Be your own therapist
Hello there
I’m in the process of producing a training course. In which I’ve brought together all my experience as a therapist, and everyday human, to help you be your very own therapist.
A course in which you’ll delve into your personal history, and your values, to gather a better sense of who you are and the direction you want to go in. Before tooling-up for the journey through the honing of a supportive inner voice, the cultivation of positive emotions, and building of sustainable habits.
Not another bloody course, do we need it?
Rarely does a training course, book, meditation, or psychedelic trip transform ones’ life completely. More often they provide small blocks with which we build a psychologically safe home for ourselves. Or a companion to walk us along the path we endeavour to follow, a little helping hand towards our goals.
It’s about finding something that resonates with you, feels true. Something you can connect to and get onboard with.
Through my work as a therapist I’ve noticed common blockages to change
We can find it hard to remember what we’ve learnt about ourselves, and where to focus our attention when we feel stuck or in pain.
Often, we yearn for a magic pill or silver bullet to come along. Or search endlessly for more problems, new answers, trying to reinvent the wheel.
And I often hear:
“I have the awareness, but how do I change!”
My aim is to support you in going from not just having awareness, but to actual change too.
This is what we need
A framework to follow and trust in, with a commitment to practice
A concise and compassionate understanding of who we are
A supportive and authoritative inner voice
A set of tools to: pause, slow down, feel grounded + take courageous steps forward
The training course
The course is made up of eight elements, which together form a virtuous circle (not the righteous, chaste kind…and certainly not a vicious circle!). By this I mean; learning and practicing each element sends ripples of change through the process, creating a positive self-improvement loop.
Here are the eight elements I’ll be teaching about:
The story of you and me
The Story of you and me is the story of our shared humanity. It's about all the things as humans we have in common.
In this lesson we’ll learn how millions of years have shaped our shared core needs of safety, satisfaction and connection. How we are a living, breathing, culmination of the psychology of our mind, the biology of our body, and the society with which we belong to. And how deep down, we all just want to be loved.
To know this story, is to understand why life can feel such a struggle at times. And by making peace with this inner complexity, we set the groundwork for change.
Your unique story
Nestled within the story of you and me, is your unique tale of how you came to be the person you are today.
In this lesson we’ll start to explore and map out your life. From your younger years, family dynamics, adverse events and achievements, to your present-day thoughts, feelings and behaviours.
Awareness of who you are is fundamental in supporting more conscious choices in your life.
To deeply understand, with an open heart, how your past has shaped you, nourishes the opportunity for self-compassion. Something we’ll be weaving in throughout this course.
Soothing your way to safety
The search for safety, one of our three core needs, can dictate the direction of our life.
Learning how to regulate our nervous system is essential if we are to also live a life of satisfaction and connection. All of us at some point will have experienced the urge to fight, take flight, freeze, or fawn when feeling emotionally or physically unsafe. Sometimes this is essential, but often our responses to feeling threatened lead us away from a rich and meaningful life.
In this lesson we’ll practice two different ways, using the mind and the body, to cultivate a feeling of safety.
Flexing the muscle of intention
If we are not being pulled by our search for safety, we can often be seeking satisfaction and connection. But sometimes those cravings can take us down the unwanted - yet familiar - pathways. All those little moments of resistance where we turn away from what we are intending to do, in search of something more comfortable and pleasurable.
In this lesson we’ll practice the skill of being intentional. Two different tools will help you find a moment of agency, encouraging a movement beyond sticky feelings of procrastination, inertia, dissatisfaction and frustration. A step towards your goals rather than away from them.
Finding flow through your values
Values are process oriented qualities and behaviours. They give direction and meaning; who, and how, you want to be in the world.
Having a sense of direction, or purpose, underpinned by a set of values you are familiar with, can bring a sense of ease, empowerment, stability and meaning as you flow through the unpredictability of life.
In this lesson you’ll get the chance to identify your top ten values. And how being able to *act consistently in alignment, with what feels like a true sense of ourselves, is the key to a meaningful life.
*And how hard that can be!
Befriending your parts (the usual suspects)
As we drop below the surface stories we tell ourselves, there is a much deeper level of self-awareness available to us.
You might already have a sense of how fragmented your mind can feel at times, as if there are competing parts of your personality, pulling you this way and that. The perpetual punishing, guilty, and perfectionist chatter.
In this lesson I’ll show you how to begin identifying the different parts of your inner experience. Our goal here is to befriend these parts, get to know them. And rather than feeling governed by these parts, we begin to assert our own inner authority to lead.
The power of positive emotions
Thanks to the default negative bias in our brains (yes, we all have it, to one degree or another), we can often get fixated on negative thoughts, feelings and experiences. It’s easy to pass over the good stuff in life, when we our wellbeing actually requires a greater ratio of positive experiences to negative ones. Damn you evolution!
In this lesson we’ll explore how your life may benefit from engaging with qualities such as joy, gratitude, compassion, acceptance and forgiveness. We’ll learn two practices in which we’ll intentionally cultivate positive emotional states.
Happiness is a skill, it has to be practiced.
Building habits: repetition, repetition, repetition
We have evolved to make the most efficient use of our available energy. To automate our thoughts and motivations through seeking patterns and focusing on short-term goals. Our mind does this through developing habits, routines, rituals, biases and beliefs.
For change to stick, we need to unpick and rewire our (sometimes unhelpful) automatic habitual ways of thinking and behaving.
In this lesson we’ll look at the fundamentals of habit building. Understanding how habits are formed through consistent, persistent small steps, which can lead to big changes. At the end of this course, we’ll make a commitment to three new habits you wish to create.
One more thing
We were nurtured into this world though connection, it is hugely important for our wellbeing. The right presence from another can be healing, literally. Our nervous system responds to the words, a gaze, the touch of another. This course is not supposed to be a replacement for therapy, but I hope it provides a framework for you to feel accompanied on your path.
My goal is to provide you with a map, one you can always return to. But I also want to encourage you to adapt the exercises in this course to best meet your needs. To explore your own ways of creating more space in your mind for conscious choices. To hone in on what positive emotions you most need, and the new habits to take you forward. While continuing to deepen the connection with the newly discovered parts of yourself.
The real work starts once the course has ended (sorry!).
See you soon.
Ben
