Squaring Circles on Film - Salt Of Life

Salt of Life is a special film and a joy to a watch. Yet it is a great example of the difficulty of squaring circles emotionally speaking.

An Italian film, with English sub titles, about Italy could lead us to think it was a reflection solely on Italian life. I believe  it caricatures superbly how in all manner of human relationships we create behavioural patterns, no matter what country we live in. It parodies how our behaviours within those relationships can become habitual. Most of all it shows how easy it is to recognise those patterns in oneself, yet do little meaningful to address them effectively, let alone alter them permanently.

It shows how we can pattern ourselves to suborn completely our own interests to those of a parent, or a partner, or a child, thereby efffectively de-selfing ourselves.

We can allow a parent’s perceived needs to dominate our lives totally. We can know we are doing it, but can have done it long enough that to change it feels like trying to alter a whole way of life.

Can it be done? Without any doubt! It needs persistence and commitment. Most of all it needs a clear visualisation of how we will behave and what reaction we will attract, with the change in behaviour achieved. 

Gerry Neale

Author of Novel: Squaring Circles

Squaring Circles: Squaring Circles In Emotional Relationships

Squaring circles emotionally is a challenge anyway but truthfully, do we know what we are really feel and what we don’t? Are we certain that we know exactly what in our partner really turns us on and what does not? More, do we really know why we react as we do with our partner – or don’t, or why they respond to us as they do – or don’t?

We see the evidence of it but not the cause.

Is it odd to reflect that two people can react to one another in a particular way and they can love each other for it. Yet they can be totally unaware of it as a behaviour, or, if they are aware, can believe it to be perfectly normal. Meanwhile others witnessing them cannot and do not want emulate it, finding the behaviour unusual.

There can be any number of behaviours performed by ourselves of which we are totally unaware, their causes residing deep in our subconscious. These can thrill, warm the heart, irritate, aggravate or downright displease our partner. They can disappoint even ourselves when we are made aware of them.

Personal behaviours in our partner will be present too of which they may or may not be aware. We each live our lives on the basis that the way we live our lives is acceptable. Our reality is as we each paint it.

Imagine in a relationship we could write out and agree a joint list even of the offending behaviours of each of us. Better still imagine coupling them with a list of the likeable behaviours to neutralise the displeasure or discomfort it causes the other! Wouldn’t it lead to there being so many more peaceful households. It would be so particularly if that act in itself triggered and sustained desired behavioural changes in the offending  ones!

Were life so simple!

Regrettably the complex force of the metaphor of “Squaring Circles” kicks in with a vengeance! The realisation of the deep-rooted tenacity with which a behaviour can become seemingly habitual and unalterable could make us look for an even more challenging description than ‘Squaring Circles’ .

One can find legions of elementary behavioural examples.

A house full of boys can make a mother’s attempts to keep the top on the toothpaste between users and the lavatory seat left down very forlorn missions! Before the children may even find it so usual to have tops left off and seats left up, that it becomes habitual and after that it is never reflected upon!

Marrying such a person who had completely forgotten that tops are always left on and lavatory seats left down, can give rise to discovering simple comfort zones we never realised we had!

In fact we have literally hundreds of them.

It would be an insuperable challenge if before we went to bed each night, we had to write out a list of every single like and dislike we had lest we forget them next morning! Fortunately our subconscious does this work of monitoring our comfort zones for us automatically. Yet if we ever do bring to mind such a comprehensive list, we should remind ourselves that we alone compiled that list! We did so by adding to it every day, week and month of our life. We did so for one reason or another, but we did it.

Evidence is unfortunately far too strong that so many of these likes and dislikes are the sum total of what we ourselves have mandated. They are most definitely not merely evidence of the way we were born.

But one thing is for sure, to go any further with this we should “want” to discover more and not feel we “have” to. Putting ourselves under self-imposed pressure would mean that only for as long as we willed a change in behaviour, would the change last. As soon as we deemed we no longer “had to,” it would stop and revert back.

                                                                                                                 

In order to change, first, awareness of an inhibiting pattern or behaviour is necessary. (It may have grown to annoy us or our partner.) Second, the need must be acknowledged that we may have to reflect hard and go right back into a childhood to find the origin. Several excellent processes and non-fiction books exist to help in this self discovery.

Most important is to use a book or process which deals effectively with the interplay necessary between the Intellect and the Emotions. So many patterns are emotionally based.

Does it produce success? Properly done, yes, definitely. How long does it take? That depends on the awareness, desire and tenacity applied.

I wish you well.

Gerry Neale recommends a book called “You Can Change Your Life” by Tim Laurence ISBN 9780340825235. It sets out the Hoffman Process.

Sir Gerry is an artist, mentor and author of a recently published cognitive behavioural novel called “Squaring Circles”. ISBN 9780956868824 Detailed reviews and background information can be obtained from www.squaringcircles.co.uk and from the publishers www.pearlpress.co.uk

Psychology Simplified On Bringing The Best Or Worst Out In People

Read this article by Gerry Neale on Complaining on Psychology Simplified Blog. Get better results and lower your blood pressure.

Child Abuse Can Be Non-Human As Well As In-Human!

Would You Believe Child Abuse Is For The Birds As Well? Can you imagine that researchers on Nazca Boobies - a breed of colonial sea birds, have discovered that abused chicks grow up to be abusers of other chicks and it does not seem to be genetic. It is an apparently behavoural response to the abuse they endured when they were young. Yet is it that surprising? Personally, I don’t think so and here is why.

I believe increasingly that the arrogance of the human race towards other forms of life is systematically being exposed and rubbished by more and more research. We have told ourselves that other forms of life cannot be like us, cannot have forethought like humans, cannot memorise things and do not have feelings.

I have always doubted these assumptions, because to me clearly this is not always true. While I am not for a moment maintaining they are the same as us, I am prepared to believe that in many ways they are not so very different.

Check it out on BBC Nature report about this research conducted over three years in the Galapagos Islands by Wake Forest University North Carolina US and reported in the journal The Auk.

It is claimed that this is the first evidence from a wild animal that, as in humans, child abuse can be socially transmitted down the generations.

They noted across three breeding seasons that not all adults produced chicks. Most couples produced just one. They then noticed that some of those adults who produced none would abuse- even sexually – chicks left alone by parents gathering food for them. Birds were ringed.

They then noticed that in subsequent breeding seasons, those abused previously, and when without chicks of their own, were prone to abusing chicks of others. And the more they had been abused, the greater they abused on other chicks in subsequent years.

In close knit colonies some abuse was inevitable but the fact that this seemed to influence their personality seemed beyond doubt. The psychological damage seemed irrefutable.

So I would urge this of anyone having access to or care of children. Of course, it goes without saying that one should never ever abuse children sexually or physically. But tht is not all. It goes much further than that. Even repeated verbal abuse or denigrating comments sustained over a period of time, and distain, and disrespect or mild but persistent criticism can also have the most damning effect on children and their subsequent behaviour towards others and particularly their own children.

Studies of packs of horses and herds of elephants have revealed startling new insights into the way they interact with each other and their young and how it can affect their subsequent behaviour. We are not unique and we can learn so much from them as well as them from us.

Gerry Neale is author of a novel called Squaring Circles touching on some of these issues. It is published in the UK in paperback by Pearl Press Limited ( see http://www.pearlpress.co.uk. More information is available on the book and the author is available at www.squaringcircles.co.uk.

Gerry is also a mentor, and an artist ( www.sirgerrynealeartprints.com ) and a lyricist.

Psychology Simplified: Why Do We Help Others And Not Ourselves?

How often are we surprised at the constructive help and good advice we give to others? Yet, why don’t we help ourselves and follow our own advice? I believe cripplingly low self-worth and self-esteem can lie at the heart of this emotional conundrum. We deny to ourselves that we deserve the help and advice. And fallaciously, we feel it must reward us somehow if we offer our help entirely to others for their benefit! Additionally there can be a dose of creative avoidance at work here too! Does all that make any kind of sense? Yes! And It can be explained even if it is not actioned!

So where do we see this example of human nature occurring? Everywhere! Take wills, you would think every lawyer at least would have made one! Some haven’t! You would think doctors would adopt the healthiest lifestyles! Some don’t! You would think those involved in healthcare would be the same, yet often they too can be marvellous at their jobs but some almost crazily overweight!

Do we not realise this illogical aspect of ourselves where it occurs. I believe we do, but we may prefer not to acknowledge it to ourselves too openly!

However if we analyse this behaviour, interesting angles are unveiled.

We each find it almost impossible to avoid soaking up highly relevant information about our interest, speciality or profession. We become increasingly and, often in our own eyes surprisingly wise in how much we can help friends, clients, customers or patients. More particularly, other than for the very selfish among us, we feel good when are able to impart that good advice or help other people.

Why then don’t we always respect our own wisdom? Why don’t we apply it to better helping and advising ourselves?

I believe there can be a number of reasons.

The first can be that we jolly well know that we ought to apply the advice to ourselves. It is as if by accepting the very responsibility to help others, it means we really ‘have to’ follow our own advice too.

But this ‘have to’ can have a perverse effect. As soon as we perceive something as a ‘have-to’, a contradictory cognitive behaviour can then kick in to sabotage us. This is triggered simply! At that moment that we feed our sub-conscious with a message that we feel we have to do something, it volunteers to assist us! It sets up for us a strategy of creative avoidance. This enables us to put the perceived have-to off.

The second form of sabotage can be a bizarre attitude of mind.  We can seek to detach ourselves from our own wisdom, seeing it as universal wisdom rather than our own. We can then tell ourselves that others deserve it more than we do. What causes that? Often it is some emotional behavioural pattern. This was more than likely formed by us as a child or a teenager. It traps us in the ridiculous belief that while others deserve to benefit, we do not.

Next we can consolidate the belief. We can try to make a virtue of this lack of sense of self-worth. We can do this by de-selfing ourselves entirely. We do this to the point where we provide all this help and advice for most moments of our working day. By doing this, we can avoid all opportunity to apply it to ourselves for our own benefit.

At the same time, we can hope that our selflessness is rewarded somehow some day In the meantime we can hope that our activity for others is judged as praiseworthy. The truth is it is self-defeating. In any event, most of the time, the recipient of our help senses the mis-match intuitively.

Even if they don’t, we know the mis-match exists.

So what should we do if we become aware of our behaviour? We should ask ourselves why we feel we can’t or shouldn’t help ourselves? We should then reflect back to try to find the origin of the pattern – that is to say the reason we formed it.

This can be done but may need help. There are some excellent books and programs available to help with this.

With that cause clarified, we can learn to disable the emotional pattern. We can then achieve a better balance between attending to our own needs, fairly and conscience free, while still helping others according to our skill.

Not only do we then secure a better life balance, we improve our sense of self worth and self-esteem at the same time.

Sir Gerry Neale recommends that the reader researches The Hoffman Process and considers reading a book by Tim Laurence called ‘You Can Change Your Life.

Sir Gerry is the author of a cognitive novel called ‘Squaring Circles’ ISBN 9780956868824. More information is available on www.squaringcircles.co.uk and on http://psychologysimplified.blogspot.com. He is also a mentor and an artist.

Good Self-Discovery Website

I suggest you check this out if you are seeking advice and training in the art of self-discovery. It can be found at www.capt.org.I wish you well with it.

A Level of Happiness Comes From The Joy of Reading and Writing.

I find today’s press reports on the UK Educational statistics distressingly disappointing news. A third of those leaving primary school have little or no real ability to read. The loss in the level of happiness, self-worth and self-esteem for those youngsters involved is appalling. For parents this is not only a worry, it should be a caution and a trigger for action. Illiteracy is almost entirely curable if, for example, synthetic phonics processes are used properly. This level of failure in literacy currently cannot be allowed to continue as we become so much more dependent on the Internet

Two competing but excellent systems are Phono Graphix and Jolly Phonics. Both can be researched on the Internet. They are not new and are well reviewed as well as used in many schools already. Well taught, they help all manner of children with reading difficulties.

In fact, I make a seemingly preposterous prediction in this age of legal “class actions” in the courts – where groups of people seemingly injured or affected by the same event join together to sue. I believe that in the foreseeable future class actions will also occur where those who left school illiterate will club together to sue schools or education authorities for negligence in not teaching them to read and write.

Their case will be, first, that schools had a duty of care to the children to use proven methods through trained teachers to teach reading and writing successfully. Second, they were in breach of that duty because they did not. And thirdly, loss was incurred by those disadvantaged in terms of their resulting inability to profit in worthwhile careers because they could not read or write..

Just because we automatically learn to walk and talk, it can be assumed by some that humans will automatically learn to read and write. We do not – that is, unless we are taught. And it also requires that we are taught by teachers who in turn have themselves been taught how to teach reading and writing.

The Evening Standard initiative on literacy is marvellous. But there is not a one size fits all solution here. Each child will, if unaided, try to develop its own strategy to learn to read and when it fails, it will drop out. An awareness among teachers and parents is vital to watch for signs. Making use of different approaches is key and the synthetic phonics systems mentioned above can be remarkably successful if the teachers involved have been properly trained

In this internet age, we should surely be vowing to ourselves that we rid ourselves of illiteracy as if it were an educational form of HIV.

Failure to do this will continue to wreak untold damage on the health and happiness of youngsters. Low self-worth and self-esteem will result inevitably but what can also happen is even more worrying. Failing to teach a child to read, (and there are more boys than girls at risk here), represents the best chance to shame that child in front of his or her peers - a group of young and impressionable individuals equally trying to find themselves.

The psychological damage can be enormous and insidious.

So ashamed can an illiterate child become that they adopt deceitful strategies to cover up their failure. They lie about it in ways that can so easily stretch to other aspects of their lives. They then carry these deceitful patterns into their adulthood.

The level of happiness to be obtained from reading and writing – and particularly in a creative form - is infinite. Sparing children the almost permanent sense of failure and low sense of self-worth must be a top priority.

Gerry Neale recommends those involved in teaching reading and writing or with children who have difficulties to read ‘Why Children Can’t Read: And What We Can Do About It’ by Diane McGuinness and Steven Pinker.

Gerry is the author of a recently published novel called “Squaring Circles” which explores a number of cognitive issues and is available through Amazon.co.uk or via the publishers at www.pearlpress.co.uk to find Squaring Circles in the Our Books section. More information is available at www.squaringcircles.co.uk.