Reconnecting with the Heart

Anne Dickson

Description

Reconnecting with the Heart offers a new theoretical and practical approach to understanding and managing feelings. We categorise feelings as either negative or positive, which means that we censor the expression of some while insisting on others.Learning to understand the whole range of emotions - what they are, where they come from, why we have them - helps us learn when and how to communicate them effectively. Feelings are not only mental events, but occur in our bodies as well. Reconnecting with the Heart helps the reader to become more conscious of the mind-body link, both in terms of how to recognise emotions and also in their connection to various physical symptoms. Although we are accustomed to blaming others for causing our feelings, the reality is that our responses have a lot to do with our perceptions. Once we stop blaming others, we can learn how to communicate clearly, even in the most difficult situations. Specific suggestions and exercises enable the reader to use this as a workbook for individual and personal exploration. The book also demonstrates how to be less uncomfortable or anxious when someone bursts into tears or is angry:we can learn to be less anxious and more comfortable when problems arise in our relationships even when strong emotions are present. This book is intended as an initial guide to our feelings, charting the currents and movements of the heart, and makes it clear that emotion is part of everyday life and need not be seen as a problem. The theoretical input is balanced by many illustrations from Anne's working experience, which allow the reader to relate the theory to their own life experiences. Reconnecting with theHeart will help anyone who struggles to make sense of their feelings within the increasingly impersonal context of everyday life.

Sujets

• Popular psychology

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 28 février 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781784628314
• Langue: English

Extrait

RECONNECTING WITH THE HEART
About the author
Anne Dickson Ph.D has degrees in psychology, mental health and environmental science. She has worked as a freelance psychologist, writer and trainer for many years and is recognised as a leading authority on assertiveness training and interactive communication. Her best-selling, widely translated A Woman in Your Own Right is still used as a core textbook for training in confidence building and personal development courses around the world. Together with The Mirror Within , it is also used widely in counselling and therapeutic contexts.
By the same author
A Woman in Your Own Right , Quartet Books, 2012 (first published 1982)
The Mirror Within , Quartet Books, 1985
A Voice for Now , Piatkus, Littlebrown, 2003
Difficult Conversations , Piatkus, Littlebrown, 2004
Teaching Men to be Feminist , Quartet Books, 2013
Reconnecting with the Heart
Making sense of our feelings
ANNE DICKSON
With illustrations by
ELIZABETH KURTZMAN



Published by the Author
in conjunction with Matador
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by the author in conjunction with Matador 9 Priory Business Park, Kidworth Beauchamp, Leicestershire le8 0rx, UK Tel: [phone] Fax: [phone] E-mail: [e-mail] Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador
Text copyright Anne Dickson 2015 Illustrations and cover image copyright Elizabeth Kurtzman 2015
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquires concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1784628 314
This book has experienced many twists and turns in its evolution which represent both my deep commitment to the subject matter and my doubts as to the viability of expressing in words what is often understood intuitively. Along the way, several people have taken the time to read all or part of the book. They gave me their insights, suggestions and above all, encouragement: to Arlene Faris, Gavin Gobell, Georgina Marshall, Brigid Proctor, Josie Rimmington and Justus Roele I express my heartfelt thanks.
The process of producing this book has involved me in an enjoyable collaboration. Antony Gray is to be commended for his patience and diligence in reconciling many different demands into the design of the book and I was thrilled that Elizabeth Kurtzman agreed to apply her immense artistic talent to translating my words into subtle illustrations and a beautiful cover image. Liz Clasen s editorial skills have ensured the content is as streamlined as possible and I thank her not only for our friendship of fifty years but also her enduring influence on my writing life.
CONTENTS
Introduction
PART ONE
Shaping the emotional landscape
1 Our cultural legacy: myths and assumptions about emotions
2 Where do our feelings come from?
3 Understanding love and grief
4 Understanding joy and anger
5 Understanding trust and fear
6 In the beginning
7 Early experience of emotion
8 Emotional education (or lack of it)
9 The mind-body connection
10 Release and resolution
11 Self-control or emotional shut-down?
12 Falling out of emotional balance
13 Restimulation
14 Could things be different?
PART TWO
An alternative approach
15 Moving from denial to discernment
16 Moving from rationalisation to acknowledgement
17 Moving from evasion to naming
18 Moving from accumulation to catharsis
19 From distortion . . .
20 . . . to evaluation
21 Learning to DANCE
PART THREE
The mind-body connection in everyday life
22 Emotion and mental health
23 Emotion and physical health
24 Emotion and relationship
25 What if . . . ?
Appendix - Setting the scene
INTRODUCTION
The earliest roots of this book lie in my personal experience as an ordinary human being, born into an ordinary family in what were, half way through the twentieth century, quite ordinary circumstances. My own recollection of family life is that although we shared occasions of pleasure and celebration, frustration and sadness, there was little emotional openness.
Feelings were not talked about. Childhood expression of tears and rage was strongly discouraged, and in adulthood, emotional expression was suitably muted. Any outbursts were treated as temporary lapses of control and explained away as the consequences of too much to drink or pressure of work or mysterious problems that couldn t be discussed.
Like many other children, I could detect a lot of emotion between my parents which was all the more powerful for the lack of open discussion, and between us, their four children. I had no name for these undercurrents: I could simply sense them. The mismatch between the lack of spoken acknowledgement and the intensity in their voices and eyes left me confused and disturbed.
Along with life s normal ups and downs, in my particular family we experienced problems of alcoholism, redundancy, teenage pregnancy and abortion, depression and anorexia, and still nobody ever referred to feelings. Even though hospital treatment was sought for help with both the depression and anorexia, any reference to emotion was cut short by subjection to the preferred medical treatment at the time (electro-convulsive and behavioural therapy respectively), so we continued to handle these phenomena in our familiar and muted fashion.
In early adulthood, I became a hard-working and committed teacher but was completely unprepared for the intimacy of relationship. I regularly used alcohol to suppress my anxieties, to gag the voices of self-criticism and, occasionally, to fuel an aggressive outburst and release of tension.
A turning point occurred around my twenty-ninth birthday when I was introduced to a set of skills that proved vital for me and certainly life-changing. For the first time in my adult life, I was presented with the opportunity to explore, express and learn to release my feelings in a safe and structured context.
Slowly and with regular and committed practice, I learned to trust my body s responses and emotional release became and remains an inevitable and natural function in my life. Without this facility, I am certain I would have had to resort to medication to get through regular periods of depression in the past forty years and, like many others, would be unable to function without it.
Familiarity with emotion has helped me understand the true value of anger as a force for change in the face of so much injustice in the world; it emboldens me to be honest with those I love and care for when it would be far more comfortable to keep quiet; it has taught me the power of love as a transformative emotion; that vulnerability is to be cherished, never despised, and that opportunities to experience joy and gratitude present themselves most days of my life.
This learning has also consistently underpinned all my teaching, training and counselling work for over three decades. Whether working in the context of assertiveness training or psychosexual counselling, the programmes I have evolved have always included an integral emotional component.
This is because feelings, expressed or unexpressed, conscious or unconscious, lie at the heart of nearly every difficulty we encounter in our relationships. What has fascinated me time after time is that people I ve worked with have always been extremely interested in feelings - in finding out the why , the where , the what , and the how of emotions - but have not known where to find the answers to these questions.
Few adults appear to have any real idea about how emotions function, whatever their personal qualities or professional experience. Many of us remain, so to speak, emotionally illiterate. We find it hard to find the words to describe our feelings: we find it difficult to distinguish between sentimental tears, manipulative tears and genuine tears; we confuse anger with aggression, grief with depression.
We suffer from all sorts of bodily ailments that we know deep down are connected with our feelings but cannot really understand what is happening. We know that tears are natural but feel desperately embarrassed when they happen to us. Without information, we remain fearful and feelings remain in the realm of the unknown and mysterious.
Talking and writing about emotion from a clinician s perspective presents a similar challenge to describing the sensation of being immersed in the sea by detailing the chemical composition of sea water or analysing the depth of ocean currents: neither conveys the subjective experience. On the other hand, talking and writing about emotion emotionally , in a way truer to the subject matter, risks becoming a sentimental and confusing mess for the reader.
This book is an attempt to combine both head and heart: it is intended as an initial guide to our feelings, to charting our emotional currents. The content clarifies many of the misunderstandings we have about emotion and explains how we can live with and learn from our feelings more productively. Above all, it makes clear that emotion is part of everyday life and need not be seen as a problem.
Unfortunately, it is our insistence on emotions as problematic that accounts for our growing reliance on ranks of professionals - psychologists, psychiatrists, therapists and counsellors - whose expertise we call on to diagnose our problem and correct it. Sometimes the experience of counselling and therapy will teach us