Christmas is fast approaching with orders placed, presents bought, and plans well underway for that perfect family gathering. Or is it? Is it possible to have the perfect family gathering? Many of us hold the myth that families should be free from stress, that the home should be a haven of peace and happiness particularly around Christmas, which is often viewed as an opportunity for quality family time. Society gives us the clear message that it is acceptable to experience work-related stress, but not family-related stress. The media is full of images of the perfect family enjoying the meal around the table and each others company, what the media does not portray is the often real life situation of arguing children, moody teenagers and parents that don’t talk to each other. When we ‘buy in’ to these unrealistic expectations, we often end up disappointed. A certain amount of family stress is inevitable. It is how a family handles and copes with stress that is truly important.
At Christmas time the pressure to be happy and enjoy things increases exponentially which merely serves to provoke feelings of inadequacy in all of us. People now often lead very busy lives and may feel that they have little time to spend together or have a desire for the simpler life. Families often will find themselves constantly bickering or spending time talking about running out of time and the tasks of preparing for the holiday period, rather than people and feelings. The person doing all the running around is often mum who feels that the success of Christmas lies solely on her shoulders.
It is well reported that, less stressed families seem to find time to support each other, display more flexibility, have reasonable expectations, communicate regularly with each other, set priorities, and view stress as a challenge that is both temporary and manageable.
Some solutions to family stress at Christmas:
• When problems begin to arise – talk about them together, avoiding problems almost always intensifies them. Planning as a family what you want to do at Christmas will go some way to ensuring everyone is on board.
• Get everyone involved, particularly if both parents are out working. On the day give everyone a task for example peeling potatoes or setting the table. Sharing out the tasks means that there will be times for everyone to relax.
• Leave work at work – over the Christmas period you do not need to be thinking about work or work related issues. This is a specific time when the family is the only focus.
• Set guidelines for all family members if you recognise and respect your limitations the others will too. You can’t do everything that your partner or children want you to do.
• Keep things in perspective – Concentrate on those items and tasks that bring the most rewards to your family and get the full benefit from them. Eliminate those that do not give benefit to the family.
Christmas is usually a time when families come together, being reasonable and realistic about your own expectations and sharing these with your family will enable you to plan a Christmas that you can relax and enjoy.
Marlow FM 97.5 the new community radio was launched on 11th May 2011. Every Tuesday from 9.30-12 The Healthy Mind and Body broadcasts with Dr Shelagh and Ann Garry. The first show went out on the 17th May 2011 with the topic of diets and our obsession with weight. Our guests this week were Sandra Hunt from the Cambridge diet company and Lucy Aphramor from the Health At Every Size (HAES) movement. Both guests presented their views succinctly, which led to a lively debate on the pros and cons of both extreme dieting and complaceny about weight. The panel seemed to come to an agreement that changing eating behaviour alone would never provide a long term solution to maintaining a healthy body, but that a change in the way we think about our bodies and our lifestyle is needed.
The Health headlines this week included the new discovery about a gene believed to be responsible for depression, a DNA strand that can tell our life expectancy and having a bad nights sleep can prevent us from losing weight by lowering our metabolism throughout the following day. Research has also shown that the social group we are in can contribute to weight status not so much from shared ideals but more from shared activities and that there is little evidence for diet being a protective factor in Alzheimer development.
Next episode on stress
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when will we share precious moments? – 15 weeks on and the divine purple mini is still in the garage! I have pondered over the impact that material objects have in our lives. Things that make us stand out from the crowd, that say something about the kind of person we are, they become part of our identity formation. Without them we feel anonymous invisible even. I have felt unsettled through out my separation from my car this is the car that i have owned for longer than any other car and means more than even my first car so without it i feel less than.
9 weeks later and my car is still in the garage! except now the garage is no longer owned by Stratstone but Sytner. Apparantly the ‘fault’ that was identified by a junior technician before the crash has now required identification by the senior technician and we are awaiting parts from Germany – hmmmm i thought minis were made in Oxford! oh well what do i know.
So as it stands i am driving an Avis car which is not a mini i might add and very unhappy – i cannot wait to be reunited with my lovely mini – does that make me sad?
Having recently started ‘Supervision and Consultation Training’ at Surrey University, I have been reflecting on my thoughts about therapy and supervision of therapy. We all know it is ‘good to talk’ to quote a well known advert from the early 90’s, and no doubt are familiar with the expressions ‘a problem shared is a problem halved’ and ‘two heads are better than one’. So the idea that a talking treatment would be helpful would be of no surprise really. It may be more surprising how it has taken off into the different fields and how much is now believed to be known about the mind and how it works. Freud was the first to be recognised as a pioneer of the talking treatment, and as they say, the rest is history.
In those times, Freud began by training others who then went on to train others and so on and so forth, clearly suggesting a hierarchy of knowledge and skill that can be passed from senior to junior practitioner. In the therapeutic world it has been a longstanding tradition that once qualified, there is an expectation that one will take on trainees. It is only in recent years that supervision has been seen as something that might require a distinct training to enable registration as a supervisor: hence the rise in supervision training. A key debate in training is the dilemmas around whether or not supervision is a hierarchical or collaborative relationship and whether it can be both.
We know that when seeking a supervisor, some of us look for someone we perceive to know something more than us. Therefore we appear to be crediting them with a knowledge and skill we believe we either do not have or have not yet mastered. However, when we are offering supervision we aim to be collaborative and share knowledge rather than it be imparted in one direction. The tension between these two positions has been alternately highlighted and soothed in the various lectures and exercises within the training. We have explored and mulled over these ideas and how they sit with both the practitioner and the supervisor within us. I currently hold the position that it is less about knowledge and more about responsibility, but no doubt will continue to evolve these ideas.
The training at Surrey is a bit different from other supervision courses. It integrates different psychotherapeutic theories to provide a comprehensive and rich learning experience. The lectures have covered supervision theory from cognitive behavioural, integrative, psychoanalytical and systemic approaches. The exercises have pushed for a broader minded approach to supervision with a clear structure around the legalities and the moralities of being a supervisor, paying attention to the wider organisational agendas. The course has also included a series of supervision of supervision sessions where each student presents their experiences to the group for feedback and support.
This is only the second year of this particular course, so in some ways this cohort is an experiment building on the learning from the first cohort. Despite this, the course has been well thought out and delivered in the usual inimitable style of further education.
When the new BMW mini was launched I lusted after it for awhile until finally took the plunge and bought one specially adapted for me. I had all the extras I wanted put on it and had it sprayed purple just for me. It was my present to myself. If you are local to me you may have seen it, there is no other like it, it is unique: 8 years on I am very attached to my mini, which actually is the car I have had the longest ever of any car I have owned. In April last year the clutch went on it which was ok as it was 8 years old: in it went to the garage for repair. Job done. Since then it has been in and out of the same garage each time for bigger issues than the one before and has a complete rewire, 4 new gaskets four new clutches, and was about to have the 4th gear box fitted when the garage technician crashed it. Colour me devastated I want to cry. Lets be clear here my car is not the issue – the garage is they have consistently failed to make the appropriate repairs without doing more damage to the car and costing me a fortune in the process – shame on you BMW Stratstone Maidenhead. I am now left without my lovely car and in an argument with the gargae about what they are going to do about it.
The latest installment on ‘the course’: this week the topic was dilemmas in supervision where we thought about the issues that we as supervisors face when supervising for example who has the power and/or authority in the supervisory scenario, and who holds responsibility and for what. There was much about how and when to intervene and how the time is divided when supervising groups. The usual debate about clinical management relationships within the supervision context. However the part i found most interesting was the discussion around the ‘roles’ we each adopt in the supervision setting for example how one person in a group can manage to say nothing and remain unchallenged by the rest of the group, or how one person can dominate the group and feel unchallengable on that. It is a bit like therapy in how does the therapist manage to allow evryperson the time a space to use the group for what they need as well as give something back for everyone else. the question is ina group of professionals whose repsonsbility is it to ensure everyone gets what they need, the group members and/or the supervisor? I think personal responsiblity is something that often gets lost: we are living in a culture now of it always being someone elses fault which leaves the average person not taking responsbilty for anything. So how about thinking about your day to day and checking what you actually take responsbility for – what would be different if you took resposnbility for everything for yourself and i do not mean taking responsbility for others just yourself- try it you may surpirse yourself
Ever feel like you are just getting on top if things only to find the task has changed? that is what I found at my most recent attendance on ‘the course’. Each term we have a piece of written work to do or actually we have 2 each term so last term I had already begun to think about the piece for this term and to get a head start on it. Having done that I find out this week that the task has changed and what I have done no longer meets the criteria for what is required. Changing the goal posts can be not only frustrating but also disheartening so how do we pick ourselves up and keep going in spite of the obstacles that we face? Personal motivation is such a changeable force, I like to think of myself as quite a motivated person but I do at times feel quite thwarted by events around me. So thinking about what I do when that happens might be a useful exercise. I tend to write a list of all the things I need to do with the dealines that they need to be done by (although the deadlines are usually in my head), then as I do a task I get a sense of achievement when I can tick it off the list. Focus is a key issue as if I spend too long at a stretch in front of the computer I tend to lose focus so I need to take regular time out to think about something else. Sometimes writing flows and other times I struggle to get a sentence out which can be a bit of a problem when the task is to write! Oh and never underestimate the value of coffee!!
I am someone who does! I work for myself and feel in order to be professional I need to have pieces of paper that say I can do what I say I can do. Now this is not to say that without the paper I cant do it because of course I can but I think when you want to charge someone for what you do then you need to have all your bits of paper in order. So I am doing this course because recently I have had some requests for supervision. I have supervised many different people in many different contexts but had not been formally trained to do so except by example so I decided to get my supervision bit of paper.
On the last day of term a small group of us were sitting talking about essays and assignments and registration once the course was complete. We were discussing the word count of the most recent essay which it turns out I had misunderstood the intructions and was having a cold sweat at the thought I may get an automatic fail if I did not have the correct amount of words. Remember purpose of doing course is to pass. Imagine my shock when everyone but me was talking about enjoying the learning and meeting new people (not that this is not also true for me)blah blah blah and that the certificate at the end was unimportant! Colour me stunned! This got me thinking am I the strange one for wanting to collect my bits of paper or them the strange ones for not caring?
any ideas from the floor?
Does a supervisor have to be better at the ‘job’ than you? not necessarily. The most recent day at the training focussed on how the supervisor can be useful to people who may have skills that (s)he does not. Ideas about knowledge and who has ownership of knowledge. In a discussion around difference in theoretical thinking the tutor described how much she learned and how much she was challenged by supervising a group of psychiatrists that were working from a different theoretical framework. The suprising thing for me is that this perosn was one of my tutor/supervisors from 20years ago and i would never have recgonised her from what she was saying. She has certainly changed. The question for me is what takes a person who is so embedded in a certain way of thinking who shows no sign of openmindedness 20 years later talking about intergation of ideas and valuing the learning of not being embedded in one way of thinking. Hats off to her. One thing that has not changed is the compulsion to turn every person into a statistic and a member of a category. We have to identify each person by visible indicators as well as invisible ones so that we can feel good about ticking the boxes of being difference sensisitve. However by doing this we render them invisible and insignificant by reducing them to a category member and so losing sight of them as a person. There is a definite need to be sensitive to every persons differences but how we are does make a huge difference to the experience. We can look at a person and decide from appearances and accents a huge amount about that person for example: white irish man possible IRA : alternatively we can talk to him and find out baout him as a person and the what he has struggled with to get where he is today staying away from military/youth brigade organisations. Line up ten black men all in same category of being black but does that mean that they \are all the same? – no it does not. Every person is different and each individual is the only expert on who that person actually is.
I've Been Thinking