How I Discovered Non-Violent Communication (NVC)

I first came across Marshall Rosenberg’s Non-Violent Communication (NVC) because I wasn’t getting my needs met in relationships with other people, and recognised that the communication skills I had inherited from my parents were terrible. I also wanted a way of communicating that would help me heal some of the pain from my past without forever going to therapy, and reduce the stress I felt around relating to other people.

I was a volunteer crisis counsellor with a local telephone hotline here in Sydney, Australia for 9 years, and the way we related to callers was all based on Rogerian therapy (“Sounds like you feel …”). Marshall Rosenberg studied with Carl Rogers and used Rogers’ empathy model as the basis for NVC, adding the concept of needs as the underlying basis for feelings. So when I came across NVC it was a natural fit for me.

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Did You Have A Difficult Relationship With Your Mother?

One of the dominant themes that my clients and other readers of this blog usually have that has undermined their self-confidence is a difficult relationship with their mother. When we have a good relationship with our mother from infancy through adolescence, our nervous system is wired for a sense of safety and we are prepared to take on the world as an adult. However, if we had a difficult relationship with our mother, this can wire our nervous system for anxiety and leave us feeling unsafe long into adulthood. Psychologists call this an attachment disorder, and the implications on the rest of our lives can be devastating.

A controlling mother can leave you feeling unsafe

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Ten Positive Things To Do During COVID19 Lockdown

It looks like we’ve all got about 6 months to fill in social isolation. How you are going to spend the time? Are you going to use it productively, or waste it bingeing on NetFlix until you can’t see any more?

It’s times like these when thinking creatively is particularly important. And since I’m here to do your thinking for you, here are ten positive things to do during the COVID19 lockdown that will leave you better off in the future when we can all go out again: (more…)

How I Released My Fear of Rejection and Abandonment

One of the consequences of being a sensitive child growing up with emotionally unavailable parents was that I didn’t feel loved and accepted for who I was. I developed a strong fear of rejection and abandonment which lasted long into adulthood. It would most often come up in conversations with women, especially if I got the sense that they didn’t like me or didn’t seem to want to talk to me.

For example, I was at a birthday dinner for a female friend a few years ago and was sitting next to an attractive young woman who my friend worked with. We struck up a conversation which went quite well and lasted for several minutes. After a while when there was a lull in our conversation, she turned to the woman sitting on her other side and started talking with her instead of me. I broke out in a sweat. (more…)

Ten Step Towards Loving Yourself

Today is Valentine’s day: the day on which people traditionally express and celebrate their love for each other. But what about loving ourselves? Many people have had the idea of self-love beaten out of them through early life experiences, so here are Ten Steps Towards Loving Yourself: (more…)

Why Am I So Anxious All The Time?

Journaling is a great way to release unexpressed emotions that can otherwise accumulate and make us feel anxious. Here is an example of some free-flow journaling that I did last year at a time when I was feeling particularly anxious. It helped me identify and release how I was feeling, so writing it felt very cathartic.

I am so anxious sometimes that it’s literally hard to breathe. Why, why, why, why, why? Or more importantly, what can I do about it? Where is it coming from? I’ve been contemplating this recently, and here are my thoughts: (more…)

Large family having Christmas dinner

Christmas Day With My Parents, And Other Life-Threatening Challenges

Christmas day this year was rather challenging, principally because my dad is dying. He’s 87 and got cancer 3 years ago. The 18 months of radiotherapy and chemotherapy probably saved his life, but now his bone marrow is fucked and he can’t make his own red blood cells, so he’s going to die. He knows it, I know it, everyone in the family knows it. We just don’t know when. I feel absolutely devastated.

Watching his steady decline is all the more painful because it brings up all the unmet needs I still have in my relationship with him, like security and significance, that I now know for sure he will never fulfil for me. I’ve realised this intellectually for a long time but seeing him slowly die real nails it home. My relationship with my dad has always lacked emotional intimacy despite my best efforts to connect with him over the years. He just didn’t have it in him. At the same time, he’s the one person I feel most confident in saying who genuinely loves me… and now he’s going to die. Fortunately, he’s not in any great pain as far as I can see… he just gets tired a lot.

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The Happiness Trap by Russ Harris

My Life Coach originally recommended I read Dr Russ Harris’s bestselling book The Happiness Trap at a time when I was struggling with a lot of anxiety which was getting in the way of me achieving consistent lasting happiness. The book is practical guide to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) with a subtitle that rang a chord with me: Stop struggling, start living.

The basic premise of The Happiness Trap is summed up when Dr Harris writes:

The more we try to avoid the basic reality that all human life involves pain, the more we are likely to struggle with that pain when it arises, thereby creating even more suffering.

We spend a great deal of our lives seeking pleasant feelings and avoiding unpleasant ones, because we think that this is what will make us happy. But herein lies the trap: the techniques we use to avoid unpleasant feelings actually tend to reinforce them, like the old “don’t think of pink elephants” trick. Or we avoid our feelings altogether, leaving us disconnected from reality. Even positive activities like setting and pursuing future goals can cause us to lose connection with what’s going on around us when we immediately notice that we haven’t met those goals yet, or we experience frustration over goals we haven’t been able to achieve yet.

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Escaping Toxic Guilt by Susan Carrell

I came across Susan Carell’s book Escaping Toxic Guilt while scouring the library shelves for something on topic of dealing with shame. Guilt and shame are close relatives. According to Carell:

Guilt is feeling bad about something you’ve done, while shame is feeling bad about who you are.

Hmm… I could relate to that. Furthermore, toxic guilt occurs when we feel guilty even though we aren’t doing anything that violates our own value system. Often the source of this guilt is conditioning by controlling parents or other domineering authority figures in our childhood.

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