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I visited Berlin for the first time last week and spotted this mural on the remaining part of the Wall in the east of the city. I think that the artist was referring to the unsustainability of a world of division, war, and inequality. Perhaps we could also include climate change, 34 years after it was painted. But it also made me think of change more generally and the inevitability of it in our lives, whether we welcome it or not. This is what Buddhists refer to as 'impermanence'....nothing ever lasts forever. But even if change is a constant and a fact of life, it doesn't mean it's always easy to cope with or that we can control it. Change can be inextricably linked to loss, sometimes terrible, unexpected, earth-shattering loss. And even if change is welcomed, it can be unsettling and mean the closing of doors as well as the opening of them. Very often the work of therapy is about change....identifying it might be required, helping you to work out what kind of change you want, preparing yourself for it, coming to terms with it and learning to move with it, not avoiding it or fighting against it. Because as I think the mural implies, remaining as we are isn't an option. How we approach and deal with change throughout our lives, however, is up to us.

In our society, we still have a very medical view of mental health. We talk about illness, treatment and diagnoses. Diagnoses can be helpful: they put a name to what we might be feeling and perhaps lead us to treatments that can help ease our suffering. But often diagnoses can become labels and encourage us to think that what we’re feeling is something fixed and unchanging, inherent features of our personalities. Or we can think that whatever we’re experiencing is evidence that we, or our brains, are broken in some way and that we need to be fixed or cured. The truth is that suffering is part of being human and sometimes we need help to understand and withstand that suffering, whatever its source. Therapy looks to individuals’ particular experience of their environment, their relationships, their inner thoughts and outward behaviours to understand what ails them and why. As Jonathan Shedler says, understanding how the fabric is woven and how it can be rewoven, is often the focus of the work that we do together in therapy. #personcentredtherapy  #therapyglasgow   #onlinetherapy   #counsellingglasgow   #onlinecounselling