Can you believe it! Yesterday we had a bit of a late start, partly due to my dear husbands desire to ensure he delivered his quota of our village news around our neighbourhood, and my need to clear up from the trail of party try on’s and make up and hair products spread from one end of our upstairs rooms to the other. This led to us arriving at the hospital half an hour after, wait for it, a visit to my very beetle juicing floor , by His Royal Highness Prince Charles his very self!!! Perhaps the universe thought I had already received my fair quota of excitement for the week but how good would have meeting royalty have been, never mind I shall just have to wait until my palace invite now.
On another note I want to share with you some information about a product I designed and developed, to enable a better understanding about how the brain works, when faced with what it may perceive as being dangerous situations. The BrainBox is being used by the mental health professionals not only in my team, but by psychologists, teachers and youth workers who have purchased the few models we managed to produce and sell from our back room a few years ago and it really is making a huge difference according to all the positive feedback I am receiving. But before I tell you more about it I want to honestly share with you a little bit about why and how it came about.
As a small child growing up in Sheffield (just down the road from Jarvis!), life may have been viewed as a simple family affair, but as for many children, it was not always as easy on the inside as it may have appeared to the outside world. Differences between my parents resulted in, without going into too much detail, a difficult time for us two girls which accumulated in a midnight run away from all we knew to the far too bright lights of London. My father was not always a good man and to escape the world he had found himself in he fled the country leaving his little girls behind. Unfortunately details are often spared from little children, but little children do have ears and eyes and large imaginations that can so often be abused. Gaps filled my head with stories as to why my daddy would abandon me and we had to leave our dear kitten, friends and family behind so suddenly. Daddy would visit, he would write and come back wouldn’t he? Had we really been that bad, that ugly, that naughty all that sort of thing. Grown ups thinking they were doing their best a new different life, new schools, new daddies all would move on smoothly and be forgotten. No blame is intended here it was just life, we see it in many homes, parents struggling with their own battles trying their very best to do the right things with little understanding of the possible consequences. In my case the circumstances led to feelings of low self esteem, and a real fear of abandonment and lack of trust. I withdrew into my own imaginative little world where goodness prevailed and I would do all I could to try to be kind and be loved but with a real belief this wouldn’t be possible. Each opportunity the devil on my shoulder would remind me that it couldn’t be, that I was unworthy to expect it, and that I should avoid and disrupt any opportunity to trust in anyone or thing so to avoid a life and death situation. Wow this is getting heavy! The reason I am explaining this is that as I became older and wiser I became more fascinated in the workings of the brain and more interested in how amazingly it would operate in order to do what it perceived was required to keep me safe. The Neuro -Linguistic Practitioner and Human Givens Psychology training provided me with a greater understanding of the workings of the human mind and with the knowledge gained during my psychiatric nurse training it all seemed to click into place. I was able to re-program my brain and move on, storing stories and banishing memories to my museum of old values and beliefs. Emerging from my cocoon into a new world where I grew in confidence and self belief, free from the little voice that used to say you can’t, you mustn’t, you can’t it is too dangerous. Today I know I can, and I do, and I survive. Gosh I do sound like such a drama queen! But this story is to illustrate why and how the BrainBox came about. In my working role I was meeting lots of families experiencing difficulties coping with situations that the brain has interpreted as dangerous, causing them great problems with anxiety and anger and sparking off the ‘ fight or flight’ response. I just thought that if I could maybe find a simple way of demonstrating this natural response, then perhaps armed with a greater understanding of their own minds, could possibly empower others to move forward in their lives. So one early morning my mind was working overdrive ( without the steroids) and the BrainBox was born.
I shall use my next blog posting to explain the BrainBox in more detail as its now 3am and If I am to stand any chance of visiting Ikea today, to pick up a much desired sofa bed to allow me to take advantage of our beautiful views , from our conservatory during my recuperation period, I will need to at least try to get some more sleep.
Wish me luck!
It worked 6 hours sleep achieved whoopee Ikea here we come!
