Are intelligent friends more useful than therapists? -- GREEN EVENTS

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Date Posted: 06:07:40 05/12/03 Mon
Author: Andrew Bailey
Subject: Are intelligent friends more useful than therapists?

The immediate answer to that question has to be yes and no.
There will always be a case made for professional intervention but, in the vast majority of cases, I would suggest that good conversation with an intelligent person, preferably a close friend usually works wonders.

In point of fact, the Brits are notoriously suspicious of anyone who sets himself or herself up as a "counsellor" and, in many cases we are right to be suspicious for there are many badly trained and inept people who set themselves up thus.

The case for the professional is easily made and usually on the grounds that medical intervention is required. That is, most certainly, the case where someone is suffering from one of the recognised neuro-psychological or mental health disorders where drug therapy usually allays the symptoms sufficiently for talk therapy to take over. However, for most of us, such a course of action would remedy nothing and might even exascerbate the situation dramatically.

The answer might well lie in life style.If we spent as much time caring for our neuro-psychological or mental well-being as we do in DIY or chasing money, promotion, the new car/house or making sure that we are included on teh best dinner party circuits, we would all be the calmer and healtheir for it.

Try stepping outside your home and bending down to scrape a bit of soil into your hand and saying to your self that without this, I could not sustain my life let alone my lifestyle.Try looking up into the upper branches of a great tree or into the inner most parts of a delicate flower and then place yourself in order of the importance of material things. Stare at a mountainrange and think that when you are dead and gone, that mountain range will still be there. It will still be there when your great great great grandhcildren are nothing but dust themselves. So how important are you in fact. Not much really so stuff teh ego back into your deepest pocket and embark on a simpler life.

We cannot eat money any more easily than we can eat the latest Ford or Porsche. We cannot breathe polluted air so why dont we all make a pact with ourselvers, by the time, we approach the end of our tenure within our physical bosies on this good earth, that we will have simplified our lives pointedly and massively. Let us do the shrinks and drug companies out of a job.

Pie in the sky? Probably but worth thining about

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Replies:

Re: Are intelligent friends more useful than therapists? -- Julia King, 18:32:55 01/31/06 Tue