Growing up through the life cycle – these podcasts are deigned to prompt thinking about one’s own life adjustments as well as reflecting on the experiences of members of the broader family.
NOTE: this podcast is longer than my previous posts. This wasn’t intended as I started to record – however I realised that the issues to navigate for young adults (and their parents) are quite weighty and deserved a bit more time.
To listen on iTunes, click HERE.
Growing up through the life cycle – these podcasts are deigned to prompt thinking about one’s own life adjustments as well as reflecting on the experiences of members of the broader family.
To listen on iTunes, click HERE.
Growing up through the life cycle – these podcasts are deigned to prompt thinking about one’s own life adjustments as well as reflecting on the experiences of members of the broader family.
To listen on iTunes, click HERE.
‘Growing Yourself Up 2nd Edition’ also available on amazon, book depository and your local bookseller.
“The message of Growing Yourself Up is that you can’t separate understanding the individual from understanding relationships. All of life’s relationships are integral to increasing self-awareness and maturity. And it’s not necessarily the comfortable relationships that promote personal growth. In this 2nd edition of the bestselling book, Jenny examines how to help others without fostering dependency, and how to determine what kind of help you or others want from therapists. This is in response to the many lay and professional people who have found this book valuable personally and want to know how to help others grow.”
All this focus on maturing self, begs the question: is it sufficient just to work on growing ourselves up in our relationships? Is such a focus on self the best way to be helpful to others? I am convinced that as we become more responsible people, aware of our own immature reactions, we become a greater resource to those around us. I do, however, see a place for being a counsellor and helper; a place for guiding and supporting others through their troubles. Indeed, much of my over 35-year career effort has been to become a better helper and therapist. Helping efforts can be both helpful and unhelpful to people’s growing up.
Getting past the desire for the quick-fix expert
A theme running all the way through my book is that clear thinking in the face of pressure increases our effectiveness. Each of us can discover that we have a surprising wealth of wisdom to draw on from our human brains that can help us resolve life’s problems. The challenge is to put aside the desire for a quick fix and the tendency to look to others to come up with the instant solution. This quick-fix mentality has created a burgeoning industry of programs that promise a new method to get us out of our difficulties. Some even promise a new you in one week. Within my own profession of counselling and psychology, amidst some sound theories there are plenty of examples of this quick-fix technique trend.
Over my decades of clinical practice, I have observed that people make the best progress when they access their own answers to their dilemmas. I have learnt to refrain from giving directives and answers to client’s difficulties and instead I endeavour to guide their focus away from changing or blaming others to looking at themself. I pay close attention to their descriptions of what they are doing to address their problems and ask them to assess what they think is helping and not helping. From here I can share some ideas about the predictable patterns that all humans get caught in when trying to manage the challenges of relationships. I then encourage clients to research these ideas in observing themselves in their real lives.
When people give up their own capacity to problem-solve, no matter what their intellectual capacity, they are left to either blindly depend on others or to blame and criticise others when their advice does not work. This leads to communities of dependent followers or reactive blamers.
When any one person pulls back from blaming others or trying to be the expert for others, or just going with the flow of others’ opinions, it is possible to emerge as a more thoughtful, mature contributor to society.
What to look for from a helping professional
If you are in a professional therapy relationship or looking for an effective counsellor, It may be useful to ask yourself the following questions about your helping relationship:
This blog is from excerpts from the 2nd revised edition of Growing Yourself Up pages 217; 238; 241-2. The new sections of this book are focused on the process of mature helping.
https://www.exislepublishing.com.au/Growing-Yourself-Up-2nd-edition.html
I am feeling close to burn out in my work. I provide my clients with lots of affirmation, good listening and suggestions from my training on the best ways to improve their situation or reduce their symptoms. After about 6 sessions I often feel stuck and frustrated.
What are the key pitfalls in offering help and counsel to others? Most problems in helping efforts occur in the ‘one up, one down’ relationship pattern. In my last blog I mentioned how I developed the ‘one up’ position in my family of origin and how this fuelled some unhelpful patterns in my early counselling work. I have also written about this pattern in the chapters in my book [Growing Yourself Up] on understanding family of origin, marriage, parenting and workplace. It is such a central relationship dynamic to any group that it deserves a bit more elaboration. Dr Bowen called this the over- under functioning reciprocity. This is where one person responds to the distress in another with increasing support, while the other responds to the support with reduced responsibility. It happens in a circular back and forth pattern that can start on either side of the relationship. People who feel most secure and affirmed being helpful to others find themselves connected to people who are most comfortable when others are paying them attention in a caretaking manner. In many ways the conventional counselling relationship is set up in this way.
So what’s the problem with this? I recall speaking to an experienced counsellor, Fiona, who came to me for supervision saying:
I am feeling close to burn out in my work. I provide my clients with lots of affirmation, good listening and suggestions from my training on the best ways to improve their situation or reduce their symptoms. After about 6 sessions I often feel stuck and frustrated. My clients say they get so much out of coming to talk to me but they don’t seem to be making any progress in between our sessions.
Fiona and I teased out her pattern in her counselling relationships. She could see how much her clients liked coming to see her because of her warmth and attentiveness. On the other hand she could also appreciate that she was helping in a way that was inadvertently fostering dependency. On behalf of her clients she was doing most of the work to sooth their insecurities and think of ways to address their difficulties. Her clients always felt buoyed after a counselling session and they liked the advice they heard, however because they hadn’t come up with their own solutions they couldn’t find the inner resolve to implement or stick with Fiona’s suggestions. As we explored this approach to counselling and the varied ways it took over a client’s own responsibilities Fiona could appreciate how this fed into her exhaustion and confusion. Increasingly she found herself referring her clients on for more intense therapy or for psychiatric assessment. Previously unbeknown to her, she had been playing a significant part in her clients reduced progress.
Fiona began to see that her position in her family had contributed to her tendency to be so helpful. Her younger sister had many symptoms during their school years and she had learned ways to reduce her parent’s stress by taking on some of the caretaking. She would spend many hours with her sister distracting her when she was depressed and would include her in her social activities. Fiona found it helpful to see how her caretaking posture was so well honed in her family. Her counselling training had acted to consolidate this pattern.
Fiona’s effort went into reducing her support for her clients. This seemed so counterintuitive and yet she understood that she did not want to continually promote dependency. She retained her commitment to good listening and conveying a tone of warm respect. Interestingly she did report her effort to reduce her tone of concerned compassion as she could see that it fed into her client’s perception that she was more on their side than any member of their own family. She began to increase the time gap between her sessions to communicate that she wanted to give people adequate time to observe and experiment with ideas in their real world and to use counselling as a place to review instead of a place to be changed. Rather than give advice she asked questions about the clients own problem solving efforts – what had they learned about what was helpful and what wasn’t? She became more careful about sharing information from professional training. We talked a good deal in supervision about when she would ascertain the appropriate timing for sharing information. Her new rule of thumb became to ensure her client had explored their own patterns of coping thoroughly before she would convey relevant professional knowledge. She would select carefully the information to share that matched her client’s own descriptions. For example when a woman she was working with said that she always did better when she slowed things down, Fiona opened up a conversation about ways to reduce the physiological effects of stress and anxiety. She was able to add some ideas for temporary stress reduction in a non-authoritative manner. Her key message in sharing information was: “This may or may not be helpful for you but might add to the ideas you are trialling.” As a professional helper Fiona was learning to collaborate with her clients, jointly investigating their patterns for dealing with their symptoms or challenges in their important relationship contexts. This more equal posture was very different to the previous ‘one up, one down’. It was providing Fiona with a new way to view her helping efforts and provided a platform for a sustainable counselling career.
Next blog: a story of triangling/side taking in a helping relationship
‘The One Up, One Down Pattern‘ – Jenny Brown
Working on best functioning promotes the building of a more resilient and less dependent self. This is a different emphasis from a focus on trying to fix symptoms, such as depression or low self- confidence.
Last week I chatted to a young woman who said: “I just have to find a way to improve my self-confidence.” She had experienced many periods of low mood and had struggled to find energy to establish herself as an independent adult. She hadn’t managed to get her driving licence, or complete her university courses. Since her school days she had shifted back and forth from dependence on her parents to dependence on a religious or social group. I asked what she would work on if her goal was to function for herself a bit better each day. We chatted about how working on best functioning, such as her idea that she could cook daily simple meals, promotes the building of a more resilient and less dependent self. This is a different emphasis from a focus on trying to fix symptoms of depression or poor self- confidence. It got me thinking about Michael, another person who had worked to improve his day to day functioning and reduce his dependence on his wife Shelley to manage his life. Here is an excerpt of his story:
Being more real rather than feeling better (From Growing Yourself Up, J Brown. Ch. 12 Symptoms & Setbacks P 176- 179)
As Michael came to see the correlation between his dependence on relationships and his sense of wellbeing, he could shift his focus from trying to fix his symptoms to trying to grow himself up. This growing-up process was going to need to be taken one step at a time as the wiring to react to others was deeply ingrained. When he had focused on how badly he felt, how anxious he was, and how hard it was to sleep, he found that he would become increasingly overwhelmed. His symptom focus left him feeling helpless and looking to the ‘experts’ to come up with a solution. However, when Michael started to work on himself and not his symptoms, he took his focus off his feelings and started to work on his day-to-day adult responsibilities, such as getting to bed at a reasonable hour, eating three meals a day, doing daily light exercise and getting himself to work on time. These efforts were focused on using his inner resources at a basic level rather than looking to others to motivate him with praise and encouragement.
Prior to tackling his own self-management, Michael had fallen into a pattern of allowing Shelley to treat him as the patient. He was letting her manage all his appointments, as well as allowing her to remind him to take his medication and cook and clean up for him. Shelley talked through how she could return to treating Michael as her husband and not be a caretaker for him. This meant she started asking for his help again and shared with him her own daily ups and downs. She worked to even up the lopsided relationship rather than to focus on trying to fix Michael.
As Michael worked to better understand himself in his family he began to consider ways he could make contact with his father and begin to get to know him as a person rather than continue to write him off as a villain. None of these efforts was easy for Michael and his progress in managing himself and staying in contact with others was often slow. His anxieties about letting people down at work, and his consequent drain in energy and sleep disruption, were also slow to improve. Michael did, however, report feeling stronger as a person, with a growing acceptance of the sensitivities generated in his earlier relationships.
I recall Michael speaking about the struggle to accept how hard it was to function without lots of approval At times I get so discouraged with how consumed I get with my awful thoughts. I can see that both Mum and Dad, in different ways, struggled with their confidence and looked to others to boost them. I guess it isn’t any wonder that I struggle as well.
I wish I had been given a better deal from my family patterns but I get that I have to do the best I can with what I’ve got.
For Michael, and others like him who struggle with disproportionate fears and discouragements, it’s helpful to take the focus off feelings and to look at doing things that strengthen maturity from within. Following are three guidelines that can assist with this in the midst of challenging symptoms.
1. Function rather than fix
Look at the things you can manage to do each day that keep you responsible for yourself. When life energy is at a low ebb this might not be much more than feeding yourself three decent meals and getting out of bed when the alarm goes off.
2. Be a person rather than a patient
Take care not to allow others to take over basic responsibilities for you. Even when receiving medical advice stay involved in your choices and keep managing your own diary.
3. Keep in contact with others
The easiest thing to do when the pressure is high is to avoid others, especially those who are most challenging to your confidence. The more you are able to maintain some contact with a variety of people, the more you are able to experience yourself as a solid person. You can see that the focus is on taking small, realistic steps to be more of a self. It isn’t the same as a purely medical approach to mental illness which focuses on fixing the symptoms. Rather than analyse the severity of symptoms, the premise is that when a person can lift their functioning just a tad, their symptoms start to become less overwhelming.
Keep putting one foot in front of the other
To grow up in the face of the energy drain of anxiety and depression can be an enormous challenge. The most important principle is to not give up your responsibility for managing yourself to the best of your current ability, no matter how compromised this may be. The more you fall into becoming a patient, who is dependent on others and medication to solve the problem, the more you contribute to an increase in helplessness. This doesn’t mean medication isn’t sometimes a helpful choice but it should not be at the expense of working on managing yourself in the basic responsibilities of each day. And if you can see that a family member is taking on the role of managing your condition, it’s timely for you to step up and get back in charge of your own health care. This is not easy when you feel so lacking in personal resources but it will assist you to hold onto enough adult self to be able to keep moving forward wisely and compassionately.
‘A Focus on Functioning not Fixing’ – Jenny Brown