Living Sensitively

When it came to creating my own Facebook page and now Instagram account I decided to name it ‘Living Sensitively’. Why, you might ask? And how is that relevant to therapy or coaching (or therapeutic coaching)?

‘Living Sensitively’ encapsulates many things. But mainly it encourages a particular attitude. I have come across various definitions for the adverb ‘sensitively’. My favourite one, which feels most fitting here is living ‘in a way that shows awareness and understanding of other people’s feelings and needs’. This is something to aspire to – a way of living in which we are considerate of the emotions and needs of others. But importantly, I would go further and include one’s own emotions and needs. We must live with an awareness and understanding of our own emotions and needs as much as those of the people around us. By holding a personal intention to do so, and with the help of therapy, we are able to foster this. We can’t be truly attentive to the needs of others if we haven’t to some extent attended to our own. That is why when flying in an aeroplane parents are instructed to put their “own oxygen mask on first” before helping a child with theirs. Also, acknowledging the truth of our own feelings allows us to have more empathy for others.

Sensitivity isn’t always seen in a positive light. Often, as children we are encouraged to ‘toughen up’ and to ‘stop being so sensitive’. Over time we can develop beliefs about what is acceptable when it comes to expressing emotions or even allowing ourselves to feel them. We can unconsciously start to suppress our emotions (to numb out in various ways). We can lose touch with how we really feel and what we really need and want. Equally we may feel overwhelmed by our emotions and experiences and may tell ourselves they are unacceptable but be powerless to change them. Therefore, we can feel unresourceful and ill-equipped to deal with life’s challenges (big or small). 

‘Living sensitively’ is, for me, about gaining awareness of what is. Through recognising and understanding our inner experience (our ways of thinking, our beliefs, our feelings, our sensations) we can identify how it affects our behaviour and relationships with others. We can cultivate compassion for ourselves as well as for others and find solutions, so that we can make changes and undergo powerful transformation. 

Living sensitively encourages you if you like, to be your own barometer and take a reading of your internal weather patterns. By gauging how you feel, it gives you clues as to what you might need – full rain gear to weather a storm or just shorts and a t’shirt as the outlook is bright and sunny. 

About 15-20 percent of the population are what has been termed “highly sensitive”, according to Dr. Dr. Elaine Aron, author of the book ‘The Highly Sensitive Person’. I would include myself in this group. It took me a while to accept and respect my sensitivity. I had to learn some hard lessons about what could happen if I didn’t. These learnings have been invaluable though and have radically changed my life. Fortunately, sensitivity is a positive asset when it comes to therapy and coaching – the ability to be sensitive to and have an understanding and awareness for the feelings and experiences of others. 

Wherever you fall on the sensitivity scale, it can benefit your life to have the space to explore your inner experience. It’s about finding balance, in order to live a full and satisfying life. It helps if we gain an understanding of what it going on for us and find new ways to support ourselves. The therapeutic coaching model I use integrates NLP, EFT, hypnotherapy, life coaching and mindfulness. These can all help in finding this balance. See here for more information about this approach.

If you would like to, please follow my Facebook page @livingsensitively and Instagram account living_sensitively.

Becoming Unstuck

We can all feel stuck at times. 

Our thoughts lead us to feeling a certain way, which encourages us to behave in a certain way. While feelings lead us to thinking in a particular way which then leads us to behaving in a particular way. Behaving in a certain way leads us to feeling and thinking in particular ways. It’s a complicated relationship – a bit like a tangled ball of different coloured strands of string, which it seems impossible to separate out and unravel. 

So how can we create change?

Well what if it could be as easy as A,B,C?

In this case, the A stands for ‘Awareness’– in order to make a change we first need to become aware of what’s going on for us. What is it we are thinking, feeling and doing that we would like to change and in what context (at work, home…)? This enables us to establish where we are – our starting point and from here we can identify where we would like to be. It can often help to work with someone else to achieve clarity. It will be helpful to set an intention – the direction in which we want to travel, which could be as practical as “I would like a new fulfilling job in six months” time” or more emotive such as “I would like to feel more positive after this relationship breakup”.

B stands for ‘Beliefs’– the crucial next step is to probe a bit deeper and to identify the underlying limiting beliefs that are driving the current thoughts, feelings and behaviours and getting in the way of change occurring. For example, we would like a new job but find ourselves putting off applying for roles, and feeling despondent, while telling ourselves that it is pointless because we won’t get any of them anyway. Underneath all of that there could well be a limiting belief such as “I am not good enough”. There could also be some beliefs relating to our capacity to experience change that will get in the way of creating it, such as “it’s too hard to change”. Identifying these beliefs enables us to work with them which is the next step.

C stands for Choice– in order to bring about the change we would like we often need to work with both our conscious and unconscious minds on the thoughts, emotions, behaviours and the underlying beliefs, to create a greater sense of choice for ourselves. In the words of Einstein “problems cannot be solved with the same mindset that created them”. This is where working with a therapeutic coach using different hypnotic, NLP and EFT techniques can really help. Doing so opens us up to a range of new possibilities and resources, enabling us to choose something different. It allows us to move from a state of ‘stuckness’ to a more resourceful and creative one, from which we can make more positive choices for ourselves in the way we think, feel and behave.

To aid this change, we will need to bring a sense of curiosity, in order to understand what is going on for us. We also need persistence as change rarely happens overnight (although it can). It will also be essential to cultivate or strengthen our sense of self-compassion – changing the way we relate to ourselves can be a key ingredient to lasting change – so that we can encourage ourselves rather than berate ourselves along the way. With this approach, just as when unravelling the different strands of a tangled ball of string, we are more likely to succeed. 

It is a balancing act between acceptance of where we are and the intention to move forward towards what we want in the future, using curiosity, persistence and self-compassion to take us there. Could this be the winning formula for becoming unstuck and moving forward in your life?

If you would like to arrange a therapeutic coaching session with me please get in touch here.

How does that make you feel?

This phrase has become a bit of a cliché when it comes to therapy. But it’s a very important question for a therapist to ask their clients, which can’t be avoided. What the therapeutic hour offers is exactly what the question suggests – an opportunity to explore your feelings, as well as the events and thoughts that have given rise to them. Therefore, you do have to be ready to feel when you come to a therapy session and you have to expect to be asked that question. 

However, you won’t be asked to feel anything you aren’t ready to. Just to feel into your current experience and emotions. In the language of NLP, this is referred to as ‘pacing’ – which means appreciating your current experience – where you are right now before trying to jump to where you want to be. This is the starting point in therapy.

A misconception about therapy, in its different forms, is that it will enable us to get rid of or find a way to transcend our feelings. But emotions come and go and when we recognise this we don’t have to fear them. Exploring beliefs and thoughts and their relation to our feelings is very helpful. There are tools we can use to work with the thoughts and beliefs, as well as the emotions they create. EFT is a very effective one for working with our feelings.

EFT stands for Emotional Freedom Technique – the name may give the impression that you will become free of your emotions. But that isn’t how it works. You gain freedom through allowing your emotions to surface and working through them. It is however a tool that helps this process along. It allows us to feel, while tapping through the acupressure points on our body simultaneously calming down the stress response within our brains. 

Some people find it hard to speak about emotions. Perhaps is seems like an indulgence – a sign of self-absorption. Perhaps there is an underlying belief that we should just get on with things and stop complaining. But this strategy has limited success rates. More likely the suppression of emotions will play out in other dysfunctional behaviours and result in less resilience overall. Increasing our emotional intelligence helps us to navigate our lives more successfully. When it comes to our emotions, it’s no good being an ostrich and burying our heads in the sand, hoping that they will go away. That is how we become stuck and unable to move forward in our lives.

We all feel differently. Another person, even a psychologist or a therapist, cannot guess what we are experiencing (and mostly we wouldn’t want them to!) as each of us is an individual with our own unique experience of life. It’s important to be able to express and pinpoint in our own words or imagery what this is like for us. True connection comes from one person attempting to enter another person’s world – to gain an understanding of how they are feeling and helping to explore this – not on an intellectual level but on a feeling level. 

Therapy sessions give you an opportunity to explore your own individual experience – your thoughts and feelings and the impact they have on you. It isn’t a place to go and be fixed, it’s a place to go and to feel and through that process to transform. That is the invitation.