Help Advice Support & Guidance
So imagine this, she enters my session full of anger. Her partner has slept with another woman and she’s livid.
When this kind of trust gets broken it’s totally understandable for the innocent party to experience significant pain.
But when you look at the bigger picture I wonder if your initial perspective changes. [Read more...]
Could we really be addicted to our emotions good and bad? Is it possible to be addicted to feelings that help us feel awful? Could we be behaving in a way that affects the quality of our life through an addiction we are unaware of? Could emotional responses like running away from problems actually give a person what they need at a chemical level with their body and that’s why they do it?
Then this might interest you… [Read more...]
As she walked into the room I could see the deep sadness on her face, she sat down and started to cry instantly, looking for the tissues I noticed that the box was empty.
“I’m sorry the session has not started yet!” I said standing up!
She instantly stopped crying! What I did was to interrupt her pattern of focus on her sadness, in a fraction of a second switched her focus from her internal sadness to me in her external world and her crying stopped!
I have used them to help clients who are planning suicide to connect with resources within themselves they will not be aware of in their moments of deep despair.
As I watch the person go into deep misery, I use shocking language to break their habitual pattern of misery and replace it with a smile. Their smile is unexpected and so they learn that their pattern can be changed very quickly.
Our patterns of behaviour are what we habitually do! So if a person has learnt how to focus on sadness or depression over the years then interrupting that pattern for them would be useful to aid their recovery.
Patterns can be learnt at any time in a persons’ life many patterns have come from childhood. For example when adults become angry you can almost see them acting like a child. In fact this is true their anger pattern was created when they were a child and is being triggered by an event.
This is why whatever we have experienced in the past will have a significant bearing on the persons future.
The most obvious one is humour, in essence creating an unexpected change of focus to engage positive resources to the benefit to the person whose destructive pattern you wish to change.
I use pattern interrupts all the time in sessions to help individuals with the thought patterns they have use for years that hurt them without knowing leading them to…
Can you see patterns in your family, how could you help them break their patterns?
Do you feel that anger is causing you and your relationships problems? Do you feel that maybe some kind of anger management therapy could be helpful.
I remember this couple that came to one of my sessions and the the lady in the couple had been advised by her then counselor to go to anger management to keep her temper under control, her husband was delighted. She did as she was advised and the result was she became depressed introverted and disconnected with her true self.
Now the relationship was suffering due to her depression. They both decided to come to a consultation with me to see if we could find answers. We explored the relationship and we discovered that her anger was directly connected to her fears that the relationship was not going to work. She felt alone and out of control of her future. Her anger was actually a cry for help.
Her partner had no idea this was the case and instead of loving her and looking after her, he became angry himself and defensive out of frustration, resulting in him shutting himself away. Of course this made her anger worse as it worried her even more as she saw it as proof that her fears were going to come true.
Once he understood her pain through sessions with me, and that he held the key to her security he chose to show her love her through her fears. The result was the trust was rebuilt and magically her fears disappeared, and her anger stopped.
Through understanding how we work and how our emotions are created, we can rid ourselves of those automatic emotions that can cause us so many problems, not only for ourselves, but in relationships and the outside world.
Most of us are aware that whatever you fear usually gets created, if you are not aware then this is important, if you are aware then this is still very important because it can affect your behaviours.
For example: If you don’t trust your partner, checking up on them, asking when they will be back, what are they doing, who they are speaking to, checking emails and texts, will result in them feeling so trapped that you become someone they cannot trust.
Jealousy is easy to spot, but fears are not as simple as we might imagine to understand.
I would say that a good 98% of the people I see have a belief that they fear something only to discover there are 5-10 things they fear more, and these are driving their behaviours, without them knowing. [Read more...]
When in sessions there is one part of what I teach that has the most shocking response from all my clients. I have had people display tears, anger, disbelief, frustration, confusion all at the same thing.
They cannot believe what has been happening in their lives without them knowing. Some have lived their whole lives this way, some have lost relationships, hurt loved ones, hurt themselves…
Some clients, senior people with significant responsibility drop their head, speechless.
What is this one thing that has such a big impact, what is it that causes so much emotion.
You see the most intelligent people start to understand with me how their life has been set up to be a life they can’t win in.
They discover that even if they are successful they will feel, unfulfilled or unhappy [Read more...]
Anna had a very simple goal she just wanted to be loved. A traumatic history combined with an unexpected break-up 2.5 years ago had paralysed Anna and almost frozen her in time. After an initial telephone consultation I knew I had to act fast. She came to see me 3 weeks ago. She had one session with me and we have been in contact over email one / twice a week.
I decided to contact Stephen after yet another lonely weekend, a weekend working rather then going out. Working had become my safety blanket, running away from my sadness and disappointment that had left me disabled and destroyed 2.5 years ago.
The man I had loved with all my heart and I thought would be my husband had left me 2.5 years before after 5 (what I though happy) years for a married woman and he dumped me via a phone call, citing not wanting to have children with me as the major reason. Yet the woman he left me for had two children, not to mention that she was still married.
This sudden and traumatic breakup had caused my world to come crashing down around and me and everything I had believed in. I had been a walking corpse for the past 2.5 years, existing, drowning myself in work 24/7 to escape the tears, blind rage, all consuming anger and disabling anxiety that were always on stand by and ready to flow/come out if I had a spare minute. [Read more...]
Too many people ignore the alarms in their relationship and within themselves and end up heading for the rocks. With the right focus this can be avoided but whatever you do, doing nothing is not a good choice and i’ll explain why…
Your mind and body is constantly working to ensure your survival. The problem is most people see the alarm as the problems and try to shut them down.
This is why individuals and couples find themselves in so much trouble.
For example: Arguments: The arguments are the signal (alarm) that something has to change, we can work together to stop the arguments, but the real issue that created the alarm will still be there.
This is why couples end up going round in circles.
Whatever your presenting problem, or alarm you can be 99% sure that that is not the real problem.
Example: I remember being told about advice a counsellor gave to one of my clients. The husband had complained about his wife dramatically over reacting and arguing with him. So the diagnosis was she had anger management issues, his wife believed the diagnosis and became depressed because she had to suppress her true feelings. [Read more...]
Do you have some days when you just want to give up. Relationship is up and down, work is getting more demanding, keeping up with all the things you know you should do seems impossible, you can’t remember the last time you had sex and you’re so fed up it doesn’t seem to matter, life is just a bit #@$>!
We all have those days, weeks, months, when the world seems to be against us. It’s not that we’re lazy, it’s like there is an overwhelming feeling of what’s it all for? You feel somewhat helpless…
I expect you look at relationship coaches and counsellors and psychologists and make the assumption that their lives are some how perfect. Rest assured we all face relationship challenges just like everyone else.
No matter how good you are at understanding human behaviour even the very best cannot help themselves or their partners to feel good in the moment all the time.
I remember before I really understood how relationships work and why they don’t, how out of control things can feel. Of course today for me is very different as 95% of what happens is much easier to deal with the other 5% needing some thought.
I have no doubt that sometimes you just want to scream as yet more relationship problems land at your feet. So I expect when you read this blog that explains how to deal with your partner or you read about how happy couples are after working with me your natural reaction could be jealousy, anger, hurt, frustration.
If you experience a negative force within you understand this: Your mind can be a force that can work with you, or against you and you have the power to choose.
One of the reason why couples are so successful with me is not because they are any better than other couples. The reason is they never gave up. They never gave up, no matter how tough the sessions became, or how much they felt they hated their partners for what they had done.
They kept going even when they didn’t want to. They believed they could make things right even when they didn’t know how.
Even when I gave them things to do that didn’t work at that moment, they kept going. The biggest killer is when individuals doubt themselves, doubt that they are enough for the relationship, not attractive enough, not lovable, not a good enough mother or father.
Even when friends and family jump to their defence telling them, their partner is not good enough for them and share their version of what they should do based on what their life experience tell them they should do, they never listen and never give up.
The answers are within you and your relationship. But as you know there are many different versions of you and some will hurt you and some will give you happiness.
Know which one is making decisions before you press the button on your relationship.
Turn your focus to where you want to go and not where you have been. Your past is simply a series of memories based on the state you are in at any given time and the meanings you gave it from that state.
Your history is not the fact you think it is there is much you do not understand or may have missed.
Remember your life is a series of perceptions. When you learn how you can create the ones that enable you to be the emotional state that will support your personal and relationship growth only then will you accept tough days and put actions in place to experience the world just the way you want to.
Your future is really down to you, if you want to understand your relationship and life then the biggest hurdle is to understand and conquer you.
Then being positive when life gets challenging is never as hard again.
If you look at yourself, family, friends and at nature what you will discover is millions of patterns of life doing the same things every day thoughout the year. We and the world revolve around these patterns.
These patterns are associated with survival deep within us as the world we live in continues to grow millions of years later with patterns strong enough for life to grow and evolve into the world we know today.
When we react to the world we automatically create patterns that to us equal survival for us as individuals, we do this without knowing, but some of these patterns may not be good for us, but they some how become part of our make-up.
I will use the pattern of anger as an example, someone who is brought up in a angry home will see this as the automatic pattern to run if they experience something they don’t like.
When someone discovers that anger is actually destroying their lives, giving it up is really hard. The mind is reluctant to let go of this pattern because it has enough proof so far that the pattern of anger has contributed to their survival so far.
Of course this is an illusion, but the mind will protest the more they try to get out of the old pattern and into the new one.
It is worried that if they practice the new pattern for long enough it will stick and become the new pattern and then you might die.
This is why through coaching we have to help the mind understand that change is safe and easy, this is why coaching accelerates whatever it is the client wants to change through accelerated learning.
Are you out of control? Is the world responsible for not giving you the life you think you deserve? Clients come to me with a massive range of personal and relationship problems. One of the questions I ask is how do they create their own feelings.
Many people feel that situations create their feelings or someone else makes them feel a certain way, if this were a fact then if 100 people were subjected to the same situation they would all feel exactly the same way. Of course this is not possible because 100 people would experience something totally different no matter what was presented to them.
So this means that all individuals create totally unique experiences, and so their feelings and emotional responses are created by them, and not by the external event.
So when someone is shouting at you “YOU MAKE ME SO ANGRY” you know that it is their interpretation of what you have done that has created a version of them that is angry at you. You did not create the anger within them, they did.
Whilst people are in these poor states, if you tell them that they are responsible for how they feel it usually results in a negative response. However once they see this to be true then they start to see that if they are creating their emotions and responses then maybe there is a possibility that they can control them.
This then sets them free from all of their suffering as they start to practice the reverse of what has been making them feel so bad.
Is your partner saying they want your relationship to work, and yet their behaviours suggest the reverse. Now you find yourself on red alert, constantly ready for trouble.
If this is happening to you, your natural response will be to mistrust your partners intentions, and react as if they are trying to hurt you on purpose.
As difficult as this may sound your partner maybe be stuck and in need of your help. Helping someone who seems to be choosing to hurt you, goes against everything you have been taught.
The rules for creating successful relationships are not the same as how we deal with people in the rest of our lives.
For example if someone does something wrong we punish them so they won’t do it again and that is the pattern we have all been taught that gets results… but does it?
In relationships punishment never works. That’s because you are making an assumption that you know what your partner is thinking and you understand why they are behaving in a way that hurts you.
Very often people that are down, depressed, or fearful have no idea why they are reacting or behaving the way they are. So if they don’t know what’s going on with them then you have no chance of understanding them either, so making them wrong or judging them is totally unfair and will get you nowhere.
Just because you can’t see a broken limb or an open wound it does not mean they are not suffering and are as confused as you are with them. So when they are placed under pressure either real or created by themselves, they will react or complain seemingly unreasonably.
Just like the person with a broken limb would complain.
It is very likely that if two people are reacting negatively to each other and have been for sometime then the chance is they are both to a greater or lesser degree in the same distorted place both stuck on red alert looking for problems.
Punishment never works so understand that your partner is complaining, because they are in pain. Rather than punishing them and making things worse, help them with the love you say you have for them.
What were you designed to be and do? If life is not the way it should be how are you going to feel. How is your relationship going to suffer if you don’t feel right.
If something does not feel right, then you can be sure that something is not right. As we go through our lives from childhood what happens is we create a purpose for our lives during that time. So our purpose at different moments in time could be to
Everyone creates these life purposes without conscious awareness and it’s the life conditions that will create the need to change or shift our purpose.
Depending on how your life conditions change your purpose will shift to adapt, but you can find that you are not meeting your core values. If this happens, whilst you might be meeting your needs your values are being ignored and this creates a very unhappy and distorted version of you.
So we can look back and say that times in our life were not good for us. This is a reflection of needs being met, but values being ignored.
Is this where you are today? If you are unhappy with you or your life you can bet that your relationship is suffering.
If you would like help with this contact me today!
From Judges to Housewives from Business professionals even to an Ex-Vietnam Soldier, I have helped people from all walks of life make the changes they wanted in their lives.
No matter what challenge you are focused on today, or how impossible it may seem, a change for happiness is always possible. If you believe change is not possible then you will make that true as you direct your actions elsewhere and that will always equal failure.
In coaching with me I will show you how to make powerful changes that last.
The way that coaching with me works is we will work together to uncover the truth of what is happening in your life and relationship.
This helps us because from a place of honesty we can plan the steps that will get you from where we know you are today to where you really want to be.
We’ll also uncover what you don’t yet know about you and your partner.
You will get to understand why your situation is the way it is today, and what behaviours and decisions created that direction for you.
We will uncover how you work, in other in other words what is the true key to your happiness and what will keep you down in unhappiness. With this knowledge you will know what to avoid that you don‘t know today.
Through all of this you will discover how your behaviours affect others and how to change them not only to help you to be happier, but how to create a far deeper connection than ever before with those you love.
As the coaching progresses and your confidence in how you work grows and your fears start to disappear, I will build in powerful leverage so that you will never consider going back to where you were before and the changes we are making in you are lasting.
Coaching with me as many of my past clients will agree brings out powerful emotions, because coaching challenges core belief systems. Your beliefs, values and rules you have set up without knowing is on some level is going to be hurting you.
Crying, laughing, surprise, anger these are all normal responses to coaching with me that are conducted in a safe non-judgemental 100% confidential and controlled environment. These powerful responses are indication that the coaching is working and proves how alive you really are no matter what’s going happening for you.
Clients also in the beginning experience “confusionâ€, this is also a great sign because a new map in your mind of how you work is being built, and that soon moves to understanding which builds more confidence, self-esteem.
During your sessions you will be given specific tools that will help you manage yourself away from the coaching sessions, so you will feel confident on demand, and safe in the knowledge that when you leave coaching with me you will always know what decisions will always equal happiness for you.
Why not discover what coaching can do for you NOW, if your life and relationship just isn’t right, there is going to be a reason and a small shift in either you, or you and your partner can make a massive difference to your future.
Remember no action is a choice too, that will always get you nothing or even more of what you have today!
Make a different choice today… Don’t imagine spending the next 5 years like this…
Call me..!
Being in the wrong relationship is an upsetting time, but how do you know. What do you need to look out for? Love is not always enough to keep a couple together it the following situations arise.
1. If your partners intent is to try to hurt you physically or emotionally
2. If your vision or goals for the future are totally different
3. If you believe their fears for losing you is controlling what you think and do.
4. Your partner is only interested in taking from you no matter how much you give.
5. If you dislike who you become in their company
6. You have real evidence that you cannot trust your partner.
7. Addiction to substances or gambling.
8. Your gut is telling you something is wrong, but you are not sure what. Register on the right for a free coaching session with me and you could just discover why you feel this way.
Through a lack of understanding between the sexes and what each other needs, men and women can get into conflict very quickly. So a little knowledge can turn a potential war into loving.
The first rule is don
STEPHEN HEDGER:
Marriage Adviser & Divorce Prevention Specialist
10 Harley Street London W1G 9PF
