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Self Help
If you know you want personal help or if you don't like reading contact us on (+44) 0845 644 1098, there are alternatives. Otherwise read on. We suggest that you bookmark this page in favorites and come back to this page occasionally and you will notice this section is developing over time to provide you with an even greater resource of information that you can use to help yourself deal with issues and this includes links to other useful web sites and may be a facility to take you to help for specific issues you may have.
As you are reading this perhaps you are uncertain you want help from a professional?
Self Help Focus guides you to think clearly about whether you do have a problem and want to deal with it. It also gives you pointers to where you may get different kinds of help here and elsewhere.
Our General Help articles can provide a basis for creating solutions to problems and getting desirable results. At this time you can assume that you are easily capable of reading and understanding this web site even if you normally like using dictionaries for unusual words. And not understanding consciously every word, you may still unconsciously recognise and act upon those key ideas that are important to you in your current situation.
For list of help for specific problems click this
Perhaps you are uncertain you want help from a professional?
Think about your problem or challenge for a while.
If you are thinking "This is important to me." then it may be worth ringing us now on (+44) 0845 644 1098, ring now rather than waste valuable time reading. You could be getting professional help. If you are thinking instead that "This is only minor stuff. I should try to fix it my self or on the cheap." then read on.
Where else can I get information or help which is free of charge?
You will find leaflets and brochures around the library distributed by government agencies, self help groups, local government, charities and individuals.
Ask the assistants to give you the name and contact of local self help groups dealing with issues similar to your own.
Enter keyword searches for your local government community website pages. Local support and self help groups, charities, individuals and businesses will be listed with contact details
GP practices hold information and leaflets on a wide range of topics
Beginning at the beginning if you are reading this because you have an issue, then you may realise all issues have a context and that is something that you already know and is personal to you. Even a work issue has you at the centre, in that it is you and your interpretations that matter to you. We each have our own model of the world in which we live and we operate from it as if it was "the only road map to help us know what to do".
Your model has been created by all the memories of the sensory input that you have experienced and that in the context of the things you know you were doing at the time. Lets understand what that means simply. When you look at the wall and see a spot on that wall, you know something about the wall. You look around at other parts of the wall and the room and you know more about it. Now consider if someone else were in your chair doing something similar to you. Would they see the same things as you? Would they recognise them as you do?
They may have another reality of the room which is different to your own view and this could be particularly in relation to how they feel about the place and what it offers them in terms of choices. You can now know as Korzybzski conveyed in his "Science and Sanity" that "The map is not the territory." It could be that if you imagine what others might see and hear and feel, you will soon realise that there is a much better view of the world you have now, than you had before.
One of the biggest illusions is cause and effect in many peoples reality. Many people believe that they are at the mercy of the world and they are merely responding to what is going on in it. They feel they have few choices and they are forced. It doesn't matter whether this is true or false because thinking this way creates feelings of helplessness and hopelessness which make it more difficult to live a fulfilling life. If you decide that you are able to make decisions you can. You can decide that you will choose that the egg came before the chicken and get on with laying one in the incubator to prove it.
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If you take responsibility for how you decide to feel about things you are only deciding how your model of the world is going to work. You can decide that when things aren't happening the way you want, you can change the way you behave to see how things change. Under hypnosis people can get rid of or create pain, indeed any sensation, and see what is not real as easily as not seeing what is real.
In the mind we can choose what we want to believe. Scientists look for patterns in the way the world works and they see them. These patterns such as, the way objects fall to the ground, enable us to model, and imagine the force of gravity. Whether it really exists is immaterial for most of us, for in practice just knowing that objects generally behave that way helps us to handle the world.
When it comes to feelings many people think that other people are making them feel bad. Yet it would be much better if you realise that they are only providing an opportunity for you to feel bad, or feel good or whatever you want to. After all you can decide whether you erase the memory of them from your mind and even if someone were continuing to torture you, they would have to work hard, and some torturers do, if you were in a deep trance and they had no idea what your focus of attention was and had no idea where in your mind you were and what your senses meant. And you don't need to be in a trance to know that consciously you can't think about even a pain without it changing and even disappearing while other thoughts are attended to, because the conscious mind is limited as scientists have discovered to remembering between 5 and 9 chunks of meaning at any one time, and when you fill up your space you have to liberate some to remember something new, and the conscious mind is not directly connected to the physical world, it has to get sensory input filtered by our unconscious. Have you ever seen an optical illusion?
Ask yourself was that conscious or unconscious?
OK you were aware of it consciously, but where was it created and did it last?
When you want something you can take responsibility for getting it. After all even asking for something is you taking responsibility and of course if the answer isn't what you want, you can consider how else you might get it. Now bare in mind that when you act, you are responsible for the consequences, and then you can think through what might happen and choose on the basis of what you want to happen. And it is worth thinking about the longer term results as well as the immediate effects, because they are often quite different.
Many people want to win at all cost and of course in the long run that means losing. Others realise that in many situations you can only win when others win. The main exceptions are in sport and war and it is noticable that even winning teams reach the end of their winning run, and the winners of wars often end up paying for their success by influxes of captives, refugees, and replacement of infrastructure and armaments, to say nothing of paying for standing armies to control their territories. Other than in sport which is really just for fun, most winners have to recognise the limited scope of their win, unless it was from a win win outcome, when there may be little to stop it growing naturally. Of course the thing is to work out what outcome you want that is really a winning outcome. That makes change a lot easier.
Having got past the biggest barrier to successful change, that was you realising you can, you will want to understand how, and in this context who to trust to help you. Somethings are too difficult to do on your own. Remember "We are standing on the shoulders of every person who has gone before us and left a memory for us.". In this context the memories may be concrete or information, the bridge and the plans. The next installment of this series of articles is focused on trusting wisely.
© Dr's A.T. and J. Small 2003 The authors give permission for this to be reproduced only for personal use, and not for commercial gain, and when reproduced it shall be legal if it includes this copyright notice. Permission to reproduce for commercial gain is easy to obtain and at a reasonable rate. Please contact the authors via change.TOGAIN (+44) (0)845 644 1098. It is better to save your energy for the next challenge rather than reinvent this wheel. http://change.togain.co.uk
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