, unfortunately. So I wish I had come to see yours. How did it go? How was your first night?
It was hilarious. Absolutely hilarious. I mean, I can talk about it now because by the time this comes out, it will have finished. So there's no spoilers for my family who are gonna come and watch it tomorrow. Um, I play Lady Madge Graves, who is the owner of this castle. It's a comedy. I step into the role because, as far as the story is concerned, a woman who was supposed to be playing Lady Madge Graves, uh, can't do it. She's not very well.
I've written into it that she's got Lumbago, and, and so I have to step in as an understudy and do her role for her in this gray wig and black dress and put on a silly voice like this. It's very funny. Absolutely hilarious. Sadly, it's probably gonna be the last play that I do in that studio theater because the council are shutting it down cuz they don't support the arts in our towns, unfortunately. So they're closing the big theater down and the little studio theater that's attached to it.
So we're gonna have to go back to the drawing board with, with what we do now in our little amateur society. Rehearse in the back room of some pub somewhere. And, um, Do our performances in some scout hut or something like that, which is gonna be such a difference from the studio theater with the lights and the sets. And to move from that into some church hall or something is, um, it's a shame. It's, it, it feels like quite the setback. It is. It, it is a shame.
It is, but we just have to say it is what it it is.
The show will go on
pick ourselves up. Yeah. This is how we wanna live our life. This is our hobby, this is our passion, this is our interest. And you know, we're not gonna let it stop us. We'll just have to do something else. We can't control it. The council have decided we're not gonna fund the arts in that, that town anymore. So, Sorry. You gotta go. It's outside of our control and we gotta accept it. Sad. Although, people are saying, Why don't you start a petition? They've made their mind up.
They made their mind up before Covid.
Well my.
then they were gonna shut it down.
My mind was going, Well, stand for the council. Take control. Take control of the council. But that's a bit of a big step, isn't it really?
Yeah, there's only so much I can do. Some things I'll just have to accept and work with it. And I know that's, that's difficult. Cause on one hand when something horrible happens and you don't want it, there's a part of you that says, like you say. Make the change. Stand up for it. Do something about it. But there are some things we can't cuz we are just not big enough.
And that sounds quite defeatist, but I, I, I sit in the middle between optimism and pessimism in a sort of optimistic realist really, that says, Yeah, there's nothing I can do about this. If that, if this massive theater, Cause it is a big theater, this big Bedworth Civic Hall. It is, It's huge. You know, if they've been hemorrhaging money for the last 10 years.
Because the only people that are gonna go to that theater are those, to see people like Jimmy Carr and, you know, big names that end up costing a lot of money. Then they, they say, No, it's not making enough. We might as well turn it into flats and make more money, or car park and whatever. I dunno what the council are gonna do, but what they're not doing is is helping the arts community. But hey, like I say, what can I do? Probably, probably nothing.
It is an interesting thing, isn't it? When you think about there's so many things in the world that have changed because somebody has really taken action and, and made the change, through sheer determination, whether those are major things. I'm thinking of Gandhi for example. He did quite a lot, really, didn't he?
Hmm. Well, yeah, Rosa Parks was the first person that jumped out at me.
that was an interesting one because that was a small act that led to, huge change. A very brave act, but it was still a small act that
what of what's going on in Iran?
physically do. Yeah. Then there's stuff going on in Iran. Getting into the council, you'd have to do so many other things as well. You can't just stand on that one platform to get onto the council. I wouldn't think you.
No, and, and although it feels unpleasant, if this is the worst thing that's happening to me lately, when you put it into perspective and you look at the, the stuff that's going on in Iran, for example, and the stand that those people are having to make. To try and make their world a better place. I've really got nothing to complain about, have I? Not really. Oh, it's such a shame, Richard, that you're not gonna have that wonderful studio theater nice and cheap. Oh yeah.
It was nice and cheap, wasn't it? Well, yeah, and that's been part of the problem, isn't it? Oh yeah. I suppose if that've been more expensive, then it wouldn't have closed. Ah but if it had been more expensive than our tickets wouldn't have been six pound each. Uh, but then nobody would've come to see it if there were 60. Oh, it. If this is the worst thing in the world right now for me, then you know, I'm not. I'm not. I've been knocked on my back. I'm still standing.
Yeah, we've talked about perspective before, I think, but, um, it's, I, I think it's worth reiterating that keeping perspective, but then not saying, Oh, my thing doesn't matter because there are bigger things in the world. Having both, both perspectives on perspective at the same time is really important. You know, it, it does matter that this, this has happened to you, because it's your thing. Um, but it, in the scheme of things, in the whole world, not so much, but it still matters. So both.
Somebody sent a, a message into us about, um, well, I'll read it out in a bit that some big things and little things feel just as painful to them, in fact. Well, shall we read out those questions that we had?
Yeah, you start with that one because that's following on from,
Yeah. It does, it was Rachel from Hereford. Um, Rachel's a, a patron of mine on my Patreon show, and she says, I have friends who seem so mentally tough that whatever sets them back seems to have little to no effect on them. Whereas I find myself drowning over the slightest of disappointments. Everything from missing a bus to not having grandchildren. All feels hard. My friends say that they don't do anything different to me, that it's just their mindset. I want the same mindset, but how?
Mindset,
Mindset. Yeah. There's a word there that springs out at me as I read that, which is disappointment.
Yeah.
recall a time when a friend of mine, said to another friend, that he was disappointed. In something that this other friend had done and he was roundly told off that disappointment is a wasted emotion and that, basically, you shouldn't be feeling disappointed that you should be bigger than feeling disappointed. I
Hmm. Here, feel criticized instead.
I feel, um, that disappointment is a very real and very useful. Emotion.
I think all emotions are useful. They're trying, Your body's trying to tell you something. Sit with it.
Disappointment is telling you something. I suppose the thing with disappointments is if it, if it lingers and you keep it too long, just take the message, do something with it. And in the sense what you were saying about your theater closing, there's disappointment. Disappointment that has happened. Disappointment that the, uh, the councillors acted this way, but then you can move on. But I'm wondering if Rachel is holding onto her disappointments for longer than is healthy for her.
That might be part of it.
Yeah, if we can sit with our feelings and try to be less stoic. I don't like this idea that we shouldn't feel our feelings. You know that they're they're the things that cause us problems. Are you feeling a feeling? Take a deep breath, Suck it up. That's not helpful in the long term. I think if you can feel a feeling and then begin to understand what's going on there? What else am I feeling? What does this disappointment mean? Is there more to this?
Cause below the disappointment might be Good things never seem to happen to me. And then you play with that. And if that's the, the negative talk that you've been giving yourself, good things never happen to me, then when good things do, you don't notice cuz your brain hasn't been wired or primed to look for those good things. So they get deleted.
If you can look underneath disappointments and see something like maybe previous times in our life where we've been disappointed, but at the same time as that, we've been rejected. We've been belittled, we've been bullied, whatever. Is there other stuff going on that the brain just latches onto? And that's why disappointment can can feel so much harder for one person than it does for somebody else. Everybody's got their own phenomenological life.
Everybody's unique, everybody's perspectives are different. But it can be quite motivational, I suppose, to look at friends and go, Well, they can do it. But rather than, Well, they can do it and I can't, Therefore I'm useless. That's not helpful. They can do it and so can I. Then I just need to practice and learn. But you don't practice resilience unless you experience the hardships. What we want is that we're not just practicing falling over and going ah I'm stuck now. We wanna practice the.
Right, okay. This is what I'm feeling. What am I gonna do with this feeling? How is this gonna drive me? How is this gonna be different next time? That's what needs to be practiced, and that's what resilience is, but it takes practice.
It absolutely does. And I think using the example of falling over is a good one. And if you think about strength training, it's about resilience. It's literally about the building of resilience in your muscles. So it's the same sort of thing of you need to build it. I just go back to this disappointment in Rachel's, question is disappointment actually what you feel when you miss a bus? I'm wondering if she's labeling these things.
I mean, you could be disappointed to not have grandchildren, but do you feel disappointed if you miss a bus? Um, I'm wondering if she's, uh, lumping things together under a word or I might be reading too much into it. Then that takes me back to episode six we talked about the Sedona method. Which is a way of letting go of it. So in terms of what Rachel's saying there, let's use the bus example. You can Sedona that and let it go.
Not so much the grandchildren one because that's a perennial until she does. Or until, Well, it's likely to be if she never does, it's likely always to be a disappointment, but then it's about living with that and not letting it have too much of an impact, I suppose. That sounds a bit trite as I say it.
it's interesting that there were some people that would be quite accepting of not having grandchildren that might be sad about it and go, Oh, that's a shame. That would've been nice. But I've had children. And even those that don't, I mean, it is a big thing in our culture, in our society and, and maybe it's other people who do have grandchildren who enjoy lauding that over.
Yeah, so there's a, there's element of, Oh, you poor thing. And I, I get a little bit of it this, Have you got any grandchildren yet?
Yet,
Yet?
Yeah.
And I'm still in the place where I say no, I haven't got any yet. And I am hopeful that I will. If I don't, I would be disappointed. But I wouldn't let it, dominate my life. I've got grand puppies, so that's a good thing. There's a concept in CBT, which might help in this context. it's a little bit along the lines of whether your glass is half full or half empty. That sort of basic mindset.
One, just like little aside, is if your glass is half empty, pour it into a smaller glass, then your glass is gonna be fuller. That's way of looking at that. , but people will have that attitude and you can switch that around. But the C B T idea is about automatic negative thoughts or ANTS to use an acronym. So, If you automatically get a negative thought from all sorts of places, think of them as ants. Just crawling around. Crawling over you. Not a nice sort of feeling. Is it ants?
Automatic negative thoughts. So something happens, you go to the bad, you go to the what if's, negative viewpoint. Some people will do that, but you can turn those around into PETS which are positivity, enhancing thoughts. If you find yourself getting an ant, work out how to change it into a pet. It's a little bit like the reframing, but with a frame around it. Frame around the reframing. You know what I mean?
Now, that's not gonna be easy. That's gonna take a lot of practice, but enough studies have been done over the years that show us that no matter how hard it is, if you practice it, it becomes easier. Even if it is challenging your thoughts.
If these automatic negative thoughts are automatic, it's because they're happening at first, outside of conscious awareness, and maybe it's a feeling that comes first, that then gets turned into a thought and the feelings are there just out of habit, cuz that's neurologically what the brain does. By replacing that with something more positive, giving yourself some compassion. Telling yourself that, yes, this might be difficult, but it'll be okay.
Bit like the Sedona method of, you know, how long am I gonna hold this for? How am I gonna feel about missing this bus? In two years time, am I still gonna care? No, We're gonna forget. Well, how about I forget sooner. Now to turn this into something more positive might take five minutes of the negative thinking first before you catch yourself and go, Ah, I was doing it again.
I was catastrophizing, I was spiraling again, fine if it takes 10 minutes, 20 minutes before you catch yourself, it doesn't matter. Because the next time you do it, it's a couple of seconds less, than 20 minutes. Next time you do it, it's a couple of seconds less than that, a couple of seconds less than that the following time. And I know that sounds like a lot of hard work, but you put a lot of hard work into becoming automatically negative in the first place. That might have took years. Years.
From the age of five to 15. It's not gonna take you 10 years to get good at the positive thinking, because actually you want to practice more positive thoughts. That's actually desirable, and because of that, you're gonna latch onto that a lot easier than you would about wanting to become negative. So stick at it. But yeah, it takes practice. It really does take practice to think differently, to then turn it into feeling differently.
I've got a very specific but very simple and straightforward technique for doing this. Which is to either get yourself a little notepad, a nice pretty little notepad if you're like me. Or you can use your phone, or your computer or a scrap of paper, anything you like. But when you notice yourself with an ant crawling over you. Write it down. Write down what that ant is, what it's about, and create the pet that goes with it.
Write it in that book on that notes app or whatever it is, and you will build up then a record of yourself changing your ants into pets. And, I think that for most people, we are not talking about, you know, the, the, the really, really, really, really serious stuff here. We're not talking about people mentally ill or that sort of thing. We're talking about normal everyday people with normal, everyday tendencies to think glass half empty.
you'll almost get to the point, well, you will at some point get to the point where you have a little, chuckle it yourself, , Look what I've just done. That's an ant. Here's the pet that that takes over. Done. And then after a while with work and repetition, the pets will appear before the ants do.
Love it.
I think it's also worth saying that the ants are there for protective reasons. They are there to help you feel safe and secure because you've checked out the negative situations and you're not going to be in danger. So in a sense disappointment, protects you from disappointment. Cause if you don't feel the disappointment, you might feel disappointment later
Yeah. Ah, yes. Yeah, but it backfires.
Does, but it's perfectly okay to feel disappointed first.
There are some things that really are so far outside of our control that it does require A lot of patience and lot of understanding, a lot of critical thinking to go, Are there other perspectives to this? What jumps out at me is the question that we had from. Somebody whose, parents seem to be going through a divorce and, and he's struggling with it it's outside of his control. And when things like that are so outside of our control, all we can do is what we can.
And that's a frustrating thing, isn't it?
Yeah, it's about protecting yourself from other people's stuff, isn't it? But should I read the question? It's from Paul in York.
Yeah.
He says, when two parents have acrimoniously divorced and one parent is actively practicing parent alienation and communicates abusively with their ex via text message, both of which behaviors negatively impact me. Are there any suggestions for techniques to become mentally resilient to this, or more generally, how do you learn stronger mental resilience? So it's obviously a very tough situation for Paul to be in. We don't know, obviously, as with all of these questions, we don't know anymore.
So we don't know how old Paul is. I think from the language he's using, he's probably an adult. But worth recognizing that parental divorce impacts adult children as well as children children.
Oh yeah.
So he's, he's in a difficult situation because one parent is trying to turn him against the other one. and he's impacted by that parent's, abusive nature with the other parent. Well, first of all, it's not easy. That's never going to be an easy place to be, Is it?
No. Talking about it can help. I'm thinking of a study that was done with some nurses in, I think it was 2015, somewhere back then. I know it was a little while ago, but it was pre pandemic, so goodness knows. Although actually I think it was replicated during the pandemic and found something similar. Because there's literally life or death situations that nursing staff work in it's highly stressful. Really, really difficult, and you need a lot of resilience to be able to cope.
And there was a study that was looking at how some nurses could, and some nurses struggled with finding resilience. And the biggest correlation in the studies was that those that were coping well were those that had a place where they could talk about it with somebody. They had emotional support, that if they were feeling rough, they had somebody that could go I hear you.
Not necessarily a therapist, it's just a a friend or a family member, just somebody who's there, to let them offload and not try to fix it. Not try to say, Well, what you need to do is no, just somebody who was there to take what they were saying and, and they could just dump it. A trouble shared is a trouble halved. That was the correlation in the studies suggesting, no surprise, talking about what bothers you can help you to feel better about it. We just need to do that.
I know that's not easy cuz it means being vulnerable. Cause it means being open and saying to people, This is me. This is who I am and this is how I feel. And maybe Paul needs to well your choice. Maybe you say to the parent that you're struggling with. I dunno which way round it is, but if it's the dad that is being really anti mum. Then you might need to say, Dad, that's still my mum.
I know she hurt you and I know you're not getting on and you probably never will and, and I need to accept that, but she's still my mum and I'm not, I'm not taking sides. I'm not gonna do it. I'm gonna love you both because you're my parents and I love you both. That conversation might need to happen and keep the door open. When people are hurt, they then hurt others. Hurt people hurt people.
I guess there's a fear there that what if I say that to my Dad and he just turns his back on me and then I lose my Dad? Well, keep the door open. Give him the opportunity to come back round once he's calmed down and keep the love. Keep saying, I love you, dad, but you're being quite cruel. As long as you reinforce the I love you first, if that's the way round it is, you know, to the
just be the other way around, just as easily, But yeah, but there's something there in the question that's sort of almost saying, I can't do that because I'm not resilient enough to do it. So I suppose that goes along the lines of the feel the fear and do it anyway. Just, just, just do it. Just stand on your own ground.
And again, that's easier said than done but going back to what you were saying about talking to people, it does rely on the individual being able to be open and vulnerable, but it does need somebody , to be that recipient of the feelings and not everybody can find that easily. And it is one of the things with therapy, that a therapist will not judge and they will not be telling you as you intimated their Richard people have a tendency to sort of say, Oh, well it's okay. Don't worry about it.
Or You should do this or do this, Don't do that. And tell you what to do to try to fix it. And it can be very helpful to actually, when you are talking to a friend, start off with the. I am not asking you to fix it, I do not want you to fix it.
I just want to offload this to somebody who will understand me and then, then that person has the weight taken off them, cuz they probably don't really want to have to fix it anyway, and it can just make that communication that much more effective for what you need. Do you remember the book? Men Are from Mars, Women are from Venus.
Yeah, A bit of pop psychology.
Yeah, the only thing I ever took from that was, was the idea that when a woman tells a man about a problem that they have, that the man wants to fix it. And I have to say anecdotally, that has been my experience. That that is what most men will want to do, but some women do as well and some men will be the other way around. So it's not completely gender specific, but there might be a tendency.
But just that idea of having an awareness that a friend is likely to want to fix something cuz they care about you and they want you to be better.
Yeah.
You can help them to see that that's not what you're after right now, they probably can't
No. Maybe there's a, maybe there's a place for a return to the old group therapy sessions where people could just take an in turns to have a vent about something that was bothering them. That doesn't seem to happen too much anymore.
I've not run group therapy. But, in my counseling training, we started off each day with basically a group therapy session where each person would check in with how they were doing, and even in that context where people are training to be therapists, there was some interesting stuff came up between people and a lot of people didn't, make it to the end of that course.
And I think part of it was that that group stuff became, unsafe for some people because the, the other attendees, well in that context, they should have known they were supposed to be being nonjudgmental and just listening, but didn't work in practice. So I think, yeah, there's definitely a place for group therapy, but it really needs a very skilled leader.
Yeah. But if they exist, if those there, it's obviously a lot more affordable than one to one therapy. Push comes to shove. How many Facebook groups are out there? To support people with emotional difficulties, mental health groups, there's probably a thousand of them. There really are.
Just join a few and see if it's a safe place to, to have a vent and start in in the same way as if it was face to face and say, I know nobody on here is gonna be able to fix this, but I just need somewhere to whinge and have a moan. It's fine. You put it somewhere else. I mean, journaling is an option, but we don't quite get the I hear you. I get it. It's crap, isn't it? Sort of feedback, which I think could be useful for people.
Mm. And just going back to Paul, you know, his, his basic question, How do you learn strong, stronger mental resilience? I'd say the fundamental thing there is, is learning about yourself. The more you know about yourself, the more you are sure of who you are, what you are, what your values are, what your beliefs are, and what you are about, then that goes hand in hand with being mentally resilient.
So, for Paul to recognize that he is an individual in his own right, yes, his parents are important. Yes, they have an influence, but he is himself and he can choose how much influence they have. going back to Rachel's question, this is not going to be easy. It will filter in, it will bleed in, but Paul can then go, Oh, hang on a minute. That that's just got through. and I'm gonna put that out. It's not me, it's not my stuff. It's their stuff. Put it out
Yeah. It takes repetition. It takes practice,
and you're never gonna be perfect at it.
Of course. Yeah. It is gonna be difficult, and that is okay. It can be useful to look through some difficulties that you might have overcome in the past just to look for evidence that, Oh, you know what? Crappy things can happen to me and I still live to tell the tail and can actually forget about it, even though it seemed like one of the worst things in the world at the time. That can be helpful.
Absolutely. Again, making notes, keeping a record of how you've responded, what you've done with that response. yeah, all of those things will help you to develop that resilience.
Well, I guess we do need to bring the episode to a close Fiona. our, our nattering could easily go on for hours and hours and hours and then nobody would listen because people's commutes don't fit in with that. They only wanna do half an hour housework and listen to a podcast or whatever.
absolutely. Absolutely. So we will be back for another episode next time. We already have our plan for that,
Yes.
Should we tell them? Should we not tell them?
Um,
them guessing. It's not that exciting, is it?
um, I guess it would follow on from this a little bit about how the imagination can help and what the placebo effect is. How to, how to use and maximize what the brain can do. Maximize the placebo. Yeah. I think that can be an interesting topic and I've had plenty of comments from my patrons on my Patreon show about these sorts of things, and we'll include them in there if it's appropriate, or just waffle on and natter if it's not so, tune in next week.
and hear us waffling on about the placebo effect Right? Let's leave them to it. Fiona, have a super week everybody. Bye for now