There was a decent program on BBC1 Wales last night about the dramatic rise in heroin use in Wales in recent years and why there are 18 month waiting lists for access to services and people deliberately commiting crimes to get caught so they can qualify for treatment. It was presented by John Cale, who was in the Velvet Underground, and returned home to Wales to find out the situation.
I have just started volunteering and training in this field in Cardiff, and the program scrapes the surface of a huge problem in this area, in heroin use and availability and in the inadequacy and lack of funding for treatment services.
“Rock star John Cale is no stranger to drugs - years of cocaine, heroin and alcohol abuse could have killed him.
Now the former Velvet Underground star returns to Wales to find heroin causing havoc in our communities.
He meets addicts, drugs workers and politicians - and asks why help is sometimes hard to find.”
How we are: News, views and information:
Recovering from psychosis without drugs • cognitive-behavioural therapy and psychosis • breast screening – the unrealised facts • black-and-white thinking • frowning and happiness • unsettled at school • sick notes • teen depression • countering hidden racial bias • weather and memory • attraction • cannabis study • voice blindness • gender-based responses to abuse • the need for social connection
A question of form
Pat Williams explores why new ideas almost always adopt old forms
Transformation in the NHS
Denise Winn discovers how a determined approach to change is revolutionising care at the Royal Bolton Hospital
Orchestrating excellence
Charles Callis considers the social potential of organised group activities that are allowed to develop organically
Therapy: the evidence about what works
There is research evidence to support many positive therapeutic outcomes. Mick Cooper has put it all together
Brain and mind: an unfathomable relationship?
James Le Fanu tells Ivan Tyrrell why he asserts that reductionist science can never explain the mystery of ourselves
Dancing out of step
Miriam Chachamu says she doesn’t take at face value what her clients tell her
A life in service
Andrew Jones’s effectiveness as a chaplain in the Royal Air Force was completely transformed by the human givens approach
He explains why targets make organisations worse and controlling costs makes costs higher. This elegant dissection of the organisational madness that pervades our culture was given at the 2009 conference of the Human Givens Institute and lays ‘Target Obsession Disorder’ (TOD) bare.
Why hypnosis and the power of the mind matter in medicine
In the 1930s a Bedouin tribesman introduced a young Irish doctor to the powers of the subconscious mind. Sixty years later, after doing over four thousand operations using hypnosis. Dr Jack Gibson talks to Joe Griffin >> Read
Normal birth can be pain free Sheila Barratt-Smith tells Denise Winn that the images and language used to describe birth can determine whether a woman experiences pain — or euphoria>>Read
The Emotional Needs Audit (ENA) is an online survey that has been running for several years and now has been filled in by over 8,400 respondents. The survey aims to find out how well we feel our innate emotional needs are being met. The results below are arrived at by adding together all respondents who
scaled themselves as only 1, 2 or 3 on a scale of 1 to 7.
Here are a selection of the results for the UK, first in percentages and extrapolated to the estimated population of the UK: 60,500,000.
33.4% of the population say they suffer from unexplained physical symptoms - 20,207,000 people
32.5% do not feel in control of their life most of the time - 19,662,500 people
36.6% do not feel well connected to any part of the wider community - 22,143,000 people
31% say they have no status that is acknowledged by others - 18,755,000 people
26.2% say they are not achieving things and don’t feel competent in any area of their life -15,851,000 people
32.6% say they are not being mentally or physically stretched in ways that make life meaningful. -19,723,000people. [8.7% marked not at all, that means they marked 1 on the scale of 1-7, and translates to 5,263,500 people..]
Aric Sigman explains why craft-based skills are as important as academic ones, and need to be taught in all schools.
“Craft-based curriculum subjects have never had the cachet that more academic subjects enjoy. Yet the practical curriculum has consistently been found to confer more than the skills learned” …. Read the full article >>
The carrot and the stick - from Volume 14 No 2, (2007)
Mark Evans describes how working imaginatively with rewards and punishments has helped his clients achieve very swift change.
“Beer, curry and sex. Not your idea of a good night in? Well, it was for David, a warehouse manager whose anger was getting dangerously out of control, and it proved to be the turning point for him. It was the reward element of the reward and punishment strategy I have devised, which I have found highly effective in my work with a range of clients. “…… Read the full article >>
The emotional needs scale - from Volume 15, No 3 (2008)
Brett Culham describes the outcome of his research to validate the needs-based human givens approach to psychological health.
”The organising idea that defines the human givens approach is that universal human needs exist and that, if these needs are not met (through correct use of innate resources), psychological stress and distress ensue.This is a powerful idea that drives an effective approach to therapy but it has not till now been shown, in a way that would satisfy academic researchers, that fulfilment of the stated innate needs is a valid measure of mental health.”…… Read the full article >>
Archived online for the first time is an interview with Doris Lessing, from a 1993 edition of The Therapist (now the Human Givens Journal). Lessing thinks we are all much closer to craziness than we like to believe and in conversations with Ivan Tyrrell she talks about age, breakdowns and the ubiquitous ‘self-hater’:
A post called 12 Most Annoying Habits of Bad Therapists over at Psych Central, including eating during a session, turning up late, falling asleep, obvious clock watching and excessive note taking has generated a lot comments from people relating their own, often shocking, experiences of bad therapists. Therapists who bring in pets to sessions, dress inappropriately, never call you back, say “and how does that make you feel?”, who talk more about their own problems than yours, invite you to be their “friend” on Facebook, give you presents and answer the telephone mid session.
It’s a sad fact that these therapists and counsellors are out there, for whatever reason not doing their job effectively. There are several reasons why this may be the case, and if you are a distressed client wondering if you are wasting your time and money it may be helpful to look at what makes a good therapist and how they can become ineffective.
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Here are some reasons why a therapist may be ineffective. All human givens practitioners are trained in how to recognise and deal with these problems.
1) The therapist has no ’spare capacity’.
It is difficult to help people when you yourself have many problems jostling for attention in your own life. A therapist going through a stressful time themselves will be less helpful to someone else in need. The problems of others will easily stir up their own emotions and they will become less able to compartmentalise their own life in order to think about someone elses. To be a good therapist you need to make sure you have a reasonably well functioning life, and therefore ’spare capacity’ to give to others. Often therapists can over estimate their capabilities when going through a stressful time themselves and this can lead to bad therapy.
2) The therapist is getting their innate needs met through therapy.
Equally, it is hard to be objective about another person’s needs when you are getting your own needs met by your position as a therapist. If a therapist is getting their need for status, attention or feeling of emotional connection through a therapeutic relationship, then the therapy is being contaminated and will be ineffective. The best metaphor for a therapeutic relationship is for the therapist to think of themselves as a calm, clear lake, coolly reflecting and reframing the clients problems. If they themselves get emotional it distorts the reflection.
3) The therapist has not been adequately trained to deal with doubt.
At any points in a therapy session, the therapist may feel overwhelmed, and think that they do not know what to do. This is a natural reaction to an emotional barrage of information from a distressed person. At this point, after building rapport and listening to the client, the therapist should calmly summarise the clients situation, perhaps slipping in a few reflective reframes (see below). This gives the therapist time to think about the situation and consider the way forward confidently. Also, by using their logical brain to remember the sequence of events and the problems of the person in front of them, their emotional brain is less likely to pattern match to the distressed client and create further emotional doubt in the therapist. Any therapist who panics and does not know what to do in the face of doubt will not be effective, and the client will pick up on this and begin to lose confidence in the therapists ability.
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So what should you look for in a therapist or counsellor? I have posted about this before, and I will probably post it again, but there is a checklist on the Human Givens Institute site that is is useful when researching counsellors and therapists. Here it is briefly:
An effective psychotherapist or counsellor:
— knows how to build rapport quickly with distressed people
— understands depression and how to lift it
— helps immediately with anxiety problems including trauma or fear related symptoms
— is prepared to give advice if needed or asked for
— will not use jargon or ‘psychobabble’ or tell you that counselling or psychotherapy has to be ‘painful’
— will not dwell unduly on the past
— will be supportive when difficult feelings emerge, but will not encourage people to get emotional beyond the normal need to ‘let go’ of any bottled up feelings
— may assist you to develop your social skills so that your needs for affection, friendship, pleasure, intimacy, connection to the wider community etc. can be better fulfilled
— will help you to draw and build on your own resources (which may prove greater than you thought)
— will be considerate of the effects of counselling on the people close to you
— may teach you to relax deeply
— will help you think about your difficulties in new and more empowering ways
— uses a wide range of techniques as appropriate
— may ask you to do specific tasks between sessions
— will take as few sessions as possible
— will increase your self confidence and independence and make sure you feel better after every consultation.
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Wider practice of practical skills such as reflective reframing could transform the sessions of many therapists. For example this skills is taught on the Human Givens Masters and Diploma in Psychotherapy.
Here is how to do it: (I have taken this from a summary of reflective reframing on the ‘Communicating in difficult situations’ part of www.campusalam.org website simply becasuse it is very succinct and I couldn’t have put it better myself! This is using reflective reframing in a situation of religious tension, but the principle is the same for all emotional situations)
“Psychotherapists Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell have developed Carl Rogers’ Active Listening into something more subtle and more effective at moving people on. They call it ‘active listening with a twist’ or ‘reflective reframing’. You basically reflect back to someone what he’s said as in active listening. But you just introduce a deliberate difference where it needs it. This can loosen up the rigidity of their thinking or start a subtle process of change in an entrenched attitude or mood.
Jaffar: People like Hassan never step up and take responsibility, they never put their faith into practice!
Facilitator: So you feel that people sometimes don’t put their faith into practice.
The Facilitator repeated part of Jaffar’s phrase word-for-word: ‘put their faith into practice’. But she also introduced a change: ‘never’ becomes ‘sometimes don’t’. ‘Never’ is unlikely to be true; it’s too all-or-nothing. (It’s that emotional brain speaking again.) ‘Sometimes don’t’ is more likely to be true. And – isn’t it true of everyone at some time or other that they don’t put their beliefs into practice?
Also: the Facilitator said ‘People’ instead of ‘Hassan’. She moved away from such personally offensive ground.
By doing this the Facilitator:
- Makes the idea less all-or-nothing – less of an ‘emotional brain’ speech and more like the ‘thinking brain’ representing reality more accurately
- Begins to break down the rigid ‘us vs. them’ thinking, where ‘us’ is totally good and ‘them’ is totally bad. This is also a characteristic of the emotional brain!
Now, for example, it’s not hard to imagine another member of the group intervening constructively with something like this:
Ghazala: But actually that’s true of everyone at some time or other. Who can constantly put their faith into practice and never slip sometimes? I know I don’t, even if I want to.
And then some of the polarised atmosphere begins to dissipate, and the highly personal, inflammatory conflict between Jaffar and Hassan is neutralised a bit.
If you’re doing this, it’s important not to be heavy-handed! It mustn’t sound sarcastic or challenging or it will have the opposite effect: wind-up, not calm-down. The change that quietly subverts their rigid thinking must go in almost under their radar.”
Therapists should all be trained in powerful enhanced active listening techniques like this.
We have just passed the 50,000 views mark of the depression and REM sleep video! Thanks to everyone who has watched and passed on the link and lets aim for another 50,000! Here are some recent youtube comments that people have left:
- “I have to say that was so “right on the bullseye” it was actually refreshing! Thanks for the education.”
- “I just read this book and it is brilliant and extremely helpful.”
- “Thanks for the video; it was very informative. going through a rough time right now and this stuff makes a lot of sense.”
Also the Human Givens Diploma introduction video has been doing very well considering it is 30 minutes long, it has had nearly 5000 views along with positive comments like this:
“Thank you so much for making this film available to the general public. I have been curious about the Human Givens approach for some time and this has helped to clarify some key questions I had about it in relation to other therapies, the individual in therapy and society at large. The vibrancy, humility and practicality of the approach is so evident in this film.” - Suzanne Lozano
MindFields College exists to deepen our collective knowledge of the science of human nature - the human givens - and to apply that knowledge to improve effectiveness and raise standards in healthcare, education and social care policy throughout the country.
This blog serves to promote knowledge and discussion of these ideas, and also to give insight into the company that works to do this - for feedback, comments and suggestions please email: eleanor at humangivens dot com
