Month July 2017

Removing the log-jams in your life

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Eleos counselling blog_logjams_of lifeSelf examination

One of the character strengths you will often notice that successful people have is their approach to life in general. So how do you improve your approach to life? First, you need to assess where you are at this very moment. This could take some time. Depending on yourself awareness you may find this quite difficult. The trick here is to look at yourself as others see you; separating yourself from the way you feel about yourself; a difficult task indeed for some.

The goal here is not to be ultra critical of yourself, it is to have clarity about how you really are, and how others experience you, with the goal of making positive changes to the way you think.

When professional lumberjacks discover a log-jam, whenever they are trying to transport logs down a river. There will often climb the largest and tallest tree beside the river, so they can have a greater overlook of the problem and find the log which is jamming up the rest. Fundamentally, what they are looking for is the one log that is creating the jam. Once the lumberjack’s   remove the log that is Holding back the rest or the “key-log”, the rest of the logs can flow down the river. Nevertheless, an inexperienced lumberjack could spend hours, if not days trying to move logs around and not move the jam.

The point here is, you don’t have to necessarily change everything about you,  or all your thinking at once; just a few ways your thinking need’s to be readjusted.

Like the logs, once you remove the log-jam in your life, your life will flow in the right direction.

Here are some questions you can ask yourself.

How do you feel about yourself?

What do you think causes the greatest problems when you’re dealing with others?

What negative thinking constantly controls your mindset.

How to help somebody who is recovering from an addiction: praise and why sometimes this can have a negative effect.

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We must apologise for not put in a blog up since the beginning of the year, Ewhat price can be a bad thingleos counselling has undergone a revamp of its website, which has taken us away from blogging, we intend to rectify this right now with this blog, hope you enjoy.

 

Recovering from any form of addiction can be hard, we have already discussed in another blog post how one of the overarching feelings that a person has when he or she is recovering from addiction is shame.

Recently while reading a book completely unrelated to counselling, I  was to find an interesting quote in the book  “the practice of practice”(Harum, 2014).The author quotes research carried out by Peter Gollwitzer into the subject of motivation; motivation is certainly one of the key ingredients that someone who is recovering from a substance misuse difficulty or behavioural problems such as gambling, needs.

 

Often what will happen is, that the person who is recovering, will not feel particularly encouraged by their support system ( the same people that encouraged them in the first place ). Often, a few months into their sobriety or change of habit a recovering person feels de-motivated as encouragement dies down, as people think that they are over their problem. In fact, this is often the hardest part of their recovery, and when relapses happen the most.

What often happens, the recovering person will state their goal to their support system which is often family and friends and people who wanted them to give up drinking, using drugs or number of other things such as, overeating, under eating, using drugs, or any number of negative patterns of behaviour. What in fact Gollwitzer says is that people need “ advance praise”, If we again return to the subject of shame and compare it to praise. Praise can be seen as the opposite of shame, so why wouldn’t a person in recovery want praise instead of Shame, with its added feelings of condemnation and judgement.

Unfortunately looking for “advance praise” can have a negative effect on recovery. Often a recovering person will gush about their goals, to others, and they would often be praised for setting such goals. The reason why a recovering addict would do this is that praise feels good, it fulfils their desire to identify as someone who is recovered, rather than in recovery. What Gollwitzer says is that our imagination is good at hamstringing the, a person who wants to change.

In fact, when somebody has been recovering, a short time their imaginative brain takes the praising which falls on them and tricks them into believing he or she have already done what he or she said he or she would do to recover;They believe that in fact  have fulfilled their goals by staying sober or making change into their negative behaviour but, unfortunately for some people, this can take many years. Moreover, it can also take many years to recover the trust that they had lost when they were indulging in negative behaviours.

 

Reference

 

Harum, J. (2014). The practice of practice. New York: Sol Ut Press.