Passive Suicide Part 3: Good Mental Health starts at birth!
Having pretty much finished the CFT (apart from the follow up), the question is, ‘Did it help’?
Yes, it did, but not in the way I expected it to. Therapy isn’t a magic wand that suddenly makes everything better and solves all of your problems, it’s a process that may be fast or slow, very effective or minimally effective and accessible or not so accessible. Every person is so unique, and add to that the fact that the therapist is also a unique person that you may or may not relate to and you start to see the variables that come into play.
You have to do your bit as well…
And therapy isn’t about the therapist doing all the work either, the majority of the work has to be done by you so the success is based very much on how much work you’re prepared to put in, to help it, help you. Sadly, some people will attend 3 sessions, decide it’s not working and never return having not given it a proper chance and possibly not having put the work in that was required anyway. An open mind is critically important with anything in life and therapy is no different, if you approach the process with a closed mind it can never work.
And yet, ironically, when I started it was very much with a rather negative attitude as I’ve said previously, I really didn’t want to do it and I honestly didn’t think it would help, but I went anyway. By the second week I had managed to shift my attitude just enough to be receptive to the subjects we were discussing as a group and to be much more open minded towards the process. It’s because of this, and only because of this that I derived any benefit from the course at all.
The basis of CFT is to encourage, and teach us, to be more compassionate to ourselves and others. Most of us in the group live our lives in either ‘threat’ or ‘drive’, the other third of this particular model is ‘self-soothing’, a skill that a lot of us have lost but that is imperative for a balanced brain, and therefore, life.
I recently spoke at Cambridge University and alongside me on the panel was the Head of the Board of Trustees for the Mental Health Foundation, the oldest charity in the UK dedicated to mental health. One of the students asked a very pertinent question, she wanted to know at what age we should start considering our mental health. Keith’s answer was very interesting.
It’s never too early to start!
He told us of a new initiative they are working on with the Government which is focused on brand new mothers in deprived areas, looking after our mental health starts at birth! The first thing new mothers are being taught is to feed their baby and then put the child straight in their cot, not allow it to fall asleep in their arms. Why is this? Because people have to learn to self-soothe right from birth, it’s a skill that’s much easier to learn if it starts at the very beginning and it’s absolutely essential for our future mental health.
Interestingly, a very large part of the CFT course was based on exactly that, self-soothing, because the majority of us have simply forgotten how to do it. Lives in the 21stcentury are chaotic, information blasts at us from every direction, so much so that we have lost the ability to do what our ancestors did and just sit, and be, and stare into the fire lost in our own thoughts.
Most of us have to be taught about living a balanced life, we have to learn the obvious because we’ve simply lost the skill within all of the tumultuous ‘noise’ we live in. Keith was absolutely right; a healthy mind is created right from birth!
For those of us who have lost the skill, or never had it in the first place, it’s a case of going back to ‘healthy living kindergarten’ in order to sort ourselves out. Perhaps we need to understand that our cave dwelling, no technology ancestors actually knew a thing or two about life, we can learn many lessons from them!
Until next time…
Film: ‘Kingdom of Us’ on Netflix https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fc8_spETMBY&t=18s
TED Talk: ‘Why my autistic children don’t need a cure’ on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xts1F-PoUNA&t=14s
Book: ‘Unravelled’ on Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Unravelled-inspirational-story-journey-darkness-ebook/dp/B00L1ENC0O/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1550053166&sr=8-1
