I have in recent times been shocked by the suicide of Chester Beddington, I was equally as shocked by Robin Williams a short time earlier. These are the suicides we hear of, there are many people who commit suicide with barely any mention at all. I live in Bristol not too far from Clifton Suspension bridge which is a bit of a suicide hot spot, it was the site where Shirley Bassey’s daughter met her demise, also 127 people jumped to their death between 1973 and 1986 (93 male 34 female) a fairly easy search turns out another 17 people between 2008 and 2013. If my memory serves me correctly there have been 3 people this year (2017) alone. An interesting story to come out of this little bit of research was the story of Sarah Ann Henley, a local girl (Easton) who had a blazing row with her boyfriend, then went to Clifton suspension bridge and jumped off. Miraculously, her dress acted as a parachute along with strong winds cushioned her fall. She survived with some minor injuries. Sarah Ann lived for over 50 years after this event. A 2006 judgement by the Swiss Federal Court ruled that anyone of sound mind, irrespective of their medical condition, had a right to determine when to end their lives. Approximately 1000 people every year now go to Switzerland to end their own lives. Whilst it would seem a large portion of these people are terminally ill, it is fair to assume that some of these people are not ill. I believe a focus on our end as opposed to a focus to get there can be a life-changing experience Confucius an ancient Chinese philosopher said

“We have two lives, and the second begins when we realise we only have one.”

  It would seem for many a real existential crisis is required before we reach this realisation. What do I mean by an existential crisis? This could be a near-death experience or illness, seeing someone from your past and seeing their ageing process, the loss of someone close to you, a birthday or anniversary, estate planning or possibly even a dream. We live in a society where we are not open and honest about our own mortality only if it is a passing joke about how old one is getting. For me, I think the only thing I can safely assume is that my demise will not be traumatic for me because I will know nothing about it. I will return to the same state I did before I was born. If there is a state of consciousness after death then that is potentially a bonus. My assumption that there is not, is a wake-up call in the here and now. If life is temporary I need to stand to attention and make the most of the life I have got. Was this the thinking of Sarah Ann Henley when she jumped off the bridge? Probably not, but I wonder if this replaced her thinking when she survived it, after all, she went on to live over 50 years afterwards. I believe for many who have committed suicide have chosen a painfully permanent solution for temporary thinking. Our mental health can be so complex it would be naïve to think a whole lifetime can pass without a single thought of wondering what life would be like if it wasn’t. Real honesty is needed amongst people, life is hard, it is full of challenges, challenges of acceptance, conflict, survival. I would be lying to myself and all around me if I said that I have never wondered if death would be easier than life. Suicide may be the option for some and as much as that is not my call, it is not my right or anyone else’s to take that from anybody who genuinely has decided that they want to end their life. I would hope though that the people who feel and think this way, have had real and open conversations in the past where discussions about the permanency of suicide have been made clear as well as how temporary thoughts can be and the swiftness that life can change. I write this blog with the belief that we all aspire to be the best we can be, sometimes we get lost along the way. All we need is faith in ourselves that we can be the best we can be, sometimes a little help believing in that faith could be all that is needed when faced with thoughts of suicide. In our society today mental health services have been stripped bare. In order to access the mental health crisis team, I have known of a few occasions that accessing this service has meant people in mental health crisis having to go to A&E. We need real conversations with people hopefully before a mental health crisis happens so we can be prepared for it when it does. Do I think this blog alone will make people at the mercy of their own lives think twice, no? I would hope that it lights something up somewhere about the tragedy that is suicide. I want to just end with the message. Suicide is forever Thoughts are temporary Life can change in an instant. If anyone has been affected by suicide or indeed have suicidal thoughts, please reach out to your nearest and dearest, where that’s not possible maybe I can help, get in touch. www.brighter-pathways.co.uk  

I sit here alone as I write this, this piece is another of my attempts to put my own individual creative stamp on the world. Whilst writing this I am being distracted from the ultimate loneliness of my existence. Yes, I have a family, I have hundreds of friends on my facebook friends list, I have work colleagues, neighbours, I also make a point of making my existence known to the people I encounter on a daily basis. An example of this is the rapport I have with the people that work in my local shop. I always make my friendly presence felt. This morally boosts my existence in the world when I am greeted with a friendly response when I encounter these people on a daily basis when I go to buy my odds and sods.

This part of me most likely exists because my ancestors were hunter-gatherers. You stood a better chance of survival if you stayed in a pack making you less easy to pick off by other hunter-gatherers or say dinosaurs. To avoid being lonely is an, inbuilt survival mechanism to elaborate this part of ourselves further. Have you ever moved to a different district and notice you quite quickly start using local lingo? Or you start spending time with somebody new and you say something that sounds like them? This is your brain working hard to help you fit in so you don’t get looked at as an outsider, your brain wants you to fit in because it has primitive instincts to survive.

Do you sometimes feel lonely in a room full of people?

Then there is the loneliness we feel when we are in a room full of people and yet somehow we still feel alone. You notice everyone talking and there is something nagging you, it feels uncomfortable and could be easily mistaken as unpleasant.

Does any of this ring true to you? What if I said there is another side of loneliness that you may not have put much thought into. Culturally in Britain, this is not something that’s shouted about and that is the ultimate mortality of our existence. Ultimately there is an ending to our life and it could well have and most likely will have a different end time to all the people I mentioned earlier ie friends family etc.

There are drives within us that are not spelt out because I believe many of us do not understand it and arguably perhaps no one will ever fully understand it. We get close to understanding it when we have a health scare or lose someone close to us. Another example of this feeling, is the indiscriminative choice a parent might make if they were to jump straight into a life and death situation to save their child. It would seem more of a loss to lose your child than your own life.

How does having an awareness of these inner drives help?

These drives are not changeable they are a permanent fixture within your existence but what we can do is work with them to understand why we react, respond or feel the way we do when we feel lonely in a room full of people, or why we feel the need to surround our self with people who are not necessarily good for us, or understand the complete shattering when we lose a loved one.

I think a way we can come to terms with some of these strong feelings associated with our existence is to find ground in tragedy where we can find a breakthrough rather than break down.  (Yalom, 2003, p. 82) says “Human beings must face up to the ultimate meaninglessness of their existence ‘that there exists no “meaning”, no grand design in the universe, no guidelines for living other than those the individual creates.”

Are my reasons for living someone else’s?

People can get lost living their life to fulfil someone else’s meaning. Imagine a parent who for whatever reason does not fulfil their own dream of becoming a nurse, so when their child gets older they push forward the idea of them becoming a nurse. Have you ever seen the Black Swan? This is a film where a mother wants her daughter to become the Ballerina because she was unable to because of an injury. This is called a mortality project when a parent attempts to fulfil their dreams through their children.

Imagine a society where we suggest to our daughters that they find themselves a rich spouse who will aid them to live happily ever after………..oh wait, doesn’t Disney do this anyway!

Where can I start looking for my own meaning?

We must find what will fulfil our individual meaning, and if that meaning is to live a life that’s not driven by meaning then so be it. I truly believe counselling can be a way to explore our own meaning. It can be a place to lay bare all the influences that have shaped your existence so far and also be a place to explore what your own meaning looks like without judgement. Therapy is a place to explore our loneliness in all its beauty, brutality and subtlety.

Carl Jung (famous psychotherapist) said “Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.”

Counselling can offer to fill that void where one exists in a world where our nearest and dearest have such busy lives that this level of self-exploration may feel easier to laugh off or could even pain our nearest and dearest which is another reason why exploring the lonely part of our self in counselling is safe.

I too have explored what it is to be lonely in the world, have I fully grasped what it is for me? I would say I have come pretty close. Does that mean I am qualified to guide people there? Peoples meaning and loneliness are so far different that no two meanings are ever the same but what I can say I will take into the counselling room with me is a knowing of the bravery it takes, I know what it feels like to rattle the core of my existence and I will know that look in another if I saw it.

Thank you for reading

Nick

In today’s blog, I am going to explore a concept that you may have heard of before but I’m going to offer an understandable explanation in more depth.

The critical parent is an attitude adopted by our parents in order to get us to behave in a certain way. This is useful to us as the child, it keeps us alive. An example of this is “Don’t cross the road like that! It’s dangerous” sometimes however this can be used to excess or in a way that is manipulative and not to the benefit of the child. An example of this is when the critical parent says “don’t be so stupid!” when the child is having fun.

I am not taking a swipe at our parents here or trying to create an ideology that some parents are worse than others but I am saying that perhaps some of that Victorian ideology of what children are exists in us, our parents, and their parents, today.

What I mean by Victorian ideology is statements like “Children must be seen and not heard!” At school, you would be caned for speaking out of turn, poor work or anything that the teacher found displeasing. This ideology was the norm in Victorian times and continued for many decades after. The closeness between parent and child was not encouraged. Winston Churchill once said, “I could count the number of times my mother hugged me.”

This attitude is still knocking around today in modern parenting as not a deliberate attitude but one that has existed in our recent ancestors for example our parents, our grandparents and great grandparents. I think the times and ideologies of society that our ancestors lived in, plays a part in the role of a critical parent but it’s a behavioural role that has probably existed long before these ancestors. If you do just a little research about what it was like for a child 500 years ago in Tudor times the whole parenting process was aimed at conformity.

So what does the critical parent sound like?

Don’t talk to me like that!

Don’t be so ridiculous!

You ought to be ashamed of yourself!

I have always got to tell you!

You Never do as your told!

 

Phrases like this either make us rebel against what is being said to us (rebellious) or we lap it up and do as we are told (Adapted). Whilst I believe the critical parent can have a damaging effect to us all in the way of self-esteem, it is the adopted stance that I feel will suffer hardest.

The adapted sounds like this?

I can’t do it.

I ought to be able to do better.

Sorry I got it wrong.

Please can you help me?

Hopefully, I will be able to do it.

You can hear the absence of confidence and self-esteem in every one of those statements. If we allow these statements to be the reaction to decision making or opportunities presented to us you can see why we might choose not to take any chances or believe that we may be able to succeed, as well as defining our mood on a day to day basis.

The statements I’ve used are just the tip of the iceberg there are so many variations and phrases that come with both the critical parent and adapted child personalities. My belief is you as the reader want quick snappy relevant information to keep you interested so I won’t list them all.

So how does, how we were (and likely still are) spoken to by our parents have an effect on us?

In the absence of the critical parent, we fill that space with our recorded version of it. After all, we lived with it for the first third of our lives, why would we know any other right? It is out of our own reluctance to change that where our parent’s critical voice is absent we fill it with our own adapted responses. I have often encountered people that are controlled by their recorded internal critical parent or adapted responses, there is no shame in this, believe me, I am one of these people.

The thing is our parent’s critical side is their attempt to shape us for the world as children who may not best be able to do that for ourselves. As an adult however we can start to make these decisions for ourselves even though we may be still guided by our critical parent. It is a difficult thing to weed out as it’s something we have lived with all our lives.

There are ways to identify if you respond with a predominant critical parent via an adapted child but some of these ways are harder than others. If you are fortunate enough to still have your parents here, having a conversation with them can help you identify how inground your critical parent is. Go have a conversation with them and tell them you have done something you know they will disapprove of, you could tell them you have got a tattoo of a budgie on your bum if you think they would believe it. Make it real enough that the response is genuine enough. I just want your parent/s to respond to you critically.

That’s the first step, now the second step of this is to recognise how their criticism affected you how did you feel in the instant the critical message has been delivered. For me, I feel a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach and then I go into victim mode to the extent I put in an application for the mayor’s post at Victimsville!  I now identify this feeling as my trigger, when I am thinking of doing something and I get that feeling in the pit of my stomach I recognise my critical parent has entered my thinking. Now I am sure that I don’t speak for myself when I say there are times I still feel every bit of the 5-year old I once was even though I am now a fully grown adult.

Other ways of identifying the critical parent is to keep a thought diary, you will also have to do a bit of reading about to identify critical parent cues a few are ‘should’, ‘could’ ‘must’ and ‘don’t be silly’ to name a few. I have also listed some above.

Finally, a more in-depth way of working out our own internal critical parent is through counselling. Counselling can be a way to identify the many layers that we have become because of external factors within our lives.

It wasn’t until I recognised why I was responding to people who even slightly reminded me what having a critical parent was for me. I recognised that my behaviours are adaptive and I lack self-esteem as a result of this. It wasn’t until I recognised my own response to people who brought out this response in me that I was able to move on. You can’t change people and critical parent is among us and in us all, what I can change is my response to it. I learned this part of myself in an exploration process during counselling.

I now try to operate all my thinking through my adult state, phrases most associated with this part of my personality are focused on facts and common sense. My adult is most likely to generate phrases such as:

Why do you feel like that?

What do you think?

What is the best way to handle this?

Let’s find out.

What options do we have?

These responses are more than likely going to spark the adult part of the personality of the person you are in communication with. This is where we want successful interactions to happen. Operating using facts instead of feelings reduces the risk of child responses and the feelings that come with that.

I strongly believe once we overcome our responses to having critical parent we can prosper in our lives moving forward. It was a painful journey for me, but one certainly worth doing and I wish the best of luck to anyone brave enough to do the same.

Thank you for taking the time to read this blog, I value any input you may have towards it positive or critical. If you found this useful and would like to read more of my blogs or would like to access counselling yourself visit my website

www.brighter-pathways.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

The Statistics and what it is

Depression will affect 1 in 3 of us within our lifetime and this blog will attempt to not only try and describe what some of its symptoms are but also try to offer tools to free ourselves from what can be a claustrophobically paralysing condition. This blog aims to make clear how depression becomes us and then consumes us.

Depression is when we experience something that makes us so unhappy that rather than face up to the feelings associated with the sadness we block it out. So what we tell ourselves is, I do not want to feel. It might sound like a pretty good built-in tool to have, however, this has its own side effects. What this does is, when something good is happening we can’t feel the emotions associated with the good event either. This is because we have internally instructed our bodies not to feel emotions.

I think often people don’t actually fully understand what is going on themselves when they feel depressed. Making a decision to change is often far from the ideology in mind because we are unaware of why we feel the way we do. We may even brush off ideas that we are depressed because of the associations with mental illness and the stigma attached to it.

It can happen to any of us

I would like to take this opportunity to release any feelings of stigma and own that there have been times in my life when I have been depressed! So low that the thought of watching a film appeared to be too much effort!
I think today’s depression looks different because even at times of suffering the need to drive on and do the day to day things we are responsible for has to still be there. It is for these reasons we need to discover outlets for our own well-being.

Why does it happen?

Today demands a lot of us, social acceptance, financial pressure, complex relationships, and long working hours to name a few of the things that can make us feel low and depressed. Of course, there may be more obvious things such as losing a loved one the break-up of a relationship.

We can try and fix ourselves by overeating which makes us put on excess weight, which makes us look at our body image in a negative light. This can serve to become another symptom of depressiveness. We now have a body to be unhappy about in light of the depression in the first place. It is worth acknowledging our appetite can do the opposite and make us not want to eat at all and then the opposite body image can happen. It can alter our alcohol or drug consumption in search of feelings of happiness or relaxation from the anxiety. We may do other things such as gamble, self-harm, search for promiscuous sex or shop excessively in order to feel better about ourselves. All of which will carry their own negative backlash if done to excess.

Depression changes the way we think, because we are feeling low we are consumed with further thoughts of lowness and un-optimistic thinking takes over. Thoughts such as “I will never be happy again” or “what’s the point of doing something positive it won’t change anything.” Therefore we look outwardly for things that may spark our pleasure principle in an attempt to try and feel, it is an attempt to find happiness or an escape from feeling low. It won’t work however because happiness really is an inside job. See below for an example of how it can often be for someone who is depressed.

 Can it get any worse?
After a period of living with negativity, the dark hole we fall into gets deeper and gloomier. Things look worse as the days go by. It feels like nothing will ever be better again. As a person who has experienced life in this way at times, I think it is worth noting here that things do get better. As humans, we are resilient and always strive towards improving our own lives.

Things can change incredibly quickly, what can help in these situations is finding the thing that prevents you from slipping into the dark hole in the first place. Me personally I make sure I get enough physical exercise this keeps my chemical balance in my brain in check. However, I appreciate this may not be everyone’s personal fix.

How can I help myself?

Finding the thing we do creatively can be a reminder to us that we are not just the thing that makes us unhappy. Talking therapies can be a good way to feel better about ourselves, my own experience in therapy often served as a relief being able to discuss my thoughts and feelings in a non-judgemental way.

Depression is amongst us all, the statistic knocking around within the media at the moment are 1 in 4 of us will suffer from depression this year. My own experience of this soul-destroying condition is just that soul-destroying. As a collective, we need to stand firm together start caring more for the people we see in the street smile at passers-by like they are the mother that brought us into the world. Hold the door for the person behind us, not be afraid to spark conversation with somebody in the queue because, for me, depression and low mood feel a bigger problem when we look at how disconnected we are as human beings to one another.

Connection to other human beings is right up there at the top of the best defence techniques against depression so reach out and connect with other humans.

Some suggestions about how we can prevent the symptoms of depression

1. Eat healthily and regularly.

There is much literature out there to suggest that if we eat foods that are not good for us then this can change our mood. I agree with this statement and if I compare times I have eaten clean to times I have not my mood is definitely something I can identify as changing. Eating regularly is also an important factor, look how Mr T gets without his snickers or Jeremy Clarkson got when his producers didn’t sort his dinner out. When we get hungry we get cranky and that changes our mood significantly.

2. Drink your 2 litres of water a day

So many people I come across fail to do this simple vital task. If we become 2 per cent dehydrated our brain function becomes 30 per cent less efficient. Water is responsible for making hormones travel around your body without being hydrated enough this process does not happen as efficiently as it should. Really if you are not having your 2 litres a day make that the most important thing you do from this list.

3. Healthy relationships

A strong belief I hold is healthy relationships are a defence against mental illness. I almost want to say put down your phone, sign out of your Facebook and go and talk to somebody in person. (Unless this really is your own way of interacting with others) Take time out of your busy schedule to spend time with people, have dinner go to the cinema, go for a walk, whatever.

4. Exercise regularly

Now I don’t want to be patronising but we have a chemical in our brain called dopamine, this is the chemical that is released when people take drugs. It makes our mood happy however the process takes some activating. When I say exercise I don’t mean to run on a treadmill for an hour, the pain you would get in your knees after that might make you grumpy! Of course, if that is your bag I take my hat off to you, a 30-minute walk a day can be enough to fire your dopamine receptors efficiently. If your schedule is busy, clear some time, the chances are you won’t feel like exercise but I challenge you to do the exercise anyway and ask yourself how you feel after.

5. Hold your boundaries and say No!

Don’t feel like you have to do something. If you are feeling overwhelmed with a busy schedule and people are asking you to do things you can’t do or are going to be pushed to do say no. There is something quite liberating about unhooking yourself from the responsibility of keeping everyone happy at the cost of your own happiness. You are not being mean or unfair you are looking after yourself. Remember no one can best stand up for you better than you. Believe it or not, people feel better about people that can hold their own boundaries.

The purpose of this blog is to offer some advice to those who suffer from low mood and depression. If however if you feel like you would like more support you can find out more about me and the services I offer at

brighter-pathways.co.uk

Thank you for reading, please comment and share as you see appropriate, all support is appreciated.

 

This subject feels relevant particularly as cupid is about with his bow and arrow at Valentine’s Day but the question is what is love? I see different perceptions of what love is all the time. This got me thinking does everyone have a different version of what love is………..Their own version. I think it is an important topic as not only will it inspire thinking about our own position within our relationships but on a wider scale. I believe that healthy relationships are a defence against ill mental health.

We are given a version of what love is as children by our parents, that version of what love is depends on how that translates to the individual. An example of this is take that girl who is with that guy who is horrible to her, he controls her, he cheats on her, he hits her……… Why would she put up with this? Accept this is her perception of what it is to be in a loving relationship as this mirrors the relationship her mum and dad had. There is the opposite of this of course where a girl might say I don’t want my partner to be anything like my dad he was an ass hole!

Another example of defining love based on our needs could be when the female in the relationship is particularly maternal to the male in the relationship. I don’t want to limit this relationship dynamic to just heterosexual relationships as it can exist in homosexual relationships also. It is a common know fact that girls often mature younger than boys and some boys never fully mature. A paternal female offers an escape from the family nest at a time when he is striving to prove to his family that he is competent enough to gain independence. The female is served because she can assert her maternal expression and the male is served because he likes her being Mumsie to him.

It is no surprise people get lost in their search for what love is, our parents give us nothing to begin with. They don’t talk of romantic liaisons and rarely show affection in front of us. This could be why as children we take the next most influential source of information in our lives, television. Then there is the attitude of dad suggesting his daughter can never have a boyfriend which could set off the ideology to his sons that the daughter is held in higher regard.

When parents talk about what the ideal partner they say things like ‘”Make sure you pick someone that will treat you nice.” Are often said but define nice, what does nice look like in light of what is being said? Is it a foot massages and flowers? Or is it diamond rings and designer perfume?

Parents add to this by teaching us a set of attitudes that have no place in a relationship by saying things like ‘I am right you are wrong!’ This teaches an ignorant mind-set that can’t be moved and I’m sure will result in some pretty uncompromising arguments. Another example could be ‘Don’t take no s*&! From no one!’ This sets up an uncompromising attitude that no one can do wrong and in life and cant allow room for error. Finally another example could be Stereotyping behaviours of the sexes. All men cheat, sets up a mistrusting ideology. She is very pretty, sets an ideology of what is acceptable to the parent.

Then there is the perception of what Disney think love is. Love in the eyes of Disney is, princesses and prince charming’s, good and evil and happily ever after’s, love at first sight. Of course in the real world if these things were true perhaps the world would be better suited if it had birds singing and squirrels that are blue (why they are that colour escapes me!) bouncing round everywhere we go. Don’t be fooled by how powerful this ideology is I have known of people to get married flamboyantly only to end the marriage shortly after the wedding, just so they could have their day as a Disney like princess.

Another interesting concept amongst Disney culture is women who have power are almost always evil and princesses are not treated very nice until they are rescued. This for me sets up an ideology that women are less, and unable to help themselves. This suits today’s society as men are problem solvers by their very nature and because of how Disney have painted men we love to be the hero. So if we see a “damsel in distress” we can’t resist but go and rescue her.

The measure of what a woman is according to Disney is clear in Cinderella. She is compared to her ‘ugly’ sisters in the story and the one chosen by the prince but she only has a couple of hours to ‘win him over’ I might add. She is happy and her sisters are not. She can cook and clean her sisters cant or are too lazy. This is the one chosen by the prince therefore saying this is what you need to be in order to be chosen by a prince.

I could really talk for ever about the image Disney paints of what it is to be female. It is worth mentioning that today Disney’s franchise goes beyond just its films it now has a channel, showing similar themed material but more frequently. Disney’s Descendants modernises the female ideology by moving on to the next generation of Disney characters such as Cruella Deville’s son, Belle’s son, Snow Whites daughter and Cinderella’s fairy god mother is present also.

The thing I find most alarming is how sexualisation of American kids TV programme front liners such as Britney Spears and more recently Ariana Grande has happened. Once cute and Disney then within a couple of months of leaving their respective roles on TV they transform into sexual icons.

Phillip Zambardo famous author of the Stanford Prison Experiment did some research on what teenage boys think love is. The results were quite alarming with many young men not even feeling close to the dating game that they substitute this image with online pornography. This unrealistic ideology of what sex is has become the social programming of what love is to a generation of young men. The days of taking a girl on a date to the cinema and having a smooch in the back row seem long gone.

The Oxford dictionary definition of what is love is ‘A strong feeling of affection and sexual attraction for someone.’

The Urban Dictionary definition of what is love is ‘nature’s way of tricking people into reproducing.’

Can we begin to see what part of the problem is here if this is what google has to offer in terms of the definition of love.

 Another point I would like to make is how many times have you come across that friend who is in what you consider to be a good relationship, but yet they are thinking about ending that relationship for lack of excitement or lack of something. Of course this could be the best course of action for this friend, on the other hand it is worth mentioning that when we crave change it can present itself in ways we may not understand.

Sometimes when we want change in our lives it can be hard to pin down where the change is needed. It could be its time to move home, find a new hobby, have a career change or even get a new circle of friends. If you have a relationship where for the most part you get along and communicate this is the foundation of what a lasting loving relationship is. If it doesn’t feel as glitzy as a Hollywood love affair that is because a relationship is not this, however it is not impossible to achieve this with good communication. In a relationship what love is needs to be renegotiated as individuals change along with their needs.

Love is individual, based on the individuals wants and needs we cant judge someone’s version of loves because it is not ours.

Here is a poem I wrote about what love could be…….

What is Love

Is it someone you always think of.

Or is it someone you like the look of

Is it your opposite that makes you feel complete like a pair of gloves.

Or is it that the peace they bring is like watching white doves,

Is it the fuel of your arguments feel like explosives,

Or is it their face when you offer a pocket full of posies,

Is it that they are there when you fall down,

Or is it their efforts to try and fix your frown

Is it because they recognise what you need and celebrate your individuality

Or celebrate your personality and offer an escape from reality

Whilst of course all of these things could be true, some of them might not be for you

Can it be that some might not want to love at all or are we somewhat captured by it all

Can it be true that Love is not pure

It meets at the complication meeting place of us all

They interact with each other like dancers at a ball

Maybe their joker can help heal your pain, or maybe their pain feels somewhat the same……….

or the hole in your soul can be matched with the wound in theirs,

There is a lot of mismatch out there take care.

So can I answer what love is? The answer to that is I could get close to telling you what love is to me and my version of it. What I would suggest is you look within and find your version of what love is to you because in the grand scheme of things the varying versions of what it can be may not even be close to what your version of it is.

You may not even be able to answer what it is for you because you haven’t put enough thought there. Self-exploration and acceptance of what you recognise your needs to be have to form the foundation of what love is for you, even if these things are not common themes in surrounding relationships around you. Own what it is you want from your relationship even if parts of it feel dysfunctional to others. It is your relationship not theirs and frankly if it fulfils the space in your life that you define as love, then let it be, its your life after all………….

If you would like to explore who you are then counselling can offer you the space for this exploration and then perhaps you can make an informed decision on what it is you want from a relationship. Or perhaps your in a relationship and you want to explore your position within it.

Contact www.brighter-pathways.co.uk to find out more.