Articles | Beyond Therapy

Written by Catharine Stott, Elisabeth Winkler, Miriam Akhtar | Posted on 11/09/2009 | Category: Our Minds

Tired of dwelling on the past to fix the future? Catharine Stott, Elisabeth Winkler and Miriam Akhtar explore your options.

Catharine tries PSYCH-K

About a decade ago I spent four years in therapy. I left much wiser and more forgiving but not much else changed. I still got bullied at work, fell in love with unavailable men, and thought I was rubbish. The old patterns were still there, and I didn’t seem able to shift them. But in the ten years since, new ways to change patterns that don’t involve analysing oneself and ones past have been appearing and some practitioners say that they can act more swiftly than ‘talking therapies’.

Bruce Lipton, a famous cell biologist, explains the science behind these claims. “The subconscious mind, one of the most powerful information processors known, specifically observes both the surrounding world and the body’s internal awareness, reads the environmental cues, and immediately engages previously acquired (learned) behaviours” he says, “all without the help, suggestion, or even awareness of the conscious mind.” Up to the age of six our subconscious mind is doing nearly all the work – soaking up everything around us with no power of discernment. And it’s only from age 12 onwards that we produce sustained periods of ‘active or focused consciousness’, which processes information at a much slower rate.

That’s why I’ve failed to stop smoking for any long period for the past 13 years. I witnessed my mother do it from the moment I was conceived. In moments of high stress, my subconscious mind activates the ‘smoke’ switch before my mind can say ‘you don’t need that’ and when it finally does, I don’t care, until the next day. Therapy didn’t work so I decided to try out one of the new techniques called – a method called PSYCH-K (pronounced sigh-kay). It’s a system for changing self-limiting beliefs at a subconscious level so that we may fulfill our dreams and potential.

“PSYCH-K uses kinesiology (muscle testing) to find out if we believe a particular statement, and if we don’t, it then uses a variety of different exercises to balance the right and left sides of the brain, so that the whole brain is being used while a new belief is being put in place, explains Liz Artingstall, an advanced PSYCH-K practitioner in Bristol. She is helping me to fulfill my dream of living in a community in the countryside, to stop smoking, and make better choice around men.

I hold out my arm to the side. Liz tells me to be strong and repeat a belief statement. If I keep my arm up when Liz presses on it, it shows my subconscious mind believes it, if I can’t then I don’t. There was total collapse when we tried ‘my love life is flowing and spontaneous’. Shortly after rebalancing that belief, I had a delightful fling with a guy I met at a barbecue, and several men have been paying me flattering compliments.

Liz uses kinesiology to find the most appropriate exercise to embed the new belief. One, the new direction balance, involves sitting cross-ankled and handed to unite both brain hemispheres and repeating the statement silently until the shift takes place. With me, the change signals itself with a shudder. Another technique uses guided visualization, another standing with my arms apart and feeling them move, unbidden by me, until my hands come together in a loud clap and the belief is integrated.

Rebalancing the smoking takes me deep into a host of self-limiting beliefs gathered up since I was a toddler. I’ve had a couple of bursts of not smoking and no cravings either, only to slip up when feeling vulnerable. So we’ve worked on beliefs to sort that out. I’ve been tobacco free for three weeks now, bar one slip that left me feeling awful.

Unexpected benefits include leaving a job I’ve been unhappy in for several years, and a general solid, confident grounded feeling of actually liking myself that I don’t remember experiencing ever before. As for the community idea, I’m busy trying it out. It is no longer a dream, but a reality that I’m in the process of creating.

Liz Artingstall. Tel: 07733 103879 or 01275 392241. Email: liz@buenavida.co.uk.
Websites: www.psych-kbristol.co.uk, www.psych-k.com.
Type PSYCH-K plus your local town into a search engine to find your nearest practitioner.

Elisabeth balances her brain

"The human brain has an enormous capacity for change, self-healing and self-balancing," says James Roy. He and his wife Sarah run Symphonic Mind in a retreat-like setting in West Harptree, Somerset. They reckon five days of intensive brain training with body work can bring about long-lasting changes.

"There is no need to talk about traumatic events," says Sarah. "The brain can rebalance itself without having to know what caused the problem in the first place. The best part is, it’s completely non-invasive and we can measure the changes as they happen." So I booked for my five days of neurotherapy with twin goals: more clarity and more calm. I had the best five days ever.

The brain training sessions were akin to a series of guided meditations, with a crucial difference - you are hooked up to sophisticated software that helps your brain rebalance. Sarah identified a large slodge of self-criticism in my unconscious (no surprise there), and by broadcasting a different pattern via sounds (beautiful, like chimes) my brain adapted to a more healthy pattern.

Sandwiched between the brain training sessions was body work with James. Trained with the Dalai Lama's masseur, he uses yogic breathing and postures to release tension. I unwound. To top it off, we had an organic vegetarian lunch, a nutritionally-balanced healing concoction of tempting tastes cooked by Sarah, a nutritionist.

Two months later, yes, I feel calmer. But many other things have changed in my life so is that a fair test? I needed to hear from someone who had experienced long-term effects, if any.

Francine Russell, a food consultant, went to Symphonic Mind 18 months ago with the goal of becoming stress and pain free, with better work focus. For 30 years she’d suffered constant body pain that hadn’t responded to either conventional or complementary treatment. "I was sceptical at first," she says. But like me Francine found her five days luxurious. Did the treatment work? "I found myself more efficient with less effort and or the first time I could drive on the motorway and use air travel without feeling anxious. My sleep improved vastly too. Within two months, the pain had gone and has not come back. I started running for the first time this year and have just completed a 5km run."

Strangely, Francine experienced another, unexpected, benefit. She stopped smoking. "About a month after the brain balancing treatment, I was about to have a cigarette, when I thought, "I am not buying them again. I dropped my 15-a-day habit and have not smoked since. You could say it was a coincidence but it feels like tangible stuff."

Symphonic Mind, Tilley Manor, The High Street, West Harptree, Somerset BA40 6EB. Tel: 01761 221996.

Miriam does Positive Psychology

Until the late 1990s, psychology focused very much on life’s negative aspects, seemingly having lost sight of what makes life worth living, what are our strengths and what makes us happy. Positive psychology, the science of well-being, is redressing the balance by undertaking research into what makes us happy (relationships - yes, money - no) and what helps us to be at our best (new ways of using our strengths and the 3:1 theory, more on that later)

Positive psychology is new in the UK. People are only just beginning to apply the theories in health, education and business, theories which add up to a paradigm shift in thinking. In business, most training focuses on fixing weaknesses, yet research shows the best you can expect from that is mediocrity. But if you focus on developing someone’s strengths, you create the circumstances for them to excel with ease. People playing to their strengths are more successful, productive, creative and happier. The health sector’s traditional disease model means that in mental health practitioners generally focus on what’s wrong rather than what you want to be. And as the saying goes ‘what you focus on is what you get’.

If psychological health is a continuum from -10 (very unhappy) to +10 (very happy), clinical psychologists and therapists aim to get you to 0. The best the depressed can hope for is an absence of depression, which isn’t the same as the presence of happiness. Positive psychology aims to get you into the plus scale of happiness and flourishing. So if you’ve ever felt stuck in therapy chewing over the same unhappy events, a positive psychology approach could help you move into a state of well-being.

Last year I began the first ever study applying positive psychology to alcohol-misusing adolescents in Bath, with astonishing results. As the teenagers became happier, their drinking levels declined by 66%, with drug consumption also down substantially. Most of these ‘dropouts' from school are back in education now; some have new jobs. The homeless or ‘sofa surfers’ have new homes. In fact most have are no longer drunk and directionless but motivated young people with goals for the future. What fuelled this transformation is one of the most remarkable pieces of positive psychology research. The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions posits that when people experience at least three positive emotions for each negative emotion, they go into upwards spirals of flourishing, possibly resulting in transformation. My prediction is that positive psychology will transform training, teaching and therapy in the next decade.

Miriam Akhtar is one of the first positive psychologists in the UK. She co-presents the self-help CD, The Happiness Training Plan.

www.miriamakhtar.co.uk
www.happinesstrainingplan.com

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