Health issues can cause a lot of suffering, both physical and emotional. In some cases, patients move from doctor to doctor, different medicine modalities and other alternative resources, without much improvement in their symptoms. This might end up in a long journey of search, hope and disappointments.
Family Constellations work can help us to start open new perspectives on the roots of the issues. It’s a therapeutic way of looking at the deeper causes of illnesses and possible ways of healing. In order to do this, the symptoms are seen as an ‘entry gate’ for the exploration - a starting place for what is really going on with that person - and not the enemy that we need to get rid of.
At the end of January, I noticed I was feeling very worried and anxious. The world has been a strange and unsettling place in the last year. Yes, I do have a very heavy job and it can get personally draining at times.
As I preach to my clients, self-care is crucial in life and I apply that to myself everyday. However, I realised the excess of information and the general collective anxiety was taking its toll on me.
So I decided to delete all my social media apps from my phone. It was meant to be just for that weekend. But I felt such a positive difference, that I decided to continue my ‘experiment’. Six weeks later, I’m still off the apps and I’m truly loving it.
Most people are finding difficult to switch off from work and separate their personal and professional lives. On one hand we are saving time from commuting, moving around between meetings and travelling. On the other hand, that time seems to be transferred and fully dedicated to work duties, without much change or respite.
Suddenly, life is becoming an endless list of obligations and demands, without the release that comes from social activities and other distractions, from meeting different people and being in different environments.
How is all this affecting our mental health and our emotions? How can I then separate my personal and professional life? How can I switch off from work?
Are people constantly disappointing you and letting you down? Do you feel you don’t matter to them, or they don’t get you, or they simply don’t care?
What about we start moving the focus away from the others and turn it towards ourselves?
What about starting questioning: Why am I feeling so disappointed right now? What did I want from this person? What is my part in all this?
Everybody is talking about it. Everywhere. There’s a lot of anxiety around us at the moment. ‘How am I going to cope with Christmas this year?’, ‘It’ll be so bad’, ‘I’m dreading the Holidays’, ‘It’ll be so strange this year’, ‘I always do ‘this’ or ‘that’ over Christmas’ and the comments go on and on.
There’s a lot of uncertainty right now. The rules and guidelines are constantly changing and it’s difficult to make plans or have a clear view of what’s to come and what we are going to do, and how we are going to feel.
But there are things we can do and change in ourselves, there are ways to think and focus that can be very helpful in these last weeks of the year. And hopefully, for other times too, ‘not only for Christmas’:
We all have ups and downs. Life isn’t a linear state and if your mood changes from one moment to another, it means that you are alive and open to your feelings. However, sometimes it feels that the low mood is taking over. From the moment you wake up, there’s that darkness and inexplicable sadness in your heart. You feel heavy and your mind seems filled with negative thoughts. What’s going on? What’s wrong with me?
I hear so many people apologising for their suffering, as if their troubles aren’t ‘bad enough’ or worth paying attention to. As if other people’s problems were always more serious than theirs and that they ‘shouldn’t complain’. And my answer is often the same: ‘How do you measure and compare suffering?, ‘Why are you not deserving of attention?’, ‘Why isn’t your suffering important?’.
