Happy new year 2010
December 31, 2009 by Vauna Beauvais · Leave a Comment
Happy New Years Graphic provided by MUDTRAP.COM
www.365greetings.com
Rose-Tinted Specs
May 16, 2009 by Vauna Beauvais · Leave a Comment
Sometimes we all get a little illusionary in relationships.
In fact, in adolescence, its an absolute must-do. Not only because of the social norms, but also because it is a natural and healthy developmental phase to go through, usually throughout the teenage years.
If it happens when you are 35, 45, 0r 55, even, then clearly you aren’t passing through a phase of development, but rather have regressed back, for some reason or another.
Four examples of illusions in clients relationships
When Mr K ’rediscovered’ the thrill of joining up with the football fans and going to all the away games and getting drunk for the whole day (something he had not done for 18 years) he knew that it was related to the fact that his wife wanted a divorce (yet she would not go until the last of their children left home in 3 years time). Mr K was reasonably ok with what he was doing, considering it an ‘escape’ and harmless energy release (but discounting the sometimes dangerous atmosphere).
During couples therapy, Mrs J told me how she ’cheered up’ when she put on her Boyzone DVD’s every evening, while her husband was in their attic study on the Internet until midnight. Although, she said that she would much rather he come down and be with her. Yet when he did, they both felt uncomfortable and did not make any conversation.
D said that he just needed to sort out his depression. There was nothing wrong with his life, nothing wrong with his relationship, and certainly nothing wrong with his partner. She was the best thing that had ever happened to him. They were best friends, perfect lovers, and true soul-mates. She was the perfect body shape, the perfect temperament for him, and was loved by ‘everyone’. All he wanted from therapy was to concentrate on getting his mood back up and ‘getting going’ again.
H wanted to cope with not seeing her partner very often. All the problems were due to his work, and the demands placed on him. H was super-reasonable about the circumstances of their living arrangement (i.e. he was just at home two days per week). She complained of her super-sensitivity, and disliked what she called ‘being weak’. Everything would be all right in her life and in her relationship if her partners workplace did not put so many obstacles in their way (i.e. it is the organisation that is the problem, not the relationship).
What do all of these stories have in common?
Positive Relationship Illusions.
There two types of illusions that I am referring to are
- I. Idolisation
- II. Idealisation
Idolisation
In the first one, Idolisation, we uncritically ‘love’ a figure or group from the world of music, entertainment or sport. Celebrities receive wide exposure in the mass media and are available to us via TV, events and concerts, films, etc.
Idolisation is based on two components
- Worship
- Modelling
.
Worshipping is about intense admiration and involves behaviours such as repeatedly viewing or listening to them, collecting memorabilia, going to events.
Modelling refers to the desire to be like the idol, and involves attempts at trying to be like them, or taking on their values and beliefs.
The purpose of idolising is to shield us from hurt and fears (for example, isolation or lonliness). We withdraw from ‘real’ relationship and seek to love and be loved by a completely dependable, constantly available object.
We create the idol and it provides both satisfaction and a sense of security.
Being a ‘fan’ offers a way to sublimate romantic and sexual yearnings.
Media stars are the obvious choice of idol because they are a ‘legitimate’ choice (its socially acceptable to be a fan) and because they media stars are always inaccessible (i.e. it is unlikely that a real romantic relationship will evolve and thereby spoil the fantasy of having a reciprocal relationship).
Idolisation is usually done with awareness.
Idealisation
The process of idealisation, however, is usually not done in awareness. It is a subconscious process. Idealised qualities are projected onto the person or situation and even when we are confronted with faults or weaknesses we deny them. We are projecting what we most desire, and we are believing it is real.
Idealisation illusions can include:
- Illusions of self-positivity
- Optimism about the future
- Exaggerated perceptions of control
The purpose that idealising serves is to keep up our self-esteem in the face of threats. So, for example, we could believe someone (or our relationship with them) was perfect, i.e. avoid acknowledging flaws, and this would assist us in side-stepping the pain of disappointment. Or, in another example, we could be idealising a person or situation to avoiding becoming aware of disapproval from them, and denying the discomfort and unease.
They don’t call them defences for nothing
Everyone is doing the best that they know how at any one time.
We sort things out when we are ready to.
.
If a situation or a stage of life is perceived as unsolvable, if a person has to live with anxiety or stress for a fair amount of time, then it is understandable that defences will be used.
They can be quite handy at times.
Defences can enable us to: carry on, keep functioning, see things out.
Using processes of idolisation and idealisation is normal in small degrees. For peace of mind and a relaxed psyche, though, we need to work through defences, and gradually take them down.
Solutions
A possible therapeutic direction for using idealisation would be about acknowledging flaws and weaknesses gradually, at a pace that is the same as your ability to deal with them.
For idolisation, look at what you are doing, and see the good in it. Use the idol as a model and, along with your therapist, integrate aspects of that person as appropriate.
Additionally, spin the projection around. Discover what the idol ‘gives back’ to you in your ‘relationship’ with them, or acknowledge what it is that you so selflessly give to them, and find an appropriate way to give that to yourself (or find a way to get it for yourself).
Amazing team-work (funny video)
April 26, 2009 by Vauna Beauvais · Leave a Comment
I came across a video and I’d like to share it with you, to demonstrate what can be achieved when you have a vision, a shared objective, and good team-work to put it into practice.
Sunday Western
Hill farmers in Wales on a project that really shows off their skills in a most amusing way
Take a look (approx 2 and a half minutes of video)
Freud dies
April 17, 2009 by Vauna Beauvais · Leave a Comment
Sir Clement Freud died yesterday.
He very much disliked talking about the fact that he had the famous grandfather, Sigmund Freud - the founder of Psychoanalysis.
Clement Freud must have been somewhere around my age when he was doing the Chunky dog food commercials. I remember them well. Those adverts were one of a very small minority of ads that were funny. We used to really giggle at them.
A few chosen words about Sir Freud
BBC News
The Guardian
Egg-hunting
April 12, 2009 by Vauna Beauvais · Leave a Comment
.
Happy Easter!
Do you think of Easter as a family time, a time of religious significance, good for spring cleaning, an opportunity to catch up on work, a time to go on holiday, a few days to do DIY or sorting out the garden?
A lot of people take time off work, over Easter, or they have enforced holiday time due to their organisations being closed. Some people are working throughout the whole of Easter, just as if it were another regular, or shift pattern, weekend. Some people would never dream of working over Easter for reasons given in the paragraph above. Some people don’t have a lot of choice.
.
The Whitehouse is holding an Easter Egg Hunt. Perhaps it’s a little different from the ones in suburban Nottingham?
I remember time spent with cousins during childhood, running around their garden looking for Easter eggs, hidden by an auntie, who was more excited than we were.
A friend sent me an email over the weekend, asking me to search for an egg that she had hidden somewhere in the world. Her clue was very full, and so it was easy-peasy. Still, a lot of fun, though.
Here is the site that she directed me to to find my hidden Easter egg.
.
Hide an egg for someone, send them an email to ask them to look for it.
You can give them a clue. Once they begin to look, if there are other eggs in the area, it will say, “this is not your egg” until they come across the egg that has been hidden for them.
The site is an airline company, and they are doing an Easter promotion.
Your recipient can also win fights with Lufthansa, if your egg is a winner.
The pain of betrayal and the stress of denial…
April 5, 2009 by Vauna Beauvais · Leave a Comment
.
The other weekend I went to the theatre to see a play, made of a true story, entitled ‘Pack of Lies’.
It was about an ordinary English suburban couple (husband and wife Bill and Ruth Search)and their daughter, Gay Search, living an ordinary life in the 1950’s and 60’s.
They had made friends with a couple across the road, who had moved in from Canada. And they had known them for about 5 years, spending nice friendly evenings with them, and having them pop around for cups of tea and so on.
One day a government agency official descends on the Search family, and persuades them to allow covert viewing of the neighbours house. The family reluctantly agree, not only unaware that the spying operation from their spare room would go on for a long time, but also totally unprepared for the effect that it would have on them to find out that their friends and neighbours were not what the Search family had known them to be.
The Krogers, across the road, were actually Morris and Lona Cohen, a pair of spies, who worked with fellow spy Gordon Lonsdale, photographing and encoding as microdots various pieces of material which they then sent to their colleagues in Russia. The microdots were sent inside antiquarian books.
Ruth Search, found the ongoing observation operation very disturbing. She often got very angry with the government officials for treating her ‘friends’ in this way. When the Krogers (actually the Cohens) were arrested in January 1961, due in part as a result of evidence gained from spying on them from the Search household, Ruth Search became very ill and died not long afterward.
.
It seems that the pain of betrayal, and the battering down of her beliefs in the friendship, along with the strain of attempting to carry on as normal with a covert operation going on in her house, were all too much for her.
She was unable to live with the reality. Ruth tried to cling on to her reality for as long as possible, until it was impossible. Ruth was in denial.
There are many processes that we use to keep parts of reality hidden from ourselves. See here for 10 ways that denial is used, and see whether you can spot how many apply to you, in regard to the things that you need to come to terms with, or change, in your life.
Using your strengths to produce results
March 8, 2009 by Vauna Beauvais · 1 Comment
.
Yesterday I took a little thin, unread, book down from my bookshelf and decided to read it. My bookshelves are full of unread books (as well as books that I have read). I find they so much come in handy when I have a weekend with no engagements planned, nothing on the TV, and I am slightly tired, anyway. Its like having a fridge full of brain-food at the ready.
It wasnt just that “MANAGING ONESELF” by Peter F Drucker looked like it could be read in an hour or so, but it was the title that appealed to me also.
“I could do with a bit of self-management”, I thought. I have recently identified a way in which I would like to be living my life differently, and I need to do things differently (obviously) to bring this about. “So maybe this little book will inspire me”, I thought.
I hadn’t realised that the book was written by a business managment guru. A bit synchronistic really, since I am currently a delegate on a Leadership and Management training course, as you know. (I had expected it to be one of those simple little self-help booklets that you get free when you give your email address on a good website).
So flicking through the internet I found that Drucker taught generations of managers the importance of picking the best people, of focusing on opportunities and not problems. In those days that was ‘out -there’.
Apparently, Warren Bennis, a management guru himself , asked Drucker how he came up with so many original insights. The reply was, “I learn only through listening,” he said, pausing, “to myself.” (I’m also a big advocate of intuition, and trusting in myself, so I liked that).
Because Ducker was born into a highly educated professional family, in Austria in 1909 (which was a time of a cultural and economic hub) his family mingled with people such as Sigmund Freud. Perhaps Druckers worldliness and style of expression is as a result of him first having met Freud at the age of eight years old, and the fact that his parents would entertain Freud, and other members of the Vienese intellectual elite, regularly in their home.
In fact, for me, the comparison with Freud could be stretched further when I read that Drucker’s most famous text, The Practice of Management, published in 1954, “…laid out the American corporation like a well-dissected frog in a college laboratory”. (Freud began by dissecting frogs in his shed at home!).
Anyway. Back to my little book. In this book, ‘Managing Oneself’, Drucker talks about managment in terms of ‘enhancing performance’. “Well, that’ll do”, I thought, “If I need to do things differently, then I can enhance my performance and see if my life is different”.
So, I’m going to share with you the bones of the book, and how I have interpreted the bits that are relevant for me - and hopefully, you too. (If you really want to, you can read the whole book in this PDF file ).
Drucker says that a person can perform only from strength. And that most people think that they know what they are good at, but they are usually wrong.
“One cannot build performance on weakness”, he asserts, “let alone on something that one cannot do at all.”
I’m not sure that I totally agree with that. And I am not convinced that I am ready to say it is not true, either. I have an open mind about those statements. With anything like that, its a case of asking myself, “How useful is it to operate as if this were true?” (See the NLP Presuppostions for more like that).
So, lets assume that this is true, because believing this will be useful. “A person can only perform from strength”.
Drucker also states that, “We need to know our strengths in order to know where we belong”.
Again, according to our man, Drucker, the only way to discover your strengths is through feedback analysis.
So, lets go now, on to discovering our strengths. This is the process that he reccomends us to use:
Take a key decision (or a key action)
My decision is ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Write down what you expect will happen:
What I expect to happen is………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
9 or 12 months later, compare the actual results with your expectations.
Instruction: Go to your outlook calendar, or your mobile phone, PDF, or whatever, and pop a reminder alarm in for you to review your expectations with actual outcomes.
I have now done this to remind me on…………………………………………………………………….. (date)
A very simple exercise isn’t it? Not very satisfactory now, I grant you, because you wanted results straight away, didn’t you? Sorry.
This method, long as it is, does have merits. You are using proper measurement. A quote from Drucker, “What is measured improves”
You are taking the guesswork out of knowing where you need to improve. If you do this across the board (i.e. with everything that you want to do / change/ become) you can see what it is that you are doing that is at the root of your failures (remember the presupposition there is no failure only feedback?) You are seeing where you are not particularly competent. You are also seeing what are your strengths (ah at last!).
Drucker is known for believing that taking action without thinking is the cause of every failure. (Sounds reasonable to me, if you have an outcome in mind, and want to control the results, at least. There is also a case for not trying to predict, and just benefit from unpredictability, but that still doesn’t mean that you act without thinking).
So, now that you have the results of your feedback analysis:
- put yourself where your strengths can produce results.
- put your energies on working on improving your strengths
- improve skills or aquire new ones
- gain knowledge (in areas other than your expertise)
- remedy your bad habits (the things that you do or fail to do that inhibit your effectiveness and performance).
.
Drucker states that what we should NOT do is spend (waste?) a lot of time on improving areas of low competence.
Instead of using energy to improve from incompetence to mediocrity, use time and energy to improve from good or first rate, to excellence. Turn yourself, then, from a competent person into a star performer.
Additionally, Drucker states in this little book, that we should
- work out how we perform,
- know what are our personal values
- be aware of personal your ethics system
- find out where we should belong
- understand what we should contribute
- take responsibility for relationships
Knowing all of this enables you to choose actions by thinking.
You can then say to an offer or to an assignment,
”Yes I will do that. But this is the way that I should be doing it. This is the way that it should be structured. This is the way that relationships should be. These are the kinds of results to expect from me and in which paticular time-frame, because this is who I am.”
Now, Drucker becomes aligned with Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in saying that successful careers (and lives?) are not planned, they develop when people are prepared for opportunities because they know thier strengths, their method of doing things, and their values. Knowing where one belongs … can transform an ordinary person into an outstanding performer.
A star performer in life.
Is your mind closed or open?
March 1, 2009 by Vauna Beauvais · Leave a Comment
How rigid is your mind?
.
Apparently, over 15 years of an average waking life is spent just watching TV.
How many days of an average life is spent reading webpages?
Desktop publishing and the Internet have increased access to production for everyone (for me, my blog and website, for example).
These days we have a more radical understanding of contemporary life because of the information that we can access.
When we watch TV, or surf the web, we are creating our own meanings and emotions. Even our dreams and our own sense of identity are shaped by the media.
- But how much does the stuff you watch or read about influence your opinions?
- Does reading this website change your decision about how to act in your life?
Way back in 1944 America, Lazarsfeld conducted a study called ‘The Peoples Choice’ in an attempt to discover the influence of the media over the American voters. He found that voting intentions were very resistant to media influence.
- Often people had already very well defined political views - and people read the papers which supported their views, not ones which might open their minds!
- When confronted with challenging ideas, voters simply filtered out messages that did not fit their preconceptions.
Only 5% of people were actually converted.
It used to be thought a bad thing that the media had a potential to influence. Even now, people are still wary - and there is still a lot of talk of whether TV and other media influence us, and in what ways it does so.
What I am wondering: “Is it still true that only 5% of people have minds open enough to be influenced?”
Are you going to read this blog and skim over all of the personal development stuff in the articles or self-help sections and filter out all messages that do not support your views?
Or are you going to be one of the 5% of people whose mind is opened and who can be influenced by new ideas to make your life better?
Three little words… (not what you think)
February 22, 2009 by Vauna Beauvais · Leave a Comment
As you come into my therapy room, you pass through a part of the building that is quite boring.
I decided to liven up a stretch of wall with some great wall-art.
Three words that read ‘Love, Laugh, Live’ now reside there.
- Is that a good mission statement for a living human being? You might also like to read about how to be happy
- If you’d like further lexical inspiration, mouse over to quotes about being alive
- If you were really dissapointed that those three little words were not what you thought, find some romance here
Debutante arrives
February 21, 2009 by Vauna Beauvais · Leave a Comment
Stating the obvious
Even before ‘Blog’ was picked as word of the year by Merriam-Webster dictionary in 2004, people have been enraptured by the blogosphere.
Blog, of course, is a shortened form of the word ‘weblog’ which does what it says on the tin - it is a log of web recordings.
Normally a blog is a written piece, with good photos, and the odd video popped in from time to time. As each dated entry (post) is added, it sits above its predecessor, and so the weblog entries are displayed in reverse chronological order - just like all of the pages on this site that are accessed from the blue toolbar (the black toolbar pages are static pages, and are not blog-style pages)
Years ago, when I myself was one of the enraptured, I would be content with reading almost anything, because blogs were all such a novelty, and there was little choice around. These days the coverage is of all subjects that you can think of, and the scope is as broad and deep as the pacific ocean (probably).
Who knew?
People have taken to blogging like a duck to that massive body of water, and the activity of blogging has grown exponentially. People from all over the world, from all different socio-economic groups make blogs. So, what is the global fascination with blogging?
Blogging is so easy. There are really easy to use blog sites, that offer you a ready-made nice-looking blog template system, where you just type in your stuff and press publish, and its all for free! No Webmaster, no SEO, no hosting fees, nothing.
Anyone can create an online presence, and therefore can exist in cyberspace.
Why should your therapist or counsellor blog?
As an independent counselling and therapy professional, Blogging is great for me.
I can
Not only can I evolve and develop by researching and writing this stuff, but also, I can learn from the comments that you provide - from my feedback from you.
Blogging allows me to connect with you in a way that a static site never could (and never did!).
I can demonstrate to you my individuality. Show you what I am like as a person. And, unlike the articles that you read here, in my blog, I can show the fun and light-hearted side of myself.
When you have sessions with me, you will find that I am good at what I do, I take you seriously and I find out what needs to be done, and get down to it. But also, there is room for some real human relating, and that includes laughing sometimes (yes, even in counselling and psychotherapy - sometimes) . Not only do I want to share information with you, but I want to share a more whole view of me as a person. I hope you like it 
What to do on a Friday afternoon…
What is the point of being beautiful if you never go outside?
I have decided that it might be worth popping my blog onto some excellent bloglisting sites, so that a few more people can see me.
I have listed them below:
You might do this with your own blog, too - feel free to use this list of blog directories.
Sign Up to Vauna's Newsletter
Loading...