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January 3, 2023 by BHP Leave a Comment

Is starting psychotherapy a good New Year’s Resolution?

Most of us make some sort of New Year’s resolution, whether overtly or covertly.  The new year can feel like an opportunity to put the past behind us and to start afresh.

Whether or not we actively name and own our New Year’s resolutions, most of us can also attest to the best held intentions for change slipping away. There are plenty of good reasons why New Year’s resolutions don’t work. We are often too unspecific in what would constitute change, and it can be hard to make change on our own.

Psychotherapy is about change.  However, the start of all change comes from inside. To make change, we need to understand ourselves and accept why we have made the decisions we have. Nothing is random.

Psychotherapy is first and foremost about learning to have a relationship with ourselves and to learn to hold ourselves in mind, often in ways others failed to do when we were growing up. When we hold ourselves in mind, we can objectively evaluate if something is helpful or in our best interests.

We learn to hold ourselves in mind through others holding us in mind. This is one of the main roles of a psychotherapist. Holding a client in mind is far broader and deeper than simply making notes and remembering what they told us. It is about having a relationship with them and helping them to understand their blind spots, their relational patterns to themselves and to others. Helping them work through this is the therapeutic encounter.

Psychotherapy is often hard. Keeping to a weekly day and time when we meet with our psychotherapist can feel like a slog. Unlike a New Year’s resolution, the process is held relationally. Your psychotherapist makes the time and space available to hold you in mind and expects you to show up for the weekly dialogue. Even if you do not attend, your therapist is there to hold you in mind.

Perhaps the question is not so much whether psychotherapy is a good New Year’s resolution. Rather, it may be whether you are committed to having a deeper and more meaningful relationship with yourself, and through this, learning to hold yourself better in mind. The latter will lead to long-lasting changes on a profound level which may or may not include more frequent trips to the gym!

Happy New Year from all of us at Brighton and Hove Psychotherapy.

Mark Vahrmeyer is a UKCP-registered psychotherapist working in private practice in Hove and Lewes, East Sussex. He is trained in relational psychotherapy and uses an integrative approach of psychodynamic, attachment and body psychotherapy to facilitate change with clients.

Further Reading

New Year Reflections

How psychotherapy works

What is psychotherapy?

Face to Face and Online Therapy Help Available Now

Click Here to Enquire

Filed Under: Brighton and Hove Psychotherapy, Mark Vahrmeyer, Psychotherapy Tagged With: habit, Psychotherapy

January 2, 2023 by Brighton & Hove Psychotherapy Leave a Comment

New Year’s Resolutions – why change might be so difficult

The start of a new year feels like a good time to make resolutions to change your life. Cut down on drinking, learn something new, be more efficient, be kinder, be more sociable or get fit.

Gym memberships regularly peak in January, increasing by 10%-20% but how many of those new memberships are used? According to research by Fridge Raiders, published in the Daily Mail in March 2019, 23% of Britons have gym memberships but only 12% use them often. They estimate that more than 4 billion pounds a year is wasted on unused gym memberships.

The reasons given for the 50 percent who did not attend regularly or at all, were to do with feeling self-conscious or intimidated, thinking that everyone was watching, finding repetitive activity boring and not knowing how to use the gym equipment. These could be valid reasons but Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey think it goes deeper. They ask why do we stick with the status quo when we are unhappy or unwell and know that change will make us feel better or even make us live longer? Kegan and Lahey have been researching the resistance to change for many years. In their book Immunity to Change (2009) they discovered that strongly held values, often unconscious, prevented both collective and individual change.

The most quoted finding from their studies comes from interviews with patients with heart disease who were told they must change their habits around eating, drinking, smoking and exercise and take their medication otherwise they would die. Kegan and Lahey found that only one in seven was able to make the necessary changes. Making further enquiries they discovered that although patients recognised the imperative of their doctor’s advice there were deep seated beliefs that contradicted their desire to get well.

A composite example would be a man who said that cutting down on food and drink and taking medication for ‘old people’ would make him feel he was old and weak. This challenged his idea of himself as a competent man in the midst of a productive life. Beneath this was his fear of becoming incapacitated and dying that brought back memories of his father’s illness and death. At a deep level the fears that prevented him taking care of himself were the very things that were likely to happen to him if did not change his habits.

There are many other examples in their book. Another composite example would be a manager who wanted to be more collaborative and involve his team in decision-making.  Until he participated in the research he did not realise how much his fear of being a weak leader prevented him from being open to the ideas of others. This feeling stemmed from the unspoken culture of ‘you must be strong otherwise you won’t survive’ in the family he grew up in and was an integral belief about himself. When he could recognise this belief and its negative impact he was able to ask for support to change and eventually become a better and happier leader.

Kegan and Lahey’s research helps us understand why it might be so hard to change our habits to improve our lives. They offer an alternative to castigating ourselves for our indiscipline and lack of commitment and, I think, suggest that we begin by being kind to ourselves and curious.

 

References – 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6765171/Britons-spend-4-billion-year-unused-gym-memberships-new-survey-reveals.html

 

Angela Rogers is an Integrative Psychotherapeutic counsellor working with individuals and couples in Hove.

 

Further reading by Angela Rogers –

Viagra: Some ups and downs of the little blue pill

The Menopause – Women of a Certain Age

A couple state of mind

Men, Sex & Aging in Relationships

Face to Face and Online Therapy Help Available Now

Click Here to Enquire

Filed Under: Angela Rogers, Loss Tagged With: habit, mind and body, New Year Resolutions

January 1, 2018 by Brighton & Hove Psychotherapy Leave a Comment

Is starting psychotherapy a good New Year’s Resolution?

Most of us make some sort of New Year’s resolution, whether overtly or covertly.  The new year can feel like an opportunity to put the past behind us and to start afresh.

Whether or not we actively name and own our New Year’s resolutions, most of us can also attest to the best held intentions for change slipping away. There are plenty of good reasons why New Year’s resolutions don’t work. We are often too unspecific in what would constitute change, and it can be hard to make change on our own.

Psychotherapy is about change.  However, the start of all change comes from inside. To make change, we need to understand ourselves and accept why we have made the decisions we have. Nothing is random.

Psychotherapy is first and foremost about learning to have a relationship with ourselves and to learn to hold ourselves in mind, often in ways others failed to do when we were growing up. When we hold ourselves in mind, we can objectively evaluate if something is helpful or in our best interests.

We learn to hold ourselves in mind through others holding us in mind. This is one of the main roles of a psychotherapist. Holding a client in mind is far broader and deeper than simply making notes and remembering what they told us. It is about having a relationship with them and helping them to understand their blind spots, their relational patterns to themselves and to others. Helping them work through this is the therapeutic encounter.

Psychotherapy is often hard. Keeping to a weekly day and time when we meet with our psychotherapist can feel like a slog. Unlike a New Year’s resolution, the process is held relationally. Your psychotherapist makes the time and space available to hold you in mind and expects you to show up for the weekly dialogue. Even if you do not attend, your therapist is there to hold you in mind.

Perhaps the question is not so much whether psychotherapy is a good New Year’s resolution. Rather, it may be whether you are committed to having a deeper and more meaningful relationship with yourself, and through this, learning to hold yourself better in mind. The latter will lead to long-lasting changes on a profound level which may or may not include more frequent trips to the gym!

Happy New Year from all of us at Brighton and Hove Psychotherapy.

Mark Vahrmeyer is a UKCP-registered psychotherapist working in private practice in Hove and Lewes, East Sussex. He is trained in relational psychotherapy and uses an integrative approach of psychodynamic, attachment and body psychotherapy to facilitate change with clients.

Further Reading

New Year Reflections

How psychotherapy works

What is psychotherapy?

Face to Face and Online Therapy Help Available Now

Click Here to Enquire

Filed Under: Brighton and Hove Psychotherapy, Mark Vahrmeyer, Psychotherapy Tagged With: habit, Psychotherapy

March 21, 2016 by Brighton & Hove Psychotherapy Leave a Comment

Top tips for breaking a bad habit

We all have bad habits.  Some are fairly innocuous and others, at the extreme, can develop into behavioural addictions.

Many of us try our hardest to break bad habits, but end up failing miserably.  There is a particular time of year – New Year’s – when many of us set out to ‘turn over a new sheet’ and to give up on habits that may not serve us.  And the statistical evidence shows that on average, only around 8% of us manage to stick to our resolutions.  We then generally put this down to us being weak-willed in some way, but the real reasons why breaking a bad habit is so hard are more complex.

Why are bad habits so hard to break?

Neuroscientists are starting to unlock the secrets of how our brain plays a key role in us staying stuck in old habits.  And it has a lot to do with dopamine – a neurotransmitter that helps control the brain’s reward and pleasure centre.

Our brain gets very easily distracted and searches for past rewards that it felt when engaging in an activity – even when the rewards are no longer there or perhaps never were.  Dopamine causes our brains to gravitate towards behaviours and activities that were previously pleasing.  And once a habit gets laid down, we have much less control of our brains than we like to believe.

So, rather than being weak-willed, our brains (or a part of them) are hijacking our behaviour to seek out its dopamine hit.

Top tips

How do we break this cycle?  Well, researchers are now suggesting that instead of focusing on stopping the negative behaviour, we should instead focus on replacing it with a new one that will give our brains some reward.

The first step in this process is to identify what the exact nature of the reward is that we get from the behaviour.  For example, if we find that we snack late at night because we are hungry, then changing meal times; changing food types; moving exercise routines etc. can all help to change our cravings.  It may be, however, that we snack because we are feeling bored, in which case, going for a walk around the block may be a suitable substitute.

In the 12-step program, participants are invited to HALT before engaging with their addiction.  HALT is an acronym that stands for asking the questions: ‘Am I Hungry, Angry, Lonely or Tired’.  Often, it is one of these feelings that is driving the addictive craving.

So, instead of self-critiquing when we once again go down the rabbit hole of a bad habit or addiction, get really interested in the following questions:

  • What am I feeling?
  • What triggered me? – time of day, activity (e.g. drinking correlating to smoking)
  • What would meet my needs in this moment?

By engaging with these questions, you can take control by focusing on putting in place a behaviour or set of behaviours that makes you happier and provides your brain with dopamine for the right reasons.

Mark Vahrmeyer is a UKCP Registered Psychotherapist working in private practice and palliative care.

pdf icon

 

For more information, click here to download our guide on habits, including top tips on breaking habits.

Face to Face and Online Therapy Help Available Now

Click Here to Enquire

Filed Under: Mark Vahrmeyer Tagged With: Brain, habit, Health, self-care

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