A Year to Change Your Mind: Ideas from the Therapy Room to Help You Live Better

by Lucy Maddox

In the end all the waiting for buses in the dark and rain was a really good motivation for commuting to work by bicycle, when even if it’s raining you still feel like at least you’re on the move, and alive, and in control of when you’re going to arrive.

Just as vicious cycles can make us spiral downwards in mood, so virtuous cycles can start the process of a lift in mood. Once Maya manages this first step, she feels slightly brighter. She’s not running around feeling amazing but there is a slight stirring of pleasure from being outside, hearing the birds and seeing the green grass. It is enough, once she has done this a couple of times in a week, to make her feel like it might be worth bothering to have a shower. In turn having a shower makes her feel much more like herself. The sensation of the water and the smell of the body wash is enough to give her a small amount of pleasure. Starting small and trying to savour activities and appreciate herself for doing them is the first bit of coming out of the slump.

If you do find yourself tipping into a lull where you feel listless and unable to get going, it’s sometimes a good idea to have a list of things which help you to take small steps in your preferred direction. So start with a list of simple pleasures, and a list of ways of achieving things, which you can just pick one from and use to help that virtuous cycle to get started. It’s common to feel like you have to wait until you feel like doing this, but in fact sometimes we don’t feel like doing the thing until we’ve begun to do it. Remembering this can be a real game changer when we feel stuck in bed or on the sofa and unable to get out.

Whether it’s fear or low mood which is keeping us stuck, our actions, even small ones, can change how we feel. Realizing that what we do can change how we feel is a powerful tool to have in our repertoire, especially when the context around us (rainy, dreary February) isn’t encouraging us to do that much either. It means we don’t need to wait till we feel like doing something. We can do something in order to feel like we want to do it.

Stories are powerful. We are constantly weaving stories, and so it’s no surprise that aspects of storytelling can be found in lots of types of psychotherapy. Narrative therapy is perhaps the most straightforward about its importance, placing it front and centre.5 In narrative therapy stories are seen as the connecting lines between the dots of events. I love this way of thinking about how we make sense of what happens. The exact same events can be made sense of in radically different ways, just as the same dots on a piece of paper could be connected in different patterns, or the same stars in the sky could be joined in different constellations.

Being able to understand what someone else needs or wants, and to express what you need or want, is no small skill. In some ways, communication with each other is all we have. All of us are here trying to make ourselves heard and understood, and hopefully trying to hear and understand each other.

I write notes in sessions (and often ask the person I am seeing to write or draw things out on pieces of paper as well). This helps me to remember what has been said, and helps me in the moment also to think about some of the most important things that are being told to me. Other schools of therapy wouldn’t write notes like this, preferring to direct all their attention towards the person in the moment and write notes afterwards. Either way, we’re all still trying to really hear what the person is coming with, both what they are saying and also in some respects what they are not saying.

I want it to be a useful hour that someone comes away from feeling like it’s been worthwhile. If I let them use up all the time with something that isn’t moving them towards where they want to be, then I’m not doing my job. Repeating back what someone has said not only helps me to check I’ve understood it correctly, but also can help to get my voice in, and then move from hearing what someone has said to building on it and offering new ideas.

It’s so easy to see someone yawn and feel sure you are boring the pants off everyone, but people come to lectures tired and someone’s face when they are listening isn’t always an expression of wild rapture.

Making friends in general can feel more awkward as time goes on, but the same basic principles apply as for when children are establishing new relationships. Shared interests and proximity can aid new friendships, and being kind, and taking care with our conversations, rather than risking a joke at someone else’s expense, can go a long way. Taking the time and energy to meet up and engage in mutual experiences is important; and also, possibly counter-intuitively, asking for help. Reciprocal asking for help with problems or with practical things can build relationships and indicate trust, so as long as it’s not too one-sided, it can be a good thing to do. In

Celebrating those moments when we have made a difference in our work, whether it is in a caring profession or in something totally different, can boost our sense of purpose and our sense of efficacy. Yet how often do we do this, either on an individual or a team level? When teams learn from previous experiences it tends to be learning from mistakes. When we think back over our performance at work it is often to reflect on how we can do better. Yet we can also purposefully take the time to print out emails where people have thanked us, to look over cards from people who have acknowledged something meaningful we have done for them and to notice moments in our day where we’ve had a really nice time, or at least felt like we’ve done our job well. Even a small amount of this can make a really big difference.

We might have left school, but we haven’t left the chance to learn behind. Life has a clever way of presenting us again and again with similar challenges in different situations and allowing us to try different ways of managing them. Looking back and feeling like we’ve learnt, and grown and changed, at least a little, can only be a good thing, however painful that learning might sometimes be at the time.

I don’t believe in trying to find a bright side for every experience, or a lesson within it. Perhaps there is some use in finding the love in the loss, though. What is the thing or the person that we cared about? How can we honour that? In the tradition of Samhain, who would we want to invite to dine with us again? And how can we invite back the people who have gone, bringing them into our day-to-day life, to carry them with us? Is there a shared value we can cherish to honour them? Or a more everyday practice of thinking of them and what we would say to them if they were here? Or if our grief is for the loss of an experience, is there a new or past experience that we can try to hold dear? Not as compensation, but as a reminder of the things which did go as we had hoped, or which went even better than we’d imagined.

I think Christmas is a bit like Paris. The expectation, the pressure, and the feeling of melancholy when things don’t land how they did in your imagination.