: Sally Baker
: The Getting of Resilience From the Inside Out
: Hammersmith Health Books
: 9781781611272
: 1
: CHF 17.20
:
: Erkrankungen, Heilverfahren
: English
: 168
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
To combat physical nasties we need a strong immune system. To combat negative life events we need resilience. Here award-winning therapist Sally Baker gives us a practical guide to developing a wider understanding of resilience and to fostering it so that we have the essential perseverance and drive to emerge successfully when confronted with life's inevitable and often unexpected challenges. Sally explores some of the key family dynamics that can result in unhelpful ways of thinking about oneself which may undermine the natural development of resilience and in its place impose a cycle of self-sabotaging behaviour. Coping strategies such as heightened anxiety, non-confrontational behaviour, people-pleasing habits, along with 'adult failure to thrive', are just a few of the learnt strategies often originally forged out of powerlessness in response to less than ideal early life experiences. These strategies however can be re-assessed and the misplaced guilt, shame and self-blame that have affixed these behaviours, often for many years, can be resolved and released, making way for the getting of resilience from the inside out. Based on extensive experience and case studies from Sally Baker's own therapy practice, working with many clients over the years, this book provides gentle, perceptive insight along with tried and tested self-help therapeutic tools, free additional online resources and the expert guidance needed to take the reader through the stages from negativity to self-empowerment.

Sally Baker began her therapeutic training firstly in physical therapies working with women survivors of sexual abuse and domestic violence. She trained in EFT and became an advanced level practitioner, followed by Clinical Hypnotherapy and later added the English modality, Percussive Suggestion Technique (PSTEC). She was awarded PSTEC Master Practitioner status in 2014. She is the co-author, with Liz Hogon, of Seven Simple Steps to Stop Emotional Eating and How to Feel Differently About Food.

My family background makes me think about all the things I am versus all the things I am not. One way to illustrate this is with my name: Sally Baker. I was born Sally Baker to a father named Harry Baker or Henry Jackson. He was born either in 1912 or 1914. He was the same man who just happened to have two names and two dates of birth on two different birth certificates. Over one hundred years ago, during the Edwardian period, confusion over family lineage was not unusual in the working class. So, although, in theory, there was a 50:50 chance of my being called Sally Jackson, I grew up oblivious to that possibility for a long time as Sally Baker.

In the Baker family, ambition was not encouraged. My mum took books away from me as I was growing up. She said I spent too much time reading and that nothing good ever happened to a girl who knew too much. Hey, who knew? I recall my father often telling the teenage me that what would make him proud was if I trained and qualified as a nurse. Note not a doctor, as that would have been unthinkable. He had me pegged to be a nurse, and that was that. (That is not to say that being a nurse is not a worthy ambition; it is an exceedingly tough training and of course much more professional and based on scientific knowledge now than it was when I was growing up. It was the lack of ‘either/or’ that was so limiting.) But what hurt me the most was his lack of stretch and the lack of aspiration for me. The fact he didn’t aspire for me to be a doctor made me believe there was something unworthy about me.

So, parental ambition to succeed at all costs wasn’t my pressure. I felt the inverse pressure from a lack of expectation that my parents had vested in me.

As it happens, this has been one of the most challenging subjects I’ve attempted to write about. Childhood trauma may require a lifetime’s vigilance to know how those experiences can undermine resilience building. The whole process of researching the latest thinking about resilience effectively highlighted where my old negative self-judgements lurked and where my lingering self-sabotaging habits hid.

Like many others, I’ve been challenged with ‘the getting of resilience’ for myself. I have had to find my way through the tangled web of negative feelings I developed growing up, including limiting beliefs I took into adulthood. I had also developed entrenched beliefs that I was never good enough or worthy of happiness. I’m a prime example of how growing up, even in a functioning and loving family, doesn’t always protect one from the outside world.

My seven-year-old self’s world fell apart when I was sexually assaulted by two teenage brothers who were the sons of friends of my family. There’s an old-school photograph of me in a summer dress, looking directly at the camera. When I look at that image of me, I try hard to determine whether this is a before or after picture. I still acknowledge that sexual assault changed my perception of myself and how I understood my place in the world.

In retelling this story, like many survivors of abuse, ingrained minute details of what happened are still viv