Author: Panagiota Nora Klagka

Decision making

by Panagiota Nora Klagka

Do you ever find yourself stuck when faced with a decision – big or small? Perhaps you ask your friends for advice, only to feel more stressed and anxious? Many people I talk to, share this exact struggle: a heavy weight of worry which often lingers on even after the choice is made. 

So what are we really afraid of when we have to make a decision? Regardless of the importance of the decision, often the fear is not about the decision itself.  What we are often sitting with is an anxiety about the consequences and how we might feel in the future. In other words, we are trying to protect ourselves from a potential future disappointment, future pain or a feeling of failure. 

Here are some thoughts which might offer you a different perspective:

A fair question to ask yourself is why worry about an unpredictable future when all we have is the present? The truth is, we can only make a decision based on the information we have right now and the feelings we are experiencing at this very moment about our options. Anxiety can feel lighter if we explore and identify our current feelings with respect and compassion.

The decision itself doesn’t matter as much as you being the one making it. The most important thing is that your decision aligns with your needs, wishes and core values in the present moment. When you try to predict the future and pick the best possible result you are unintentionally turning your back to your current self.

By focusing on your current needs and values you reclaim your power and energy and allow yourself to move forward with clarity and self trust.

A difficulty in decision making doesn’t mean there is something wrong with you. It means that you have learned not to trust yourself and your feelings. It means that your feelings have been repeatedly dismissed, criticised or manipulated and as a result you have grown to doubt them or suppress them. You just need to re connect with your inner compass and navigate towards choices which serve the fulfilment of your current self. 

Towards healing

by Panagiota Nora Klagka

How Am I feeling right now is a question which helps you to reconnect with your body. How Am I feeling right now? Tense? Stressed? Calm? Happy? Content? Curious? Alert? Sad? Recognising how you feel even in a fleeting moment signals a sense of self acceptance and appreciation which is the first step towards healing.

As Gabor Maté states: “Trauma is disconnection from the self”. By identifying a feeling you take a step towards reconnection. This reconnection brings an instant peace, the peace of being with you. 

Counselling – “validate your feelings”

by Panagiota Nora Klagka

This post will clarify a few things around the practice of counselling and its vocabulary.

Counselling means talking about yourself to another individual who is there to listen and to help you to make sense of your feelings. But what does “making sense of your feelings” really mean and what does it include? What does it mean in practice and why it is considered beneficial and therapeutic.

Explore Your Feelings

What Am I feeling and why.? This is a question we very rarely ask ourselves when we are on our own ” how Am I feeling right now?” . Asking yourself this question will be the first step towards a healthy relationship with yourself and the world. Recognising how you feel, is a big step towards recognising yourself, taking control over your life and make peace with the world around you. There is a famous counselling quote: ” in order to heal you need to feel” but in my opinion it is even deeper than this: It is about being aware of who you are and it is about feeling alive.

Validate your feelings

This is the most common advice in the counselling practice but what does it really mean? As a counsellor, I was asked this question many times: what does it mean “validate your feelings” and “how do I do it?”. Validate your feelings means accept them for what they are. Do not criticise them. If you are feeling sad, you are feeling sad. Accept it and try to find the reason behind it. Criticising your feeling means that you do not want to admit you are feeling sad ; means that you have been told by the people around you that you really have no reason to be sad, so you are suppressing your sadness or you are feeling shame for feeling sad. “Why Am I feeling sad? I have no justified reason for it . Maybe I am the problem. Maybe I am too emotional, or too weak or I need to be more resilient”. What you are really doing is validating other people’s opinion about your feelings over your own. And there is where the confusion starts.

Dismiss – Criticise your feelings

There was a scene on Mad Men ( there is so much psychology in the series!) where Don Draper’s young wife, was trying to talk to him about her mother who had recently died but as soon as she touched upon the subject she was immediately interrupted by her husband ” Don’t ! No melancholy. This is your day, you need to celebrate it. Mourning is just extended self pity”.

How many times you have been interrupted in a similar way? How many times people told you “not to go there”, not to feel the pain? How many times they urged you to feel positive, to “man up” and “get it over with”. The insistence on strength and resilience is another big subject but I won’t go there now. I will stay in this: Advice like “do not go there”, “let it go”, ” move on” leads you to criticise the way you are feeling. As a result, you will subsequently try to suppress or change your feeling. You maybe even experience a sense of shame about the way you feel or about your difficulty to move on. This is external pressure which directs you away from your present feeling, it does not allow you to accept and experience it. It does not allow you to validate it.

We often go to counselling when we are experiencing strong, difficult and unpleasant feelings like depression, anxiety, confusion, loss, grief, shame. Nevertheless, in our everyday life, we encounter feelings of a less dramatic scale and we allow them to pass through our body unattended. In other words, we normalise them, we accept them without questioning or we simply ignore them. We only pay attention to them when they become the heavy feelings we are not anymore capable to ignore.

The work of the counsellor is primarily to create a safe space for you to explore, validate and make sense of your feelings and the reason behind them.