Introduction to the Posts on this Blog

INTRODUCTION     March 2013

About me. Who am I?

I have spent a lifetime looking for ‘what I was supposed to be doing’, casting around, never really happy, quite sorry for myself, and wondering what it was all about. Others seemed to be happy; to find love, a partner, children, and to have fun, achieve, and find recognition, etc. etc, etc. So, what was wrong with me?

Being single meant that I had time to read, so I did; a great deal; mostly psychology, personal growth, the esoteric, and ‘New Age’. So, I went on, learning, watching and thinking about what seemed to work or make sense and what did not.

By the time I was 50, I felt progressively more trapped and I did not like the person I was becoming. I also had the feeling that if I did not change this, I would get ‘hit by a truck’. I tried to make changes, but became ill with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, which left me feeling very stuck indeed.

However, at the end of that year, (of being 50), and through my apparently disastrous attempts at change (through worrying about the truck), I ‘fell over’ someone who helped me greatly with both goal-setting and clearing the fears that stopped me getting to them.

It still took another 10 years to integrate and understand what I had learnt within the context of what I had read and experienced, but in the end, writing this is ‘what I am ‘sposed to be doing’ and it has taken me quite some time (more years) to face ‘coming out’ with ideas that make sense to me, but are so counter to what we are taught.

Emotional pain and physical illness have been the sticks that made this donkey get a move on and search for whatever carrots I could find. It is my ‘sticks’ that have taught me all I know; if I got what I thought I wanted or deserved during my earlier years, I simply congratulated myself, or thought I had it all under control, until the next time that I had not.

About the posts.

The posts that follow are mostly sections of chapters of a book that I am writing called “Integrating the Shadow and Finding Your Direction” (ITS&FYD). I would like to say that it is all planned out and chapters and sections will be completed in due course, but this is not the case. The book seems to have a mind and a timing of its own. Chapters or Sections that I think will be easy aren’t, and get huge in front of my eyes. So, you won’t find any plan or outline here, at least at this stage.

But, because it is a book, the posts are not simply topics in isolation, and are not meant to be read that way. They depend on concepts and logic developed in previous sections. Also, the nature of posting to a blog means that the posts end up ‘backwards’, in that they really need to be read from the bottom up, not the top down, which is how they are presented to the reader. Not to mention, my posts are much longer than ‘normal’.

In fact, I hope to eventually set up my own web-site when there is rather more to mount than so far, but that’s in the future.

The first chapter is called Structures because I am using it to build a platform or foundation for more complex ideas.

The second chapter will come…sometime….

About the book.

I find it very difficult to easily say what the book is about. It is how I make sense of all that I have read, learned, observed and experienced. It is not a philosophy or a theory; it is what I have found as I chipped away at facing my rubbish and as I cleared my useless decisions, so there is a kind of ‘take it or leave it’ flavour to it. It is my ideas on the purpose and meaning of life on earth, and it is what works for me, which is why I call it a Useful Understanding System. But its primary purpose is as a vehicle for what I would call the Insight Tool which I developed or modified from others’ methods, and how it works, as well as why it works.

The Insight Tool is my psychological method for turning my shit or sewage (or what I was shitty about) into fertilizer for my own growth. In effect, I found that I could use what I didn’t want to get me to where I did want to go or what I did want. This sounds a bit daft, or almost backwards, but I had had no idea of what I really wanted; I had only developed a lifetime’s experience of what I did not want.

I tried to tell people about this wonderful method that was manifestly helping me get what I wanted, but all who knew me thought it was ‘luck’.

Eventually, I began to understand that this method needs a lot of explaining because it is so counter to our cultural and social understandings. Not only is the method itself counter to ‘normal’, it is best used within a framework of ideas that are also counter to normal. This framework itself has come out of what I have found as I have worked with this method.

Thus, it seemed to me that if I had to explain what it was and how to use it, I needed to explain the framework within which it works.

Over the last 2-3 decades, there has been increasing emphasis by ‘New Age’ enthusiasts on concepts such as ‘spirituality’ and ‘unconditional love’; so there tends to be lots of ‘love and light’ hanging around. However, Jung said something to the effect of.. ‘One does not find the light by ignoring the dark’. Accepting one’s own very spotty internal self, warts and all, is the hard part as far as I’m concerned, but infinitely worth it.

In the end, as far as I can see it, most people do not want to know about their problems because they believe that they can not be ‘fixed’. It’s too hard and just means pain for no point. In fact, people will not look unless they know first that the problem can be solved, and there is very little anywhere that tells us this can be possible, so we run and run, and hope things will change….

This book then, is saying that..

1. Your problems can be solved, or they can be useful to you, or you can become a lot happier about them, which means much less pain and sorrow
2. That it really is worth looking; there is every point in doing so..

..and here’s why and how.

so, Who are my audience?

Errm I don’t know. It’s likely to be some proportion of..

            Other ‘Seekers’,

            Beck’s ‘Mender’ types,

            NFs (the ‘Idealists’) of the MBTI,

            HSPs,

            People trying to make sense of what we are taught about life,

            Someone looking for a way through to their own creativity,

            Those who use Byron Katie’s ‘Turn it Around’ (= the Work).

The story of developing the Insight Tool.

(Other names for this tool/method could be Shit-Shifting or Bug-Hunting, but I’m not sure.)

In early 1999 I did an NLP course with Jon Brenton and a small group of students. Jon himself was trained by Tad James who in tandem with the NLP also uses a method he developed called TimeLine (T/L) Therapy. The 2 methods together are most effective for goal-setting and for clearing the things that stop us getting them, hence I consider them very important.

NLP is a suite of techniques based on an understanding of how the mind works. These techniques are great for solving problems, and we ‘bring the problems up’ by setting goals. Thus, during the course we were asked for our goals (what do you want to be, do, or have?) and what our values about these goals were. Then we ranked the values from most important to the least. Then we would look at what we actually had versus what we valued and they were usually the opposite of what we valued.

Then we would put these values and their opposites on our different hands, asking ourselves what each taught us about the other. It was fascinating to feel our hands wanting to come together as we ‘understood’ (not always consciously) what that learning was.

We also learnt to picture our goals and to put them into the future, and then we would TimeLine the fears that came up. I think that Jon had modified Tad’s T/L script to better fit in with how he wanted to use it.

This worked fairly well for me, although I had an enormous amount of trouble with the actual goal-setting, and asking me my values stumped me greatly. Also, some things I worked on didn’t really seem to stick. However there was so much for me to work on that it seemed to be a very moot point.

Jon continued to run a group for us on a weekly basis where some 5-10 people would come and we would practice our NLP. Jon gave me enormous help with traumas and goal-setting; hours and hours of help. This is to say I needed a lot of help, and got it. It sounds a bit dramatic to say that it saved my life, but that is how it feels.

I was also trying to understand what I had been taught and how to use it, since I would have liked to have been as effective as I considered Jon to be for me and others. However, I suspected I just did not have the mind for it, in terms of speed of thinking. I also found that I was more interested in the unconscious methods rather than the conscious ones.

Eventually, another woman in this group, Susan Oliver, spotted that re-doing the opposites, as in, looking for the opposite of the 1^st 2 opposites, (the AO2) really did seem to make the process stick. She used the words ‘absolute opposites’. This was a breakthrough for me; the insights were so interesting and the goal-setting seemed to work better. She also taught me to clap my hands together as they came together.

As the years went by I spent a lot of time working on myself by myself. I was still ill with the Chronic Fatigue, and trying to work out how on earth to keep myself afloat. There was still an awful lot wrong with me, and I was still trying to work out how to get better. I had already had a great deal of help for free but couldn’t keep doing that, and couldn’t afford to pay for help from others, so DIY was what I got to do.

Besides, it helped me relax as nothing else could, and I loved it. It is a way of ‘tracking’ one’s self, and I found it fascinating and absorbing, and really, it gave me hope; I knew no other way of beating this illness, and I was hunting down the ‘hidden advantages’, which Jon taught us about as part of the course.

I had noticed with trying to goal-set that I was often better off starting from what I didn’t want in the absence of any idea of what I did want. It would end up as a see-saw as I went from one side to the other developing the concepts and building up a ‘picture’.

From reading Byron Katie’s books, I learnt about ‘turning it around’ and started to do this to what I wanted to complain about (aka ‘judge thy neighbour). Invariably I would find that I had done to others in a previous life exactly what I most complained about in this one. It was through this that I began to formulate the Mirror Laws.

From reading about the MBTI, I began to realize that the questions that start the process of ‘looking’ didn’t work that well for me, and in fact work much better when tailored to the person’s type.

I also modified the goal-setting and the T/L scripts to run together, and found that if I had done the 1^st set of opposites (the AO1s) properly and thoroughly the script would ‘run’ well, and I would get a great deal out of it. The AO2 would ‘lock’ that process in, and so I trundled on.

Once I had this method in place, and had practised it over and over, and seen the results which I liked so much, it gave me more reason to trust that I could handle whatever turned up in my life. Thus I could learn to ‘trust life’ and allow and enjoy.

So, this is how I learnt to turn my shit into fertilizer for me.

In all the ‘New Age’ spiritual stuff, the primary emphasis was always on meditation and stilling the mind, but I had a mind that would not stay still ever, and I simply could not meditate. Neither was I at all sure that I wanted to be like those who could, since I felt vaguely allergic to the ‘loving’ tall, generally bearded men in flowing clothes (especially the ones who liked to look like guess who) who taught such things. Eventually, I learned to address every single concern that crashed around in my mind by using this method, and what I learned in the process is what I am writing about here.

I love this method that has brought me so much, and that is why I want to tell others about it.

It is not the be-all and end-all; of course there are other methods. For starters, it does not deal with trauma, which I suspect needs 2 people.

Well, am I going to tell people what this method actually is?

I intend to spell out the method at a later stage. This is partly because there are some aspects that I am not sure about.

Primarily, the T/L script is a hypnotic script and is trademarked, as are others if they are worth anything. Tad James invented Timeline Therapy and Jon modified the scripts for his own use, so both have intellectual input. I may be able to use them for my own purposes, but I must not publish them. Sadly, Jon died in December 2012, so I cannot ask him. It is a major part of the method and I am not sure how else to present it. I know of nothing else more relevant or more effective, and I have looked. However, I really will have to find another way for this part of the method

I have not done another NLP course with another trainer, so I do not know which bits that we were taught were part of Jon’s own training as both a teacher and a psychiatric nurse, or part of a more ‘standard’ NLP course.

I think Dilts uses the opposites and I suspect the understanding of its value is more ‘around’ now than then, but it was Susan Oliver who spotted doing it twice, and showed me, and for that I am extremely grateful.

The end.