EPISODE SEVEN

Please note this is a verbatim transcription from the original audio and therefore there may be some minor grammatical errors.

Dougie Jackson

this is Tickety boo, the podcast that aims to be candid and concise about the anxieties and traumas. We all experience the podcast that says it’s okay not to feel okay. My name is Jackie Jackson, welcome along to Episode Seven in mental health voyage of discovery. And time to find out more about Andy Griffiths his personal experiences, and what led him to becoming a therapist.

Andy Griffiths
During the formative years of my life,I’d been programmed in such a way that connecting with people and engaging and contributing in any way was a bit challenging for me. So I had a number of flawed beliefs about how I should be act, feel, and do. I conditioned myself to think I was a bit crap, you know, and not good enough. And that’s called learned helplessness, that’s not a good place to be. So some of us in this scenario will struggle because we’ve had damage to our emotional systems. It could be something like Asperger’s or an addiction to drugs or alcohol or a brain injury through an accident or assault. But the very biggest reason for most of us why we struggle is some kind of psychological trauma, anxiety, something’s happened to us, and they create very powerful memories of past events. And the stuff that’s happened to us does play a role in how and who we are today.

Dougie Jackson
Okay, so over time, you managed to get on top of your anxieties and your depression issues. Was that a gradual thing though, or something you were able to just go right? Enough? Let’s sort this.

Andy Griffiths
When I won my battle with anxiety, I did have a bit of a floored belief that floored belief was I must feel amazing, every single day, because if I don’t, I’m not winning. Even Andy, the therapist has bad days, I have days where my mental and emotional energy is low. I have days where I want to sit, watch the telly, eat chocolate and do nothing. And that’s okay. As long as I’m not doing it every single day. And you know, sometimes when we fall into that place, we just need a little bit of help. Just somebody saying, Are you okay, what’s going on? Just listen. Somebody I didn’t want I’m just feeling a bit meh at the moment. And I can’t quite put my finger on it. Yeah, I get it. I have days like that as well.

Dougie Jackson
What’s the secret to overcoming mental health problems and building resilience? What do we have to do?

Andy Griffiths
We need ways to be able to think about our problems in more empowering ways. That’s something that can be learned, you know, we can teach this psychological resilience. It’s like building a muscle, you know, we can train ourselves. But that doesn’t come from taking a tablet, you know that tablets not going to teach you that resilience is something that can be taught with some simple strategies and context and context and strategies start with a conversation and reframing things is one of the most powerful things we can do it human beings. I can look back now my past traumas and stresses, and I can see them in a different context. Now I can take the positive from that man, I couldn’t see beyond them. Off loading our problems is so therapeutic, you know, and it can help us tap into our thinking capacities. You know, that healthy relationship between emotional brain prefrontal cortex, rational brain.

Dougie Jackson
Now if someone very close to you is currently struggling, what should you do? How should you help them?

Andy Griffiths
My advice would be don’t try and be a do gooder. Don’t be that guy or girl that tries to take all the person’s problems away. Oh, yeah, your job or go get you another job. Or you’re struggling financially, I’ll lend you a load of money. Because what you’re doing by doing that is you’re stealing that person’s self development. Don’t get me wrong. Sometimes we all need a little help and guidance. If you’ve never driven a car before you need guidance from a driving instructor or a family member. But you need to learn methods to do that on your own. You know, the driving instructor is not going to be with you every single day in life. So, learning how to relax better to get better routines to look at some of the things that you’re doing in life, and somebody to give you strategies to do that, then you get self development, then you can build up this resilience, then you can start to bolster your mental health. And yeah, help and guidance, but we have to take the responsibility for that. Beyond that, what we want to set clear goals. If you said to me back in the day, right, Andy, you’re struggling with all this anxiety and these panic attacks? How do you need to look, feel and be in order for you to be better? I don’t think I could have answered that question. I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. You can’t just say, Oh, I just want to be happy again. How do you want to be happy, you know, it’s got to be vivid, our brain has to focus on something, it’s like, I’d be able to get up in the morning, make more breakfast, go for a walk and feel good. I want to be able to sit and watch the telly feel calm, relaxed, want to be able to go out and have a conversation with my friends and not spend hours and hours over thinking it. We need to be able to see that because we need to know we’re making progress. And how do we know if we’re making progress if we don’t know where we’re going? So getting clear on what will recovery look like? What will life be when you’ve achieved this? And what is it that specifically important about this change to you? What is your going to be able to do that you can’t do right now.

Dougie Jackson
So a bit of soul searching. And a look towards the future should help you identify what you need, and bring it into sharp focus. However, this needn’t be a similar mission, you don’t need to do all in your own and you don’t need to do a massive archeological dig into your dim and distant past either.

Andy Griffiths
There is definitely something to be gained from doing a bit of work on some of the stuff from the past. But that is not the majority of the time. If you want to get better, the focus has got to be on how do I want to feel? Where do I need to be? What does that look like and heading off in that direction, set the goals up, sever the anchors to the past, you know, learning simple things like how to relax again, people are so wrapped up in themselves and full of stress their sympathetic nervous systems going absolutely bananas, you know, learning simple relaxation techniques and listening to you know, hypnosis recordings to help yourself relax or breathing in apps, there’s loads of breathing apps out there how to go for a walk, and just getting yourself into that rational part of your brain where you can sit down and look at things for what they are. And because our brains has this tendency to look at situations and amplify them and make them much worse than than they are, you know, this kind of rumination and catastrophising of what’s going to happen in the future. And if we believe our thoughts about the future, that’s where we end up in trouble.

Do you find you have to spend a lot of time at calming your clients down before they’re able to take your help and advice on board? Would you help them get control over their fears? and worries? First,

How can we start to move forwards to a better place? When we’re in constant panic, and fear? We can’t. So teaching somebody to relax their mind is one of the most fundamental things that you can do to enable recovery, because recovery is not really possible. Without that you can’t move forward, full of fear and dread. Some people literally need to be retrained how to relax. Strange, I know. But again, we have to retrain the mind to be pulled away from the thing that we don’t want, and get focused back into changing stuff.

Dougie Jackson
Why can’t we see ourselves sinking into a depression and take evasive action? It’s like, you don’t know you’re heading down the big dumper of depression and despair until you’re actually on that slide. Why can’t we help ourselves?

Andy Griffiths
For me, I didn’t believe anything I was going to do was going to work. Certainly the way that I felt didn’t really motivate me to get up and move. And I think that’s part of a problem as well, people go, I’m depressed or I’m anxious. I’ll wait till I feel a bit better before I do something about it. And there lies the problem. So many people I sit with in in client sessions, and I’m like, this is what we need to do. And at that point, I’m not telling them anything they don’t know. But what they didn’t realise was, they’re gonna have to start doing some of this stuff when they don’t feel great. You know, it’s like, you need to get up and start doing stuff again. You need to get involved, you need to get back out and do your hobbies. The amount of people that say to me, I don’t listen to music anymore. Don’t read anymore. I stopped watching my favourite box sets, I don’t meet up with my friends. I don’t play my computer games. And I’m like, and you wonder why you’re a bit sad. Life has no value, your sense of involvement, your sense of community has been completely removed. And you’re just staring at the same four walls all day, not eating good food, probably drinking too much. And you wonder why you feel awful. You need to get up you need to start doing stuff you need to get back into your hobbies. And by the way, when you first start doing this, you’re very probably not going to feel like you want to do this. But guess what, if you persist It comes back, you start feeling like you’re connected again, you know, guys I’ve had in here again, I used to love playing golf, and I’m like, get down the driving range and spend a couple of hours smashing golf balls down the rain getting out of your head. Huge difference.

Dougie Jackson
Get up, get busy, get moving. Don’t wait for inspiration, don’t wait for motivation, or indeed, the drugs to kick in.

Andy Griffiths
There are no magic pills, no ones that can be waived. But there are some really, really simple things that we can do to get up. But if we wait till we feel like we should be doing it, we don’t end with depression. And that’s one of those ones where we’re consistently worrying and ruminating and the more you do that, and the more you lead yourself down into depression, because you’re just operating on an emotional level, got to get back into your rational brain. Give yourself a bit of time, build up that mental resilience, get the structure back at the sense of connection back. And guess what depression starts to lift. If you’ve been taking antidepressants for 12 years, do you think they are working? It is important to say some people do get benefits from medication short term, but it’s not a long term strategy is going back to we have to change this. So maybe you take some medication to give you some stability. But again, this wraparound is there’s a plan. There’s a structure, there’s a process now to pull us out of this depression. And that involves getting up doing stuff, stepping back into the community giving, feeling again, that is what lifts depression, not just sitting there going tablet, tablet, tablet. That’s why people sit there for years and years and years and they get a better look quite simple, really. You know, we need to talk to people we need to get out in the sunlight. We need to eat healthily. And we need to do stuff and generally, life is a lot better when we’re doing that.

Dougie Jackson
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