Promoting resilience and wellbeing

  I have been thinking and talking a lot about trust this year and as 2022 draws to a close I wanted to share Brene Brown’s beautiful trust metaphor.   Something I have found so incredibely helpful both personally and professionally.     I often work with parents and partners who are battling with trust.   For parents they often desperately want to allow their teenagers more freedom but feel unable to move away from the “I will allow them when I can trust them” And similarly for partners, they will often feel sad about the lack of trust in their relationship but feel powerless to move towards change until there is more trust. We all identify trust over and over again as something that is fundamentally important to us. And yet our understanding of trust is unsure. Brene Brown often quotes Charles Feltman who defines trust as “choosing to make something important to you vulnerable to the actions of someone else”.   You let someone on your team know that you really struggle with a p

  John and Julie Gottman just published “The seven day love prescription”.   For the past fifty years these world-renowned researchers have been researching love and relationships.   So much interesting data has emerged from their research but their general philosophy, based on decades of research, is SMALL .   They suggest that “tiny little doses, every day is what it takes to make a healthy relationship. Why? Because that’s exactly what a relationship is – not one big thing, but a million tiny things, every day for a life time ”.     So, what does this look like in reality? PRACTICE . According to the Gottman’s, love is not a feeling but an action.   They suggest that being good at loving other people is a skill that we can all get better at with practice.   Sometimes when we think about connection in our relationships, we think about date nights or a weekend away without the kids.   And because we think about connection in these terms, we often feel we need lots of time and en

Dr Becky Kennedy, a clinical psychologist based in the US, has coined the term Most Generous Interpretation. This concept stems from the basic idea that we are all good inside. Adapting this concept creates space for us to be curious about other people’s behaviour and supports us to shift from “what is wrong with you” to “why is this behaviour happening”. So how do we take this idea and make it applicable in our everyday relationship moments?  Essentially, we do this by asking one simple question “What is my most generous interpretation of what just happened.”   Imagine the scenario – you have just arrived home after a long day at work, you come in the front door and your daughter asks if you have remembered to pick up her book from the library.  You have completely forgotten and apologise to your daughter.  Your daughter starts shouting at you “you are rubbish, you never think about me, I hate you” So how do we respond.  For most of us this will activate our own threat response

For young people who are struggling with depression life can feel unbearable.   They often struggle with debilitating low mood, they cannot find the motivation to do the simplest task, they feel isolated and often find it hard to hold on to hope for their future.   Living with a young person with depression can also feel unbearable.   We now know just how contagious our emotions are and anyone reading this who has a child with depression will know just how difficult it is to remain upbeat.   We want the best for all our children and most parents work hard to provide the extra support a child with depression needs.   In many ways this is positive, treating our children fairly means that we need to consider each of our children as individuals, who require a specific type of support based on the uniqueness of who they are. However, with so much focus on the child who is struggling we also need to be mindful of how we show up for their brothers and sisters. Dr Nicola Corvill, a clini

There is no such thing as a perfect parent, we all get it wrong over and over again. And while we are often left feeling shame and guilt when we lose our tempers or react in ways we are not proud of …. the silver lining may be the lessons our children can learn when we are normal human beings who get it wrong some of the time. Imagine this scenario, it is Monday morning and your youngest child has just told you that they have a project due in this afternoon, you can’t find your work computer and nobody can find the dog in the garden.  This is a pretty typical scenario in many houses on a busy Monday morning.  Your resource cup, which was feeling quite full after a few days off work, is beginning to feel very empty and when your oldest child starts complaining about having to walk to school you completely flip your lid.  You temporarily get highjacked by your own big feelings. Once our big feelings (anger, frustration, disappointment…) are in the driving seat, we no longer have access t

  Through the summer months we often wonder how best to support our young people.   How can we use this unstructured time to build up their life skills and resilience?   Should we book summer camps? Should we travel and let them experience different cultures and different climates? Should we leave them at home, allow them to get bored and sit back and watch their creativity emerge? Of course, our children will benefit from all the above, structured and unstructured time is important as is exposure to different people and places.   BUT what really matters for all our children is their relationships with the people who really care about them – their family, their cousins, their uncles, their aunties, their grandparents, their community, close family friends…. these are the people who contribute to their relational wealth.   Relational wealth is a relatively new concept from Dr Bruce Perry, an American Psychiatrist who writes extensively on resilience and trauma.     Relational wealth

Stress is so ubiquitous in our society that we often don’t give it much thought beyond describing ourselves as being stressed.   But having a good understanding of the stress cycle can make a significant difference to how we manage it. In their book, Burnout, Emily and Amelia Nagoski describe the stress cycle as another biological process in our bodies that has a beginning, a middle and an end.  They emphasise the fact that dealing with your stress response is a separate process to dealing with the things that cause your stress, the stressors. Stressors are the innumerate number of things that cause us stress every day.  The work project, the job interview, our commute to work, being a parent…  All of these things have the capacity to activate the threat response in our bodies. Stress, on the other hand, is the physiological response that happens in our bodies when our threat response is activated.  This response gets a lot of bad press but it is fundamental to our survival and dev

  Once I move into a better house and get that promotion at work, I will be happy. Sound familiar? If it does you are not alone. Despite the privilege of life in the UK and in many other countries across the world a huge proportion of us report feeling like our life is missing something.  The positive psychologist David Myers suggests in this book, The American Paradox, that “our becoming much better off over the last four decades has not been accompanied by one iota of increased subjective wellbeing”.  This is a puzzle.  In the developed world our lives are much more comfortable, we are better off financially, we have access to better health care, we can travel to anywhere in the world and we have the technology to make our lives much easier.  And yet we often feel a high level of dissatisfaction. Why does this happen? So much of our life is focused on trying to reach our goals - getting good exam results, getting in to a good university, gaining a qualification, buying a house – and

  I work with many teenagers and when I mention breathing it often elicits eye rolls and yawning.   And I get it, we breath all day every day and most of the young people I see are tired of people telling them to take some deep breaths.   The beauty of deep steady breathing is that we don’t have to believe it will work in order for it to work. When we get overwhelmed by our big feelings, we automatically start to breath more quickly and this activates the stress response in our bodies.   Our heart starts to beat super-fast in order to pump blood into our arms and legs and our breathing speeds up to increase the level of oxygen in our bodies.   This often feels really uncomfortable and many people describe feeling out of control in these moments.      This is where breathing becomes our superpower.   It is something that we always have with us, we never leave it at home and even if we don’t believe for one tiny second it will help …. it will because deep steady breathing is our bodi

  One of the most exciting discoveries in the past 20 years is the fact that our brains are constantly changing.    Psychologists call this neuroplasticity and essentially what this means is that our remarkable brains can continue to grow and evolve in response to the experiences that it is exposed to. And this can happen all the way through our lives. Understanding and believing that our brains can get better with time and effort is possibly one of the most important pieces of information both for ourselves and for our children.   Carol Dweck has carried out extensive research in this area and identified two types of mindsets:   Growth mindset - a belief that our intelligence and our general ability can be improved with support and hard work Fixed mindset – a belief that our intelligence and ability can’t change regardless of what we do As you can probably imagine the first one creates high levels of motivation while the second one can generate feelings of helplessness for b

  When I talk to people in my clinic, they will often say something like “I just want to be happy”. And why not, we all want to feel more happiness in our lives.   But maybe chasing happiness is not the best way to actually achieve more happiness….   we now have so much research which tells us that putting our efforts into pursuing meaning and purpose rather than happiness contributes much more to our wellbeing.   Martin Seligman defines meaning as being part of or belonging to something bigger than ourselves. His research suggests that being able to contribute and belong to something meaningful creates a sense of purpose in our lives.   And it is this sense of purpose that nudges us closer to a flourishing wellbeing.   Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning proposes that there are two different kinds of meaning.   The big M meaning which is about the meaning of life .   This meaning is about finding a grand purpose in life – this might be researching a cure for cancer,