Category: Behaviour

Categories
Behaviour Health

Is Anorexia Nervosa a Weapon?

The great majority of we human animals want to live in communities and follow the same lives as others with the same rules. There have always been a much smaller number of rebels who do not want to follow this example. They consist of leaders, stuck-insiders and creative geniuses. Leaders are those who have their own ideas and their aim is to teach them to groups of people who want to be told what to do. If they don’t want that then the leaders will coerce them by brute force, i.e. rulers who need to raise armies. The rest of the outsiders consist of two species. The first are the stick-insiders who want to do their own thing or nothing, but don’t want or cannot because of their retiring nature show it to anyone else because they are fundamentally terrified of their fellow creatures. (more of this later). The second kind are those who are the imaginative geniuses that prefer to educate themselves and spread the fruits of their research to all of us. Einstein is a good example. Although he could mix with the people he loved, he himself admitted that his work came first.

When people’s lives become unbearable, the bravest of them go on strike. When the suffragettes were imprisoned the only way they could make themselves noticed was to go on hunger strike. This is a very effective way of drawing attention to their plight. Nelson Mandela did the same for the same reason when he was in prison. Their enemies knew they would get blamed if they died and that would rouse wrath outside.

Whenever a large group of people feel they are not free enough to do what they want and say, a new outbreak of strikes emerge. Today there are many young people, mostly women, who go on hunger strike. Only we don’t call it that, it has been dubbed as an illness: anorexia nervosa. Why? For the same reason that Russian politicians had their political prisoners diagnosed as mentally ill which gave the authorities a right to take away their freedom. How can anything be an illness when it comes into being as the result of deliberate action by a person?

What do we do? Put them in a different kind of prison: hospital. Unbelievable!! Here are two good reasons why girls go on reduction dieting and put their lives in danger. First, they want to follow the fashion of being very thin so they can wear certain kinds of clothes that most other girls are wearing. The other reason is to rebel against their parents. You won’t believe this, but it is treated in the same way as the suffragettes were treated, but in a less brutal manner.

One of the reasons I gave up being a therapist is that the usual method is to try and get them to eat again or to go into hospital in extreme cases. There is only one thing to do. Help them to win back for themselves the right to care for themselves properly and to work out for themselves a regime good enough to keep them well and prevent them from dying. You have to have a will of iron to give up eating. This means that when they finally see what they have been doing to themselves, they are in a position that enables them to solve the problem for themselves by learning to give up their illusions and come to terms with reality which means accepting their true selves, not anyone elses.

Categories
Behaviour Depression

How Depressed are you Today?

When I did my psychotherapy training we were told to treat clients with care because they were vulnerable and to listen to what they say. Whenever anyone lays down a rule to everybody I always question it. We are all descendants of survivors. The further back we go in history the worse were the living circumstances for the vast majority. I believe it is best for practitioners to talk with them as we talk to everyone else. We are all in the same boat. A client once said to me “You cannot imagine how awful it is to be depressed”. “Indeed I can. I grew up during the war and was depressed throughout my adolescence. In those days no-one paid attention to children unless they didn’t do their homework”.

My client said “Am I working with a damaged therapist?” “Of course you are. You won’t find anyone who is not. My experience is that unless we have worked through out own difficulties and come to terms with them, we are not fit to work with clients”.

One day I had a phone call from a lady who was very distressed and wanted to come to see me that afternoon. She was crying so hard I could scarcely make out what she was saying. I made an appointment in two days time. When she arrived my husband opened the door and told her to go upstairs to my consulting room.

She sat down and continued crying very loudly for a few minutes. As she slowed down I spoke to her. “How long have you been doing this?” She stopped crying and looked very surprised. “I don’t know” she said. “You must know. You are doing it” I replied. “ten years?” She thought for a moment and started to cry again. “Two weeks?” I said. “You are slowing down now. I think I can cry much better than you.” I threw myself about and made the strongest screeches I could imagine. “See what I can do! Try it again and put more energy into it.”

She burst into laughter. When she had stopped she said “Don’t you want to know my story?” “Not particularly, but you can if you must.”

She started and before long she got into her stride.. I stopped her after ten minutes. “Do you know what you are doing?” “What do you mean?” she said. “You are very good at complaining. One of the best I’ve ever had.” She paused again and then laughed and couldn’t stop. “I didn’t know psychotherapists were like this.” “No they are not” I replied.

“Can I come to see you again? I don’t know what you are doing but I feel a lot better.”

“Well I suppose so but you must practice laughing every time you feel like crying. It must be more fun.”

“You do say funny things!” she said as she put her coat on and went downstairs chuckling to herself . My husband was astounded. “Whatever did you do with her? When I opened the door she was crying and ten minutes later I walked past your door and she was laughing!” There must be something in this psychotherapy lark. Well done!”

This lady came back after only two more visits. This doesn’t happen twice. Every client is different. She was an attention seeker, a particular species that I come across quite often. All they have to do is to find a new method.

Categories
Behaviour Guilt

Animal Instincts

Being able to use words is a huge advantage and a huge disadvantage. We need to remember all the time that we are still part of the animal kingdom. All animals except ourselves just get on with their lives by following their instincts. They know what kind of animals they are. I can’t tell you how because I don’t know. All I can do is guess.

One of the ways we can explore how different other animals are from us is to take one into our house as a pet who is not put into a cage but has the freedom of the house and garden and other nearby houses and gardens. We give them a name and in many ways treat them as part of the family. We then develop a tendency to see them as anthropomorphics. We talk to them and teach them tricks and make rules for them which they learn to obey. This we call training. Note that these rules are all for the benefit of the human beings who own them.

There is an enormous popularity for stories about talking animals. Both children and adults love them. It seems to me that our species longs to make other animals more and more like ourselves. This works very well until a cat catches a bird, for example. We treat them like backward children, especially when they break our rules. Hunting comes naturally to cats and they do it whenever they have the opportunity. They soon realise that instead of people praising him for a killing, they usually scold them for it and try to release the prey.

Cats learn fast. They soon drop the habit of giving a person their prey as a gift and learn to sneak it into the house. When this happens for the first time, the cat shows us by its behaviour that it experiences the feeling of guilt. The greater the number of things the cat does that annoy their owners, the more the animal is obliged to change its natural behaviour.

When we remember that we were once animals who couldn’t talk, we can get a much better understanding of why our lives can be so difficult. We still have vestiges, deep in our unconscious minds, of the basic instincts our far distant ancestors obeyed. They often clash with the rules we are taught, mostly when we were very young: rules that have been made not by nature but by all different kinds of religions and governments to ensure that people fit into their own particular society. This is why guilt is one of the most common feelings from which we suffer.

The problem of consciousness and unconsciousness has been studied for centuries. Consciousness is how we live our lives when we are awake. Unconsciousness prevails when we are asleep. Hence we are our real selves when we are asleep and alone which is one of the reasons we are so interested in dreams. Dreams do not lie, but most of them have to be decoded because we all have elements in ourselves that we find disturbing. I believe the more individual we are and the more creative the more we dream and the harder it is us to live our conventional daytime lives. We have to know what we can say to whom or we would soon be in deep waters. Is it possible to be a real individual person and at the same time manage to find a place for ourselves where we can use our talents and maintain our own persons? It isn’t easy but it is the main underlying motive of these pieces I am writing.