A sense of belonging

Lucy Hyde on 28 February 2025

I had a weekend away recently with friends, in the Lake District, not far from where my parents had lived in Kendal. I felt ambivalent about being back in an area that had been very familiar to me for a large chunk of my life.

I made a detour on the way home, to visit my parents’ grave in Kendal cemetery. I hadn’t been to the grave since shortly after Dad was buried when I’d checked on the completed headstone, about 11 years earlier. I hoped this time not to find ‘something wrong’ with the grave (damage of some sort) that I would then feel a responsibility to do something about.

Settling into an ecosystem

There was nothing wrong. It was good to see the headstone, no longer new, settling into the landscape. Plastic flowers, that littered so many of the surrounding graves that had sprung up since I was last there, were a jarring contrast to the gently rolling grassy slopes and mature trees.

There were no flowers of any kind at Mum and Dad’s grave, of course, but the stone stood in a rich cushion of golden-green moss that dominated the turf. The rough top had been colonised by more moss, plus a variety of lichens. The face was blackened and streaked – weathered by rain trickling down – and more moss was beginning to take hold in the lettering, tiny clumps in the first and last lines of the inscription. We’d chosen a stone made from a slab of Lakeland slate, endemic to the landscape and buildings of the area. The headstone looked as if it belonged, as if it was being absorbed into an ecosystem.

Afterwards, we walked into the town, along half-recalled routes – ways that had been familiar but not now travelled by us for a decade. It was nearly midday as we passed the town hall, and I remembered to pause and wait for the tune to play on the bells. Familiar, familiar tune – I had a fleeting, vivid memory of hearing the chimes from Mum and Dad’s house on Fellside. We stopped for lunch in a pub that had been refurbished – probably more than once – since I’d last been in there. And then I headed off to the railway station, to wait on the bleak, windy platform that I associated with visits to my widowed father in his sheltered housing.

Human connections

It felt good…..right………..helpful – I’m not sure what the word is – to have gone to Kendal. Not necessarily good to go, but to have gone. I realised that I’d been avoiding it, and that this was something to do with not knowing who I was, there, any longer. I felt as if I’d lost some sort of ownership. While Mum and Dad were there I hadn’t belonged – it wasn’t my place, I’d never lived there – but I had had a connection, a ‘right’ to be there. When I thought of going back, I was a tourist.

The visit there to bury my father, who’d moved to be closer to us shortly before his death, came to mind – the large house that me and my siblings had rented to have somewhere to be together, and how that felt so different from staying in the family home after Mum died. The ‘family home’ that had never been home to any of us – but which nonetheless had some of the qualities of ‘home’ because of our parents’ presence.

I wouldn’t stay there for more than a week or two at a time, yet for many years it had been a retreat, a place where I could relax, push worries and stress to the back of my mind and be looked after. Until it wasn’t. As my mum was dying, it became a place to be reminded of sadness, and to attempt to be the one doing the looking after, and a place where she died, and a place where I grieved, and a place where I felt helpless in the face of Dad’s pain, and a place to be cleared out as we moved my father into his new and different home.

The right conditions for growth

This time, I returned home to my Scottish fishing village (I wrote ‘home’ there without even thinking). The next morning, as usual, I started the working day with my ‘commute’ – a 10 minute stroll along the sea and back. As I walked by the harbour I was reminded of my decision that “I choose where I belong”, that I chose to belong to Cockenzie. I made that choice with a fierceness when I returned from two years living in Italy where I had felt unrooted and adrift, with a sense that I was consciously committing to the place where I had gradually put down roots and made connections without quite noticing.

As I sat down to work, I noticed the contact between my body and the chair, my feet on the floor, noticed that I felt solid and grounded, and the thought “this is where I’m choosing to belong at the moment” came. With that thought, came another – if I’m choosing this now, then I can choose to belong to somewhere else. We’d been talking about this recently, prompted by my feeling hemmed in by the increasing urbanisation of the land around us, my distress at local ecosystems being bulldozed and cleared, feeling so powerless to stop it that I wanted to escape instead.  

I noticed a fear reaction in my chest. Something in me was afraid of being in a place where no one knew me. This sense was, very clearly, not about lacking social activity, but of not being ‘known’, a kind of subliminal sense of being recognised and acknowledged and seen, of people caring about me. I had a sense, as I imagined living somewhere else, of being untethered, without the fine strings that connected me to people in the vicinity.

An image came to mind of roots being put down. Not thick tree roots finding cracks in the bedrock, but delicate hairs and strands, the tiny filaments used by moss to hang on to the carved letters on a gravestone. Part of me – perhaps that part that was afraid of being untethered – thought that if I had put roots down, then this was surely where I was meant to be?

Yet books that I’d read recently – of trees, and moss, and ecosystems, of mammalian safety responses – reminded me that just because this is where the tree-seed has ended up, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the most nourishing environment for it.

What’s best for the tree’s health? If it’s uprooted at a mature stage of its life, how will it cope? Once transferred into a site with better conditions, will the benefits of the added nutrition outweigh the trauma of the uprooting? I found myself disappearing down a rabbit-hole of tree analogy……….”if you’re going to transplant the tree at this point in its life, you have to be really confident that the new site has got the perfect environmental conditions, because it will need time to establish; and to think about the additional care that will be required to help it flourish after the move”……….”wouldn’t it be better to think about what additional material needs to be added to the current situation to feed it where it is?”

What is belonging?

What does it mean to belong? Chambers dictionary gives the definition “to pertain (to); to be the property (of, with, to); to be a part or appendage (of); or in any way connected…..; to have a proper place (in); to be entirely suitable; to be a native or inhabitant, or member (of).”

What a myriad of related and yet subtly different meanings. The ‘felt sense’ of belonging is something that we hold within ourselves. Or – is it more accurate to say that many of us hold a yearning for what we imagine ‘belonging’ feels like? The definitions above describe belonging, often, as being within the ownership of another.

Yet a Cornell University definition gives belonging as “the feeling of security and support when there is a sense of acceptance, inclusion and identity for a member of a certain group”. And Carl Rogers, who developed person-centred therapy, said “Belonging is….a unique and subjective experience that relates to a yearning for connection to others”.

These definitions refer to human connection, so important for feeling safe. The feeling I had in Kendal, of not having ‘ownership’, would certainly make sense seen through the frame of human connection, now that my parents are no longer there. Perhaps I’m searching for the wrong thing when I look for a place to belong.

Yet I wonder if these definitions above pay enough attention to our place in the landscape, the connection that our bodies may naturally feel to safe spaces. I remember reading my dad’s diary, where he had recorded 6-yr-old me spontaneously exclaiming how happy I was as we walked in the rolling green hills of North Wales – I can imagine the contrast of being ‘held’ in that space after the excitement of the rocky scrambles of Crib Goch.

Hefted

The Lake District fells are populated by Herdwick sheep, a small, hardy breed that are ‘hefted’. It  means that they are tied to a particular area of the land by instinctive knowledge. Of course this doesn’t evolve from nowhere – hefting develops through animals being constantly shepherded in one area until they learn their ‘heft’, and thereafter the knowledge is passed from sheep to lamb through the generations. 

I’ve always had a kind of wistful awe of these creatures for whom the sense of where they belong is in their blood. I’ve heard something of it too, in the voices of people whose families have lived in the same place for generations (James Rebanks, author of The Shepherd’s Life and English Pastoral, comes to mind). I can only imagine the depth of sorrow felt by those who have been forced from their lives and homes in war zones, how that forced separation from place layers trauma on top of trauma.

In my family the unspoken expectation seemed to be that we moved far away as soon as possible; certainly that was the example given me by my parents’ generation, and then by my older siblings, most of whom left the country while I was barely a teenager.  But although I’ve lived in other places for periods of time, the homesickness that I felt wasn’t just for people, it was for landscape too. I wanted to get back to hills and green and I welcomed the changeable weather that made the Scottish landscape what it was.  

I want to not be searching for the ‘right place to be’. Internet searches for ‘how to cultivate belonging’ focus on ‘creating a workplace culture’ (i.e. how to ‘make other people’ feel they belong) or on seeking to connect with others, to look for what you have in common. I recognise that there’s value in that – finding ‘your people’ is important. But there’s two other facets that seem important to me too:

Belonging with myself:

I don’t quite know what this looks like, but there’s something about not trying to escape from where I am (in the hope that I’ll find where I belong), of bringing an attitude of self-acceptance, of listening to and learning what I need, of looking for the smallest steps towards that, of being comfortable with not being comfortable with myself. I know I can trust that the practise of Focusing will support me with this, reminding me that I’m already ‘home’ with myself.   

Belonging to the more-than-human world:

The idea that belonging is about people feels so incomplete to me. When I lived in a city I was constantly searching for the tiny patches of scrubby green, for the signs of life in the canals and in the cracks between the stones. We’ve been so conditioned to separate ourselves from the rest of the world, yet something in me withers and starves if I don’t make those connections.

Even my splitting these into ‘myself’ and ‘world’ is another example of that insidious disconnect – I need to allow my mind and body to be one system of belonging, and my body yearns to be with, and belong to, the world.

As I look at the word ‘belonging’ again, I’m struck by how it looks like an action word, yet we see belonging as something that descends upon us while we passively wait. I remember how I returned to my village six years ago with the decision that ‘I choose where I belong’. Perhaps belonging requires me to be active, to apply myself to belonging, to look and reach and attend to allowing the tiny moss threads to attach and connect me to people and place. And belonging is something I will continue to muse on.

References

Belonging definition – Cornell University: sense-belonging

Belonging – Carl Rogers: Making sense of belonging

Hefted: Hefted-flocks-and-herds

My favourite books of 2024

Lucy Hyde on 7 January 2025

2024 was a bit of a struggle for me in some ways and I’ve often felt I haven’t had the space I need to find my balance. Perhaps my need for space has grown. However, I notice when looking over the list of books that I’ve read in the year, that one thing that has been prioritised is reading time. It feels good, that I’ve managed to give myself that.

Books can be an escape, a resource for healing, a balm for the soul, an inspiration. As always it’s a bit arbitrary what makes the cut to my ‘top books’ list, and while there are some that were on there without question (Paul Lynch, damn you with your harrowing Prophet Song), I’ve tried to find a balance of books that soothe, inspire and/or entertain.

I’ve read some drivel too – the first book I read last January was so badly written I could barely finish it, even though I was really interested in the subject. But it still amazes me that with so many books in the world I can continue to find something new every time I open a cover. All hail the book!

Here, in no particular order, are my favourite books of 2024:

Waubgeshig Rice: Moon of the Crusted Snow

I picked this up in Munro’s Books in Victoria, British Columbia, when visiting friends there. Waubgeshig Rice is from the Wasauksing First Nation in what is now called Ontario, and this book begins in an Anishinaabe community. As you get into the story, you realise it’s a dystopian tale – what happens to a remote community when the lights go out and you don’t know what’s happening out there in the world?

Or is it utopian rather than dystopian? That’s the edge on which this story teeters, and what makes it such a head-expander. For me, the idea of the established order collapsing is pretty terrifying. But if you belong to a community where your way of life was almost destroyed by colonisers, where the land you lived on and with was taken from you and treated as a commodity and where you continue to be disempowered and disadvantaged by the status quo – maybe the collapse of that power isn’t a disaster?

I love discovering a new world through someone else’s eyes, and this book – the first of a series following the same family – really gave me that.

Paul Lynch: Prophet Song

This choice by one of the members in my book group is tremendous and terrifying. Like Rice’s ‘Moon of the Crusted Snow’, the story is set right about now, or in the immediate future. So much of it is familiar – a family going about their day to day life in Dublin. Except that their day to day life is in an Ireland that is becoming a totalitarian state under a far-right government that has suspended the constitution. Lynch has said that he was inspired by the West’s indifference to the plight of refugees escaping the Syrian civil war and the story certainly brings home an understanding of just what that experience might be like.

The story is terrifying enough – or, with the horrific rise of right-wing populism we’re currently experiencing in the world – believable enough to be terrifying. But the style of writing gives it an extra edge – there are hardly any paragraph breaks and sentences run on for ever giving you the feeling as you’re reading it of running to try and catch up with events. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that had such a bodily effect on me – I felt anxious a lot of the time because of this writing style and goddammit where’s a break so I can put it down!

So not a relaxing read AT ALL – but this may be the most powerful book I’ve read in almost 20 years of book group meetings.

Michelle Obama: Becoming

I’m not much of a one for a celeb memoir AT ALL so even though I’ve admired Michelle Obama’s grace and articulacy (is that a word?) I would probably never have got round to reading this, had it not been offered to me by someone who’s as unlikely as me to pick up biographies of the famous.

But I’m so glad I did. First of all it totally challenged my assumption that you only get to that sort of position if you come from power and wealth. Spoiler alert – Michelle Robinson did NOT have a wealthy start in life, and neither did Barack Obama. Not wealthy in monetary terms at least – and there’s more inspiration in this tale, for just how much difference it makes when you have supportive, nurturing, loving, interested parents, family and community.

The other eye-opener was the detail on just how bonkers life in the White House is, probably even more so if you grew up working-class, and what it was like to try and adjust to that life, from the attempts to make a house with over 100 rooms a comfortable living space, to what happens to a child’s life when she is shadowed by a security team all the time, to the challenge of maintaining a healthy marriage when your husband is never not working and that work has an impact of millions of lives.

A fascinating read.

Hannah Ross: Revolutions

Whether you’re interested in cycling or not, Revolutions – subtitled How women changed the world on two wheels – is a great social history of some of the women who used their bikes to take action to challenge assumptions, taboos and laws. There are some amazing stories in here – such as that of 24-yr-old Annie ‘Londonderry’ Kopchovsky who became the first woman to cycle round the world in 1894. She took on the challenge after two men bet a woman couldn’t do it – even though she’d never actually ridden a bike.

There’s plenty of opportunity to be awestruck at the determination required to break social norms – as well as the physical efforts involved; and of course into the bargain plenty of eye-rolling and for-fuck’s-saking at the ridiculous costumes women were required to wear, the beliefs about the effects of cycling on the delicate constitutions and feeble mental states of female creatures. I did a lot of that laugh-groaning.

If you ARE a woman who loves the freedom of getting out on your bike, this book will make you appreciate it even more.

Josie George: A Still Life

I first came across Josie George reading The Guardian’s nature diary and was really struck by how someone could bring such focused attention to the seemingly everyday. She writes beautifully about the crow in the rain that she watches from her bedroom window, inviting the reader, too, to find it marvellous.

Since childhood the author has lived with disabling, fluctuating chronic illness, and this book – a memoir – was ‘written mostly from bed’. It follows the year from Winter through to Autumn, and weaves between her life now, aged 36, in a wee terraced house shared with her teenage son, and her years growing up. It’s quiet, philosophical, and also full of beauty in her observations of the world around her – non-human and human.

Sarah Winman: Still Life

A lovely, lovely tale that I really didn’t want to come to the end of.

There’s a tremendous cast of characters who move in and out of each other’s lives over four decades from the end of the WWII. It ranges between Tuscany, and London’s East End, and back to Italy – to Florence this time – touching on beauty, love and community. I ended up caring deeply about the people in it.

Although it deals with loss and love that goes against accepted norms of the time, it’s also a gentle, sweet book – an easy read in the best possible way.

Merlin Sheldrake: Entangled Life

How to describe this book? I mean, essentially, it’s a book about fungi. But saying that doesn’t convey the mind-bending stories of fungal life that it contains. This is a book not just about natural history; it’s also a sort of philosophy text, exploring how humans look at things, our interpretations that stem from our biological structure and processes, and how fungi can help us look at things differently because of their structures and processes that are so very very different.

This book was the ‘read-aloud’ book in our house for the winter*, because it’s so entertaining and full of ‘what the hell?!’ moments. There’s some quite dense sections in there but Sheldrake’s writing is so easy to read that it’s not a difficult read. It also has more notes at the back than possibly any book I’ve ever read, but some of those notes – going off into the unexpected way in which a particular discovery was made, for example – are also good fun.

*the last couple of years my partner and I have had a book that we read out to each other on occasional evenings by the fire. Who said you have to grow out of reading aloud?

Kate Raworth: Doughnut Economics

I never thought I’d be recommending an economics textbook. In fact it SHOULD be a coursebook, if it’s not. It’s a mind-blower and completely changed the way I think about how the world works and made me realise how many assumptions I had about ‘this is the way it has to be’. The doughnut, by the way, is the framework for considering an approach to life where humans don’t overshoot the ecological ceiling (the outside of the doughnut) while at the same time ensuring ALL people have enough of life’s essentials (without falling into the hole in the middle).

The person who recommended this book to me said it’s “a great read if you’re pure raging that like 3 men just invented how the whole world works without including in their economic modelling any labour typically done by women, and you’d like a more hopeful alternative to think about”. I can’t say it better than that – economics isn’t just for beardy old white men.

Jenni Fagan: Hex

If you like short books, this is for you! It punches above its weight in terms of impact. One from a ‘retelling history’ series published by Birlinn books, it touches on the North Berwick witch trials that were a scourge and a shame of Scotland in the late 1500s, and that had a brutal impact on hundreds of women, and the communities around them.

The novel takes place in the cell of a teenage girl, Geillis Duncan, convicted of witchcraft, on the night before her execution, where she receives a visitor from the future who offers her support and solace. It brought the events of hundreds of years ago right up to date for me, as I imagined what it must have been like to be a teenager powerless at the hands of men who objected to women having skill, talent and knowledge. A gem from a writer who never disappoints.

Val McDermid: Queen Macbeth

The launch of this book saw Val McDermid being interviewed by Nicola Sturgeon; two very articulate women who don’t take any shit, which made for a great (and funny) introduction to this book.

Like Hex, above, this is in Birlinn’s series of Darkland Tales, where “the best modern authors offer dramatic fictional retellings of stories from history, myth and legend”. If you’re familiar with McDermid’s crime thrillers, this is nothing like them – but it’s a gripping page-turner nonetheless.

The Queen in this tale is completely unlike the witchy power-behind-the-throne character that Shakespeare gave us. This is the first queen of Scotland, on the run with her three companions, a healer, a weaver and a seer. They are tough, strong and clever and an ode to the power of female solidarity. Above all, this is a great yarn.

Elizabeth Tova Bailey: The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

The title of this book is irresistible and it’s been on my list for ages since someone told me about it. I finally bought it at the same time as A Still Life by Josie George and, like that, it’s written by someone whose health challenges reduced her ability to access outdoor spaces.

It’s wholly lovely – the quotations that open chapters (where snails have entered the world of literature), and the delicate pencil drawing illustrations, really complement the text. Bailey was forced to remain in bed due to a debilitating illness and a friend brought her a snail which initially lived in / on a plant-pot, and then in a terrarium. She closely observes the life of this individual and so this book is so much more than ‘a study of snails’ – it’s a study of this particular snail. Her curiosity when it hides, or changes its behaviour, prompts her to learn more about snails in general, but it’s the relationship with this small part of the natural world, and her own world crossing over with it, that make this such a special little tale.

Dougie Strang: Bone Cave

Anyone who knows me, knows that I love solitary explorations into remote places, so this book was always going to appeal to me. The author spends a month in autumn walking and travelling through western and north-western Scotland – but doesn’t follow established routes or marked Ways.

“Instead, I used stories as waymarks – folktales and myths, primarily from Gaelic tradition – and I made my way between the places that held those stories according to chance and circumstance.” These stories are woven through Strang’s present-day account of the walk, and seem to influence his wish to move fast or slow at different places on the journey. Sometimes he’ll hitch a lift, or move briskly over a mountain in the gathering gloom; at other times he camps for 3-4 days in a quiet spot, slowing down, spending his days gathering scraps of wood for a fire.

In a year when I haven’t got out away from people very much, this book reminded me how wonderful it can be to get out into the more-than-human world and simply be.  

Sathnam Sanghera: Empireland

Whether fact or fiction, I love reading things that challenge my assumptions, that remind me that what I see as ‘it just is like that’ always has its roots in something.

This book certainly does that. We often think of the British Empire as a thing of the past – depending on your perspective, something to be proud of (I know, probably not my target market) or something to see as a regrettable aspect of UK history. Empireland drills down into how aspects of what we consider to be ‘modern Britain’ are rooted in its history of empire-building.

It could be – and is – a heavy subject, but Sanghera writes with a dry wit that makes it a book that is, if not comfortable to read, then certainly not difficult.

RF Kuang: Babel

A novel that takes place within the context of empire-building – this time in a kind of parallel universe, which reminded me a little of the world in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials books, perhaps because of the central role that the alternative Oxford University plays in it.

The tower of Babel in the book is the university’s institute of translation – but there’s more than just understanding other languages involved as Babel is also the centre of magical power via the use of meanings that are lost in translation, and this power supports the imperial quest for colonisation.

There’s a fantastic diversity of characters and the plot swirls around a group of new students at the institute, and their increasing awareness that their academic efforts support Britain’s imperialist white supremacy. A gripping, entertaining read.

Susan Jordan: The Box

This is a story of people putting their lives back together. The two central characters are Richard – whose wife, Kate, has died suddenly at the age of 40 – and Jo, Kate’s twin sister, who Richard had a brief relationship with before he and Kate met. The box in question is that containing Kate’s ashes, which Richard is trying to figure out where to scatter.

The novel alternates between the perspectives of Richard and Jo as their lives move toward and away from each other. It’s a sensitive portrayal of the unpredictability, upheaval and messiness of grief, as well as, in Jo’s case, an exploration of hope and finding a way forward from mental health struggles and trauma. The author is an experienced psychotherapist, but this at no time reads like a case study, it’s a simply and compassionately-told tale.

Hwang Bo-Reum: Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop

After burning out doing all the things that she was expected to do to ‘succeed’ in life, Yeongju follows her dream and opens a bookshop. This is a story of normal people living normal lives – there’s no major drama or adventure. All the characters have experienced disappointment and have doubt in themselves, and as the book unfolds, they begin to find their ways, that may contradict what traditional Korean society expects of them.

It prompted me to wonder, what is ‘a life lived well’? And how different the things are that bring meaning and contentment in life are from one person to another.

A gentle book about people finding their places in life.

Nicola Chester: On Gallows Down

An achingly beautiful, heartbreaking book – the book I wish I could write! – this is a wonderfully-crafted nature memoir and more, covering rural protests and political activism. The author finds refuge in nature as a child, protests the devastating loss of ancient trees as a young woman, attempts to give her children a good life in insecure tenanted homes on large estates.

Chester is utterly rooted in the landscape where she grew up and lives her adult life – the North Wessex Downs, Greenham Common. She pays exquisite detail to the wildlife around her, from the songbirds to the badgers she takes her young children to see. She finds hope in the rewilding of Greenham Common. And she doesn’t gloss over the terrible grief of really attending to the world around you and seeing the disregard paid to the creatures we share our planet with. Beautiful.

Emma Dabiri: Don’t Touch My Hair

For the last decade plus, I’ve reverted to a hairstyle that takes as little time and input as possible – I just can’t find it in myself to care. But even when I had long curly locks, they didn’t take a lot of looking after – and anyway, I live in a country where easily obtainable hair products were more-or-less geared towards hair like mine.

This is a fascinating read that links Dabiri’s own experience of taking care of her hair – as a girl brought up in Ireland, with a white mother – to a history of black hair and hairstyles, encompassing slavery, community, women’s friendship, social media. Towards the end she explores the role of indigenous fractal mathematic systems in black hairstyles, which just about blew my mind. An amazing education that’s crucially also an accessible read.

Sarah Perry: Enlightenment

This was a popular read this year in our bookgroup. The notes on my book-list say ‘wonderful from the start’. I realise that I’ve been thinking about it as a ‘historical novel’, but actually it’s set now, following the lives of two unlikely friends over twenty years. It’s partly the nature of some of the people that give it a feel of another time, and partly that two of the characters are  obsessed with a nineteenth-century astronomer who seems to have disappeared.

Definitely a story for winter, to curl up with and lose yourself in – much of the action takes place after dark and is interspersed with star-gazing. The characters are wonderfully constructed and while I felt there’s a sense of melancholy to the book, it’s also ridiculous at times. Completely immersive.

Andrew Miller: Now We Shall Be Entirely Free

Oh, I just loved this tale. It’s a real page-turning adventure yarn with flavours of Buchan or Stevenson or Du Maurier. It’s set in the time of the Napoleonic wars and gives a very different flavour of the utter carnage and chaos that must have been, if you’re used to Jane Austen’s treatment of the handsome soldiers wandering about town on leave.

So far, so fascinating, but then the plot turns into a flight to Scotland and the Hebrides, with the main character, Lacroix, pursued by a sinister and terrifying English corporal teamed up with a Spanish officer. I was slightly distracted by the attempts to figure out just which islands they’re landing on, but the feel of the landscape and the contrasting lives of Glasgow and the Islands are a wonderful addition to the thrill and terror of the hunt. A ripping yarn!

Bethany Rivers : The Sea Refuses No River

I get lost in novels and I’m moved by nature memoirs. But sometimes it’s only poetry that can convey or capture the feel or sense of an emotion. I don’t really know how to write about or ‘review’ poetry as I can’t always tell what I like about it – I seem to experience it in a less cognitive way. Or perhaps I don’t have enough practice.

So, I will just say: I liked this collection of poems. And here’s one for a taste:

February

February is a plank of wood

between darkest winter and the beginning.

You can be forgiven for

not looking as you crawl along,

pushing your candle slowly out in front,

your scarf of many colours double-layered.

A survival month: the well is still

empty, and you’ve yet to find the food

that nourishes. The plank is narrow

and stretches across streams and grass-lands

your feet dare not touch. The plank

is slippery: your hands grip both sides,

sliding one in front of the other,

one in front of the other.

If you too love books you may well have a list as long as your arm already (I now have different categories of books-to-read in a notebook, but they still seem to grow ten times as fast as I cross titles off).

Nonetheless, sometimes it’s nice to jump into someone else’s choices. If some of these have appealed to you, check out my reading recommendations from 2023 and 2022.

Happy reading!

How to find your balance in life

Lucy Hyde on 28 June 2024

Jabkdaw bird walking along a rope

Work / life balance, or life balance, is something that’s often referred to as necessary to a healthy life. But how do we know what the ‘right’ balance is – what’s the formula?

This is something I’ve been thinking of a lot recently, in a year that has felt very busy with activities – both work and personal. As I reflected on a period where weekends were taken up with family visits, or a gathering of Focusing colleagues, or friends visiting, I noticed I was telling myself that I’ve ‘got the balance wrong’, even where everything I was doing was something I wanted to do.

Also, no matter how many pithy memes you see telling you that no one lies on their deathbed wishing that they’d done more dusting, the reality is that there are some tasks that we need to keep on top of in order for life to roll on at least relatively smoothly.

Image by Tolu Bamwo on Nappy

What are essential life tasks?

There’s no one formula that works for everyone. You might find batch-cooking is essential to support their healthy eating habits through a busy work week. Or maybe you need to look out the next day’s outfit before you go to bed, to start the day feeling in control. For me, a couple of hours spent baking is time well spent, as knowing I’ve got a bit of cake in the tin to have in my mid-morning coffee break gives me a sense of stability and comfort, when I have a full day of therapy clients.

And it’s the same with so much of daily, weekly, even monthly life.

Do I need to know if I’m an introvert or an extrovert?

In the global north, we tend to think of things in binary terms (which ultimately leads to conflict and extremism – ‘I’m right, you’re wrong’ – but that’s for another day). On a micro scale this affects us personally, in the way we think about and describe ourselves. Gay or straight? Right wing or left wing? Autistic or allistic? Cat person or dog person? We’re taught to categorise people, to put them into the ‘correct box’, and in doing so we trap ourselves in boxes too.

An example of this is the introvert / extrovert label. For a while there was a craze for people to define themselves as one or the other and for organisations to try and categorise employees to make the most productive combinations (I remember you, Myers-Briggs ).  My 20 yr-old dictionary defines ‘extrovert’ as ‘person interested mainly in the world external to him/herself……hence (loosely) a sociable, outgoing, lively person.’ ‘Introvert’ is ‘a person interested mainly in his or her own inner states and processes rather than the outside world……….loosely, a shy or reflective person.’

Woman with eyes closed in coffee shop

Check out one of the myriad online quizzes (just do a search for ‘am I extrovert?’) and in reality you may well fit somewhere in between extrovert and introvert. Perhaps more accurately, whether we tend towards one or the other in a situation will be influenced by the day we’re having, how much time we’ve already spent engaged in social interaction, and what’s going on in our lives more generally.

Labels – good or bad?

It’s tempting to think that finding the right label for ourselves will help us find where we belong, that there’ll be a formula that will work for us if we just figure out which tribe we’re in. It’s as if we’re allowed to have the needs that we naturally have – but only if we can justify it with a diagnosis. This says more about the conditioning we’re subjected to in our upbringing, our culture and society generally, than about whether our needs are OK.

I encounter this sometimes with people who are wondering if they’re autistic because of sensitivity to noise and visual disturbance, or because they find social settings confusing and exhausting. Although an autism diagnosis won’t make those environments any easier to handle, for some people having a diagnosis can make it easier to give themselves permission to find such situations difficult – and perhaps to justify it to others.

But – what if we simply give ourselves permission to listen to our needs – whatever they are?

Small tent in front of a hill

Are my needs normal?

We can be so influenced by what others think about our needs, which, if you’re a people-pleaser, can be uncomfortable. (In Scotland, the age-old classic is when you’re in the pub and someone wants you to have a drink when you’re not in the mood for, or simply prefer not to drink, alcohol.)

But what others think is on them, not on you – and although it can be uncomfortable when you push back, remember the first time is the hardest. It does get easier because, often, people are actually understanding about the needs of others if they’re pushed out of their own autopilot assumptions.

And those people who continue to just not hear it, no matter how many times you push back? You’ve got the opportunity then to consider whether you really want them around you, and/or to bring some choice into how much you let yourself be affected (I’m thinking about family relationships that you really wouldn’t choose but aren’t quite ready to kick out the door yet).

Anyway, back to balance – it’s an individual thing, that you can’t necessarily lift someone else’s formula for. And it changes depending on what’s going on in your life, and even on what stage in life you’re in.

figure walking away into the sea
Image Jon Gerrard

Too much or too little social interaction?

Using myself as an illustration, for years I thought of myself as a ‘people person’. I come from a big family, I traditionally worked in jobs where I was dealing with people all day long. I felt OK going into settings where I didn’t know everyone, and making the appropriate small talk.

It’s interesting, looking back, to wonder how much ‘what I’m good at’ might have become conflated with ‘what I need’. In recent years I’ve allowed myself to step back a little in social situations and wonder how much the outgoing me was masking and/or trying to compensate for feeling uncomfortable, by ‘doing the right thing’ socially.

As a counsellor, I now work in a role where I still spend a fair amount of time with people – but in a one-to-one relationship that is focused on them. The intensity of this work means that at times I feel I need to withdraw from people completely – yet doing so has sometimes led to my feeling isolated and losing touch with myself as a living, breathing organism that is part of a larger ecosystem.

Lately, I’ve come to better understand that activities that invite me into a space with other people, but without intense verbal engagement, can bring that much-needed nourishment that comes from feeling myself as part of a community. Where I get this from currently is in community rowing on the sea, singing in a choir, joining in Focusing circles. In these spaces I can usually enjoy connection with others and also be in touch with my own needs. I’m recognising that being alongside others in an unspoken shared experience is important to my wellbeing.

Changing your mind can be an act of self-care

As well as being able to say ‘No’ to things outright, we might also need to say ‘I’ve changed my mind’ or ‘I want to, but I can’t’. This can be particularly difficult if we’re faced with a choice between two things that feel as if they would be equally nourishing to us – but knowing that if I did both I’d feel overwhelmed means that changing my mind on one is necessary, even if it means flipping a coin.

What’s the formula for a good balance?

I’d love to be able to finish this piece with a pithy step by step process for getting life balance ‘right’. However – that would be at odds with the whole quality feel of this topic, which is about balance not being one thing, but a state of flux that requires you to tune in to yourself from time to time, to sense what needs to be tweaked or adjusted.

Here’s a few things that might help:

  • Develop a self-awareness practice: If you can find a practice or routine or habit that helps you to check in with yourself and listen to what your needs are (for me it’s Inner Relationship Focusing) then you’re more likely to be able to respond when your circumstances, life situation or environment change.
  • Have a go-to list: If you can keep a list – mental or physical – of the things that you know help you re-find your equilibrium, this can be a starting point, a helpful prompt when you notice you feel ‘off’, of what you might need.
  • Drop the label: If you can allow yourself to let go of some of the self-analysis and labels by which you identify yourself (‘people person’, ‘introvert’) this could allow you to be more understanding and responsive to your needs in the moment if they don’t fit what you see as your usual pattern. Sometimes these labels are attached to us by others – you don’t have to let them.
  • Connect to the world around you: Things that remind you that you’re a living creature that’s part of a bigger world always help. Going for a walk where there’s something green to see. Paddling or swimming. Talking to someone who you feel safe with. Focusing on the sensation of your breath flowing in and out.

And finally – remember that balance isn’t a fixed point to ‘get right’. Finding balance is a dynamic process.

If reading this has resonated with you, but you don’t know where to start, get in touch. Talking to someone who’s not involved in your life can help you get a bit of distance to understand why you might be feeling that something needs to change – and counselling can help you take the steps to change.

My favourite books of 2023

Lucy Hyde on 14 December 2023

I love reading! It’s one of my great joys in life that I feel really

  • nourishes my soul
  • gives me time out
  • helps me escape reality
  • takes me on journeys to new places
  • broadens my understanding of others…………..

In no particular order, here are my favourites from my 2023 reads.

Kazuo Ishiguro – Klara and the Sun

A story told from the unique perspective of a solar-powered AI life-size ‘doll’ designed to be a child’s companion, Klara makes sense of the world the best way she can – and of course develops a more sophisticated knowledge all the time (there’s plenty of the reference to ‘the black oblongs’) that people’s attention is so caught by).

We don’t know any more about the world than Klara knows, so only have glimpses of a dystopian world where children need to undergo modification to obtain success.

Hilary Mantel – Fludd

I started reading this and then said to my partner ‘this is a book we need to read to each other’ – because I knew that otherwise I would keep interrupting him to read bits out.

Set in a grim little moorland village in and around a convent and a presbytery with a host of (mostly) dysfunctional or odd characters, Fludd is dark and funny with a flavour of Stella Gibbons ‘Cold Comfort Farm’.

Michael Rosen – Many Different Kinds of Love

Oh…..my heart is breaking as I just think about this book, a memoir of Michael Rosen’s experience of catching Covid early in the pandemic, and being in intensive care for two months (including being put into an induced coma).

It is a beautifully moving book made up of his prose poems, excerpts from the diary kept by medical staff and emails from his wife to family members. It of course reminds us AGAIN of the incredible, normal  humans who make up the NHS.

Sara Sheridan – Where are the Women?

A clever tour guide to an imagined Scotland where women’s contributions to the world are prized, celebrated and memorialised to the same extent as men’s.

The book is broken up into sections for different cities or parts of the countries, and each section includes a description of the building, statue or other monument and a brief history of the (real) woman it celebrates. Some do exist (Lady Stair’s Close, Edinburgh), some have been renamed (Edinburgh castle becomes St Margaret’s Castle), some have new landmarks created for them.

A fantastic and clever route to learning more about some of the really important women in Scottish history.

S R Crockett – The Raiders

If you like a good rip-roaring, swash-buckling historical novel, this could be a book for you. Chosen for our Bookgroup weekend away in Galloway, it’s set between the Solway Coast and the wild Galloway hills and includes smugglers, outlaws and cattle-thieving.

The narrator (a man) doesn’t have a particularly high opinion of himself, and the story features plenty strong intelligent women – even though the book was published in 1893. Most of all I love how the landscape features in this book.

In May I tried to recreate the route that the narrator takes, wild camping en route – but was defeated by the terrain and infamous Galloway bog……

Steve Silberman – Neurotribes

This is a fantastic and fascinating history of the neurodiversity movement; it’s a big book but an engaging and interesting read.

Silberman explores the various attempts to ‘cure’ or treat neurodiversity and how much a neurotypical viewpoint has dominated (surprise surprise), but also looks at the way forward for a society that is more humane, supportive and facilitative towards people who learn and process in all our different ways.

Honoree Fanonne Jeffers – The Love Songs of WEB Du Bois

Amazing, multi-generational epic novel set in Georgia, USA. I had to take a deep breath to embark on this 800-page tome, but found it difficult to put down once I started.

The story moves backwards and forwards in time between the life of Ailey, exploring and discovering her identity and family history, and the many generations of her ancestors, some of whom arrived in bondage from Africa, some indigenous Americans, some white settlers.

A wonderful weaving of stories, some tragic, some triumphant, all gripping.

Cal Flynn – Islands of Abandonment

This book is soooooo right up my alley – it’s about abandoned (by humans) spaces that nature has begun to reclaim, moving from Chernobyl’s surroundings, through former war zones, abandoned formerly thriving industrial cities of the US, to a Scottish island roamed by feral cattle left by humans in the 1970s.

As Flynn says “when a place has been altered beyond recognition and all hope seems lost, it might still hold the potential for life of another kind”. Beautifully written, there’s also an audiobook version read by Flynn, who hails from the Scottish Highlands.

Harry Josephine Giles – Deep Wheel Orcadia

This is like no other book I’ve read EVER, never mind this year.

It’s a sci-fi novel, about finding home, set on a space station – written in verse, in Orcadian (the Orkney dialect). It has a parallel translation into English to help those of us who aren’t familiar with Orcadian dialect words.

Sounds demanding? Give it a go – it’s entertaining as a well as a mind-stretch.

Betsy Whyte – The Yellow on the Broom

This was a recommendation from someone responding to a Facebook post I made about the persecution of Travellers in Scotland (which included attempts to ‘educate children out of their nomadic ways’ in the twentieth century).

It’s a wonderful autobiography of Whyte’s childhood as a traveller in Scotland in the 1920s/30s. As well as being a great first-person insight into the life and customs of travellers at that time, it’s also a fascinating snapshot of wider society during that time, including how other people viewed travellers.

Aldous Huxley – Brave New World

I’m not sure how I’ve only just read this 20th century classic for the first time. It’s set in a dystopian future where emotions and individuality are conditioned out of people at a young age, and embryos are engineered to develop in such a way that they fulfil different classes in society from ‘Alphas’ (the leaders, intellectuals) to ‘Epsilons’ (the labourers).

I found it really interesting to read this book almost 100 years after it was written, noticing the echoes of the idea that things can be engineered to make us happy in our consumer-focused society today – ‘distract yourself from your natural feelings by buying happiness’.

Britannica.com says ‘Much of the anxiety that drives Brave New World can be traced to a widespread belief in the 1920s in technology as a futuristic remedy for problems caused by disease and war’….. unnervingly reminiscent of the way many people today cling to the desperate hope that technology will somehow rescue us from environmental collapse.

Janey Godley – Handstands in the Dark

Janey Godley first won a place in my heart in 2018 when I saw the wonderful photograph of her protesting at Donald Trump’s golf course with a placard reading ‘Trump is a cunt’.

She then made it to National Treasure status during the pandemic with her hilarious yet informative voiceovers of Nicola Sturgeon’s daily public Covid briefings (which Sturgeon herself appreciated). 

I bought this, the first volume of her autobiography earlier in the year when I went to see her ‘Not dead yet’ show. It’s dry, funny and heartbreaking. While not an ‘easy read’ because of the trauma and tragedy it covers (shooting up in the room where your relative’s coffin is laid out, anyone?), it’s gripping and entertaining too.

Amy Liptrot – The Outrun

Another recommendation via Facebook – and another autobiography. Amy Liptrot was born in Orkney and escaped from a complicated family situation to the bright lights of London. After reaching rock bottom in her struggles with alcohol addiction, she returns to Orkney to try and recover, ultimately retreating to Papa Westray – “Britain is an island off Europe, Orkney is an island off Britain, Westray is an island off Orkney, Papay is an island off Westray…”

These are the bare bones of the story but don’t capture the beautiful writing of the book, the way she captures both the descent into alcoholic hell, and the wild and bleak Orkney winter. She is brutally honest and exposing of her pain and struggles.

Ali Smith – Seasonal Quartet

Is it cheating to have four books as one choice? Ali Smith had the idea to write a sequence of books, each dealing with a season, written as quickly as possible, and published as quickly as possible, to be as comtemporaneous as possible.

The book covers (which feature the same view painted by David Hockney during different seasons) were designed before the first manuscript had even been completed (see Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet: an oral history (penguin.co.uk) )

It just so happened that the period over which she was writing the books took in Brexit, the ramping up of anti-immigrant rhetoric, the Grenfell Tower tragedy, the Covid pandemic and the increased awareness of the Black Lives Matter movement. They tell separate stories but are also inter-connected. As I read each one, there would be at least one point where I would say aloud ‘what the hell is going on?’ but I never wanted to stop reading. They’re written with a really light touch and were a particular welcome change whenever I’d finished a book that was rather intense or heavy.

Dr Devon Price – Unmasking Autism (The power of embracing our hidden neurodiversity)

Just brilliant. I’ve recommended this to a number of clients. It’s also a great read for any allistics (neurotypicals) wanting to better understand the autistic experience, or for anyone who feels that they have to hide aspects of themselves – for whatever reason – to be safe or accepted in society.

Dr Price has written a super-accessible book that includes up to date research and personal insights, examining the phenomenon of masking. It’s a passionate rallying cry for the right to be authentic and to resist conformity, and for a society where everyone can be themselves and be allowed to thrive.

And it’s just a really good read.

Lisa Allen-Agostini – The Bread the Devil Knead

I was in the library one day and my partner dropped this in my hands and said ‘this looks like your sort of book’.

It was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2022. It’s a fast-paced, gripping read with a great central character – a 40-yr-old woman who manages a boutique in Port of Spain (Trinidad). She doesn’t fit the typical image of a feminist but absolutely is her own woman (hurrah for pulling down stereotypes!).

Be warned – it tackles domestic abuse, rape and racism in an unsparing, matter-of-fact way. One thing I loved about it was the Trinidadian creole voice that it’s written in, which I hadn’t encountered before – although easy to read, I really enjoyed that there were some words I didn’t know and (if I couldn’t figure it out) I just had to accept that!

Jenni Fagan – The Panopticon

Like ‘The Bread the Devil Knead’, the central character in ‘The Panopticon’ is a unique, unusual (to me) voice. Panopticons were prisons designed to provide constant visibility of all inmates. The one in this book is an institute for adolescent offenders somewhere in central Scotland. The narrator is 15-year-old Anais, who has already had to deal with an awful lot of shit in her short life, including the death of the one foster-mother who she seems to have formed a bond with.

Jenni Fagan herself grew up in local authority care in Scotland, having 29 different placements in her first 16 years before living in homeless accommodation. Her experience may well contribute to Anais’s believable voice.

Anais is in no way a victim; instead she’s a fierce, tough survivor who simply won’t let you pity her. I couldn’t help feeling sorry that she’d had so little love in her life. An amazing, tragic, read.

Frances Quinn – That Bonesetter Woman

A random pick off the library shelf; I was attracted by the odd title.

The woman in question, Endurance Proudfoot, is based on a real woman who became a bonesetter in Georgian England. Endurance is clumsy, strong and plain-spoken. Even thought her bonesetter father believes it’s not a job for a woman, she’s determined, and eventually makes her way to the career that she wants.

Needless to say, an independent woman isn’t given an easy time of it in the man’s world of 18th century London. Endurance needs every ounce of courage and strength she has. A real page-turner with some fantastic characters.

Daisy Johnson – Fen

I don’t know if you’ve read any Daisy Johnson, but she is hands-down the most watery writer I’ve come across.

I gradually realised, as I was partway through this collection of short stories set in the Fens, that I’d read another book of hers. ‘Everything Under’, which is set partly on a canal boat, has a similarly muddy, watery feel to it. My list of books read has a note in brackets after ‘Fen’ that says ‘eerie, bonkers’.

Many of the (human) characters in the stories seem to have something of the flooded fens in their nature. It’s as if they haven’t long emerged from the wetlands themselves. There are strains of myth and folklore that weave through the tales – an uncanny and mysterious gathering of stories.

Natasha Pulley – The Bedlam Stacks

I bloody love Natasha Pulley. I mean, my first introduction to her included a clockwork octopus in ‘The Watchmaker of Filigree Street’ – what’s not to like?

This book, also set in the late 1800s, is similarly wistful, quirky, full of adventure and with a host of fascinating inhabitants. The main character is recruited by the India Office to search out a source of quinine in Peru. In the process he discovers an almost-impossible village at the edge of the Amazon, a mysterious priest, and various characters who are woven around with myth and magical qualities.

Infused with love and melancholy, this is a perfect read to lose yourself in over a long, dark, midwinter weekend.

If you’ve enjoyed reading about this (pretty much uncurated, random) collection of books you might like to check out my 2022 favourite book list here, and my blog about how reading books can make your life better.

Staying connected to the world around you

Lucy Hyde on 22 November 2023

How do we remind ourselves that we’re part of the interconnectedness of everything?

I’ve been ‘inviting people into my garden’ through Facebook for nearly four years, since the beginning of the Covid pandemic, when travel and activity was restricted. I was acutely aware that some people didn’t have their own gardens or even balconies, and I shared my green space to give people ‘virtual access’ to nature.

Lucy Hyde therapist sitting amongst some trees

It’s been valuable for me to connect to others by connecting to the natural world. At times, when life is busy, the gentle pressure to check what’s happening in the garden has reminded me to spend even a few moments noticing the changes and new arrivals. It’s encouraged me to bring my attention to the tiniest flowers, the weeds, the creatures that make their life in my garden.

Humans are part of the ecosystem

Something in me has evolved over the last few years, and I realise that I’ve changed the way I think of humans interacting with nature. The separation I used to see between ‘the human world’ and ‘the natural world’ feels more and more artificial, a symptom of the development of modern (industrial/post-industrial) society.

This synthetic distinction between humans and nature has encouraged humans to prioritise their own wants and needs without consideration for the impact on the world as a whole, and is a significant contributor towards the current climate and environmental tragedy.

Humans are part of the global ecosystem too. Looked at on a geological scale, humans were an extremely successful species for a long time at surviving and thriving. However, if we continue as we do we will suffer a huge population crash – possibly functional extinction. Nonetheless in a few millennia the planet will adjust and adapt to a new climatic system, and life (with or without humans) will continue. Taking this wide-angle view sometimes helps me accept that humans are just part of the natural cycle of life on the planet.

A one-world view

I joined a choir a few months ago, and one of the songs that I’ve learned is ‘Mni Wičoni (Water is Life), which was written by Sara Thomsen, inspired by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and all the tribes, nations, native and non-native people who came together to protect the land and water threatened by the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (you can hear the song here ).

One of the Lakota phrases in the song is ‘Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ’. The closest translation, in English, is ‘all my relations’ – but ‘relations’ in the sense of other people, animals, insects, plants, rocks, mountains, rivers……..this one-world-view of ‘all my relations’ really resonated for me, and continues to touch me every time I sing the song. 

Disconnection as a defence

The disconnection that many of us maintain from the rest of the world encourages us to see bugs and beasties as ‘pests’, to vacuum up spiders (that would thrive, if we allowed them to, by eating the flies that annoy us). It prompts us to see nature as ‘inconvenient’ when moss grows on our plastic grass and concrete driveways. But it also enables us to ignore the pain and sorrow we experience if we really allow ourselves to notice how the numbers of swifts arriving each summer has plunged, how there aren’t as many ladybirds around from year to year, how seeing a hedgehog in our garden is a vanishing rarity.

Small reminders of the world around us can help us stay connected – connected to other people, connected to ‘all our relations’, connected to our own experience. Staying connected is essential if we want to make changes in ourselves and in our societies – together we are stronger and more resilient, and have a better chance of making life possible and tolerable for everyone, not just a privileged minority of humans. Finding ways to connect reduces the fear-based ‘us and them’ which prompts us to blame others for the wrongs in the world and stops us hearing that those people are afraid too.

Connecting in grief

finding your home Lucy Hyde online therapist

Staying connected to the world we inhabit inevitably involves grieving (e.g. in my case, when hundreds of thousands of scallops were washed up onto the shores near me by Storm Babet, to perish above the waterline). Grief, anger and sadness are appropriate, natural responses to tragedy, and by allowing ourselves to feel them we learn that we can tolerate them and carry on. Grief can bring people together.

Yet there can be a temptation to avoid strong or difficult feelings by numbing or distracting ourselves through forms that are harmful to us and the world (escaping on a flight, buying things without considering whether, honestly, we need them, over-eating or drinking). Most of us do this in some way, at some point – because staying with the discomfort can be really hard.

Many of us are expert at compartmentalising, which causes us to miss the relationships between things, for example, the influence of mind on body and vice versa. Just as we are healthier creatures if we allow our bodies and minds to be part of the same organism – enabling us to be more in tune with our needs – so we might be healthier creatures if we allow ourselves to be part of a community of humankind and of the world as a whole, bringing us in tune with the holistic, planetary need for health.

Noticing what’s around you

Paying attention to the seasonal changes and to older traditions of marking shifts through the year is a way I’ve found to be more in touch with what’s going on around me, and also to the impact of such changes on me – which includes allowing myself to feel affected by gloomy days, for example.

So, while I’ll be continuing to invite people into my garden, I’ll be thinking of this less as a retreat or withdrawal to nature, and more as an invitation to be present with what’s around you, wherever you are.  I’m not offering hope that ‘everything will be OK’, so much as an opportunity to be real and present, acknowledging what IS. Staying connected is a way of supporting each other in our collective grief.

Nature isn’t just ‘out there in the wilderness’. It’s in the daisy growing between the paving slabs. It’s in the spider in the corner of your ceiling. It’s in you.

If you’re experiencing anxiety, grief and distress in reaction to the impact of capitalism, greed and fear on the planet – no wonder; your response is normal and healthy.  But if your feelings are overwhelming and seem unbearable, please get in touch – I can help. 

Further reading:

Wild Therapy: Rewilding our inner and outer worlds by Nick Totton

Holding the Hope: Reviving psychological and spiritual agency in the face of climate change ed. Linda Aspey, Catherine Jackson, Diane Parker

Does counselling REALLY change lives?

Lucy Hyde on 23 February 2023

‘Counselling changes lives’ is the strapline of the BACP (British Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy ).

I realised recently that it’s 20 years since I had my first experience of counselling, as a client. It prompted me to think about the course that my life has taken since then, and to see that counselling did change my life.

I can’t remember now, exactly what it was that prompted me to seek counselling in 2003. I was miserable, I know that much. Feeling depressed, stressed, trapped, that life was meaningless, not feeling good enough – all these had been familiar states of being for me as long as I could remember, certainly since early teenage. I didn’t think of myself as having a bad life, as these feelings were interspersed with periods of relief, moments of joy, happy events and the comfort of some truly meaningful relationships.

I think I was probably closer to truly believing “I can’t cope” than usual. “I can’t cope” is a phrase that I’ve become accustomed to hearing from other people, yet actually unhappy people are very good at coping. Coping is what we do; we manage, we survive, we keep on going. Often, I believe, when we say “I can’t cope” to another person, something in us is saying “I don’t want ‘coping’ to be my way of life. I want more from life than ‘coping.’”

I remember that I went to my GP. It wasn’t the first time that I had spoken to a doctor about mental distress, although I didn’t have the language to describe it other than to say that I was stressed. Although the word ‘depression’ had resonated with me for many years I thought that people who were depressed didn’t have functioning lives so didn’t think I had the right to the word. On at least one previous doctor’s appointment, I’d been offered medication, but had been reluctant to pursue that route, thinking agreeing would be an admission that I was never going to feel better (rather than seeing it as an opportunity to help me feel better).

I can’t now remember whether I was offered anti-depressants in 2003, but I do remember the GP giving me a leaflet with a list of local counsellors and counselling organisations on it. They couldn’t provide me with this via the NHS, but they could signpost me to where I could access it for myself.

I now see that even that was hugely important – the doctor (I can’t remember who it was, but I can certainly remember those old white male GPs who it sure as shit wouldn’t have been) helping me believe that talking to someone was a valid avenue to pursue, and also that there was something I could do for myself that might help, rather than getting that via the NHS. GPs even now have a powerful role, and that GP – though I had wanted them to tell me what to do – handed some of that power back to me.

Clearly I was in a sufficiently privileged position to be able to pay for counselling, although I’m sure I, like many clients I’ve worked with since, struggled to believe that it was really a justifiable expenditure. I expect I could probably have afforded more than the 4 or 5 sessions I permitted myself, but at the time, my emotional wellbeing didn’t sit in the same position in my priorities that it does now. In fact, the phrase ‘my emotional wellbeing’ wouldn’t even have been in my vocabulary.

There’s lots I can’t remember. I can’t remember the name of the counsellor who I saw, although I’m reminded of them anytime I pass the end of the street that they lived on, where I would visit for sessions on dark winter evenings. I wouldn’t recognise them if I passed them in the street. I don’t remember much of what we talked about.

What I do remember is that, during those few weeks, I noticed an advert in my local paper for care assistants at a local respite centre. The pay was significantly lower than my earnings in my customer service role in a financial company, yet something drew me to it. I didn’t really believe I should apply for a job as a care assistant; I worried I was just trying to run away from work stress in my existing role, but I mentioned it to my counsellor, who responded as if it was a perfectly normal thing to be interested in, and helped me explore the potential rewards and fulfilment in such a position that were missing from my job. I remember her suggesting that caring for others might in itself be something that I would find nourishing.

It was possibly the first time that I’d been encouraged to trust my gut instinct for what felt right, rather than what I imagined was the appropriate or culturally expected way forward (and by culturally I mean my family culture as well as society; I already thought I was a failure for not having a ‘graduate’ job).

I went into the session wondering if my counsellor would know what was wrong with me for being attracted to that job. I came out of the session thinking “I am allowed to want this.”

And I made a change.

I resigned my job in the city and exchanged a long bus commute for a half-hour drive across farmland in the opposite direction, to Leuchie House , a respite centre for people with long-term conditions. I can remember those first shifts, where I didn’t really know what I was doing, but was blown away by all the interesting guests (we never called them patients) I got to meet, and nourished by the gratitude and appreciation they expressed to me for helping them with tasks of daily living that I took for granted.

It changed my life.

I didn’t stay in the role for long. Caring wasn’t for me after all, plus the pay levels at the time were unsustainable for me, on top of running a car to commute 30 miles a day (there being no public transport). I found the process of deciding what to next, 10 months later, stressful, and felt anxious about my future all over again – but I still didn’t regret having made that move. I remained with the organisation, ultimately moving to a managerial role and developing a career in human resources, and stayed there for 13 years, during which the organisation went through some incredibly challenging times, and so did I.

It wasn’t perfect, and at times I struggled with work stress. By the time I left to build a private counselling practice, I felt I had given as much as I could and was ready to go.

But I also thrived in the various roles that I had, and at times felt a sense of purpose that had been missing, being part of a team working towards a single aim, that of providing the best possible nursing care in a holiday home environment. I met and worked with some really inspirational and passionate people. And the experience that I gained, including practising mediation skills, having difficult conversations, supporting colleagues through difficult times, meant, when I was offered the opportunity to do a counselling skills course, I jumped at it, which ultimately led me to being a therapist today.

I’m absolutely not saying that I took one step in a different direction and never looked back. The decision to switch jobs didn’t change me totally. That younger Lucy, who was stressed, depressed, anxious and self-judgmental still resides within me. Although she doesn’t appear anything like as much, or have such an influence on what I think and feel and do, that’s not just about me having had one change of direction. It’s thanks to many years of therapy, lots of hours of psychotherapy training, learning Focusing skills and practising behaviours or skills to shift my mindset, over those 20 years. Plus a bunch of other experiences, influential people and being taught to see that difficult times could also be AFLOGs (Another Fucking Learning Opportunity for Growth).

But, as I look back over 20 years, I can see the thread that links my life now – as a therapist moving into my seventh year of self-employment – to the choice I made as a result of those few counselling sessions in someone’s living room 20 years ago. I can see the thread that links some rewarding adventures, following scary decisions, to the encouragement, from that therapist back then, to trust what feels right, not what I imagine other people think is right.

Image: Mabel Amber on Pixabay

And I’m very, very grateful to that anonymous counsellor whose name I’ve forgotten, and who doesn’t know the huge difference she made. Counselling changes lives.

If you’ve read this you might be wondering whether you could use some help in making a big decision – or a small one. A decision that might seem relatively small, can have a much bigger impact on your life than you expect.

Or perhaps something is feeling off-kilter in your life and you don’t know what to do about it. Maybe you don’t want ‘coping’ to be your life. Talking to someone can help you to access a deeper understanding in yourself, and discover that there is wisdom there that can show you the way.

You might find it helpful to read about how therapy works – what the process is like and how counselling promotes change.

If any of this resonates with you – please get in touch, even if it’s just for a chat to see if counselling could help change your life.

My favourite books of 2022

Lucy Hyde on 23 January 2023

I love reading, it’s one of my great joys in life that I feel really nourishes my soul.

In 2021 I started keeping a note of the books that I read. I planned to share my 10 top books of 2022 in the run-up to the year-end, but I could only narrow it down to 20.

I shared these 20, in pairs, over the last few days of 2021 – but I thought I’d gather them all together in one place here too – so that I’ve got them somewhere to remind myself!

Please note these aren’t specifically therapy (or self-help) books – there were some of those, but I haven’t included them here.

In no particular order!

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

A wonderful immersive story moving from Nigeria to the US and back again. Ifemelu moves to the United States to study, where she encounters racism and for the first time, discovers what it means to be a “Black Person”. One of those that I didn’t want to put down and also didn’t want to end.

The Wild Silence by Raynor Winn

A friend recommended Raynor Winn’s first book, The Salt Path, after my first solo wild-camping-walking expedition (and if you haven’t already read it, start with The Salt Path). The Wild Silence continues Ray and Moth’s story as they try and find a place to settle and feel safe, after enforced homelessness in middle age. It’s a memoir, and Winn’s voice is just so bloody authentic.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

One of this year’s Bookgroup books, Piranesi is mysterious, eerie, magical. I still have vivid mental pictures of the ‘house’ in which the book takes place – an ocean-filled Roman temple that is invaded by tides twice a day. The reader gradually learns more about how Piranesi comes to be there, becoming more emotionally attached in the process.

The Library of the Dead by TL Huchu

A great romp through a dystopian Edinburgh, following the main character, Ropa, a teenage school drop-out who makes ends meet talking to ghosts. It almost feels like Young Adult literature except some of the events are just too gruesome. Great fun for anyone who knows Edinburgh and can picture the entrance to the Library via the Old Calton Burial Ground……

Feeling Heard, Hearing Others by Rob Foxcroft

This is a book about Focusing (and if you don’t know what that is – check out my blog: What is Focusing?). It’s kind of a how-to… and also isn’t really. It’s not really a self-help guide… and it is also helpful and therapeutic. I wasn’t sure whether I liked it at first, the structure and pace is so unlike other books, as is the tentative nature (there are no rigid guidelines here) and the mixing of poetry through the prose to try and convey another sense of what the writer is wanting to express. But I realised that it has similar qualities to Focusing itself; everyone will respond differently, some ideas can’t be captured easily with words, it requires both the speaker (writer) and the listener (reader) to engage, to find a way of meeting or making contact ‘enough’.

English Pastoral: An inheritance by James Rebanks

The word ‘elegaic’ was made for this book, which is a beautiful ode to a landscape by one who is truly hefted to it. James Rebanks is a Lake District farmer who inherited the family hill farm. As a child he watched farmers around him turning to new ‘improved’ methods and saw the destruction of the fabric of the soil, and the disappearance of the creatures living in, around and through the land; in middle age he is returning his land to something closer to the natural/human-influenced state that had evolved over the previous centuries. If you read this, keep going through the middle section of heartbreak; hope does return.

Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah

This book gives an experience of a very specific place in time, one which was completely new to me. The young boy who’s the main character is transferred from his rural home to urban East Africa in bonded servitude as payment of his father’s debt, and then has to adjust to European colonialism and its upheaval of existing social hierarchies.

All the light we cannot see by Anthony Doerr

This novel is also in a very specific place in time – that of occupied France in WWII. It follows the stories of a blind French girl and an orphaned German boy whose worlds collide, and is hauntingly beautiful with wonderful imagery and language. I really didn’t want it to end.

Natives: Race & Class in the ruins of Empire by Akala

OMG. It’s brilliant. When looking for ways to educate myself about racism, it’s easy sometimes to get distracted by offerings from across the pond, and then to be frustrated when things don’t seem to fit or have the same relevance. Someone on GoodReads says this is ‘essential reading for anyone British or who wants to understand Britain’. Akala uses his own experience to drive the narrative to brilliant effect. It’s also so chockful with information and references and ‘things I want to know more about’ that I could probably have spent the whole year just being led on to other books by it.

Joseph Knight by James Robertson

A different angle on the intersection of colonialism, empire-building, race and class. You may not know (I didn’t until a couple of years ago) that Scots made up a disproportionately high percentage of British-born plantation owners – Scottish cities owe a lot of their beauty and wealth to the proceeds of the slavery. Joseph Knight was brought to Scotland by his ‘owner’ and eventually successfully gained his freedom in the Edinburgh courts. This true story has been turned into a historical novel by James Robertson – it has the flavour of Scott or Dickens, though I’m not sure they would have given as much credit to the strong female characters. 

Silence is a sense by Leila Al Ammar

A novel I picked up by chance in the library, Silence is a Sense is narrated by a young woman who has lost her ability to speak following a long, traumatic journey from Syria to the UK, and begins with her observing the lives going on in other flats in the tower blocks around hers. She begins writing anonymously for a magazine, and the book uses fragments of emails and articles to put her story together.

Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez

From silent to invisible. This is a book I’d been meaning to read, but was afraid it would make me furious. When it was chosen for our Bookgroup I read it. Guess what? It made me furious. It picks apart every single aspect of life and carefully and forensically demonstrates just how data bias perpetuates systemic discrimination against women. Public transport. Car safety (crash test dummies being based on an ‘average male body’ meaning that women are at far greater risk of injury and death than men, for example). Sport. Health. But really – it’s a book that any man SHOULD read (you’ll be furious too, generic male, but not as furious as me), because men are needed to change this.

Diary of a young naturalist by Dara McAnulty

My list of books read, says in brackets after this one ‘one to return to for spiritual guidance’, which makes it sound like some religious treaty. The book is drawn from Dara McAnulty’s journal, written over his 15th year. He’s autistic, and finds solace in the natural world when the neurotypical human world becomes too overwhelming, and this in particular spoke to me; that at times when I find myself despairing because of the uncaring of human beings, I can retreat to nature. His ability to look at the tiniest bugs and creatures and lose himself in their worlds is inspiring for people of any age.

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

From tiny bugs to big bugs – that’s all I’m saying. This book is mind-bending, amazing – I saw it described somewhere as ‘evolution-based science-fiction’ which is right enough. There’s a whole world, a civilisation, that develops through the book, alongside a bunch of astronauts from a fucked-up Earth travelling through space for all that time. You read /hear about suspended animation all the time in sci-fi, but the way it weaves through the story, with different people having to wake up to do stuff at different times, the way they age at different rates as a result… it’s tremendous, adventurous fiction that Really Makes You Think.

Underland by Robert Macfarlane

Robert Macfarlane is right up there with my absolute favourite authors of all time, the way he writes about landscape is just so beautiful and lyrical. This latest book of his is about underworlds – literal, mythical, literary. Unlike many of his other books, I felt happy to be an armchair traveller with this one; I do not want to do that potholing shit where you have to hold your breath to get round a u-bend in a cave in the hope that there will be air on the other side.

Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit

Somebody recommended this to me a while ago and I’m so glad I read it at last. Solnit writes about the relationship between thinking and walking, and walking and culture… taking in pilgrimages and urban strolls. Beautifully written, I’ll be looking out for more Rebecca Solnit.

David Mogo Godhunter by Suyi Davies Okungbowa

I’m getting to know more African speculative fiction – there’s some exciting stuff out there, of which this Nigerian god-punk novel is just one. This is set in a dystopian future, but one where the Orisha War caused thousands of deities to come down onto the streets of Lagos. David is a demigod who needs to, essentially save the world. The environment of the book is vivid and terrifying, and very visual – I could imagine this being made into a blockbuster or a Netflix series with lots of CGI and special effects.

Dark Hunter by FJ Watson

A book set in a place I know to some extent (Berwick-upon-Tweed) but at a time I’ve never given much thought to – the young squire, Benedict, who narrates the story is with the English-held garrison here, in 1317, 3 years after the Scots were victorious at Bannockburn. Much of the time they are under siege, hungry, bored and homesick. There’s lots of chat about the savage Scots. To make things exciting, however, Benedict has to solve a murder. A good rip-roaring page turner.

Our Homesick Songs by Emma Hooper

This was the first book I read in 2022, sent me by a friend. It’s a lyrical, wistful story of a family in a small village in Newfoundland in a time where fish stocks begin to dry up and people have to move away to find work elsewhere. The place, the landscape, the time, play just as much a part in the story as the characters. 

The Sea Road by Margaret Elphinstone

…and the last book I read. Margaret Elphinstone is a recent discovery for me and I love her storytelling that immerses me among peoples and times that I’ve never considered, opening my mind wide open. The Sea Road, based on a real person, tells the tale of Gudrid, an Icelandic adventurer (who of course never got a saga because she’s a woman) who travels ‘outside the world’ to what would later be called Newfoundland.  

Do you read to relax? To escape? To learn? Because you feel you should?

If you like reading but don’t let yourself loose on books as much as you would like, check out my blog 7 ways that reading books can improve your life – it might encourage you to give yourself permission.

What is Focusing?

Lucy Hyde on 9 November 2022

Focusing was developed in the 1960s by Eugene Gendlin when he was researching why some people were able to sustain a more lasting change from psychotherapy than others. He found that those who made more sustained changes had a natural ability to check within themselves for an inner felt sense of a situation or difficulty, and to use that felt sense to intuitively find a way forward. Gendlin developed a process in order that those people who don’t have this natural ability, could be taught to develop it.

Focusing is…………

  • A tool for supporting self-compassion
  • A self-help exercise
  • A way of life

Focusing is all of these – and more.

Image by Tolu Bamwo on Nappy

My own experience is of a history of getting stuck in my head, trying to think my way out of an uncomfortable situation or experience – believing that if only I could figure out the right solution, I’d stop feeling so distressed / uncomfortable / anxious. This resulted in lots of overthinking, rumination and self-criticism for not being able to get it right. Focusing has helped me develop another, much gentler way of managing difficult thoughts and feelings, which means that even when I get triggered back into old patterns of overthinking, I’m better able to recognise what’s happening and to move through it more quickly.

For me it’s been nothing short of life-changing, which is why I decided to complete the training to teach other people this wonderful skill.

How Focusing can help

Many of us learn at an early age to suppress feelings, or to be frightened of strong emotions. This can be a result of experiences of feeling unsafe in childhood, may have been modelled to us by our parents, or may have been part of the conditioning of the society or culture we grew up in – there are lots of possible reasons. Over time this can lead to us being afraid of our feelings – you might be afraid that if you let yourself feel, you’ll be overwhelmed by your emotions, like opening Pandora’s Box. In some cases we become so skilled at not allowing our feelings that we’re not even sure what we feel.

Even if they’re buried deep, those feelings don’t go away, and can often manifest themselves in other ways, including physical symptoms, poor immune response, anxiety, stress symptoms, or erratic moods.

Focusing with a skilled companion, you can learn to acknowledge, first of all, that there is something there that wants attention. You can begin to listen to what those suppressed parts of you want to say – while keeping a safe distance. Doing this with a supportive teacher helps you be alongside thoughts or feelings, rather than be overwhelmed by them. You can recognise that the feelings are part of you – they’re not all of you. With practice, you can learn to build relationships with those inner parts of you, and the intense feelings will ease as those denied voices realise that, actually, they don’t need to shout so loud to be heard.

Sculpture by Matt Baker

How does Focusing compare to mindfulness or meditation?

There are similarities between all three practices. They all aim to bring the attention inside the body, and to remain in the experience of the present moment.

However, often with meditation and mindfulness, the intention is to not get ‘caught up’ in thoughts or feelings, but to let them pass. With Focusing we bring interested curiosity to a thought, feeling or sensation. We might enquire what it’s like, what it might be connected to, and we want to stay with it in a friendly way. With this curiosity more can arise and stuck feelings can shift.

Is Focusing a type of guided visualisation exercise?

Some people will have a lot of visual imagery when they’re Focusing, but some people will have body sensations, or thoughts, or memories (and lots of people have a mixture). In my own process, I often find I start with a body feeling and then images can also come later. My role is to support people to allow images or other experiences to arise, and to find ways of describing the experience. In that process, where these ‘parts’ are attended to by trying to describe ‘just what they’re like’, images may develop into other images, or emotions, or memories.

When someone is new to Focusing, I’ll make suggestions, like ‘perhaps you could sense if there’s an emotional quality to this image’, or ‘if it feels helpful, perhaps you could check if there’s something this part is wanting’, to support a dialogue or relationship with these inner experiences.  As people become more experienced with Focusing, they’ll often learn what’s helpful for them, e.g. whether they like having suggestions or .

Should I choose Focusing or counselling?

Focusing is not therapy, although it does, of course, have therapeutic benefits. If you come to me for Focusing sessions, you’ll be learning a self-help practice, which you can also do on your own, and if you decide to take it further, you could develop Focusing partnerships with other people who are learning Focusing. The role of the teacher or companion in Focusing is to support you (sometimes via suggestions) to follow your own direction. You don’t need to give me any history, unless you want to, as we will be dealing with your present-moment experience in sessions, even though this experience will most often be influenced by past events.

Because Focusing has become an integral part of who I am, it is also an element of my counselling process. For example, I may suggest a pause within a session, to check inside, to allow some space for feelings to emerge. I sometimes also offer some Focusing teaching within counselling sessions, if I think that it may be helpful to tune in to some feeling or experience that seems difficult to put into words.

If you have a clear goal of what you want to change in your life or behaviour, it may be that counselling is more appropriate than Focusing. If you’re not sure what you want, it could be that Focusing might help you get a clearer idea of your steps forward. If you want to develop a better relationship with yourself, Focusing and counselling could both help with this.

I suggest that, if you want to try Focusing, we plan in 3 sessions initially. My reason for this is that, for some people, it can seem a bizarre and unusual way of relating to themselves, and the unfamiliar can be uncomfortable. Committing to a few sessions means that you give yourself a better chance of moving through this discomfort, where something in you might be tempted to shy away after the initial experience. Also, we’ll take some time during the first session, for some preparation before the guided exercise, and some feedback afterwards, whereas a greater proportion of the second and third sessions can be dedicated to the experience of you being with yourself.

What happens in a Focusing session?

I’ll ask you to close your eyes (or look down if you prefer), and then lead you into your body with a body-scan or check-in, then use gentle suggestions to see what’s there wanting your attention, or to check in with a particular issue that you want to look at.

You describe to me what you experience and I reflect that back to you. I may make suggestions to help you to begin gently to build a relationship with what comes up. We’re not attempting to analyse or interpret – although part of you may want to, in which case I’ll encourage you to acknowledge that aspect of you, too.

Image: Ben White on Unsplash

I’ll give you a time signal that we’re coming to the end, and I’ll suggest you take some time to thank whatever has shown up, then encourage you to come back to the room and open your eyes.

If you want you can talk about what happened in the session, and you can ask for my feedback if you think that would feel helpful.

What is Focusing most useful for?

Anxiety

I’ve found Focusing particularly helpful with clients who have high levels of anxiety, who often feel compelled to keep busy at all times and/or to focus their energies on trying to keep others happy. Anxiety can provoke over-thinking, ruminating thoughts, and compulsive behaviours as a way of filling up any empty space which might otherwise be occupied by strong feelings. With Focusing we can turn towards those feelings that are provoked if you don’t keep busy, and you’ll discover that anxiety is something that you don’t need to react to or ignore. When you acknowledge the anxiety, and turn a compassionate and curious attitude to what may be underlying it, the intensity of the feelings will lessen and become easier to tolerate. 

Trauma

Focusing can be a wonderful way of soothing the parts of you that are easily triggered due to past traumatic experiences – without having to go into the story of the trauma. This means it can be equally useful if you experience triggering or fight/flight/freeze reactions, even if you don’t think you’ve been subject to traumatic events. Because of the Focusing principle of being alongside your experience – as an observer, or witness – rather than being in it, you can get a little bit of distance from your emotions. We work with your in-the-moment, embodied present, and having the experience of being able to be in relationship with your traumatised parts can be profoundly healing at a whole-body level.

Inner critic

Focusing treats the critical voice as a part of you – not all of you. By using Focusing to build a relationship, you can develop understanding of how that inner critic has your best interests at heart – even if it doesn’t feel like it. The inner critic tends to develop as a protective device (based on some kind of childhood belief that if it works you hard enough you’ll be loved / you won’t be abandoned), and by your responding to it with compassion, it will learn over time that it doesn’t need to push you as hard.

Pre-therapy sessions

As mentioned above, Gendlin developed the Focusing process to support people to get more out of their therapy. I believe that developing your skills of listening to all parts of you, can be helpful as a precursor to counselling sessions – whether with me or another therapist.

Focusing for therapists

Focusing is a great resource for counsellors and therapists to help them manage their own thoughts and feelings stimulated during sessions with clients. Some counsellors find it difficult, sometimes, to engage with their own personal therapy, because a sense of competition or fear of being judged by their therapist can hamper their ability to be honest during sessions. The emphasis in Focusing is on developing the client’s relationship with themselves, more so than their relationship with the Focusing teacher. I don’t need to know any history or events and I don’t need to know what a particular feeling, memory etc, is connected to, in order to support your process, which means that Focusing may be experienced as a safer space than counselling at times. In addition, because I don’t need to know about the content, I can offer Focusing to people that I have existing relationships with, in a way that I would never do with counselling.

I find it hard to describe exactly what Focusing is, in a way that really conveys its essence! The best way to really understand it is to try it for yourself. If it sounds like something you’d be interested in – please get in touch with me.

Further reading and resources

What is Focusing? – The International Focusing Institute

What is Focusing? – the British Focusing Association

Eugene Gendlin talks about Focusing

Get a feel for Focusing via this video:

Resilience and connection

Lucy Hyde on 6 October 2022

I was recently asked by a 10-year-old if she could interview me to “learn about my resilience strategies” for a school project.

Which of course made me wonder what my ‘resilience strategies’ are – what do I do when ‘something challenges me’?

What is needed for resilience?

I guess when I feel challenged I go to my Focusing practice; I try and check in with myself what’s bothering me, and to listen with compassion to the part of me that’s feeling overwhelmed. By doing so I remind myself that it’s not all of me – i.e. that I can (usually) hold the part that’s feeling challenged and recognise that I am, as a whole, OK, in this moment. It’s not always easy, depending on the degree of challenge, or the level of emotional intensity – and it’s something that I’m able to do in those moments only because I’ve been practising this way of paying attention to my inner experience for a long time.

AND sometimes it just feels too difficult to do.

So – what other things help my resilience?

If something is going on which is generating frantic thinking or a feeling that I have to do something, I go for a walk outside – it probably needs to be an hour or more (although anything is better than nothing, right?) because although there’s something about the physical rhythm that helps shift how I’m feeling/thinking, it doesn’t happen straight away.

With time the greater, physical rhythm of my whole body begins to interrupt the hamster-wheel frantic speeded-up-ness of my thoughts. Almost always, the pattern of my thinking calms and sometimes I come back home feeling that things have clarified, or that I have a new way forward.

Walking anywhere can have this effect, but my preference is to be somewhere in nature. I’m lucky to live and work close to the country and sea, so nature is easily accessible to me, but if I’m in a city then getting to some green space, a park or under trees is great too. Connecting to the wider world – i.e. not just a human-created landscape – helps me to bring myself into the moment and to bring my attention to being OK in this moment.

Reflecting on all of this made me think about connection and its role in our emotional or mental resilience.

Image by Lola

I often get pissed off when people talk about resilience – or more specifically when resilience is couched in terms that imply it’s an individual’s problem to solve. A classic is the client who worked in an organisation which started putting posters up around the place on ‘how to be more resilient’ – trying to paper over the cracks by shifting the responsibility to the individual, from the reality of an underfunded, understaffed environment where people were burning out by being asked to work at an unsustainable level.

It’s a national and societal narrative, not just a job one. Resilience is a product of being physically, mentally and emotionally well and healthy. How can we expect people to be resilient if they aren’t paid a living wage? How can we expect people to be resilient if it’s impossible for them to secure healthcare? How can we expect people to be resilient if they are unable to afford to feed themselves with healthy, not over-processed food?

Inequality in the UK is among the worst in the ‘developed’ world and has got steadily more extreme in recent decades; an unequal society is not a resilient one, although it may produce individuals who look resilient because they manage to keep coping – just – even in the worst circumstances. That way those at the top of the pile get to ‘admire the fortitude of the poor’ while not considering the impact on the overall health of the people in question.

Long story short, I think the subject of resilience has become manipulated to help businesses and governments weasel out of their responsibilities, responsibilities required in a compassionate society that looks after the less-privileged as well as the over-privileged. Reflecting on how an individual’s resilience is about more than how strong their own little island of self is, pushed me to thinking about the role of connection in how resilient we are.

I think of this in 4 layers, like concentric circles:

  • Connection to self
  • Connection to people
  • Connection to community
  • Connection to the world

Connection to self

This is what I mentioned at the start – the ability to check in with myself on what’s bothering me, and to be able to create some space for the part of me that’s troubled, without making it wrong or without reacting to it. If I’m connected to myself I’m more able to respond to my needs, both physical and emotional. Improving my ability to hear those needs means that less energy is expended by the parts of me that are shouting to get my attention.

For me, that usually means making a bit of quiet time for myself to bring my attention inside. It can also take the form of an activity that I find soothing, often something physical, like gardening, cooking, or walking; these are all things that engage more of me than just my brain, and that help to keep me at least somewhat in the now because of the need to give some attention to what I’m doing.

Image by Lola

Recently I’ve also gravitated towards camping somewhere away from other people where I’m forced to be with myself (I don’t know how else to put it – there’s something about the reality of there literally being nothing to distract me that puts me in a profound space where it’s just ME in the NOW). I wrote about this experience in another blog, What I learned about myself from wild camping.

Connection to people

I think we all need to have someone there. However much you enjoy solitude, we’re a social species who depend on each other for survival, and there is something about sharing our humanity with others that’s important to our wellbeing. I’m not talking only about having a spouse, significant other or best friend, who we can open up to when we’re in distress. Although these relationships are great, and important, we don’t all find close relationships easy to maintain (often depending on our early life experiences). Also, not all relationships are healthy for us – and we might in fact need to withdraw from some relationships, particularly those where we’re so drawn into taking care of the needs of others that it’s harder for us to take care of ourselves.

So, other types of contact or connection with people are valuable; for example, I remember years ago when moving from a city to a village, the experience of being greeted by people I’d never met before, if we passed on a walk or in the street. A simple ‘good morning’ with a smile is an acknowledgement that I exist; that I have value, even in a very small way, to another human being.

Working with a counsellor comes into this category too; the opportunity to have a safe and trusting relationship with another, or to be able to say what you feel you can’t say to those around you.

Image by Lola

And this connection works in both directions (hence the two-way arrows in the image). We can open ourselves up to be more available to contact and connection to others. I did this semi-consciously when moving back from living abroad – glad to be back on familiar ground, I found myself wanting to smile at everyone I met without waiting for them to smile first. Often my invitation drew a smile and greeting from other strangers. Don’t underestimate the power of connecting briefly to someone you may never see again – these human interactions matter.

Oh, and touch – as a friend reminded me – can be a really valuable aspect of people connection. Hugging, being held, is a visceral, whole-body experience of safety, no matter how young or old we are. (Please note: touch isn’t for everyone, and some people are triggered by, or unable to tolerate, being touched. Hugging needs to be agreed by both parties, so please be respectful of others’ boundaries.)

Connection to community

Again, this is about human contact, but with a slightly different nuance. I’ve a recent example from my own experience. I frequently feel overwhelmed and despairing about things that are bigger than me – most often, at the moment, inaction on climate change and seeming indifference to human inequality. My pattern is to believe I’m not doing enough and at the same time paralysed by the enormity of it (‘what difference can I make anyway?’).

I decided that one way to support myself might be to join with other people, and reached out via a local forum to ask if anyone wanted to get together to see if we could support locally-nesting swifts (whose numbers have declined in my village hugely in the last decade). A handful of people responded and we’re taking this forward gradually as a group. It’s not easy for me – I like doing things alone so that I have control – but I notice that sharing the burden, even in a very small activity like this, helps me feel a little bit less alone and overwhelmed. I’m part of a very small community in this; people who I didn’t know previously, and whom I now know share with me this value of care for a declining species.

Image by Lola

‘Community’ operates on various scales, and is where I think the two-way arrows really matter, and link back to the dissatisfaction I mentioned earlier with the implied responsibility of an individual for their own resilience. We are responsible for each other too – a resilient community is more than the sum of its parts.

Connection to the world

By the world, I mean the physical, natural world. Swimming in the sea has become a sort of mental health maintenance for me. It’s just not possible to be doing anything other than just be in the water, aware of my physical limitations, aware of my surroundings. It’s the most in-the-moment experience I know. (See my blog about it.)

Image by Lola

You don’t necessarily have to get out into the wilderness, because I know that’s not possible for everyone when they need it. But our environment is rarely so sterile that we can’t find a stone, a weed, a bug, to contemplate. Doing something physical – and by physical I mean anything from walking in the woods to watching, smelling, touching flowers and creatures in your garden – is a reminder that you are a physical being in a physical world, that you are connected.

Why trying harder doesn’t work

When people say to me “I just have to be more resilient so these things won’t affect me” I feel sad. I’m sad because they’re criticising themselves for not trying hard enough, I’m sad that they think ‘being affected by things’ is wrong, I’m sad that they think it’s all down to them – it feels like a lonely and isolated place.

My image of resilience is a growing tree. It doesn’t resist the wind and stand unmoving, it’s pushed by the storm and then moves back into its original shape. Over time it becomes sturdier – often as a result of some of the wilder weather it’s experienced – and it’s less shaken and bent by the wind. But in order to be able to grow it needs the conditions to be right, it needs good soil for its roots to develop and hold it, it needs nourishment.

mental health support by walking - Lucy Hyde - counselling for depression

Resilience doesn’t mean that I don’t get overwhelmed, that I don’t have a meltdown from time to time, that I don’t have days where I think life is just too hard to bear. Resilience means that I have all those experiences and then I recover from them, and the better that my growing conditions are, the more quickly I recover, and the better the cuts and scrapes will heal. My roots need to tap into my inner wisdom, the nourishment of other people, the support of community and to know and feel their place in the greater world. All that feeds resilience.

A heartfelt thanks to my pal Lola, who asked the question that gave rise to this – and who made an awesome poster that says it beautifully.

Image by Lola

References / information

Inequality in the UK

Johann Hari talks about the value of connection to mental health in his book, Lost Connections .

Therapy journeys

Lucy Hyde on 5 August 2022

Often, some of the most vivid memories of a journey are when we’re not moving. Pausing to catch your breath as you climb a mountain, and taking the opportunity to look all around, to enjoy the view from where you are, right now.

I’m at one of those pauses, I think. I’m at the point of completing my Focusing Practitioner Training almost three years after I started this particular journey, and, as I gradually absorb that reality, it’s prompted me to reflect on the way in which my development (or growth, or expansion – there isn’t really a single word that captures it) as a therapist has happened in a number of phases. Inextricably intertwined with that professional development has been the personal growth that comes with those shifts and changes.

Learning to be human

The first shift was as I did my Counselling Skills Certificate, begun in 2010. For various reasons, that certificate course – often run over 6 or 7 months or less – took almost a year to complete. I learned during that time that I could do this work even if I didn’t feel completely confident in myself and didn’t believe that I was ‘fixed’ – no, more than that, I began to believe that I might actually be good at it even I wasn’t always completely tranquil mentally myself. I also learned that counselling and therapy could be a way to help me understand myself, rather than just a means to emergency-fix something that was broken.

Photo by GEORGE DESIPRIS on Pexels.com

I needed all that time, to discover and internalise that belief. If I had done a 2-day workshop (provided by the organisation I then went on to train with as an alternative to the certificate course), I don’t think I’d have got there. In fact, I’m not sure how I would have reached the point of applying for a diploma course, without the time spent with my Certificate course-mates, the trust built with them and my trainer, the months of counselling alongside, that gave me space to figure out the meaning, for me personally, of what I was reading, learning and practising in those modules.

Learning how to be a therapist

The second phase was as I did my four years of TA training – my Diploma in Counselling with Transactional Analysis, followed by a further year of training (insurance policy for the possibility that I might want to progress to an analyst qualification later on). During the weekend workshops, and through the various essays, transcript analyses and case studies that were required to complete each year, I gained models and tools to help me understand myself – and to help me understand and think about others, including the clients I began to work with through my voluntary placement.

As I learned and became comfortable with particular models or theories (Transactional Analysis loves a diagram!) I began to share them with my clients, too. And those years of training supported my growth in confidence, not least through practice – the repeated sessions with clients that got me used to being a counsellor and believing I was a counsellor. To those placement clients, I was a counsellor from the very first session, which helped me believe it too. Although I learned to think about psychotherapy in the training room, I learned more about actually being a therapist from working with real people.

Image georg-arthur-pflueger-unsplash

Learning to be me

Moving on to the third phase: this shift has occurred over the last year or two, as I’ve been completing my Focusing Practitioner Certification training. Focusing is a practice that was developed in the 1960s by Gene Gendlin, to help clients, for whom it didn’t come naturally to pause and check inside themselves for a bodily felt sense of their issues, to learn how to do so – in order to get a more lasting benefit from psychotherapy then doing it all in the head. (You can read more about Focusing, which can be used both in therapy and as a stand-alone exercise or practice, in this blog.

My Focusing experience started while I was in TA training but I’ve increasingly committed to it over the last 4 or 5 years, commencing my practitioner training nearly 3 years ago. This phase has been about me learning to use myself more in my counselling work, becoming more comfortable in my counselling skin. It has been a letting-go of some what I took on during my TA training, including the ideas I’d formed about what is required to be a Good Therapist. The Venn diagram balloons of ‘me as a person’ and ‘me as a therapist’ have a much greater overlap now.

These changes and more, came about through my own personal practice of Focusing, my own therapy with a Focusing-oriented counsellor, and the gradual introduction of Focusing into my own practice with clients. That all needed time.

A slower pace

I don’t believe any of these phases could have happened any more quickly. Focusing Practitioner training typically takes one and a half to two years; I took three. I could have embarked on it as soon as I finished my core psychotherapy training, but I’m not sure I’d have got to this place, where I am now, any sooner. Each development hasn’t simply been about workshops, training, reading, CPD hours; it’s required me to gradually incorporate what I learn into me, an evolution that’s taken place through my whole mind-and-body self.

Image Jon Gerrard

Recognising that, in itself, is a significant sign of a change in me. Most of my life, I’ve been driven by the belief that I need to get on with things quickly, that achievements are better the faster they happen. The realisation that this pace, including the times when I’ve

paused for breath

paused to notice my surroundings

paused to re-calibrate in the middle of something

….that this pace has been right, exactly right, for me, is powerful. I’ve meandered off down cul-de-sacs, I’ve taken radical changes of direction, and they’ve contributed too.

Journeying with clients

All this has prompted me to notice that the same is true for the journey of any client who comes looking for therapy – and how important it is to have those pauses in the journey. The pauses give you a chance to notice how far you’ve come, to notice what’s changed, they help you realise the things that you now know about yourself that you didn’t – that you can’t now un-know. Equally important, the pauses give you a chance to consider what direction you want to head in, from where you are now.

Just because you had a particular goal in mind when you first looked for a counsellor, it doesn’t mean that that same goal applies now, where you are, in your current place.

Sometimes a client will ask me the ‘right’ way to approach a problem, or they’ll ask what I normally tell people in their situation. I often say, I don’t have an answer to give, because everyone is on their own journey, and sometimes all you can do is pause for a breather and check – Where am I? Where have I come from? What direction do I want to go next?

And the journey doesn’t take place in isolation – we’re affected and changed by what we see and experience. The first stage of my counselling training journey was in the aftermath of my mum’s death from cancer, and in the midst of the threat of redundancy and subsequent driven hard work and determination, with my colleagues, as we fought to make our section of a big national charity, Leuchie House, succeed as an independent organisation.

My dad died during the second phase, and I also discovered a new love – coastal rowing – that changed my sense of who I was (no longer the girly swot who never got picked for teams). The third stage began alongside the terrifying and exciting experience of living abroad, out of work, with limited language skills. Crucially, the clients, colleagues, the people I’ve worked with through all these stages, have played a part too. These experiences, and more, were woven through the journey, woven into me.

The way forward

I have some vague ideas of where I might want to go next – for example, thoughts about the work I do outdoors with clients and how we might allow the environment to take more of a role in that. These are hill-tops glimpsed between veils of cloud. For the moment, pausing where I am, reflecting on the last miles and not pushing on too quickly, is just the right place to be.

Perhaps YOU could pause and reflect on your own journey. You might be surprised what you notice.