Why "Ripple" Counselling?

“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” (Krishnamurti)

Without getting political (and there is my first oxymoron of the day), the world we live in can often be too much. In the last couple of hundred years, we have gone from slow release and fragmented news of the globe, to a daily entourage of devastating news which we have little or no control over. Unfortunately, we do not evolve biologically as fast as we do technologically. This leaves our being racing to keep up and ill-equipped to deal with the quantity of data coming our way. Additionally, researchers have no way of keeping up with this rapid ‘progress’. For example, we cannot yet know the long-term effects of media usage on our development.

 A simple solution to an unfathomable problem

Call it avoidant if you will, but when I found myself crushed under the weight of the world in 2020-2022, what saved me was turning the news off. Switching my phone to silent mode and setting boundaries around the time spent talking about the world. I turned my attention to talking about the garden beds we made, the books we read and the home-cooked meals we wanted to share. Soon I noticed something magical happening: the weight of the world began to lift, my interest in creative hobbies returned, and the people around me seemed lighter in themselves.

Even if they didn't initially understand my boundaries, they were soon belly laughing along with me when we spoke about our actual lived lives, the ones that we needed to keep living despite the state of the world.

Fight, flight, freeze, our adaptive survival strategies

Without them, humanity would never have existed. However, as these responses live in the most primitive part of the brain and haven’t had time to evolve since our main threats were being eaten by predators or freezing to death, sometimes we need to guide them.

In 2021 my first response was fight, that didn't go so well… I became abruptly aware I was completely overpowered and under resourced. I collapsed into a freeze response for many months as my nervous system believed it was in imminent danger. It was only by setting boundaries and turning towards my actual lived life that I started to unlock. Overriding primal instincts is no mean feat; I had to take it in tinny increments, breaking down the larger task into manageable actions. And here’s the beautiful part: a tinny action, causes a small but mesmerising ripple. One which we often want more of. That ripple then scales, bringing movement into a frozen being. Once my focus was in front of me, connecting with my family, taking walks and adventuring with home cooking, the light returned to my eyes and I re-entered the land of the living.

As mentioned earlier, I did have to set some hard boundaries, essentially, at least for a little while during recovery, I needed to pretend it wasn't happening. I had to focus so intently on what was in front of me that yes, it could be called avoidant, AKA ‘flight’. But in this context, flight was not a pathological avoidant strategy, but rather, avoidance was the adaptive and appropriate response to an overwhelming threat which was not imminently going to kill me.

Rippling in the everyday: Momentum

State of the world aside, we have all, at some point, felt daunted or overwhelmed by things which are directly in our lived lives. A few examples might be starting a business, losing weight, overcoming anxiety and depression, running a marathon, or decluttering our home. All these things have the potential to send us into a helpless state of overwhelm. Here is where the metaphor of the ripple comes in: imagine your life is a totally still lake, very beautiful to look at, but water needs movement to stay healthy. If it stays still for too long, the water will turn stagnant. Equally so, a storm is beautiful to watch from the safety of our lake view home, but if it goes on too long or is too strong, it will begin tearing at the landscape, violently reshaping it and leaving it to pick up the pieces in the aftermath.

With ripple counselling, I want to help people fill their pockets with a stash of tiny stones and learn to toss them in at appropriately timed intervals, so that a small but constant ripple of momentum, vibrance, and meaning is formed. Breaking up whatever it is that overwhelms you into tiny waves takes away the overwhelming element. You throw your first pebble (put on running shoes), seeing the beauty of light glistening on the now gently rippling water, you don't wait for the ripple to return to stillness, you throw your second Pebble (walking out the door). And so the journey begins, you run a marathon, one pebble at a time.

A final word on the benefits of the ripple counselling ethos

Humans are pack animals; we learn by example, and we change as a society based on trends that start as ripples and become waves. Maybe I'm naive, but I'm OK with that. I believe when we create ripples of positive change in our own lives, we have the power to create waves in our community.

This is also why I don't see focusing on what’s in front of us as avoidant, because it's actually engaging in the most powerful way we can. If you want to change the world, first change your own.