Do you struggle to make social connections? Are you wracked by anxiety, self-doubt, or a fear that you will never find love? Or perhaps you worry that you’ll never achieve success in life?
Questions and issues like these can plague even the most confident people – and when it comes to finding the answers to these deep-seated concerns, many turn to therapy… lots of very expensive and time-consuming therapy.
In 2019 alone, spending on mental health treatment and services had reached a staggering $225billion in the US alone – and by 2022 more than a third of Americans admitted that they’d had to stop therapy because they could no longer afford it.
So what happens if you find yourself in the troubling territory of desperately needing help with life’s many complications – but without the resources to pay for a $200-a-session professional?
That’s where celebrity psychotherapist Owen O’Kane comes in with his new book, How to Be Your Own Therapist – a step-by-step crash course that helps you to help yourself with a simple series of exercises that can bring about the same inner calm that a professional therapist would charge you thousands to achieve.
And it takes just ten minutes a day.
Celebrity psychologist Owen O’Kane is demystifying pricey therapists’ most useful tools to help you become your own therapist – and save thousands of dollars in the process
Owen, an international best-selling author with more than 25 years of experience in mental health care and a wealth of celebrity clients, has demystified therapists’ magic so that you can put their most effective tools to use in your own life.
Actor Benedict Cumberbatch says of Owen’s guide: ‘Anyone looking to understand how therapy can help them help themselves should look no further.’
Owen’s no-jargon book draws on a range of therapy techniques from mindfulness, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and interpersonal therapy, to create a toolbox for everyday life.
His goal is to empower people with the confidence to be their own therapist with smart, short techniques throughout the day which can form healthier perspectives and let you ditch harmful thought patterns.
In the first of a three-part series that breaks down the essentials in Owen’s toolbox, the mental health expert reveals the essential first steps to becoming your own therapist.
STEP ONE: START WITH YOUR STORY
Everyone experiences hard times, no matter how perfect their life might look. Your story will have many hidden treasures that help you understand who you are and how you can live a fuller life. Threaded throughout your story will be darkness and light, failure and success, loss and redemption, hopelessness and hope.
Owen has been endorsed by A-list actor Benedict Cumberbatch, who said of the psychotherapist’s new book: ‘Anyone looking to understand how therapy can help them help themselves should look no further’
The events of your life are like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. As you begin to fit the pieces together, you eventually reach a point where you can see the whole picture. That whole picture represents all there is to know about who you are, and why you are that way. For example, a child who has been left alone a lot by their parents may develop a fear of abandonment in adulthood.
Your story is the foundation work of therapy – looking at our core beliefs and learned ways of behaving and dealing with emotions and understanding that you can unlearn those patterns which don’t serve you well.
That self-awareness will help you feel safer, calmer and more at ease when you’re feeling down, or scared, or out of control. It will also help you bounce back quicker. The story of your life will lead you to your ‘Aha!’ moments. These are moments of sudden insight. Your story is your power.
‘When I first went to therapy in my early twenties, I thought I was pretty ‘sorted.’ I was about to come out as gay and I thought talking to someone beforehand seemed like a sensible idea. In the first session, I started to tell my story to the therapist in a very mechanical, rehearsed way. It was all fine. I was fine. My life was fine. My family were fine. Everything was fine, fine, fine!’ Owen explains.
‘The therapist paused and very calmly, said to me: ‘You tell me you’re fine, but you look a little sad.’ And that was the end of being fine. I suddenly found myself crying. Of course, I wasn’t fine, and it was time to stop pretending. Not only was this a relief but it was also the beginning of a new understanding of myself.’
STEP 2: LISTEN TO YOUR BODY
There’s an expression: the body keeps the score. This means that when we endure heartache, loss, trauma or adversity, the pain from these experiences is often held in the body. The body will always be a guide, and will always lead you to where you need to be. The problem is that it’s often hard to think your way out of distress when the body is in a state of alarm. The key is often to deactivate the alarm before trying to use other tools or techniques.
Sometimes a life event can activate these memories physiologically, and they manifest as bodily pain and tension. Just like emotions, that pain can serve as a barometer for how we’re doing, even if consciously we’ve not acknowledged the depth of our distress. Think about when you hear people say, ‘I have a lump in my throat,’ or ‘My chest is pounding’ or ‘I feel like my head’s going to explode.’ Research shows that many (not all) physical health issues have some psychological component. So the pain of that memory needs acknowledgement and release.
Owen is also an EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing) therapist and worked with one a young woman suffering from severe PSTD who had been tortured in her home country because of sexual orientation. ‘During treatment she started to cry and protect her arms. She was clearly in pain. When I asked her about protecting her arms while crying, she looked a little puzzled. She had no recollection of doing that.
‘Then she rolled up her jumper to reveal multiple cigarette burns. While her mind couldn’t remember these being inflicted upon her, her body remembered and her distress was expressing itself in the pain she was feeling on her arms, a reliving of the pain she’d felt during torture,’ he explains.
‘It’s an extreme example but it shows that, if you are holding on to negative emotions or not dealing with issues in your life, they can get held in the body. It’s always worth bearing in mind the role psychological difficulties like stress, loss, emotional pain and trauma have to play in bringing about physical health issues in those already at risk, or exacerbating pre-existing symptoms.’
Under stress or anxiety, the body goes into is ‘fight or flight’ response to a perceived threat which activates the amygdala, or ‘fear center’ of the brain, and leads to the production of the stress hormone cortisol, an increase in glucose levels, increased heart rate, and an increase in blood flow to the muscles in the arms and legs,
In this state, you are not able to be rational nor reflective and so it is impossible to begin your therapy until your body returns to a more relaxed state.
STEP THREE: YOU ARE NOT YOUR THOUGHTS
People think they are their thoughts. You are not these thoughts. Most of your thoughts are just old patterns of beliefs and thinking that you’ve inherited, taken on board and never challenged. That doesn’t mean that they’re true. It doesn’t mean that they define who you are.
Neuroscientists estimate that we have between 60,000 to 80,000 thoughts a day. But thinking itself isn’t the problem. The problem is that critical, catastrophic, self-deprecating or inflexible ways of thinking, and negative emotional responses, often become automatic. For example, if someone comes from a family with very critical parents, they may automatically think the worst of themselves and struggle with negative thoughts when they are in situations that mirror aspects of their childhood.
Your thoughts and your feelings are separate but interconnected, and they’re constantly communicating with each other. For example, if the rather unwelcome thought, ‘My partner doesn’t care about me,’ crops up in your mind, it will automatically create a feeling of sadness or something similar. Likewise, you may experience a sudden shift in your emotional state that leads to a catalogue of unhelpful thoughts.
Think of a time when you told yourself that you had to be perfect at something, and it didn’t go to plan. If you have (or had, at the time) inflexible beliefs around perfectionism, then the outcome may have, predictably, been negative, self-critical or self-deprecating thoughts. Your emotions will have been dominated by a sense of not being good enough, of having failed or disappointed others.
Your rules and beliefs will have created a thought and emotion distress response. On the other hand, an imperfect outcome can be managed with compassionate thoughts, for example, ‘I did my best and I can learn from this for next time.’ Emotionally, that’s easier to manage.
TOMORROW: Owen reveals how you can incorporate 10 minutes of self therapy into your daily routine – and on SUNDAY, he lays out how manage life when it throws major curve balls.
HOW TO BE YOUR OWN THERAPIST by Owen O’Kane is out now ( Harper Collins $14.99)
