Should I Stay Or Should I Go?

Should I stay or should I go?

Have you ever been in a situation where you repeatedly asked yourself the above question? 

I have, in both my personal and professional life. 

I have also worked with some clients who found themselves at some point facing such a dilemma. 

Although being in this in-between stuck situation feels uncomfortable, the experience, with the guidance of a professional, might present opportunities for growth and self-discovery. It can offer a space for personal development.

As a coach and counsellor I of course do not have the answer to my clients’ question. It is not my place to tell them whether they should stay or indeed go. My role is to work with them and explore together, from the here and now, the best way forward for them. 

We explore together what aspects of their personal history are impacting the present situation. Together we decontaminate the present moment from past out-dated beliefs, prejudices and fantasies so the client can gain clarity and expand their capacities for an appropriate response in the here and now. 

 I do that by applying a model called the Ego State model from transactional analysis. This model proposes that we have three distinct parts to our personality: Parent, Adult and Child. Each of these parts has its own set of thoughts, feelings and behaviours that interact differently with the world. 

When we are in Parent ego state we interact with the world like a Parent figure from our childhood. We embody their beliefs and prejudices about the world and way of thinking, feeling and behaving. 

 When we are in Child ego state we interact with the world the way we did as children, emotional, spontaneous, creative and uninhibited. 

 When we are in Adult we interact with the world from the here and now moment using all the information and data available to us in the moment. 

 We reach a dilemma because we are trying to negotiate between Child needs and Parent demands. 

 Together with my client I explore the following:

 What are the past childhood needs that the client is trying to meet today?

 What past parental beliefs and prejudices are still forming an obstacle today?

 And in their quest to meet those needs and uphold those beliefs and prejudices are they losing their authenticity? 

 Being in a space and time when we are asking the question “Should I stay or should I go?” means that we are in a space between stories. The old past story and a possible new story. 

 The above curious exploration allows for discovery that in turn leads to recovery. The aim is to strengthen the client’s Adult so they can think for themselves and give themselves the permission to hold on or let go of what no longer feels harmonious to their authentic being. 

 This added clarity allows the client to take the right actions in the moment from their Adult ego state. 

 So if you find yourself like me, once upon a time, or like some of my clients, facing the kind of dilemmas where you are asking yourself the question above, then working with a coach or counsellor can help you arrive at making the appropriate decision. An outcome that is reached with awareness and is devoid of unwanted influences from your past. 

 Is this something you need support with? 

 Get in touch. 

My Story With Self-Esteem

“ No way” said the lady incredulously, “She can’t be your daughter!”

“Yes, she is,” insisted my stepmother, looking a bit uncomfortable.

“Then why is she abdeh and you are not?” retorted the lady smugly.

Abdeh is an Arabic word that literally means a slave. It is the word that ignorantly was and perhaps still is sometimes used to mean black.

These were the kinds of encounters that I repeatedly experienced during my childhood and teenage years in Lebanon in the 1970s. Sometimes instead of my stepmother, it would be one of my half sisters being challenged. It was understandable as I was black and the rest of my family members were white. Without my Ghanaian mother’s presence in my life, strangers outside our family could not figure out the connection.

It is then not really surprising that I grew up feeling like I didn’t belong. I stood out even amongst my own flesh and blood, the only kid with black skin and frizzy hair. My parents divorced when I was a baby and my paternal grandmother, whom I called Teita, brought me up in The Lebanon.

Even when I later moved to live briefly in Ghana for few years, this common scenario still took place as I lived within a Lebanese community. I remember a particular time when Baba, (dad in Arabic), took the whole family swimming at the pool at Tesano Sports Club, just outside Accra. You had to have had membership to use the pool and dad was a member. As always the person at the reception looked at the whole family and spotted me, the odd one out, and pointing at me said to Baba,

“Who is that?”

It was often assumed that I was, perhaps, the maid and it was against club policy to admit maids . Usually Baba would patiently explain that I was his daughter. This question always brought an awkward feeling in everyone, especially me. It was a constant reminder of my difference. On this particular occasion Baba just lost it and screamed at the receptionist for asking such a stupid question. I think dad felt bad at the fact that I had to endure such an inquisition on so many occasions when we went out as a family. But by screaming and attracting more attention he actually made me feel worse. I remember vividly the scene at the entrance to the club with all seven of us standing there patiently. The children looking longingly at the shimmering and inviting blue water of the swimming pool, which was in full view from the reception area. Baba was shouting at the top of his voice and various people entering the club looked at us disapprovingly. I wanted the earth to open and swallow me up.

That is why when I got older I often volunteered the information to save everyone feeling awkward or guilty and pretended in the meantime that it didn’t hurt and that I could handle it. This was a theme that stayed with me for most of my life, pretending not to be hurt by other people’s actions and insensitivities. No one needed to know how I felt inside. I cared more about protecting others from pain than acknowledging my own emotions.

Somehow these experiences made me feel inferior. I was the ugly duckling amongst the swans. I truly believed that I was ugly, that I was beyond hope. So much so that I dared not look in the mirror in public lest I was ridiculed. As there wasn’t much that I could do about my physical appearance in order to blend in, I just accepted it. However I could do something about my mind. I focused on my studies and as a result did very well at school.

The brief time I lived in Ghana at least made me realise that there were a lot of people out there who looked like me. I wasn’t that inferior after all.

I always felt that people looked at me and all they could see was my black skin and frizzy hair. They did not linger enough to discover the girl within. Remember, it was still the 1970s and black identity and pride was still in its infancy.   I don’t know how the child in me coped with that rejection. I just buried those emotions deep in the dark centre of my core and denied them entry into the light at the surface. It was easier that way.

Perhaps that was the reason that I became someone who was eager to please in order to be loved and accepted. I did a lot for others and in the process neglected my own needs. So much so that after sometime I had no idea what my own desires were. Later in life when I read so many psychology and therapy books in order to make sense of my experience, I always found it difficult to answer questions such as “What do you want?” and “What makes you happy?” I had no clue, since I never ever put myself first in any situation.

It was a lot later in my life, at the age of 36, when I was already married and a mother that I began the journey of finding who I truly am.

My story is not unique and there are many young people today who because of gender, sexual orientation, religious beliefs or physical appearance, feel unaccepted or have a sense of not belonging. As children if we repeatedly hear verbalised or non-verbalised messages about ourselves while growing up, we eventually internalise these messages and accept them as the truth. These internalised messages become the pillars on which our self-esteem rests. We start comparing ourselves to others and start doubting ourselves. We start valuing other people’s opinion of ourselves more than our own. In today’s world of social media this becomes 100 times worse.

In his book Emotional First Aid, Guy Winch writes the following: “Having low self-esteem is akin to having a weak emotional immune system: it renders us more vulnerable to many of the psychological injuries we sustain in daily life, such as failure and rejection, Further, people, with low self-esteem are often less happy, more pessimistic, and less motivated than their higher-self-esteem counterparts. They also have much worse moods; they face a greater risk of depression, anxiety, and eating disorders; and they experience their relationships as less fulfilling than people with higher self-esteem do.” Therefore, low self-esteem is one of the reasons for the rise in depression and eating disorders amongst teens and young people today.

Through learning NLP all those years ago, I was introduced to some tools and techniques that slowly helped build up my self-esteem, and as a result I began to feel more confident and assertive. I began to believe in myself and in my abilities. I dare say that NLP unlocked the key to my happiness. In this blog I would like to share what NLP taught me about self-esteem.

Change your beliefs about yourself
Beliefs are really powerful. They can drive you to the heights of success or drag you down to the depths of despair and failure. Your beliefs, especially about yourself, are formed in all kinds of unconscious ways. I believed that I was bad at mental arithmetic because of a comment from a teacher. As a child when you hear such a comment you delete any opportunities you may have had to learn to be good at anything, be it arithmetic, drawing, singing or dancing. After all, you were told that you couldn’t be good at it. Beliefs begin as a tiny seed in your mind and with time you begin to find instances which validate them. Over a period of time the seed grows to become a concrete belief that you live by. In NLP we say that one must choose their beliefs carefully because they have a tendency to become self-fulfilling prophecies. Start questioning those beliefs about yourself. Are they really true? Are they your own beliefs or have others imposed them on you? I find Byron Katie’s four questions quite useful for challenging beliefs:

1. Is it true?

2. Can you absolutely know that it is true?

3. How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought?

4. Who would you be without the thought?

As a child I was lead to believe that my Afro hair was unsightly. For years I did all kinds of horrible chemical treatments to smooth it out. Now I leave it as God intended and happen to believe that it’s gorgeous!

Stop defining yourself by what others think or say.
Generally, what someone says about you says more of him or her than it says of you. In NLP we say Perception is Projection. The idea of this comes from the psychologist Carl Jung who said that what we perceive is who we are. In other words, people are not so much perceiving the external world as they are projecting what they carry inside out onto the world around them. So those who perceive you to be insecure are projecting their own reality about themselves on you. So what others do and how they act is their choice, just as much as how you perceive their actions is your choice.

Individuals have all the resources they need to achieve their desired outcomes.
In other words, everyone has the potential to change develop and grow. Self-esteem is a habit: through repeated negative experiences we acquire the low-self-esteem habit and if we do not take action we will be stuck in it for the rest of our lives. Instead we can learn a new habit, the high self-esteem habit. This can be achieved by changing our habitual way of thinking. How? First, we must become aware of our internal dialogue and pay attention to our negative self-talk and self put-downs. We can then replace those with more positive internal dialogue and affirmations. Model someone in your circle who has a good sense of self-esteem and observe how they act and get information about the kind of self-talk they engage in. I bet they don’t say phrases like: “I am such a loser!” or “No one cares about me!” and the like. If they can do it so can you.

Celebrate your uniqueness              
As Ellen DeGeneres said, “What makes you different right now, makes you stand out later in life. So you should be proud of being different. Proud of who you are. ″    
 
Through NLP I finally understood, that in order to be loved I need to love myself first; and to be able to bring up children with high self-esteem I need to experience first hand what that feels like. The fairy tale is true. The ugly duckling can indeed change into a beautiful swan.

Do you suffer from anxiety, fear or panic attacks?

Why is it that so many people suffer from anxiety? The majority of my clients come to me to resolve issues directly or indirectly related to fear, anxiety and some times panic attacks. Whether it is worrying about an upcoming presentation or exam, getting on a plane, performing on stage or at an interview, giving birth, dying and leaving a family behind, getting the next promotion, failing to meet Mr Right or like me thinking that harm would befall my children if we were separated for a lengthy period of time, feeling anxious is normal and every one of us has felt anxious or afraid every now and then. It is when the anxiety is so intense and chronic that it cripples you and prevents you from leading a normal life that it becomes a problem that needs to be addressed.

For as far as I can remember, my dad, was an overly anxious man. He worried constantly and was mostly in an agitated state of mind. So  when in turn I suffered from anxiety I didn’t really give it much attention and just thought that it was genetic. I worried about everything and anything and spent sleepless nights tossing and turning in my bed churning all kinds of negative thoughts about future events. I used to envy people around me that looked calm and relaxed and wished that I was born with such a gene.

Then at the age of seventeen something terrible happened. I said goodbye to my cousin, who was also my best friend, as she was going on a holiday to London with her parents the next day. The next morning my cousin was dead. I was in shock. No one had prepared me for such a catastrophe. One-day life was normal; the next day life for me came to a standstill. I found it difficult to make sense of this new reality. So I buried my feelings deep within the crevices of my unconscious mind and somehow found a way to move on.

When I became a parent for the first time, a new kind of anxiety was added to my previous lists of anxieties: separation anxiety. I found the prospect of being separated from my child extremely unbearable. I felt anxious and afraid that something terrible would happen to her and I won’t be present to save her. This anxiety not only affected me personally but also had a great negative impact on our family life and stood in the way of my husband having the chance to naturally bond with his daughter, as I felt terrified leaving her even with him. It was insane! I first assumed that the way I felt was part and parcel of motherhood. However as I listened to other mums I realised that something was seriously wrong with the way I felt and behaved. I needed to do something about this and fast.

I dealt with this fear the way I have dealt with all my other fears and anxieties, I took a plunge. At first I started slowly to do the very thing I feared the most. I allowed my husband to take my child for a stroll in the pram and I stayed home. I allowed my neighbour, who had been offering countless times, to babysit my child while my husband and I went out for a meal one evening. And when my daughter was two I dared to send her to nursery for three mornings a week.  There was one problem with this solution. I suffered immensely in those few hours when I was away from my daughter and didn’t really have any quality time. I wanted to find a way to be comfortable in those situations. I wanted to be anxiety free. The real solution to my problem came much later when I came across NLP.

According to Dr David Burns, there are many forms of anxieties: fears/phobias, performance related anxieties, obsessive-compulsive behaviours, social anxieties and post-traumatic disorders. And there are also many theories and therefore treatments relating to anxieties. Many people prefer taking a pill to get rid of their anxieties. But since anxiety relates to our thoughts about a future event, it makes more sense and perhaps a more lasting and empowering solution if we were to change those thoughts about those upcoming events in order to get rid of our anxieties once and for all. That is exactly what NLP offered me.

Discover your strategy

If you take my case for example, my anxiety came as a result of my having thoughts of all kinds about horrible events that might happen to my daughter while she was away from me. I was extremely creative in this respect and my over active imagination served me well by giving me the most horrific scenarios. I felt that as long as she was with me she would be safe as I would be able to save her. Through NLP I became first and foremost aware of these thoughts and images that I made inside my head. Awareness is the first real step to change. It might seem obvious, but in reality these processes that took place in my brain were very fast and outside my conscious awareness. The process we do in our brain to produce a behaviour is referred to in NLP as a strategy.

This strategy is very common in cases of extreme fear and panic attacks. In most cases the strategy is played so fast in our brain that the only thing we are aware of is the fear or panic, which is the final step in the strategy- the end result. Using NLP the client can discover the strategy that they make in their head to produce the fear.  By discovering the individual steps and sequence in this process, the client is then aided to change it. By changing it, we change the end result. In other words, anxiety, fear or panic disappears. The easiest way to understand this is if you think of it like the recipe for a cake. There are certain ingredients, and they need to be added in a certain sequence to get the perfect cake. If one ingredient is missed or the sequence of steps jumbled, the end result will be different.

The brain doesn’t know the difference between real and imagined thoughts and therefore, my body reacted physiologically to my imagined thoughts as though they were real.  So changing my thought pattern ultimately had an effect on my physiology.

Change your belief

The second thing that I needed to work on was to challenge the validity of my thoughts, the beliefs I had surrounding the issue of what might happen when I am separated from my daughter. Often anxiety results from unrealistic and distorted thoughts or beliefs. And some of my thoughts were certainly just that! This is done by what is referred to as Meta programming. These are simply questions that are designed to challenge your perceptions and beliefs. In his book, When Panic Attacks, Dr. Burns uses what he calls Truth-based techniques to examine the evidence for our negative thoughts. What was the probability that something terrible would happen to my daughter when she was away from me, and was it really true that I am the only person in the world able to protect and save her? Sometimes this work can hint at an underlying root cause or past trauma that might be linked to one’s anxiety. If this is indeed the case then Time Line Therapy can be used to heal such a trauma.

Time Line Therapy

The root cause of my separation anxiety was of course the death of my cousin when I was 17 years of age. I just buried my feelings instead of processing my emotions and making some sense of this tragedy. My traumatic experience made me think of doom and gloom every time a loved one was late, or for some reason didn’t answer their phone. In such a situation I would conjure up in my mind the worst possible disasters, when in reality there could be so many innocent, non-sinister reasons to explain the situation. I believed that I needed to be always prepared for disaster. Fate will not catch me unaware again!

Through Time Line Therapy I was able to mentally travel back in time and view the past with a fresh perspective, learn what I needed to learn to heal and come back to the present with new skills and more empowering coping mechanisms.

NLP simply changed my life. This doesn’t mean that I do not feel anxious. It means that my anxiety is normal, realistic, transient and  appropriate to the situation. It meant I was a more relaxed and calm parent the second time round and when the time came for my eldest daughter to leave home and go to university I was able to cope well with this separation. Although emotional, I was able to let her go and have my mind conjure up all the wonderful and positive experiences awaiting her in the years to come.

Recommended reading: When Panic Attacks by David D. Burns M.D.