Visit the site -: The You Turn

Overall the book aims to take traumatized and depressed people and those with low self esteem and take them on a journey of understanding of their emotions, their personal make up, and their relationships, and guide them to a life of joy and self fulfillment. That is the U turn, where you take a person with self hatred at one end and you transform their life into one of self appreciation at the other. This is the journey around the U-turn.

The main method advocated in this book is one of action. The purpose of the journey of understanding is to make a journey of action and change possible. The purpose of self-understanding is to use that understanding to transform life from suffering to contentment, and you need both things understanding and action in order to do this. You can't have one without the other. Understanding without action leads to greater self-hatred and lower self-esteem. Action without understanding leads to frustration and unhappiness because it is purposeless. The other point about the action you take is that it must be worked out personally in order to have the desired effect upon your life and happiness. By understanding what oppresses us, we can learn what we truly want from life. By taking action against it, we can fundamentally change what we think of ourselves. We can say we will take back control of our lives, armed with self-understanding in one hand and with a plan of action in the other. Each of the sections of the book takes a different aspect of that U turn, and brings you to a greater understanding of what causes hurt and unhappiness and what makes you fulfilled and content. The journey is personal and the route to be followed is also personal. There can be only one author, and that is you. If you are not content with what you are at the moment and if you are suffering because of it, then it is necessary to dig inside before you make your move outside. This book maps out the pathway to self-understanding through the very emotions that make you unhappy. It then explores the underlying principles that govern those emotions and shows you why you feel the way you do. It then moves through the most fundamental aspects of your relationships to show you how to make them a positive and happy force in your life. It finally explores the journey you have to make to reach your ultimate goals, and helps you find out just what those goals are.

All through this book the journey through self-understanding to self-fulfillment is mapped out by the U turn principles. These principles are very simple. They are FEEL, THINK and ACT. These principles guide you through the different stages of the journey and let you plan a route for yourself. And although each section of the book deals with very different emotions and very different structures behind these emotions, these principles guide you on your U turn at every stage. You can turn your life around using these principles in the way outlined in this book. And as you will see, these principles and the journey they will outline for you are very easy to say and very difficult to carry out. For no matter what any other book may tell you, the U turn in your life is not a painless process and is not going to happen without effort and action. The process you undergo will be easy to say and difficult to do. The choice is yours, is this going to be just an interesting read or is it going to be a fulfilling journey? The only person who can answer this is you yourself. You can take a U turn in your life and make it like your wildest dream, or you can let it go and leave it simply a dream. The choice is yours.

Chapter 1: Introduction

"Life, the Universe and Everything" is the title of a book in a comic series about a space traveler, jumping space ships, meeting aliens, having strange adventures and generally pottering about in a surreal and disorganized world. He travels to various planets; he deals with various strange and disturbed personalities, and can't find his own way back to the safe existence he once knew. Does that sound familiar? Don't we all potter about, or occasionally rush around our own little universe, busy with our own little lives? Don't we have our own little adventures, our own strange encounters and amuse ourselves with everyday events and trivia? Don't we all just meander along the riverbanks of life, looking in at the great surging flood of world happenings and life events, wondering what it's all about in a vague, confused and slightly disinterested way?

We can get away with it too. We can tick over, immersed in everyday trivia, "wallowing in the habitual, the banal", as the poet Patrick Kavenagh said, unfocussed and undirected but not exactly miserable, until "it" happens. What is "it"? "It" can be anything, from the death of a parent, to the death of a dream; from the sowing of insidious seeds of self-doubt, to the dreadful blooming of a self-detesting and suicidal despair. "It" may be an external event or an internal one. "It" may be precipitous or "it" may be a slow dawning. "It" may be a reaction to something, or "it" may have a life of its own. "It" may start out as a small niggle and turn into a life-consuming crisis over a period of time. "It" can take many forms and indeed "It" is as varied as the number of people suffering from it. "It" is a tremendously individual experience and yet a universal human complaint. We may not even be able to define "It" as we are going through it, but we can recognize "It" in others as ourselves. "It" is suffering and pain and hurt and despair,"it" is grief and unhappiness, "It" is sorrow and sadness.

And "it" stops us in our tracks, turns us around and forces us to think, maybe for the first time, about "Life, the Universe and Everything". We don't ask ourselves "Who am I?" or "What am I?", like they say in all those religious textbooks, but we ask ourselves two basic questions: "Why am I unhappy?", and "What the hell can I do about it?" The tremendous thing about hurt and unhappiness is that it leaves no room for anything else in our lives, it dominates us and imprisons us in its web. Our only thoughts are for termination of "it", for "it" to cease at all costs, even if that means that life itself should cease.

The answer to both those questions? The answer is both breathtakingly simple and incredibly complex. It is very easy to say or write down but much more difficult to carry out. The way out of prison and the way back to the way we once knew, the path from "Hurt to Happiness" is within us and not without us. The U part of the U-turn is Understanding. And not simply understanding the world, the people in it and the way it works. Not understanding the people around us and the way they work and the way they do things. The understanding required is very deep and not at all as simple as understanding those around us. The answer to both those questions " Why am I unhappy?" and " What can I do about it?", can be encapsulated in the words "Self-Understanding".

The key to understanding why we are unhappy is to understand ourselves, truthfully and completely, warts and all. The key to overcoming unhappiness is making a journey through self-understanding to self-appreciation, from self-appreciation to contentment, and from contentment to happiness. The journey is by no means as simple as it sounds, because it involves work, work in an area we are not used to. It also involves facing up to reality, but reality of a different sort from the everyday trivia of life, that is an internal hidden reality. It is only through educating ourselves of this internal reality that our discontent becomes comprehensible and eventually resolvable.

It is only through making a journey into the depths of U, from Hurt perched on the left hand side of the U, through the Understanding at the bottom of the U, that we can make it through to the Happiness at the right hand side of the U. It is an arduous journey, taking a look at things we may not want to recognize, and facing up to things we may not wish to face up to, but it is the only way we are eventually going to succeed. It is possible to regain our previous happiness temporarily without making any journey at all. It is possible to even rebuild our lives without any emotional journey of any depth, and it may succeed, but only temporarily. The key to long lasting happiness is work, often harder than any other kind of work we have known.

Bob Geldoff is one of the more unusual heroes of our age. In a profession not particularly noted for its altruism and selflessness, he stands as a shining lighthouse of decency and conscience. He was the lead singer of a band called The Boomtown Rats that had considerable success on one side of the Atlantic in the heyday of the Punk era in the late 70's and early 80's. His greatest achievement however was in masterminding the Band Aid Concert of l984, a concert that eventually raised over $100 million for the starving millions in Ethiopia and Africa, almost solely through sheer force of will and guilt, his will and everyone else's guilt. His achievement will stand as the memorial to his generation of music makers, long after their music fades away. However it is not for this that I am mentioning him now. In his autobiography, "Is that It?", written in the aftermath of this great effort that galvanized thousands for a simple altruistic aim, he mentions his habit over years of rigorously analyzing himself before he goes to sleep at night. He goes through all his actions of the day and asks himself why he did something or other, and was he right to do so. If he was being honest, as he appallingly is throughout the rest of the book, then he has the key to happiness in his hand, and he has unlocked himself, for the self understanding that he has gained over the years is the guiding light steering him through the rest of his life. It was also this self-analysis that led him to realize that he simply couldn't bear to see the pictures of dying children on the television at night and not do something about it.

So what is this inner reality then? Where is it? Can we touch it? Well, we may not be able to touch it, but it's there all right. It governs us much more than Governments, and it controls us more than our parents ever did. It dictates our actions far more than we would like to believe. It is our "core" and around it everything else revolves. The fundamental thing about this inner reality is not to define it or categorize it, but to understand how it works, how it lives and breathes, how it controls our lives and talks to the rest of our being.

Core

An old friend of mine told me a story about when she was a young woman. She grew up in a large town in Ireland, and being very good looking and having a warm friendly personality, she attracted the attention of a large number of "Gentleman callers", who would take her out socially. She lived with her widowed mother, a strict and staunch Northern woman, who vetted these gentlemen with a huffed "hallo" and a searching glance from the corner of the kitchen when they came around. Over the years, most of the callers came and went, but there was one chap, let's call him Daniel, who remained on the scene, gently and patiently, while my friend grew tired of various other boyfriends. Her affection and friendship with Daniel grew over time, and she became convinced that he was the right one. One night, after taking her for dinner, while walking her home through the old cobbled streets, he proposed to her. Flushed, excited and grateful, she accepted, and they parted, happy, at her doorstep. But that night, she woke up at 3 o'clock and couldn't get to sleep again. Everything went round and round in her mind and she couldn't get it to stop. And it wasn't anticipation, but apprehension that filled her and made her restless. She got up the next day and talked to her mother and told her about Daniel's long-awaited proposal. Her mother was pleased, because she knew he was a kind person who loved her daughter. But then my friend said "I can't accept". Her mother, surprised, asked why. "Because something inside me told me not to. I just felt deeply that it was wrong for me" was the reply. And she didn't marry him, she married another man two years later, and is now very happy, many years later. She had a family of two sons, one of whom became a computer company executive and the other went on to become a doctor and psychiatrist. I know she is very happy all those years later because she is my mother and she told me that story many years after it took place.

Many of us can relate to that type of experience, a feeling that something or someone was very right or very wrong for us, and we often follow the dictates of this "irrational" impulse. Many of us base our most fundamental life decisions, like choosing our life partner, around simple feelings that have no explanation and an uncertain origin. We entrust the course of our lives to them, yet when asked what they are and where they come from, we simply say things like "It felt right"or "I just had to do it". Instinct tell us what is correct when things are going well, but it is when things aren't going so well and the instinct begins to fail us, we realize that we know very little about what makes us tick, and we hopefully realize that the only way out of the impasse we have gotten in to is to gain a much better understanding of just what this fundamental feeling is.

Emotions

How does this inner "being" talk to the rest of our minds? How does it let us know what it wants, it feels, it thinks? How do we know what we fundamentally desire, and how do we know what our core is telling us? It talks via instinct and feeling - our emotions! Then, the key to understanding ourselves and then turning that understanding into control, is not just to be aware of but to understand our emotions, use that knowledge to wrestle against them and then turn that control into contentment. This is the essence of the U-turn: we cannot learn anything if we simply repeat the same old story, and simply relive the same old emotions again and again. We cannot change our lives if we simply acknowledge our emotions and then do nothing about understanding them, let alone changing them. The key to starting the journey is to break the vicious cycle and start trying to find the pathway that led to the current emotional spiral.

Half the battle about changing life and especially dissatisfaction with it, is understanding why we are unhappy. It is also vital not only to understand why we are unhappy now, but understand the various internal and external forces that act upon us now and even may have brought us to this point in the first place. We are not islands or rocks, we don't exist in isolation, we are all part of groups, families and cultures that all play a major part in how we feel about ourselves at any one time.

Many years ago, I went on a hitchhiking tour of the United States. In retrospect it could be regarded as foolish and indeed as I spent many an hour sitting on the highways and byways of America waiting in vain for a lift, I often felt like I was engaged in a rather foolish exercise. For my troubles I ended up in Orlando Florida, where I was mugged. I have myself to blame to a fair extent for I let a total stranger give me directions around town to a youth hostel, and then let him lead me there. Inevitably, as we hit a quiet part of town, he looked around him, pulled a knife from his back pocket and asked none too politely for my wallet. I gave it to him in two seconds flat, and he emptied the six dollars and 42 cents in it with a practiced hand. He also took an alarm clock, a pair of jeans, and my brand new Quartz watch worth about eighty dollars. He turned to walk away, and came back frighteningly to ask for more money, not believing that a tourist could have so little cash. I explained to him that all my money was in travelers checks- (did he take American Express?)- and he rifled through my personal belongings in the middle of the road at ten o clock in the morning looking for more. Eventually he went away and I ran in the other direction, eventually going back into town. I reported the crime at the local police station and much to my surprise, they picked him up within a few minutes. ( He was stupid enough to point the police station out to me before he pulled the knife.) I got back my money, my alarm clock and my jeans, but he had got rid of the watch in a short space of time. I went home and tried to forget the whole thing.

Weeks later I began to wake up every night at three in the morning in a dreadful panic, sweating and frightened. I felt I simply had to find my watch, so I fumbled and stumbled my way out of bed until I got my old watch into my hand and then it took me ten minutes to calm myself down. It took me weeks of absolute fear before I figured out the best way to prevent my panic was to wear my old watch on my wrist during the night, so that when I woke up I would be able to feel a watch on my wrist immediately and realize that I had one. It took me a while to recognize that what I was feeling in the panic and fear of the morning was the fear of being killed that I felt when the mugger pulled the knife on me. The watch was a symbol but the fear was real. It was only with that realization that I stopped waking in the early morning, and I got one of my first lessons in the power and pathways of the emotions that lie at the heart of us all. It was through understanding that the fear diminished and I regained control over myself.

What does that story tell us? Apart from telling us that I was very silly and naive to be led through the streets of Orlando by a complete stranger, it tells us something about how the mind communicates within itself. It teaches us that we have a communication system running from the "pit-head" on the surface to the "coal-face" down below. The " coal face " down below is what we can consider our "core", our fundamental self, and the emotional center of our being. The "mine shafts" that run between the two, the surface and the core, are our emotions; but unlike mine shafts, they don't run in straight lines and they are not straightforward things!

The emotional segment of the brain, in physical anatomical terms, is in a place deep under the surface of the brain called the "Limbic System".

The Limbic System, in evolutionary terms, is in one of the oldest segments of the brain. That means that not only do we humans have one, but chimpanzees have one also. Not only do chimps have one, but squirrels, too. And not only squirrels, but squid! Almost every animal, down to the developmentally primitive that would barely generate a blip on a brain scan, has some form of Limbic System. But what does that mean? Do squirrels weep when they hear a Mahler symphony in the air? No, but dogs do howl on their master's grave. Do squid shed a tear for a deep-fried friend? No, but penguins are monogamous for life, and don't mate again if their partner dies. Research on animals such as dolphins and gorillas show that these animals have a full and rich communication system and behavioral patterns of social interaction that indicate deeper and more varied emotional lives than we may like to admit. As children we all thought that animals were human like and shared that thoughts and feelings of ordinary humans. As science progresses we are finding out that animals have a lot of behaviors and communications that look very similar to our own, and a lot of behaviors and communications consistent with a full emotional life. Any pet owner will tell you that his or her pet has various human like emotions. So it should come as no surprise to us to know that emotions are very deep down in the evolutionary line, and that the Limbic System, the emotional base in the brain, is a very basic system indeed.

Survival

Thus, primitive animals have some form of emotional life, restricted in depth and expression by their lack of intellect, or higher brain function, but definitely there in some limited form. So what is it for, what use is it to them, and indeed what use is it to us? The answer is: Survival! Things that threaten us and challenge our potential survival elicit our negative emotions such as anger and jealousy. Things or events that encourage us and confirm our survival ability product more contented and happy emotions. Emotions are crude and rather badly formed things. They tend to be repetitious and non-progressive. They are basic things, they reflect our basic selves and they were designed for one basic reason - survival.

Survival in our highly developed human context is not purely a matter of eating and drinking, not just a matter of existing from day to day, but something that can be threatened by non-physical things also. Humans like many other animals are highly social animals and thus threats to our social survival are felt as deeply as threats to our physical survival. Death of a loved friend elicits tremendous deep emotional responses because it threatens our own survival in our structured social world, as well as reminding us of our own mortality. Episodes of depression and anxiety often revolve around a feeling of despair of the future and fear of not knowing how we are going to get by, feelings of not being able to survive in our own personal social context. There is more to all of us than our bodies, so survival means much more than existing physically.

Emotional arousal, positive or negative, can be elicited as often by personal interaction as by a physical need, such as hunger. What might have been a primitive survival instinct in a less developed animal becomes refined through the course of evolution into a fully developed human emotional life that is fundamentally associated with our core being. Our emotions are the major determining factors in how we live our lives and how we view the world. It is easy to forget when things are going well just how crude we really are at the center and especially how our emotions govern us when things aren't going so well.

Sol Wachtler was the chief judge in New York State up to 1990. He was a highly respected judge, with a lovely wife and four children, and a high personal profile that could have led to high political office. He started an affair after 35 years of marriage and quickly became hopelessly in love with a high flying New York socialite. He wined her and dined her and was her lover for four years. She broke off their relationship, as it became clear he wasn't going to leave his wife for her. His emotional life fell apart after this break up and he began to destroy the whole of a lifetime’s effort and work in the space of one short year. He began writing anonymous letters to her threatening her and making phone calls to her in the middle of the night. He increased the intensity of his threats and demands culminating in a written anonymous threat to kidnap her 14-year-old daughter. He was eventually traced by the FBI through making an obscene phone call to her from his cellular phone, and they stalked him for many months before eventually arresting him. He made a full confession and is now serving time in prison for his crimes. His reason for this bizarre behavior? - He said he was in the throes of a deep depression after she broke up with him and he was still deeply involved with her emotionally. This led him to his bizarre obsessional behavior with her and eventually to a prison term. This highly controlled and intellectual man was as much a slave to his emotions as the next man and it was his emotions that destroyed him.

Once we dig deep into the emotional well and begin to comprehend the different forces that play on us and shape us, we have a chance of taking that knowledge and using it. For although the key to happiness is self-understanding, the gate is only fully opened when that self-understanding is put to good use. If comprehension is the bud, and happiness is the flower, then behavior is the fruit.

Behaviour

How we think of ourselves and how we behave is as intimately intertwined as the strands of a piece of string. Separating the two in terms of cause is very difficult; we may think badly of ourselves and thus not behave up to the standards we would like and vice versa. Separating the two in terms of how they affect us is not only useful but also vital in terms of progress towards our ultimate goal, not the pursuit but the achievement of happiness. For if we end up pleased about our inner being and totally displeased with how we look, speak and act, then we have a recipe for a rather short period of contentment. Equally, if we act and behave perfectly, like well mannered Victorian aristocrats, without any genuine comprehension and with only "duck pond" depth of feeling; we end up shallow vain and bitter, with no purpose to existence, and a feeling of having been somehow cheated in life.

Increasing the purposefulness of our behavior and increasing the depth of our self-awareness are two vital paths on the way to furthering our personal development and happiness. It is unfortunate that in psychiatry, a "political" split has arisen between the old psycho-analytical school which maintains that comprehension is everything and that the only goal of a psychiatrist is for a patient to understand their symptoms and they will disappear and they will automatically be happy, and amongst other schools, a modern behaviorist school that says "if you do it well, you are well", and looks no further into the patients needs. Neither approach is completely true in itself because any one person is a being of many parts, not is not just a mass of emotions or a jumble of frenzied and useless activity. Thus, neither single approach can fully deal with an individuals numerous components; gaps are left in treatment and people and their symptoms sometimes fall through the holes. However, if the two approaches are combined, either by a therapist "graduating" as it were from his own school and incorporating the benefits of both approaches in any one individual, or indeed by an ordinary individual developing in emotional depth and in behavioral control, then the possibilities are endless and the real goal of true happiness achievable.

Insight

I remember meeting a highly-strung young man in a highly distraught state when he came into hospital one evening. He had a bundle of obsessive thoughts and compulsive repetitive actions that would have driven a saint to distraction. He couldn't walk in his own front door without turning around five times, and he couldn't enter his own living room unless he ran up and down the stairs five times. If he didn't obey his own tortuous mental rules, he was convinced some disaster would befall one of the five members of his family. His life was crippled with repetitive exercises and various mental tortures, which he was unable to fight off by himself. And interestingly he had been "cured" of exactly the same problem four years previously. He had been cured by a dedicated behavior therapist, who had helped the distracted young man to fight his behavior, repetition by repetition, ritual by ritual. They both won, the compulsive actions and the crippling repetitions slowly disappeared, and the man went home happy. This cured the disease, but not the unease. I had what might be called the good fortune to meet this man on his second admission into hospital, with a re-occurrence of his original symptoms and worries. Meeting him taught me a valuable lesson about the nature of psychiatric problems and the ways to fully overcome them.

There's more to any human than meets the eye because we are all greater than the sum of our actions. "Curing" his "problem" stopped the outward manifestations of his deep seated anxiety and unhappiness, but didn't prevent the "problem" recurring some time later. In order to become truly content, we must not only tackle what everyone else sees, but we have to dig deep and discover what only we can individually see - our emotional being, our true selves, our core. What we need, in a word, is - insight!

At the beginning of every old "Star Trek" episode, the narrator’s voice boomed out that the crew was "to boldly go where no man has gone before". That in a sense is what each of us has to do in order to truly progress in life and in happiness. We have to explore wider, and dig deeper, than on any previous occasion, in order to learn about and understand ourselves; and then we can take that knowledge and use it to take charge of our lives, rather than remain as victims of circumstance.

Individual Journey

In this setting, psychiatric categories and finding of labels to "diagnose" ourselves become less important than our own individual journey of self-discovery. Psychiatric diagnoses such as "depression" or "panic disorder" are not actual disease entities like "diabetes", but are just descriptive collections of symptoms. When a doctor says a patient suffers from "anxiety neurosis", all he means is that all the symptoms described by that patient resemble a set of feelings and symptoms described by another patient, which resemble a set of feelings and symptoms described by yet another patient, etc. There is no broken bone in the Limbic System to correspond with a particular emotional pain. So far, no one has defined a psychiatric "disease" that can be picked up on an x-ray or a simple blood test.

It is the similarity between suffering people that doctors can recognize, categorize and often successfully treat. But it is the individual differences in lives, in happenings and reactions, that determines what each individual experiences, and no two people's experiences are the same. The similarity of experiences can be helped by doctor and psychiatrist, but the individuality of the experience can only be helped by the individual himself.

Some people are fortunate enough to have that individuality of experience examined and explored with the help of a friend or therapist, but most people don't, and have to make the journey alone. The journey is often painful because it involves exploration of emotions, both positive and negative; it involves stripping away layers of self-delusion which we build up over the years, to arrive at a self-portrait which is at once sympathetic and accurate. It then involves using the hard-won self-knowledge to change those very things that were tormenting us into things of the past. It may also involve setting new limitations on our expectations and setting new goals for achievement. It ultimately involves self-acceptance and through that, contentment.

The place to start this journey is at the bottom, the fundamentals. In order to know ourselves, we must know, understand, and appreciate - our emotions!