Well, yet again I have been confronted by a client!

I don’t mean that they have ‘taken a pop’ at me; I mean that in conversation with a client I found myself confronted with my own ‘stuff’. (‘Stuff’ is a technical term in the therapy world. It refers to anything that forms patterns of behaviour, usually ones that are somehow problematic or cause difficulties).

So the ‘stuff’ that was challenged yesterday was my reluctance or my difficulty to trust that friends really like me, or that they aren’t my friends because they somehow feel sorry for me, pity me. So there. I have been honest with you. Although having said that I do expect that those of you who know me well may already have seen that, or sensed it somehow anyway. Perhaps I am not revealing anything that you didn’t already know.

The long and short of it is… that I am confronting myself with the message that enduring patterns of behaviour really only change when we decide to change them. We usually don’t feel like changing them, after all we have been practicing them for a very long time. They usually have some form of payback for us – like ‘protecting’ us from our fears, making us feel we are ‘safe’ – when all they do is keep us living as we have always lived.

The real risk is change.

Change is scary. Change is difficult. Change doesn’t always come easily. Change is deciding to think about something differently; not practicing the same old same old and expecting a different result. After all (as the saying goes) that would be madness!

So I am deciding to change. Yet again, I am deciding to do life differently. To live more connected to others, and to live positively.