leebus99
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About leebus99
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England
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Great question. It was absolutely awful to be honest. Being cut off completely from our support network was really difficult. I worked from home throughout the whole pandemic, so it felt like the 4 of us were imprisoned in our house most of the time. The care from the hospital during the pregnancy was poor, and the limited appointments we did have my wife had to go on her own, including scans. They also decided my wife had gestational diabetes very late in the pregnancy, using a method that doesn't really make sense, so then wanted to induce her and messed us around with that, so the end stage of the pregnancy was tough. My really good friends who had a baby due a few weeks later ended up losing her during childbirth because complications had been missed during the pregnancy due to the poor care. It was definitely a terrible time to have young kids for a lot of people. After my son was born we started seeing our parents in a 'bubble', and that certainly made things a bit easier. In terms of what helped me get through it all, very little to be honest! I really didn't cope very well at all. Sleep deprivation hit hard, because neither of our kids were sleeping for months. Eventually in early 2021 it all got to boiling point and I ended up going off work with stress. I had a couple of months off, started counselling then changed jobs. I just didn't have the right skills, knowledge or coping strategies to deal with all of that stuff hitting me at the same time. Once the 'dust had settled' I decided I would never let myself get in such a hole ever again, so started my self-improvement journey. Got into meditation and Buddhism, and through that found Actualized.org. Fast forward 4 years I'm now retraining to become a therapist, and I'm a very different person to who I was pre-Covid/pre-Kids.
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If a snap election was called in the UK tomorrow, theoretically Nigel Farage could be a front runner: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_election So as far as I'm concerned, anything is possible these days. Perhaps Tate could get a cabinet role in a Reform government, Secretary of State for Exploitation or something.
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I'm 36 with two kids, 6 and 4. Having children was the most growth inducing thing I've ever done. The experience, coupled with Covid and career failure totally broke me and I had no choice but to remake myself into something completely different. If I never had kids, I'd still be stuck neck deep in stage orange wealth/success obsessions and living a boring and empty life.
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@Vercingetorix Thanks for your post. I agree that self acceptance can be a major objective in a lot of therapy, but not all. I've seen a lot of different ways of differentiating therapy and coaching, and I certainly like your take on therapy being past/present focused and coaching being present/future focused. For me, coaching all involves a lot more knowledge/information/experience sharing from coach to client, whereas a therapist should be 95%+ focused the client's space, but with a little room for psycho-education etc. Part of me thinks that with yellow and above on the spiral, therapy content/topics could became quite all encompassing, and it might be quite difficult to really differentiate between therapy/coaching/mentoring/guiding etc etc. at that level. In fact, I think as a general point when you get to yellow and above a lot of labels and definitions start to lose meaning and became much less useful.
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@Michael569 That's exactly the sort thing I was thinking about, and super helpful, thanks for bearing with me! What you're saying makes perfect sense, if I stay local I'll be practicing (face to face at least) in a small town, so would imagine most of my clients will be either middle aged blue/orange, and perhaps younger orange/green. So I think a lot of the theories that really interest me, and were really important on my own journey, probably won't land at all with a lot of my clients, and like you said, probably turn a lot of them off completely. Working primarily with people higher on the spiral all the time would be fantastic, but like you said, probably very difficult to build a practice around. I wonder if there are trends between spiral stages and the need/efficacy of therapy. In my own case, being neck deep in stage orange values started to cause me a lot of stress, and it was mainly learning about SD and getting into green/yellow that helped me move on from those values I've seen a lot of stage green people though absolutely stressed/miserable/anxious with the state of the world/their world as well. But like you said, people solidly in yellow/turquoise are going to be much more self-aware and conscious, but then again that might actually lead them to seek out others who can help them continue to grow. I wonder how easy it would be to have a local practice focussed on common issues, working face to face, but an online practice, branded and marketed different to try and appeal to higher consciousness people seeking a different style of relationship to work on their less socially understood growth areas. I'd love to know more about what you were talking about in your last paragraph if you are happy to share? @ricachica That's really interesting, thanks for sharing. Sounds like you've got some good plans to work at. I'm yet to explore psychedelics personally, but have read a fair bit on how useful they seem to be for treating various conditions. I can see that over the next decade more adoption of their use in clinical settings, so hopefully some options will open up for you. I haven't learnt too much about Jung yet, but I think I'll find his theories interesting once I get into the detail. Looking forward to what you'll share here in the future!
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Both really. I find that things like spiral dynamics factor heavily in my sense making of the world/people/problems now, but it doesn't seem to feature massively in the core modalities of therapy. I almost find it hard to not see things through a spiral dynamics lense most of the time, but it's probably because I found it so helpful in my own journey. There seems to be an increasing amount of therapists incorporating spirituality into their practice, but not in a dogmatic religious way. I guess that's bordering on existential therapy as well. So I guess I'm kinda seeing a Venn diagram of 'actualized stuff' on one circle and 'therapy' as the other, and wondering what people find sits nicely in the shared segment.
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Hi All, I'm 6 months into re-training as a therapist (counsellor / psychotherapist / talk therapist etc etc.). I'm 36, live in the UK and currently work in engineering management, which I have completely lost interest in, and was probably never truly interested in it in the first place. I had counselling myself 5 years ago during a miserable 2020. It was totally transformative, and led me to discover meditation, spirituality, developmental psychology and of course a lot of that has been through the Actualized YT channel. I found an almost inexhaustible enthusiasm for these topics, which hasn't remotely waned over the last 4 years, so decided it was time for a career change and a move towards life purpose, and becoming a therapist appealed to me for a variety of reasons. I'm interested to know if there are any qualified or trainee therapists on the forum, and if so, how do the topics covered on Actualized inform/interact with your practice? Or perhaps if anyone has any related insights on the career path. Lee
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Princess Arabia makes some good points on labels, but I would suggest you look into 'Pansexuality'. I thought it I was Bi after experimenting with men a few times, but my attraction to women is still much stronger. I am much more specific in the type of guys I am attracted to, and considering myself pansexual rather than bisexual kind of 'opened me up' a little and made me feel like I didn't have to have a 50/50 attraction to the normal gender binary. Another good topic I picked up from a Bi girl my wife and I dated was that she described herself as bisexual but homo-romantic. We could all argue about semantics till the end of time, but point she was making was that she had sexual attraction to both genders, but only a romantic attraction to other women. Perhaps thinking about your own feelings through these terms might help. I would consider myself pansexual but hetero-romantic.
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leebus99 replied to VictorB02's topic in Spirituality, Consciousness, Awakening, Mysticism, Meditation, God
I really liked this documentary. Such a good thing to watch from a Spiral Dynamics point of view as well. I saw it as a great example of Blue vs. Green, but then you've got Ma Anand Sheela who very Orange, kind of battling for power against Osho himself, who is Turquoise (but with a rather strong Orange fondness for luxury cars perhaps!). Also, what happens when you gather a group of people with a strong Red element and parachute them into a Green community. My only criticism of the doc is that it doesn't go very much into Osho's teachings, but I get why they didn't. -
I wouldn't worry too much about Blue, I find its more useful as a societal lens than a personal one. Perhaps spend time reflecting on the demographics that are very 'Blue' in your own society and see what value you find in how they operate. I also wouldn't worry about Orange, the western world is so painfully Orange that you'll be 'Oranged' out up to your eyeballs as you go through life anyway. I find I'm constantly drawn to Orange thinking through work, finances, raising my kids, economics, etc. Just keep focusing on developing your 'Yellow' style thinking (mega-threads are great), and you'll continue to understand all the preceding stages more anyway. But remember, the map is not the territory, and Spiral Dynamics is a model, not the ultimate truth. Use it, but don't base your life on it.
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Here's a few bushcrafters from the UK, a couple of which are local to me: Craig - East Anglia Bushcraft - Really nice guy, talks a lot about the mental health benefits of the outdoors. Met him at the Bushcraft show a few years ago and he's a really genuine bloke. Simon, A Bloke in the Woods - Been going a long while, good quality video production. Andy - Kent Survival - Big channel in the UK, does a lot of content including lots of different gear/tent testing etc. Mike - TA Outdoors - Really big channel, lots of content but I particularly liked his traditional building videos. I watched all of these through sleepless nights shortly after my daughter was born, and that's what got me into bushcraft. Finally no list would be complete without: Mike - MCQ Bushcraft - A real OG of Youtube bushcraft, Oldest video is 11 years old so he's a @Leo Gura generation Youtuber. Channel is inactive now, but he still does the odd stuff on a different channel focused on overlanding. This channel has a lot of really good instructional videos, as he used to be an instructor for quite a few years, so good content for any newbies out there.
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If a life coach just tells you what to do, they are a shit coach. /thread
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Sounds like you know what's important to you (family/dad), sounds like you know where you want to be in the near future (back in Italy) sounds like you know what you're good at and can earn a living with (teaching guitar), sounds like you know you want to do in the future (help people, learn about spirituality), sounds like you know the problems you are creating (overplanning), and sounds like you know what you need to be doing right now (focus on your studies and see what happens). So my advice is, follow your own advice! Trust yourself, stop worrying about things too far in the future, and enjoy the now.
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A personal observation: marketing yourself as an Andrew Tate supporter could be very bad for business. Some people will struggle to see past that. I think a lot of the things that Tate says that people find valuable are just regurgitated from somewhere else. So perhaps dig a bit deeper into the things that resonated with you and see where they originated from. Branding yourself as a big believer in Stoicism and Marcus Aurelius' number 1 fan is a lot less polarising and will paint a very different picture of you. That's just my two cents. Best of luck with your venture and I hope it brings you much joy.