Chapter Six: LIVE YOUR LIFE THROUGH CURIOSITY

Living our lives through curiosity can be incredibly empowering.  The simple and strong desire to understand, that is curiosity.  We like to see curiosity as a window through which to view the world.  Integrating curiosity into our everyday life is like breathing in some beautifully pure and cold fresh air first thing in the morning.  Curiosity keeps us fresh, young at heart, open to growing as humans.  Curiosity can help us to be more compassionate to ourselves and to others, it can help us go beyond our fears, to connect with something larger than ourselves, something inspiring.  Curiosity can be a useful tool in helping us ground ourselves.  Rather than reacting to our own emotions and to other people’s behaviours and attitudes, curiosity enables us to take a proactive stance, to set the pause button before we go into autopilot.  The sooner you can integrate curiosity into your life the sooner you will be at ease with the challenges that life throws at you.

Curiosity is perhaps the ideal state that we should all strive towards.  We are arguing for a particular kind of curiosity.  Not the kind that makes you just plunge right in without any thought.  No.  The kind of curiosity that we are advocating is one that is measured, calm.  Taking a deep breath, being open to our own and others’ experiences without automatically judging ourselves and other people.  Simply suspending judgement and if we find ourselves having judgemental thoughts then allowing those thoughts to float up into the clear sky above.  We work with our clients to explore what curiosity is to them, how they can bring this stance to their own lives, to see how it can improve their wellbeing.  We are also aware that being therapists we are inherently curious about the lives that our clients lead.  We also know that being curious about our clients can really help build a strong therapeutic relationship with them, whereby we approach each client as a unique individual.  Our curiosity has perhaps developed from a family past where truth is impossible to discover.  All we have are fragments of our families’ experiences from their own re-imaginings, and being curious to know what these re-imaginings are has perhaps helped us become effective therapists.  Much like building a jigsaw puzzle, where one small piece is added at a time, curiosity is about exploring each small piece in that jigsaw puzzle without worrying too much about the bigger picture, or establishing a so-called ‘truth’.  Be curious about yourself, about the lives of the people around you, be curious about the world.  Enjoy being curious now.

BASIA: LOUISE AND TRANSGENDER RIGHTS

‘It’s a bit like building a jigsaw puzzle, you don’t have to have all of the pieces in place’ I said this with a sense of urgency in my voice given the situation that my client, Louise, was currently in.  I was looking at Louise through my computer screen.  She presented as Paul, and was sitting in her garage.   I could see that the space around Louise was jammed full of stereotypical male items like model aircraft and tools.  Louise seemed hemmed in, almost suffocated by the equipment in the garage, and I thought to myself how very apt given Louise’s current set of circumstances.

‘I’ve been eating loads, biscuits and pizza mostly.  Since lockdown I have put on loads of weight.  I haven’t been out.  I’m really struggling.  The other night I felt almost as bad as when I thought about killing myself last year.  I don’t know how long I will be able to cope with my situation.  I can’t go to work, I have to stay at home with my wife and son, I can’t wear any of the clothes that I would normally wear.  I can barely look at myself because the middle aged, overweight, hairy and balding guy wearing a cap, t-shirt and jeans is just not me.  I feel sick at the sight of myself.’

‘I have to say that you do look like you are in a bunker, hiding from everything’ I reflected to Louise.

Louise nodded, ‘It takes me back to when I was in the special forces.  Only that was easier because I was in a war zone and I knew that I had my army mates next to me.  Here at home I have no space to be myself, to be Louise.  I have had to hide all of my dresses, shoes, underwear, in boxes in this garage.  I can’t paint my nails, I can’t wear my bracelet, my wife just goes ballistic if she even detects that I might be being myself’.

‘What did you do when you felt suicidal?’ I asked a question that I don’t enjoy asking clients but sometimes it is such a key question in keeping some of my clients safe and alive.

‘I messaged my trans friend, she has been a massive support to me since I started coming out.  She’s lucky however because her wife accepted her for who she is.  I would love my wife to do the same’.

‘That’s great Louise that you have someone you can get some support from’.  I was always mindful in my interactions with Louise to call her Louise and not Paul, even though the insurance company that was paying for Louise’s therapy registered her as Paul.  When Louise was dressed as Paul it could be quite confusing, particularly as she was tall, broad shouldered, I guess classically male.  She also had been in the army as Paul, and I could well imagine Louise as a tough nut, which she had explained to me was her being hyper-masculine as a way of trying to hide her inner feelings about her real identity  No wonder Louise looked really uncomfortable within her appearance as Paul.  When she used to come to my house for sessions before lockdown she appeared almost clumsy, like a clumsy giant, huge shoulders stooped forward, wearing jeans that were slightly too large for her oversized legs.  She had explained to me that she had body dysphoria, an obsession about how much she disliked her man’s body.  She used to show me her hands which were the delicate feature of her body.  When Louise went to work she would paint her nails a neutral colour as this she found soothing, enabling her to get in touch with her feminine self.  I found that it got easier over time to forget about Louise’s outward appearance, to see Louise inside the male body of Paul.

‘I love my wife to bits but I can’t deny who I really am any longer, I can’t hide Louise away otherwise I put myself in danger of suicide.’ Louise was struggling to look into the computer screen, I could see that she was struggling to connect with me in this session.  Maybe I was a similar age to Louise’s wife, maybe she feared being judged negatively by me.  It was therefore key for me to be unconditionally accepting of Louise, without any gender expectations, and to do this I drew on curiosity.  I mean, what must it have been like for Louise to always have felt female, from around the age of seven, what must it have felt like to be seen by a psychiatrist as a teenager to be told that Paul was the problem, not gender identity.  I was curious about what it must be like to feel female yet to have male physiology.  Louise sometimes referred to her body, mostly with disgust.  She craved having breasts, a vagina, things that I had always taken for granted.  My sessions with Louise would often force me to reconsider what we mean by gender identity.  For Louise to feel a woman it was important for her to wear dresses and skirts, lots of make-up, to have her nails perfectly manicured, often to wear high-heeled shoes.  Yet for myself I like wearing jeans and yoga pants and I haven’t worn a skirt or dress for almost thirty years.  I rarely wear make-up because I dislike how it feels on my skin and I don’t wear heels, yet I identify as a woman and female, and always have.

‘’I just feel that my life is on hold.  I am a 45-year-old trans woman living a middle-aged man’s life and this lockdown has really stopped my progress of transitioning.  I just can’t see any direction in my life anymore.  My son is 11 years old and he needs to know, sooner rather than later.  I just think that everyone in my family seems to think that transitioning to Louise is some kind of middle-aged crisis and that now that I have gone back to being Paul all of the time because of lockdown they assume that my crisis is over.’

‘Can you maybe try and see your current situation through curiosity?’ I suggested. ‘Suspend any judgements over yourself and the direction your life is going in.  For the next couple of weeks simply try and be curious about your emotions, and your family’s reactions.  Try to think of your present situation as a small part in a much longer journey, and let go of any absolute end point you feel you should be at.’

Louise nodded, ‘ I will try’.

This sense of your life being a process, being a journey, and being curious and open to your own experiences is something that my relatives have taught me, through my encounters with them.  Just as I believe that I have found an end point, a place where I understand my family’s troubled past, something new comes to light that forces me to suspend any notion of there being an ‘end point’.  I have found that remaining curious about my ancestral history has enabled me to sustain the many turbulent moments of my life journey.

BASIA: FAMILY SECRETS REVEALED IN PIZZA EXPRESS

I was sitting in Pizza Express with my mother, about 18 months before she died.  We had decided that we would go together to Market Harborough as this was a town close to where my mother was based when in a refugee camp in England.  We had spent the morning walking some of the streets of this picturesque town and my mother would point out relevant landmarks for the Polish community in England – a factory where many of the Polish refugees first worked when they arrived in England, a school that was used to educate their children.  We were now sitting looking at our menus and deciding what to eat.

‘You know when we lived in Wales for a few years my mother, your grandmother, would allow some kind of uncle of mine to come and stay with us at weekends, and he would share my bed’.

I looked up from my menu, this was a story from my mother’s past that I had not heard her speak about before.  I immediately thought about how old my mother would have been, probably around about 17 or 18 years old, having just come out of a sanatorium for the treatment of tuberculosis.  

‘Your grandmother didn’t seem to see this as an issue. I used to hate it, sharing my bed with him’.  My mother was looking intensely at me.  She sometimes had this over-intrusive way of looking, staring really, trance-like, which I used to find uncomfortable but which my years of working as a trauma therapist had taught me was a form of dissociation.  Her voice was also slightly shaky, coming from that traumatised part of herself.  I noticed that my mother was wearing a cardigan that I had given her maybe ten years ago, with a blouse that she had worn to work maybe twenty-five years ago.  This was her way.  Since my father had died four years earlier my mother had found it almost impossible to buy new clothes for herself and increasingly, I had been noticing my mother recycling old clothes from her past, perhaps they comforted her in a way that new shiny clothes could not.  We had bought a new scarf for her that day but it was proving impossible to buy any other new clothes, my mother disliking any new skirt or jumper or blouse that I had highlighted to her whilst we were shopping.

My mother’s words initially stunned me into silence.  I found myself wondering whether she had been abused by this so-called uncle, and who might this uncle be, my mind went into overdrive.  I did manage to say to my mother, ‘This wasn’t fair on you, sharing a bed with a man when you were a teenager’.  I breathed a sigh of relief as I heard myself say these words, my healthy adult mode coming in to save the moment, healthy adult mode is something I raise in therapy with my clients.

‘Yes, I hated it’ was my mother’s response and as I heard her say these words, I was unsure about what trauma or abuse they hid.

Silence then engulfed us both as we continued to read our pizza menus.  This was normal to us, a part of our family life together.  We would be doing normal, nice things together, and then my mother or my father or someone else from my family would make some kind of emotional revelation about the past. It was like throwing an emotional grenade into an ordinary everyday situation.  Although I was used to this, I found that the older I became, and the more I came to understand what ‘normal’ is, the more disturbing I found these family stories to be.  My mother and I continued to consider what kind of pizzas we were going to eat and our conversation shifted to pizza toppings and salads.  Later on, that day my mother would reveal something else from the past equally, if not more, shocking.

PAUSE FOR THOUGHT: Think about secrets in your own family or friendship circle.  How do these secrets become known?  How do you feel about holding onto any secrets yourself?

BASIA: LOUISE AND TRANSGENDER RIGHTS

Another two weeks had passed since I had last seen Louise.  She was in her garage, presenting again as Paul, looking trapped and uncomfortable.  At home Louise’s wife had made it clear to her that she was not welcome, that Paul was the only identity that would be tolerated.

‘My wife just sees me as the breadwinner.  She’s happy for me to make all of this money whilst she sits at home doing nothing.  Then she expects me to cook for her and Richard my son, even though I have put in a full day at work here in my garage.  You know we were talking about my wife Lydya being emotionally abusive towards me, I can see that, but I still love her.  Don’t get me wrong, I can get really angry with her.  She’s overweight and doesn’t do anything.  I have to pay a small fortune for a cleaner but a cleaner won’t sort out the piles of items my wife has bought and hoarded from charity shops.  The only space I have in the house is my office but even in that I am having to squeeze in because of all the crap lying around.’

I found Louise’s relationship with her wife fascinating.  It seemed to me that her wife had no room and little healthy love for Paul, so how could she have any love for Louise?  We had explored Louise’s relationship with her abusive mother before lockdown, as a way of helping Louise understand why it was that she continued to love her wife Lydya even though Lydya was emotionally cruel to Louise

‘I know I keep talking about the same things but being in lockdown is like being in groundhog day.  Every day is the same, I have to hide Louise away and I am finding this really difficult.  I keep thinking am I a fraud?  Before lockdown I was sneaking my clothes and make-up into my car each night, then I would get up an hour early just so I had enough time in the carpark of the supermarket next to my workplace to put everything on and be Louise.  I was getting quite good at applying foundation and eye liner using the mirror in my car.  I was so excited to be wearing the pairs of boots and shoes that I had bought and stored in boxes.  At least when I was physically going to work I could be Louise for some of my day.’

The image of Louise sneaking out of her house each morning, stashing away her belongings like a teenager hiding things from her family was quite shocking.  I nodded empathically at Louise.  Transitioning would have been hard enough without there being a pandemic and lockdown, keeping us all confined to our homes.  Okay if we have a happy and stable family life, but not healthy for people like Louise who struggle to get on with their spouses.  I found myself feeling strongly connected to Louise.  What could this connection be about I asked myself?  Then I had an epiphany.  Both Louise and I shared something - family secrets!  Every family has a secret or two.  Most of the time we do not speak about these, so when Louise was speaking to me about her family skeletons somewhere deep inside fragments of my own family’s secrets were being reawakened.

BASIA: THE SS GUARD AND BLACK LIVES MATTER

‘Remember Pan Wladek ? He was a secretive guy’. My mother had started talking to me about how much she hated going to the hairdresser.  I found that since my father’s death my mother was finding even reasonably pleasant experiences challenging.  I therefore distracted her from her negative rumination by bringing up Pan Wladek, as we sat in my car and I was driving my mother home, having now spent our day in Market Harborough.  

‘He kept his past life a mystery but rumours abounded’ my mother said this to me in Polish. ‘My mother, your grandmother, enjoyed his company but some people thought he was a former SS guard, of a concentration camp in Poland.’

I remembered back to a time when Pan Wladek visited my grandmother, it must have been in the late 1970s.  I remember his thickly cut glasses, his large nose, his imposing face.  What I remember most vividly is his voice.  Deep, almost sinister, and I remember a dark energy that surrounded him, the kind that I have experienced as an adult in places of power and corruption, like when going to the House of Lords for a lunch that I had been invited to.  It is hard to quantify the heavy and controlling energy that I had experienced in the House of Lords, but my visit there left me with this lingering feeling of people knowing they had power over others, over our society, and enjoying the fact that they had this power.   I remember the bittersweet chocolates we were given over coffee, with the House of Lords emblem stamped on the paper wrapping them.  The paper was so much more pretty than the taste of the actual chocolates.   As a child I had kept my distance from Pan Wladek, sitting on the other side of the room from him, there was something domineeringly self-assured about him.  The fact that my grandmother had befriended him did not surprise me for looking back at her through my therapist’s eyes I can see that my grandmother had very loose boundaries between herself and other people.

‘You know Pan Wladek had seen a man burn to death infront of his eyes’ my mother continued.  She was like that at times, no beating around the bush, straight to the point.   ‘It was an industrial accident at a steel factory in South Wales.  We think this is how his heart was diseased, from the stress of seeing a workmate fall into a vat of hot oil.  He stayed on working there afterwards but then this is where the rumours come.  Pan Wladek mysteriously left his employment a few years later and people say that this is because a former inmate of the concentration camp where Pan Wladek was based was an employee at the same steel company and he recognised him.  That’s what people say’.

Silence engulfed my mother and I as we sat in my car.  I was just about to change the subject to a lighter note, to a garden centre that we were driving past when my mother suddenly said,’ They left the black looking kids behind in Africa’.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked, confused.

‘You know that I and your grandmother and other relatives were in Rhodesia during the war, living in small African huts that had been specially built for us’.

I nodded for I had heard many stories of my mother’s experiences of Africa as I was growing up.  I knew that she had loved the bananas there, the mango fruit, the sugar cane.  She had often spoken about the jungle and the dangers there and how very quickly it got dark at night, not at all like England.  She had told me about the morning that she had woken up to find a snake lying next to her on her pillow, no doubt snuggling in for the warmth.  Nights could be very cold.  My grandmother probably did the only thing she could think of at the time, she grabbed a broom and hurled the snake outdoors.  My mother had also told me about malaria, how serious this was as a disease, how she had had this twice and how it was still in her body, causing her fatigue and liver pains.

‘We were in Rhodesia for quite a long time.  The black children born to Polish mothers were left in Africa when the British government told us we could come to England and build new lives for ourselves there.  Yes, the black-looking kids were left in Rhodesia’.

This was the first time that I had heard about this.  I don’t know how true this story is but I do know that my mother did not make up stories and that no matter how bizarre some of the things that she said were, they had an element of unforgettable truth about them.  For instance, we used to enjoy discussing one of my eccentric aunts who would go for months without talking to certain people in her family.  My mother revealed that this aunt was the only sole survivor of her siblings as her mother had been forced to concentrate her efforts on keeping this particular daughter alive, otherwise she would have lost all of her children to dysentery and starvation in the camps in Siberia.  The back story to this aunt’s life really did explain her eccentricities, or in modern day terms, her mental health challenges.  

‘Are you sure?’ I asked my mother.

‘Yes,’ she replied without any hesitation, ‘the Black looking children were left behind’.

Silence once again surrounded us as we sat in the car returning from a day out on a sunny day during summer.  I thought about the community of Poles in my hometown of Leicester, how they were all white, nobody of mixed race was there, and yet I know that this community had been in Africa for several years.  It made sense that during this time some romances would have developed between the Poles and Africans, for that is human nature.  I think about the Black Lives Matter movement, how Black lives really didn’t matter, how mixed-race kids would have been seen as something to be ashamed about.  Family secrets, community-wide secrets.  I wonder to myself what happened to those children.  I hope the best for their lives but I also know that prejudices exist, overt and covert, and that it is likely that these children would have struggled to fit in.

PAUSE FOR THOUGHT:  Can you think of any family or community secrets that you have discovered?  How do these make you feel? Can you bring curiosity to these?

BASIA: LOUISE AND TRANSGENDER RIGHTS

I am sitting in-front of my computer, calling Louise.  I am expecting to see her as Paul, squashed into her garage, squashed into a body that is just wrong, not fit for purpose.  Louise comes into vision on my screen, as Louise.  I am shocked.  I think that I have become so used to seeing her as Paul that it takes me a few moments to take in her appearance.  Dark flowing hair, bright red lipstick, green eye shadow, a striking blouse.  She is sitting in her car.

Louise smiles at me, ‘I am starting to go back to work. I am staying the night at a hotel so I don’t need to get changed.’

I smile, I can see that Louise is in a different emotional and psychological space.  There is no sense of her being hemmed in, she is giving out a powerful aura, a strong femininity that is denied her at home.  

‘What happened Louise?’ I ask, genuinely surprised by the transformation in Louise. ’Last time we spoke you were really struggling and you are in a different space now, I can see that’.

‘I don’t know.  I think I hit rock bottom and then just thought this is ridiculous.  I decided that I could start going back to work, and could be Louise, and that I am going to embrace the strong person that I am.  I have started my hormone therapy and plan to start surgery next year.  There is no going back now.  I have always been Louise.  This is me, this is who I am.  I have changed my name from Paul to Louise on LinkedIn.’

Louise then begins to talk to me about work, how her transitioning means her political involvement in the transgender rights movement.  Louise asks me whether we can go down to monthly sessions as she doesn’t feel that she needs such regular therapy anymore.  I agree.  That is the last interaction that I have with Louise.  When I ask the insurance company for their permission to go down to monthly sessions with Louise they decline and Louise texts me saying that she doesn’t need fortnightly sessions any longer.  I struggle to disconnect from Louise because we haven’t had a proper ending.  Endings in counselling are really important.  We tend to review a client’s progress and then share with them a little of the journey that we have both been on together.  Final sessions can be emotional, raw interactions between ourselves and our clients.  In Louise’s case we haven’t really ended, no goodbyes, just a text from Louise saying she doesn’t want to have fortnightly sessions after I have texted her saying that the insurance company won’t give permission for her to have monthly sessions.  I find myself dwelling on Louise, and at first I consider this to be because we haven’t ended properly.  However, as I ponder upon my therapeutic encounters with Louise, I begin to see connections between us that perhaps partly explain my attachment to her.  Family secrets.  Hidden lives.  People not being fully quite what they seem.  Personal histories shrouded in mystery.  I remain curious about Louise, her journey into embracing herself more fully, the sacrifices this will involve for her.  I also remain curious about any future discrimination she may experience as a result of her transgender status.  Afterall, bullying and discrimination are often covert things.  I remain curious about the people who together made up my family, I remain curious about their survival, about the people they became, about who they might have been had they not experienced ongoing trauma during the war years and its aftermath.  Perhaps this curiosity keeps me motivated to keep trying new things – running, canicross, Tai Chi – through my own personal learning and growth I can perhaps sense a glimmer of who my family members might have been had it not been for the Second World War.  Curiosity enables me to redefine my ancestral karma.    I say this to my ancestors:  ‘I strive to live a fully actualised life out of my curiosity and respect for you’.

I guess that over the years I have learned to be curious about my family’s past as a way of lessening the psychological and emotional impacts of their survivorhood.

MARK: THE CLOCK AND THE LOCKDOWN BLUES

What if this Covid doesn’t go away and I am stuck in the house forever? The grim thought gripped me and pushed me down a dark claustrophobic tunnel. Four weeks into lockdown and I was struggling badly, I found myself see-sawing between two anxieties, isolation and abandonment, which clung to me like ugly pimples. I wrote the thought out in a notepad, determined to externalise it, and gazed out of the window into the empty street below. Normally a car would drive down my street every few minutes but I hadn’t seen a car, at least one being driven, for days and days. Nothing moved in this new silent hidden world other than my dark thoughts.    

The next morning I went for a walk and passed an antique shop close by to my house. The shop was derelict. A traditional wooden mantel clock with Roman numerals in the shop window caught my eye. Other than a dusty rocking horse with flaking paint and with its rockers missing it was the only item in the shop. There was a hole in the window; it looked like someone had put a brick or a large stone through it. I looked up and down the street before carefully placing my hand inside, and lifting the clock off the shelf. There was no one around to catch a thief.

MARK: TONY AND THE IRRESISTIBLE PULL OF CURIOSITY

Curiosity and wonder are such powerful emotions that they can spawn in us the overpowering desire to search beyond our deeply rooted beliefs and truths in order to discover something new about ourselves and the world that we live in. This process is as important in day-to-day life as it is within therapy. Curiosity and wonder promote learning, personal growth and awareness. Many of the things we learn, such as walking and talking, we have little conscious awareness of. Instead learning language and body motion relies on the instinct and curiosity of the child. Children absorb everything around them. We can reconnect with this part of us, applying a healthy dose of curiosity in our daily existence.  The desire to discover something new can ultimately overcome fear and adversity; it can soothe suffering as we probe and resolve the reasons behind destructive thoughts, disturbing emotions, unhealthy patterns of behaviour.

An ex-boxer came into therapy struggling with his identity; his parents had both been drug addicts and from a young age he had gone into care and also lived with foster parents, not very good foster parents. He was from an ethnic background and shared little of the instinctive and inherited part of him with others, as well as the culture and values he spent his earliest years within. This made him angry and anxious. Tony wanted to find out about his background - who he was, what he was, where his parents had ended up - yet the anxiety of this prospect was causing him great procrastination. He had built a successful business offering boxing lessons for all ages. Now he needed to battle the anxiety and anger raging in his soul, suffering that he had dulled through drugs and binge drinking; an ageing scrapper who was punch drunk yet maybe ready to hang up his gloves for good and recover his health.

I asked Tony to put his boxing gloves on. He did as he was told although he looked a bit puzzled. ‘Today we are going to do the whole session with your gloves on,’ I said firmly. ‘But first what I want you to do is to pick that pen up,’ I pointed to the biro on the coffee table. He looked dumbfounded. ‘I can’t with these gloves on,’ he replied, a little angrily. ‘Okay I’ll pick it up myself!’ I said, feigning an irritated tone. I began to pretend to scribble something in my notepad. ‘What are you going to do if you get an itchy nose?’ I said mischievously, after a short while. Tony, still bemused, shrugged his shoulders. ‘I’ve had harder things to deal with,’ he said, closing his eyes. I got Tony to imagine a world where his hands were constantly in boxing gloves, where he was unable to touch or feel anything with his fingers, where he would never raise a flower up to his nostrils and smell its beautiful scent; a world where an itch couldn’t be scratched. At the end of the session I asked Tony to take off his gloves.  

‘So you think that’s how I’ve been living, with the boxing gloves on all the time?’ Tony said.

‘The drink and drugs have been your boxing gloves,’ I replied, ‘In the words of Samuel Beckett, there is no greater deadener than a habit. The only way you’ll be able to discover your true identity and your past is to have senses that are open and free, not wrapped up or bound in cowhide and string.’ I didn’t think Tony’s gloves were made of cowhide and string but somehow this description I thought added more gravitas to my observation of his condition. ‘As you open up your senses you’ll begin to connect with that inner child, the secret detective within you, and all other parts of you that are open to experiencing new things, to wonder how and to wonder why.’

Tony scratched his head, looking thoughtful. ‘I see what you mean, I’ve sort of sparred with myself rather than the world.’ As he said these words the energy that he gave off I was used to; I sensed the wonder coming from within him. I began to feel excited. Perhaps we could direct this wonder into helping Tony discover the identity of his parents?

Ever since I was young, I was filled with a very real interest about own my parents, my grandparents, where they came from and who they really were. I consider my own existence in the world as that of a blossom floating between two neighbouring meadows, one a rich flower filled meadow vibrant with its colours and wildlife, the other a little sparser, a bit duller, with less flowers but with a large tall tree, probably an oak, in the middle. The former represents my young life experienced in the strange kind and deeply interesting bubble of the Polish community in Leicester, where we would spend Sunday afternoons after mass watching the young girls perform Polish dances such as the Mazurka in their traditional dresses and where old mysterious women would get up on stage and read strange poems that the adults huddled along the rows of wooden chairs in front of the stage would laugh at. Then there would be hot food, Bigos, in the upstairs bar and lemonade too. The mothers and fathers would be talking, laughing, hugging, sharing stories of a past in Poland, some moaned at the current state of affairs, others talked about the church service in the morning, the priest would turn up for a brandy and some sernik, cheese cake; in short togetherness. This is my inherited background, my rich identity. The other sparser meadow is my life after the passing away of the older generations, their dancing and laughter fading like the clacking of a departing train along a track. Yet I have inherited the old Polish community’s spirit and soul, and I am different as a result of this, though in ways that are difficult to describe.  I am curious to others, and like the tree I stand out a bit, and this is nothing to be afraid of and a good deal to be happy about for there is a lot of comfort in sitting under a tree, shading oneself from the harsh sun.

Perhaps Tony had discovered his own way of becoming open to uncovering his troubled past and finding out about what had happened to his parents but I would never know for he didn’t turn up again. His gym was still being advertised on the Internet though and he was also offering yoga and meditation once a week, so something had changed. I felt this instinctively as I looked at the picture on his website of people meditating on mats next to the boxing ring where a pair of gloves hung off one of the ropes.

MARK: THE CLOCK AND THE LOCKDOWN BLUES

When I was a small boy, my father had tried to build an almost identical clock to the one that I was thinking of ‘borrowing’ from the antique shop. It had taken a long time, the best part of a year from what I can recall, although time has a tendency to blur and blunt the edges of our memories. But one thing I’m sure of is that he must have drawn from a vast reservoir of patience and resolve in order to cut and rout the wood, to assemble and carefully glue the different pieces of walnut for the case; to put together the levers, gears and springs for the mechanism and to fit the clock face. Every evening after work my father would scratch his head and suck on his pipe, shake his head, muttering to himself, bits of the clock spread out across the dining table. As he ventured further into his project, there was hardly any space to sit down and eat.

When it was time to put together the working parts of the clock my father got stuck, very badly stuck. He couldn’t figure out how to assemble the mechanism. The clock gathered dust on the dining table. When was he going to finish it? I thought, excited about the prospect of seeing it in full display in the living room. We hadn’t much in those days so a new clock was like owning a crown of jewels or the Turin Shroud.  The days turned into weeks and then to months. The dust gathered some more. I had given up on ever seeing the clock finished.

But then completely out of the blue, a eureka moment! My father bought an almost identical, though cheaper looking clock that he took apart. Now there were two clocks in bits on the dining room table and my mother was very angry while I was confused. My father smiled passively at the two of us. How silly we were! He probably thought, inspecting the internal mechanism of the second clock. He wasn’t the slightest bit bothered about not being able to put this clock back together again because he was exploring and learning at the same time. Now he could put together the mechanism for his own clock! Some forty or so years later I know why that clock ended up on our mantelpiece and not in the rubbish bin. My sister still has the clock in her living room.

In the end I didn’t steal the clock from the shop. Instead I focused on a thought that flashed up in my head as I placed it back onto the shelf. What hobbies could I explore during lockdown? My curiosity was piqued. How could I fill this silent deadly time better? How could I make better use of my resources and beat the potential terror of joining the many others that had shut themselves off from the world with their facemasks and fear? Could I shift my energies towards something positive? The clock stirred, filling the dead air around me with a chilling chime.

PAUSE FOR THOUGHT: Can you think of a time when curiosity led to a solution for you in your life?  Can you think of a situation currently in your life that could be helped by you focussing your curiosity on this?

MARK: JOHN, TRUMPET AND SKETCHES

‘And you can begin to reflect upon why…’ I was about to say the words you no longer consider playing your trumpet a joyful experience when I stopped. I stared at the client, a man called John who was in his early fifties, a jazz musician that had arrived on my doorstep one very wintry afternoon several years ago. All my other clients had cancelled due to the heavy snow that had started in the early morning and was still in full force so I was surprised that John had turned up. He had big bushy eyebrows, a familiar face, almost like a picture on a wall that you walk passed each day but only casually notice. In my late teens and early twenties I was a guitarist in a funk rock band and must have bumped into John on the gigging scene on more than one occasion. When he relaxed during our trance work, his eyebrows would slither above his closed eyes like a pair of furry slugs. His lips would purse very tightly too as he focussed on deep breathing. He cut a serious figure. John had come into therapy because he was depressed. I asked him why he thought he was depressed and he replied ‘because I’ve lost the will to play my trumpet.’

‘In what sense have you lost your will?’ I replied. John, still clutching his leather briefcase, which he brought with him religiously to each session, pondered my question for a few moments.

‘I argue with my band members. I don’t like the band that I’m in. The audience irritate me. I always play badly and I feel very sad on stage.’ His eyes glassed over with tears. ‘I used to love playing with my brother… he played the double bass. But he’s gone now… we were twins.’ John’s head lowered and his whole body took on the posture of someone carrying the world, the moon, the planets and galaxies on his back. I did recall a double bass player in my gigging days. They were so rare, and probably still are. Perhaps it was John’s brother that John actually reminded me of? ‘The drugs you see… they took their toll in the end.’ He looked at me gravely. ‘I don’t know how long I can keep going…’  

After several sessions John was as firmly entrenched in his depression as ever.  Even worse, he was now considering leaving the band; playing gigs in venues around the country was his only source of income so he was worried about how things would pan out for him without any money. The thoughts of suicide were still there he reported, although he was getting some counselling which was helping. As I watched him from the other side of the coffee table, his eyes closed as he tried to relax, I shook my head, cursing inside the silent confines of my mind. How could I have been so stupid?  My suggestion about getting John to become curious about the joy of playing his instrument wasn’t going to work. I knew that he would not respond to this, yet nevertheless I had almost persisted with this intervention once more. My own inner voice told me that I had to take a different approach. I had to find out more about John and his life. When he had regained full consciousness at the end of the session I asked him, ‘John you know I love jazz music. Any chance of coming to one of your gigs?’

A couple of weeks later I found myself in an underground bar, a live music venue in town. I’d only just finished with a client and by the time I’d arrived John was already on stage. But he may as well not have bothered. There was no energy to him. He played the whole gig on autopilot while around him the rest of the band put their heart and soul into the music. His performance put me off my beer. How could he insult Blue Mitchell and Miles Davis and the rest of the great trumpeters in this way? It was all a bit half-arsed and I could feel anger rising within me. I was about to leave in a huff when I remembered that John was my client, he needed me. I couldn’t let him down so I stayed until the last track. John leaned his trumpet against an amplifier and mooched towards me.

‘Do you see what I mean now… about the way I play,’ he said. He looked at me stiffly.

‘It wasn’t that bad,’ I replied.

‘It was.’

The resigned look in his face suddenly made me angry. ‘Yes, it wasn’t a great effort, I’m sure you could do much better. There was no soul in your performance. You need to engage with the audience more. No good turning your back when you play a solo.’ I raised my voice slightly higher than I meant to. Was I angry towards John and the fact that he couldn’t overcome his depression or was I angry towards myself for not being able to help him?

MARK: CURIOSITY CREATED THE CAT

There have been many instances where a healthy dose of curiosity has transformed clients with paralysing issues. Kim, a young woman in her mid-twenties, plagued by social anxiety and low confidence, had begun to avoid meetings at work by feigning illness. An hour or so before a scheduled meeting, Kim, who worked as an assessor for an insurance company, would start to complain of stomach pains and feeling dizzy. She would find herself in the toilet, forcing her fingers down her throat and vomiting into the sink. While she went through this cleansing ritual she hoped that another female member of staff that was also attending the meeting would come into the toilet and catch her doing this, thus validating her suffering. After making herself sick Kim would work the rest of the day from home. By the time she had entered therapy Kim had been issued with a final warning over her repeated absences. She was about to lose her job.

Although initially nervous, Kim had a playful energy about her when she relaxed as well as a good sense of humour so we began by exploring what it would feel like to have the curiosity of a child. Kim recollected a time when she was very young and would gather flowers from a local playing field that she would press using a large dictionary and then put into an album. She remembered the aroma of the flowers, how the petals tickled her fingers, the buzzing of bees. Kim reconnected with her senses and how she could utilize these in order to explore and learn new things in old situations such as the meetings she had been desperately avoiding. Curiosity provided the motivator for learning and suggestions were given for the work environment being an experience where Kim could have a chance to have fun and discover more about her colleagues. Kim began to wonder how it would feel to be curious about the people she was interacting with at work, their thoughts and feelings, their motivations, their issues, rather than worrying about her own confidence and what people thought about her. Curiosity in action. Suddenly her working environment became interesting instead of threat provoking. As her anxiety decreased so her confidence grew and she was able to attend meetings without feeling terrified. She began to speak up.

MARK: JOHN,TRUMPET AND SKETCHES

‘John, I think it might be a good idea to review our progress during this session,’ I said gently. ‘You could think about seeing another hypnotherapist perhaps or even consider CBT as an option?’

John looked resigned. ‘I haven’t exactly been the model client have I?’

‘You mustn’t blame yourself. We’ve tried everything to turn your depression around. Perhaps I could put you in touch with another therapist that I know, she’s very good and I think she could help you. In the meantime we can continue to work with the suicidal thoughts so that they become less intrusive. How does that sound?’

When John had gone I felt the weight suddenly lift off my shoulders but there was also a sense of guilt too. Try as I might I couldn’t find the answer to his problems. I couldn’t bring his brother back and the thought of this hurt most of all. I wiped down the coffee table and noticed that he had left the leather briefcase. It was then that I did something that I wouldn’t normally do. I opened the briefcase.  

I stared at the drawings in front of me in amazement. So much beauty and force and abandonment in the pencil strokes, the images of faces, figures and flowers threatened to jump out of their 2-D world and slap me in the cheeks. John was so entrenched in his abysmal trumpeting that he hadn’t mentioned his talent for pencil sketching. I was overcome with emotion. This was brilliant breath-taking work.

Three days later I arrived at John’s flat with the briefcase. I’d tried ringing him on the phone several times but there was no answer. I knocked on the door and waited patiently. When John eventually opened the door, I was shocked at his appearance. He looked like something that the cat had dragged in. His trousers were dirty, his shirt hanging out of them like a soiled bed sheet and he hadn’t shaved, a thick rug of silver stubble flecked his chin, matching his eyebrows. From inside there was the waft of takeaways and curdled milk.

I didn’t know what to say. ‘Apologies but I looked inside your briefcase. You have an amazing gift,’ I eventually murmured, handing it back to him. His eyes momentarily flickered, as though someone had flicked a light bulb on behind their usual impassive soulless stare.

‘I have many more. Come inside and take a look!’ he said brightly. The flat was poky but open planned. The kitchen, which could only be described as a hovel of laminate and steel, was filthy, the sink piled high with plates. Clothes were strewn across the floor in the living room and the coffee table was filled with a heap of polystyrene takeaway boxes. His trumpet leant forlornly next to a TV. There wasn’t a bit of light or colour anywhere in the room other than in the far corner where John’s sketches hung on a wall next to a tall bookcase. John led me to his work. There was a spring in his step. ‘I’ve drawn a lot since my brother died. The process helps me focus and relax.’ He looked alive, fully present, nothing like his usual defeated self. It was an amazing transformation here in the part of his flat that shone like a beacon. ‘Wow, absolutely amazing! It must have taken you years of practice to get this good,’ I said. John nodded enthusiastically and smiled. ‘If I’m honest with you, these days I prefer drawing much more to playing the trumpet. I wish I could do something with the art, you know, perhaps sell it online?’

It was then that I knew how I could help John. ‘You could contact the children’s ward at the Royal Infirmary and teach the kids how to draw. I’m sure the nurses would allow you to.’ I said, making it up as I went along. ‘Give it a go! Also, there are local arts charities where you could demonstrate your work.’ Again, I wasn’t sure about whether there were arts charities that could help John but my curiosity got the better of me.

John didn’t return for therapy until several weeks later and the transformation was inspiring. He’d taken my advice about the hospital and charities and was now spending quite a few hours each week teaching children and young adults how to sketch drawings. His whole demeanour had changed, there was a glint in his eyes when he told me that he was enjoying playing his trumpet almost as much as he used to when he played with his brother. The dark thoughts that had plagued him for months had faded and he was looking forward to the future, and what he could do with his music and art. He had one more session and then packed therapy in. After John left that final time, I reflected on our work during that harsh winter of snow and storms. It was wonder and curiosity that had allowed me to help John. Instead of continuing to focus directly on his depression and anxiety I had developed a healthy interest in his beautiful drawings. I had wondered how I could get John to spread the light that was in that little corner of the living room of his poky flat into the world beyond. And how he could sketch his life out the way he wanted it to be.  

MARK: THE CLOCK AND THE LOCKDOWN BLUES

“Social distancing is hard

They want metres – I like yards

Will we ever meet again?

Let’s keep singing until then”

A composer friend, Graham Dale, provided the answer to my quest for better use of time with his song ‘Lockdown Blues’. As I listened to the lyrics on my headphones, standing masked and distanced in a long queue outside Screwfix, waiting for a water pipe and some clout nails. “Got sofa-rage in my hamster-cage, I got the Lockdown Blues.” I tapped my feet to the rhythm, half expecting the rest of the queue to join in. It was time to look into the mechanism of this new life, to take it apart and rearrange it patiently. It was time to build up my vinyl collection of jazz music!

Soon records by artists I had never previously known about appeared on my doorstep and I took pleasure in slapping them onto my turntable. My own Lockdown Blues was replaced by the excitement of discovering the infinite possibilities of jazz music. An album, Blue Soul, by trumpeter “Blue” Mitchell, reminded me of John and his battle with depression. Had I not become curious about John’s life as a musician and his passion for drawing I believe he may never have come out of therapy alive. That Blue Mitchell album reminds me that there is always hope when you are willing to learn.

CONNECTING WITH CURIOSITY

We enter this world with our first curious breath. There is nothing quite like a child’s eyes, so open with wonder, as their senses entwine with each moment. The unconscious mind is a vast reservoir of eternal curiosity, waiting to be filled, for this is how we learn about the world, about others, about ourselves. Balancing our instinctive need to explore is our tendency to criticise, to reject. An awareness of our shadow side is equally useful and necessary in order to keep us balanced. The conscious mind is very good at resisting new things even though they are better for us, at least potentially so. As therapists we have worked with many clients that have lost curiosity and wonder, becoming stuck, trapped even, in a one-dimensional experience of their reality - be it depression, anxiety, unhealthy habits, damaging thoughts. We all must open up to the many or even infinite experiences and layers of our world and our suffering. Depression experienced as different things and in different ways can lessen its impact because it no longer is this perceived all-consuming entity; instead there are many different forms of it, some lighter, others heavier. Tuning in to the different levels of depression and being aware and curious about these levels can begin to shift us into more favourable territories. So too with anxiety, unhealthy eating habits, trauma. Instead of stopping to smell the roses we stop smelling, touching, seeing. This default setting must be quickly reset in therapy and whenever we are struggling in our own lives too, so that we can start to learn and to figure out again.  

To connect with curiosity we must engage all senses and the way to do this is to be fully present. Imagine what it would feel like to be a child again and to be able to investigate, to explore anything that you want to explore. Imagine the freedom and joy and wonder offered by this experience. Shakespeare was so in awe of the delicate early morning songs of the skylark that he wrote a song “Hark, hark! The lark at heaven’s gate sings” in his play Cymbeline. Others have been inspired by similar wonderment: George Meredith, the English novelist and poet in Victorian times, wrote the poem ‘The Lark Ascending’. Had he himself become curious about the skylark through reading Shakespeare’s Cymbeline? Inspired by Meredith’s poem, composer Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote a musical work of the same name. To live a life with wonder is to live a life inspired, a life that is richly connected with beings and entities in our world.

Curiosity transcends any fear and insecurity. It can be a wonderfully healing experience to develop a sense of wonder, to think about how you can become confident, passionate and alive. To explore our existence in this way is to summon the inner healer, to live an open life without judgment. Curiosity didn’t kill the cat - it opened its eyes, pricked up its ears and twitched its nose.  

SUMMARY: LIVE YOUR LIFE THROUGH CURIOSITY

Here are some exercises that will help you live your life through curiosity:

• Go for a walk in a park or wood and as you focus on your breathing imagine all your senses coming alive. Feel the ground beneath your feet, see the different shades of green of the leaves on the trees, run your hand along the bark, smell the aroma of the flowers, hear the birds singing. Perform this sensing meditation regularly and your senses and perception will become aligned with your presence and awareness.    
• If you had one hour to be curious about something what would that something be? What things inspire you or make you feel passionate? Make a list of these. How can you integrate wonder and passion into your daily world? Write down your ideas and act them out.  
• What sort of life do you want? How close are you to this life? What needs to happen, what things do you need to do in order to experience the life that you desire? Write down any barriers or limiting beliefs that you have and think about ways of challenging these.
• Think about the different roles that you play each day. Wife? Mother? Boss? Do these roles connect in any way, if so, how? Are these roles in harmony with each other? Are they at odds, if so, how? How could these roles connect with each other in a healthy way?  
• The next conversation that you have with someone, put yourself in their shoes, think about their perspective, their situation, happiness, suffering. How does this change of awareness alter your interaction with that person?
• How you could live your daily world through curiosity? Each day write down a question you have on your mind e.g. how can I be kind today? Find answers to your questions through your thoughts, actions and experiences with others.
• Write this mantra down: Stop and smell the roses. Act it out in any way that you desire.    

For further self-help exercises, videos and podcasts on LIVING YOUR LIFE THROUGH CURIOSITY visit our self-help www.hypnotherapy-in-leicester.co.uk/feelgreat