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Counselling in Wokingham – The Disappearing World

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Paul Cockayne – 07791 970406 – paulcockayne3@gmail.com
This blog is intended to give you a flavour of how I work as a counsellor. You can find more information about me by clicking one of the links above.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the world went away sometimes? Don’t you feel that it would be great if everything just stopped, just vanished?
And the good news is that we can make it go away, for a while, in various ways, some healthier than others.

Our favourite pastimes usually help escape from the world. Sports, for instance, require intense concentration as well as physical effort and that tends to mean that everything else vanishes while we are playing.

escapeOther activities help us to escape because they are intellectually demanding; Sudoku or crossword puzzles; reading. Absorbing ourselves in some sort of planning – our next holiday; which shoes to buy; our training regime; these things occupy our minds and stop us worrying. Work, for some, can fulfil the same function, though for many it is just a necessary bore, an opportunity for our mind to wander and worry rather than forget about things.

Another form of escape is to find activities that are emotionally engaging. Listening to music is an example of this, or watching our favourite soap. So too is risk-taking; bungee-jumping; driving fast; gambling. Sex always helps us to escape in this way, giving us a mix of physical and emotional pleasure, as well as (potentially) risk-taking. Spiritual activities are also important for many of us, whether it me prayer, or some form of meditation.

escape2Another way to escape is to have fun! Spending time with friends, dancing, loud music, and humour are all great ways to forget about our troubles. Alcohol and drugs can help as well, and gambling, and pornography, and all those other tempting activities that call, all too easily, become addictions.

We all have our preferred forms of escaping from the world, and I think we all need a mixture of the different types of escape mentioned here; physical; intellectual; emotional; spiritual; recreational. It is an interesting exercise to think about your preferred methods of escape and whether they give you a good mix. Would you benefit from more physical activity? Are you letting your mind stultify? Is your life emotionally flat?

Do all these activities really make the world disappear? I am reminded of a witticism from Denis Norden : “It’s a funny kind of month, October. For the really keen cricket fan, it’s when you realise that your wife left you in May.”

But humour aside, when we finish our sport, our crossword puzzle, our TV programme, our bottle – when we finish and look around us again, it’s all still as we left it. Escaping for a while can be what we need, it can be healthy, but it doesn’t tend to change anything – eventually we have to take responsibility for ourselves and take action, whether that means doing something differently, or learning to deal differently with the way things are.

We can’t make the world go away, but we can make changes make it easier for ourselves to live in it.



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