Stoicism is a way of approaching and coping with the world, society and the vagaries of life that brings peace, calm and even joy. It’s a method of being both effective and contented no matter what life throws at us. There’s an awful lot of wisdom in some of those old books, you know. Why not take a lesson or two from ancient stoics like Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius. You’ll be glad you did.
If you think Stoics are boring, you’re not doing it right!
There’s nothing boring about Stoicism.
There’s nothing boring about embracing change, about opposing injustice or about developing self reliance.
There’s nothing boring about experiencing life and all it has to offer whilst still maintaining control of your emotions and judgement so you can savour the experience all the more.
Soap operas and small-talk are boring. Trashy novels and superficial documentaries are boring. Endless consumerism is boring.
Stoic joy and the wonder of a life well lived is far from boring.
Stoicism isn’t boring – it’s liberating.
What is schizophrenia? How do reasonable attempts to cope with symptoms like voice-hearing come to be thought of as symptoms of illness in themselves? Why is it so easy to get diagnosed with schizophrenia? More importantly, how can we use an understanding of the diagnostic process to aid recovery?
In this short video Stuart Sorensen introduces the basic idea behind the tripartite recovery model and shows how meaningful recovery is really all about coping. It’s not magical and it’s not complicated. Like most of mental health work in social care it’s about doing relatively simple things, repeatedly and well. Do the things that help people to feel valued and to cope with their experiences and you’re more than half way there.
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This series of blog posts first appeared a few years ago on a now defunct blog called ‘Care Training’. It was inspired by the training maxim of ‘making the unconscious conscious’. It is intended to take what really ought to be the most basic principles of health and social care and put them down on paper. The series isn’t only an exercise in stating the obvious though whatever the title might suggest. It’s actually intended as a philosophical foundation manual for workers and informal carers to help them get their care ‘on track’ and then to keep it that way.
A good friend of mine began attending a well known self-help group for problem drinking a few years ago. I’m happy to say that he didn’t attend for very long, partly because he found himself far from convinced about the group’s ‘message’.
He’d been having a difficult time at work and briefly retreated into alcohol as a way of coping. It wasn’t the best tactic he could have chosen by any means and it did start to cause more problems than it solved. It was a response to stress and like many such coping strategies it made him feel better in the short term but only served to exacerbate his troubles in the long term. But it was still a coping mechanism, however self-defeating it may have been over time.
The self-help group he attended took a very simplistic, almost religiose stance. All alcohol was bad, or so they told him and even a single drink would automatically put him right back to square one. They wanted him to believe that he had a permanent, unresolvable problem that could be managed with total abstinence but never ‘cured’.
According to my friend, we’ll call him Tom, the other members of the group accepted this idea uncritically. Presumably that was because those who didn’t accept it left the organisation, as did Tom after a few months. But he did stay around long enough to notice something very interesting.
As the pressures at work lessened he found himself able to drink in moderation once again. He reverted back to previous levels of alcohol use – social and quite infrequent. He stopped getting drunk and found himself quite able to ‘take it or leave it’ as the occasion required. However the other members of the group, those who believed the ‘one drink and you’re back where you began’ mantra didn’t seem able to do that.
During Tom’s time in the group he witnessed a small number of others ‘fall off the wagon’. They too had intended to have only a couple of drinks but they seemingly were unable to do so.
Tom realised that their belief prevented them from controlling their alcohol use. They thought that they must keep drinking after their first little tipple and so didn’t attempt to do otherwise. They defined a single drink as impossible to achieve and nobody tries very hard to do what they think is impossible.
It was a self-fulfilling prophecy
Had those people been able to acknowledge the possibility of ‘lapse’, a single event, they might have stopped at a single drink but since they believed only in relapse or abstinence they couldn’t.
So it’s important that those of us who work in mental health and/or addiction services understand that success in any endeavour (not just in overcoming substance related problems) depends upon both achievements and lapses into previous ways of coping. The lapses are a vital part of the process because, as we saw in a previous entry, it’s how we learn. It is neither necessary nor desirable to convince people that they’ve failed when all they’ve really done is stumble a little along their path to success.
Lapse is different from relapse
This series of blog posts first appeared a few years ago on a now defunct blog called ‘Care Training’. It was inspired by the training maxim of ‘making the unconscious conscious’. It is intended to take what really ought to be the most basic principles of health and social care and put them down on paper. The series isn’t only an exercise in stating the obvious though whatever the title might suggest. It’s actually intended as a philosophical foundation manual for workers and informal carers to help them get their care ‘on track’ and then to keep it that way.
Take a moment to think of all the things that you’re most proud of in your life.
For some that might mean professional qualifications from NVQs or VQs to diplomas, degrees and even PhDs. Others will think of less formal achievements like charitable endeavours or learning to play a musical instrument. Perhaps you’re good at a particular sport or maybe you’re proud of overcoming your fear of heights and going on a parachute jump. It takes a particular form of courage to jump out of a perfectly good aeroplane several thousand feet above the ground. A friend of mine recently climbed Kilimanjaro. He’s rightfully proud of that.
What have you achieved?
The fact that you’re able to read this blog at all means that you’ve achieved something that most humans throughout history never managed to do. You have learned to read!
Whatever you’re thinking about the chances are that the things you’re most proud of didn’t come easily. They took effort. They took mistakes.
Thomas Eddison reputedly failed thousands of times before he successfully invented the light bulb. His attitude to these mistakes was interesting. He didn’t see them as failures. He saw them as learning opportunities. He saw them as milestones along the road to success.
Every time he built a bulb that wouldn’t light up he learned a little bit more about how not to make a light bulb. Inevitably all that knowledge, all that trial and error eventually led him to find the right way to generate light.
Eddison learned from his mistakes just as you have learned from yours. Writing the first assignment you submitted in that college course, your first fumbling attempts at making music, the first time you tried to hit a cricket ball or ride a horse you made mistakes. Over time you learned from these mistakes and you did better.
That’s as true for you as it is for your service users. They make mistakes too. And when those mistakes are handled correctly they learn from them – just like you do.
So the next time your service user gets something wrong or fails to meet expectations don’t assume they’re incapable. Help them to grow because of that mistake, not in spite of it. It’s a vital part of learning new skills and new ways of coping.
This series of blog posts first appeared a few years ago on a now defunct blog called ‘Care Training’. It was inspired by the training maxim of ‘making the unconscious conscious’. It is intended to take what really ought to be the most basic principles of health and social care and put them down on paper. The series isn’t only an exercise in stating the obvious though whatever the title might suggest. It’s actually intended as a philosophical foundation manual for workers and informal carers to help them get their care ‘on track’ and then to keep it that way.
Imagine a small child in a very large sweetshop. The lights are off and it’s completely dark except for a single spotlight illuminating a tiny piece of shelving. On the shelf, visible in the little pool of light are three bars of chocolate. One bar is milk chocolate, another dark while the third is white chocolate. That is all the child can see.
The child has one simple instruction…
Take your pick…
Obviously the child will choose one of the three chocolate bars he can see. It doesn’t matter what other treats might be in the shop because he can’t see them – he doesn’t know that they are available options.
This little post isn’t really about chocolate bars and children in sweetshops though. It’s about social care service users and the options they have available.
The sweets in the shop represent coping strategies. They’re behaviours. Choices about what to do in different situations. And just like the child in the sweetshop service users (along with everybody else) only choose the options, the behaviours that they know about.
So if someone you work with makes poor choices that’s not necessarily because they don’t want to do better. It’s more likely because they either don’t know what else to do or because they don’t think that other options will work for them. Many people understand intellectually about good coping skills, socially acceptable behaviours but don’t believe that they will be given the opportunity to make different choices work for them. If they’re used to being treated with mistrust they won’t believe that the truth will work for them. If they’re used to being ignored they won’t believe that not drawing attention to themselves will meet their need for human contact. And they may well be right.
So, just like the child in the sweetshop they take the best option available to them.
They do the best they can with what they’ve got.
Mind The Care Training 