Life Change Blog

29 March 2010.

Welcome to the Monday Morning Life Change Blog. Over the past twenty years we have amassed a huge amount of knowledge and experience in "life change". We post a new Life Change blog article every Monday morning. Hope you enjoy them and find them useful.

Therapy That Works

This will cheer you up.

I was talking to a change holiday guest last week who told me that she read three weeks worth of Life Change Blog articles until she thought “I’m going to book up a change holiday myself”. Since then she has had a great week in Thailand and is busily changing her life.

So given this as a rough time scale if you are reading this for the first time you are only 4 weeks away from changing your life forever.

This is a true story that always helps put things into perspective.

I had a good friend, a counsellor and therapist who collected standard therapies and counselling approaches like some people collect stamps. He was an accredited Cognitive Behavioural Therapist, Behavioural Therapist, Cognitive Analytical Therapist and Clinical Psychologist. He had also been trained in Transactional Analysis and Person Centred Counselling. He had an established counselling practice in Hammersmith in London and spent a lot of his time helping people overcome all kinds of problems. He claimed that he could cure anyone of their fear of flying in 6 sessions. He was very good and I didn’t doubt him.

One day a young man contacted him suffering from agoraphobia, the fear of open spaces. He had suffered from it for quite a while but only recently had it got a lot worse. He felt that the outside world was a threatening and frightening place creating in him terrible anxiety and panic attacks. He had found it difficult to get to work and home again and in the end had missed so much time he left. He was spending all his life in a small flat in West London. Life was grinding to a halt.

As part of the standard course of therapy my friend would accompany his new patient on small trips out of doors, establishing that his fear was unfounded.  They walked to the end of the garden and back, all went well. They walked to the end of the road with no problems. All was set on course, by the fifth session they were to walk up to Hammersmith High Street and back, which they duly did. Unfortunately on the way back they were approached by a dishevelled young man who at knife point demanded their money. Needless to say this episode unexpectedly interrupted the normal course of therapy. They had to start all over again with only partial success.

This story exposes the problem inherent in so many standard therapies and counselling approaches.Motivation and Change Therapy that we use during Change Holidays does not fall into this “assumption trap”. That is why it is so very successful. It does not assume anything.

If you are interested in our approach to making changes in life or dealing with difficult feelings and life situations please do talk to us, or a member of Friends of The Life Change People to find out more.

Have a good week. Hope you enjoy The Life Change Blog. Talk to you next Monday.

Alex.