Happy Sunday!
It's funny how things work out sometime.
Kerry, our guest blogger, sends us her entries whenever she completes them, and we don't generally read them until the day we decide to post them. Like today.
So it was funny how things work, because just as we wrote yesterday about being a good person, and posing the question to anybody who chooses to consider the reasons as why anybody should bother. She reminds us that most people are good people, and sometimes in life negative forces work against us, and if we look at it in the right way, it can be used as a time of growth and creativity, not self-destruction/moral-destruction/stagnation/unhappiness.
Creative (Endopsychic) energy, as Kerry writes about, is exactly how we saved our own lives. By creating an outlet, by using art & writing therapy as a way to deal with our mental illness, and the things that were going on in our life; and by turning into a project, an example, to provide others with a means of learning to deal with difficulty, no matter what it is. We could go on and on about the benefits of writing (and art) therapy...but we probably have in some other entry.
Kerry hit's the button on the nose. Creative energy, and the desire for forward momentum, for change, can take your life, turn it into something else, and help you deal with stress, anger, confusion, illness, and any number of things that you encounter, any number of things that try to push you down in life, try to eat away at you and try to destroy you.
Now, as many of our readers, and our Twitter followers/friends know - we may not all subscribe to this upbeat and empowering message (however, some of indeed found her words empowering); but, at the end of the day...
[...]Out of the Ashes the Phoenix Will Rise
I was on some training recently and I was introduced to the psychological term endopsychic energy. Now I know that psychologists can be an odd but lovable bunch and they have a panache for making up phrases to describe things, those phrases baffle the rest of us lesser mortals. However, I like to think of myself as an educated lady who knows a thing or two, but even I was thinking ‘what the fuck?’
Endopsychic energy is part of a model that looks at group working, particularly in a work environment rather than a therapeutic one. The endopsychic stage of the model comes at the time of conflict and argument and how this discomfort and resistance induce us to be creative and energetic to escape from that situation. It may be a new concept to some of you to realise that from conflict comes creativity. It is something that I see in my patients on a regular basis but I am often cautious about highlighting that having a mental illness can be a very creative process – as a punch in the mouth often offends.
A classic example is a woman who has PMS comes home and the kids are fighting, hubby is asking what’s for dinner, there is a pile of ironing to do and then she snaps. ‘Fuck it’ she shouts, ‘we’re eating out because I can’t be bothered to cook!’ Sound familiar? It’s a frequent occurrence in my house. I can hear you thinking – where’s the creativity? I will break it down. The woman is tired and frustrated, other people are putting their needs before her own, she may feel that she is not getting the attention or love that she needs/deserves and there is social pressure there to maintain the status quo. To extract herself from this quagmire she shouts, which tells people that she is not happy and forces them to focus on her. To move away from working in a pattern that she does not want to do she changes it, thus the eating out. She releases the others from their pattern of behaviour by suggesting something new. All in all, pretty amazing, shame we have to feel shitty to get there in the first place.
This is only one example, there will be many in your own lives if you look back. I put on heaps of weight when I was pregnant, so after I finished breast feeding I went to Weight Watchers and lost 5 stone (70 pounds). I was stuck in the same dead end job so I overcame my fear of learning due to my dyslexia and went back to uni[versity] (I got a first class degree). My writing stemmed from my frustration and me trying to make sense of situations. My cancer has lead to so many opportunities including working with Frank et al (I would have preferred not to have cancer but we don’t always get the choice, I think it’s better to try and make the best out of whatever life hands us). Out of the ashes the phoenix will rise. People do not change because they want something, they change because they don’t want something. People who smoke don’t desire to be ex-smokers but they’re bloody sick of that smoker’s cough and paying out all that money. Fat people don’t want to be thin, rather they dislike how they feel about themselves right now.
At the time of writing this post, we are still coming to terms with nearly a week of rioting in the UK. It has sickened the majority of the British people to see others behave in such a violent way. The most famous of which is when Malaysian student Ashraf Haziq Rossli had his jaw broken and then when he thought he was getting help he was robbed by his ‘helpers’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Og-0xQDC8Dg (be warned it does not make pleasant viewing). His mother was naturally worried about her son and wanted him to come home but Ashraf said that he wanted to say here and that most of the people in the UK were good people. He was right, people have donated money, so much money (over £22,000/ $36000) that his mother can now fly over here to see her son.
Hard and difficult times means that we need to make choices, we do not need to make these choices when we are happy with our situation. Often adversity, illness, prejudice and all manner of negativity force us down a path that we had never thought of. Sometimes it’s not a pleasant path, sometimes we don’t like where we end up but it is that creative energy that enables us to change what is happening to us.
- Our New Guest Blogger (Kerry Stott @kerrystott)
- Our Guest Blogger Writes About Depression (Kerry Stott @kerrystott)
- Our Guest Blogger Writes About Suicide (Kerry Stott @kerrystott)
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