I wonder, is it really possible to change your attitude to life – permanently? I don’t really know much about cognitive behavioural therapy – or maybe I do without realising it, the Eric Berne Transactional analysis stuff could be part of it, and neuro-linguistic programming. I know a bit about both of those. But I don’t see any way of using them to change things.
Is change possible? A lady at meditation last Thursday said that she felt she had changed through going there, and one of the other women said last summer that I had changed while I’d been going – but that was before all the upsets happened and I lost any progress I might have made. I suspect she had just seen different aspects of me, as she got to know me better. This has happened before, people have told me I changed as I grew more relaxed with them, but the changes never really last – I am still just as awkward with other people.
So is real change, real deep down, fundamental, irreversible change, possible for me? When I went to hypnotherapy, I seemed to change in the short term, my attitude seemed to change. But the change in attitude wasn’t matched by a change in the circumstances of my life, my supposed increase in confidence (which was supposed to grow more and more every day) withered away in the absence of reinforcement. The supposed virtuous circle, of greater confidence leading to greater success and greater self-esteem, never took off. It ground to a halt again, bogged down in the mires of self-doubt.
But in the short term, I know that meditation, yoga, singing, even gardening, lots of things can improve my mood, temporarily, at least. So, if I keep practising, even if it doesn’t seem to go anywhere, might it lead to a real long-term change, to a fundamental shift which would be irreversible? A step change? That seems to be the implication of what I’ve read. I stuck at yoga for years before I began to feel the real benefits in my body. Maybe I need to stick with meditation longer before I feel any real benefits in my psyche.
The day after I wrote all this stuff about change in my diary, I started thinking about counselling, and my experiences of it. I have tried various sorts of counselling to try and improve my self-esteem, my attitude to life, to try and develop a ‘positive mental attitude’, if you like.
Because how do you do that? Negative mental attitude and low self-esteem is a self-fulfilling prophecy, but, as I’ve said before, the trouble with self-fulfilling prophecies is that they are constantly being reinforced. Whereas virtuous circles are very hard to get going. My hypnotherapy tapes tell me how my subconscious mind is going to help me and how my confidence will increase with every day that passes, and how it is going to help me to cope so much better with life… bollocks, I have been playing those tapes for years. When I listen to them now, I know they didn’t work – my self esteem and confidence hasn’t increased.
Kandamoist made a comment about ‘clinical’ and ‘non clinical’ uses of counselling. Why does he assume that my need for counselling is ‘non clinical’? Do I have a problem, or don’t I? These self esteem issues are not ones I can solve with a new dress or new hair do. So what is the obvious thing to do? Try and get help? I would have thought so. I actually started thinking about describing the counselling I’ve had because I assumed that if anyone read this, someone would say: ‘Have you tried counselling?’ And the answer is, yes I have, but I’ve never found anything that works.
So, is anything ever going to work, or am I going to continue to feel like this for the rest of my life? And I guess the answers must be: no, and yes. So I might as well just give up.
This is me and my life, and this is who I am and how it is, how it’s always been and how it always will be. To think it could have been different or could be different makes it worse because if I acknowledge that, I have to face up to the fact that it’s my fault that I turned out the way I did. The problem does not lie with my marriage or my career, it lies with me and the person I am, the person I cannot change.
The kind lady who made the comment on Sunday about getting a cleaner emailed on Monday to ask if she could help. I have ‘known’ her for years, but she has never known me. I am very usually good at keeping myself hidden, except, bizarrely, on this blog.
I am just ranting into the void, because of the impossibility of happiness and change and development. I am just ranting because I don’t know what else to do.