Negatives to Positives Archives - Sarah Wiesendanger

How Counselling Helps with Five Addictions

We all lead difficult lives. Pressures of work, family and lifestyle can sometimes find us struggling to deal with certain situations and lead to addiction as a way of coping. Whether it’s you that’s experiencing the addiction or you are the friend or loved one of a person that has a developed an addiction, counselling can help discover the root of the issue and offer some solutions. Finding great counselling in Surrey will show you how you can move forward.

If you are experiencing addiction,by reading this you are taking the first step in getting rid of your addiction. When we become set in our ways and focused just on our own feelings, we may not be aware of the impact of our actions on others. Depending on your addiction, you may be taking the risk of financial ruin, permanent health issues or even death. It’s vital that you consider the effect that your addiction is having on your friends and loved ones. You may be surprised at just how concerned are of those that care about you.

There are many different types of physical and psychological addictions that can affect a person at any time. Identifying these possibilities is only the beginning but this means that the person experiencing these situations is hopefully on the start of the road to recovery.

Alcohol Abuse

When an individual has gone further than binge drinking; relying on alcohol to get them through strains of life, this may mean that they have developed, or are developing, an alcohol dependency syndrome. If untreated, alcoholism can affect every part of the body, with the potential to cause death. As any addiction, it’s common for a person to hide or ignore the fact that they are struggling.

Drug Addiction

If you are struggling with drug addiction, you may be unlikely to be aware of the impact it’s having on you and those closest to you. It may not be that you are continually physically dependent; however drugs can have both a damaging effect on your health and your attitude to your loved ones. Talking with an experienced professional on a one to one basis can help to find out the trigger behind your addiction and ways to overcome it.

Eating Disorders

There is such pressure in the media to be the perfect size and shape. For some people this can become a living nightmare. Not just affecting young girls, eating disorders can be experienced by men and women of any age. Counselling can help both the individual that is being affected in addition to their family members who may also be experiencing difficulty with coming to terms with their loved one’s illness.

Gambling Addiction

We live in an easy world. The introduction of the Internet has made it incredibly simple for people to gamble at any time of the day or night – without anyone knowing what you are doing. Before you know it, the threat of financial ruin can be upon you. Talking with a counsellor can help to tackle the reasons behind your addiction and how to deal with this problem.

Shopping Addiction

For some this may seem a trivial addiction. However if it has got to a stage where your urge to shop is taking over your life, it may be time to visit a counsellor. He or she will be able to help you identify the cause for your addiction in the first place and plan for a way to transform your life so that it’s no longer an issue.

Moving Out of Fear

Nelson Mandela said: “The greatest glory in living does not lie in having never fallen, but in rising every time you fall.”

When things seem to go wrong time after time, some of us feel too weighed down by fear to keep trying. Fear is paralysing and exhausting, fueling in our minds loop feeds of worry that play over and over again. And so, although we want more good in our lives, we allow our fear to hold us back from doing those things that we know we need to do in order to succeed and move forward.

But what if we were to shift gears and live from a place of faith – in ourselves and our own lives? “It is a funny thing about life”, wrote Somerset Maugham, “if you refuse to accept anything but the very best, you will very often get it.” After all, successful people are successful because they have chosen to be just that.

When we trust ourselves, it’s not just that we have more courage to do what we previously hadn’t dared, but also that we become more creative, imaginative, inspired, so that new ideas and possibilities present themselves to us. As Winston Churchill said: “a pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity but an optimist sees opportunity in every difficulty”.

So, how do we make this gear shift? Changing our belief system is fundamental. We need to:

Believe that we came into this world to make a unique, positive difference. We need to identify that purpose, and believe that within us are the resources we need to develop in order to achieve that purpose
Believe that every with every end, there is a beginning, and that it lies within our power to make that beginning positive
Know that often, the tougher the challenge, the closer we are to success
Take full responsibility for our own lives
Refuse to give up until we have succeeded
Know that failures don’t have to knock us down, but can be used as an informative helping hand to setting us on a fresh path
Remember that life is a journey, not a race

To find out how Sarah can further help you in your journey moving out of fear, please contact her.

Negatives to Positives

TURNING YOUR NEGATIVES INTO YOUR POSITIVES

Our thoughts become our reality. This is because the human brain is designed to meet expectations, whether our own or other peoples’.

So, not only is it true to say that we learn from our experiences, but also that our experiences are shaped by what we have learnt.

NEGATIVE BELIEFS CAN BECOME OUR REALITY…

Schoolteacher, Jane Elliott, from Iowa discovered all this in a startling experiment which she conducted with her sixth graders. One day, as part of a lesson on discrimination, she told the class that people with blue eyes were not as bright as those with brown. It was not long before the brown-eyed children were asserting their superiority. And it was not long before the brightest girl in the class, who happened to have blue eyes, began stumbling over the text she was reading aloud, and was then unable to do her multiplication. All it took was a few hours, for the fabricated myth to become the childrens’ reality.

THOUGHTLESS COMMENTS THAT CAN SHAPE YOUR LIFE…

Gone uncorrected, how much damage would this have done in those childrens’ lives? Closer to home, are there things that you were told in your childhood – thoughtless opinions from unwise adults – which still shape your life today? Perhaps you were told you were bad at something and, taking that to heart, you realise that it’s a belief you still hold today.

The power of negative comments was shown by a study from Harvard University. It was shown that if someone is told they couldn’t do something by one person, it would take 17 other people to tell them they could before they believed it.

Imagine the thoughts in your own head. We all know what it’s like when they just go round and round, repeating the same thing over and over. How many times a day can we tell ourselves the same thing? If it’s negative, it’s going to create a negative belief and soon, a negative reality.

BUT NEUROSCIENCE HAS SHOWN THAT POSITIVE THINKING WORKS…

Our thoughts, and the emotions attached to them, create neural pathways in our brain. The more those pathways are used, the more established they become. Stop using that pathway, and it begins to fade until gradually you lose the ability to access it all.

RE-SHAPING OUR REALITY…

In the past, it was thought that the brain stopped adapting as we aged. Neuroscientists have now discovered that in fact the brain keeps learning throughout life. This is great news because it means that if we start consciously focusing on new positive thoughts, we will begin to create new neural pathways to create new, positive habits, and so a new positive reality.

To begin with, you don’t even have to believe the positive thoughts, pretending will be enough. But being as thorough and consistent as you can be is important. This simply means that when you notice an old negative thought, replace it with the new positive one, and allow yourself to dwell on it for a while. Like being at the gym, regular practise produces results. This doesn’t mean that you need to suppress the negative thought or feeling, just that you switch your focus onto the positive.

Emmet Fox, author and lecturer, suggested in his leaflet “The Seven-Day Mental Diet” that if we spend only a week focusing on positive thoughts, our brain patterns, our habits, the way we relate to the world, and our reality will already be much transformed.

To find out how you could benefit from counselling or life coaching with Sarah, please contact her.