DYSFUNCTIONAL BEHAVIOURS

Welcome everybody. Thank you for joining me for another episode of Live the 8Wise^TM Way with me, Kim Rutherford, Psychotherapist, Author of 8Wise^TM Ways to a Healthier, Happier Mind, and the podcast host of the Live the 8Wise^TM Way podcast, where you can get all the tools, tips, and techniques you need to help you Live the 8Wise^TM Way for better psychological wellbeing and overall better quality of life.

You might be able to hear from my voice that I’ve got a bit of a cold happening at the moment, well, to be honest I think it’s more to do with allergies. I’ve been away for a couple of weeks. I was in Spain and then I was in France and the weather was lovely and fine, but I had to leave my gorgeous, gorgeous dog Archie at home with some brilliant, brilliant friends. He is basically a shih tzu cross chihuahua, so he has this beautiful silky hair and we always cut it really short. So it was cut really short before I went, but because I hadn’t seen him in so long when I picked him up to give him this gigantic, big hug when I saw him for the first time the dust has got inside his hair and I’ve sniffed all the dust and now I sound like I’ve got a cold. But the snuggles were worth it, he’s absolutely gorgeous and I missed him dreadfully. So, I’m going to battle through this episode, sorry if I sound bunged up, is the technical term, if I sound bunged up, I will be doing my best to get through this for you because this for me is a really, really important episode.

Today it’s episode 18, and I want to talk about dysfunctional behaviours. These are the behaviours that we implement for ourselves when we are struggling with situations or when we are triggered by situations that become a little bit dysfunctional in our lives, and we tend to lean towards them, the coping mechanisms that we have that we don’t necessarily want anymore, but because we’ve used them for so long, we don’t necessarily know how to end them or get rid of them. I want to use this episode to share something important that I did in my life to try and manage my dysfunctional behaviours as well.

If this is your first time listening to Live the 8Wise^TM Way, thank you so much, I really appreciate you coming along and listening in. If you get the chance, it’s worth going back and listening from the beginning where I take you through the entire 8Wise^TM model, talk you through all four of the different areas and then talk you through the core eight elements of the model that I use in my private practice with my one-to-one clients, and also in my training academy with all the training that I do and I also work with many employers to help them implement this strategy into the workplace so they can help with wellbeing in the workplace and looking after their staff better. So go back to episode one if you can and, if you like this episode, then I really appreciate if you could click like and share it so more people know about it and so we can help as many people as we possibly can. Then, of course, please subscribe so you don’t miss out on any more of these episodes where we will be sharing all of this great information with you and helping you to manage your psychological wellbeing, the challenges and transitions that happen in your life and hopefully giving you the tools and tips to cope more effectively so that you have a happier, healthier mind and a better quality of life.

So welcome here to episode 18. Dysfunctional Behaviours. Let’s start at the beginning with regards to how they grow really. So, what happens is a situation in your life happens, it happens, and it triggers an emotion. That emotion lasts for about six seconds, but within those six seconds, it triggers a thinking pattern linked to those emotions. When you link an emotion to thinking, you create feelings. Those feelings and the thoughts that are now generated with them create a set of symptoms. Those symptoms can make us feel comfortable or uncomfortable. If they make us feel uncomfortable, we then identify strategies for ourselves to alleviate that feeling, so we don’t want to feel uncomfortable anymore.

Now I am going to share with you the way that I have coped over the years, and that will give you some indication of the types of things that can be dysfunctional.

I don’t know exactly when in my life I had the big moment that created a trigger that led me to my coping mechanism, but it was very, very young, very, very, very, very, very young. I had a traumatic childhood, lots of people had a lot worse than me so I don’t want to make it out like it was really, really, really horrific because a lot of people out there have had a lot worse childhoods than I had. I had a mum and dad who loved me very, very much, it was nothing to do with that kind of thing, but there were things that happened within our family that led to childhood trauma. So my coping mechanism for childhood trauma was to eat. And what I learned was I became a dysfunctional eater, a disordered eater, otherwise known as an emotional eater or a stress eater. This was from a very, very, very young age. I can remember coming home from school and as a person who’s never really felt like they fitted in although I loved school and I loved the academia of school and I loved learning and I genuinely liked spending some time with people that I liked, I never really felt like I fitted in and so the energy it took me to cope with school was a lot bigger, and I’ll bring you to why that is soon but those days were really quite tough. So when I would come home, my parents were still working, so I would come home to this wonderful empty house that I loved, all this solitude because my sister, she was really out there and outgoing, so she was always out and about doing things so I’d have the house to myself and I would just eat, and I don’t mean eat normal food, I wouldn’t make a sandwich or anything like that. I would make bowls of icing sugar, and I would make up bowls of icing sugar and then I would sit there and just eat bowls and bowls of icing sugar, and then I would put it all away and hide it and pretend it never happened.

And it’s one of those things that was my normal, so I didn’t think that was wrong. I just thought that’s what people did, people went home and they eat what they liked and for me, I thought it was icing sugar. It wasn’t until much later in life that I actually realized that that’s disordered eating and that I had developed disordered eating as a dysfunctional behaviour of coping with the stress in my life.

That’s some of my earlier memories. I also had a situation where I was allergic to almost everything. As you can see, I’m allergic to dust and it’s not the only thing. I had so many other food allergies that I started to develop really strange relationship with food and really bad relationship with food and so as every single stress situation I experienced, I went to food. I would eat and eat and eat my way through whatever I could eat my way through in order to make me feel better, to make me feel happier. What was happening for me, if you think about that cycle, a life event would happen, a challenging event in my life would happen in some way that would trigger an emotion. That emotion would sit with me for six seconds, approximately six seconds, and it triggered a thinking pattern, a thinking process. That thought process changed that emotion into a feeling, those feelings then lead to a wide range of symptoms. For me, it led to symptoms of anxiety, negative thinking patterns, an internal critical dialogue that made me just feel rubbish. I would feel stressed all the time. I’d have incredible tension. I’d feel sick an awful lot. I would just feel really closed off from the world, and it made me incredibly unhappy and so to make me feel less unhappy, I would eat and I would implement my dysfunctional behaviour, and that cycle continued.

What happens is people go to me “well, how does that happen, how does that work” and I’m going to take you back to some conversations I’ve had about the wonderful mind and the way that the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex work together. So, hippocampus is a part of the brain where memories are retained and the strong memories are usually linked with strong emotion. What happens is your prefrontal cortex is helping you to navigate through the world so everything that happens around you comes through to your brain and into your mind via your senses. Something happens, your senses pick it up and it sends a message to the prefrontal cortex to say “you have to navigate through this situation”.

The prefrontal cortex sends a message directly to the hippocampus and says “this is the situation we’ve got, what do you have in your memory banks that can help me navigate the situation” And the hippocampus goes “well, you’re feeling stressed out today, the last time you felt stressed out, you had some icing sugar and that made you feel better and it removed all of those symptoms that you are feeling uncomfortable with. So why don’t you have some more icing sugar and that’ll make you feel better”. And your prefrontal cortex goes “genius idea hippocampus, let’s do that”. Then you have the icing sugar, or in my case, I had the icing sugar and what that does is then strengthens that memory because not only now has your hippocampus got one memory, it’s now got two memories of when you were made to feel better by eating something that wasn’t good for you, wasn’t healthy for you, and in fact wasn’t a structured, safe coping mechanism for the situation you were in. But that’s how it builds.

The next time you have another stressful situation, that conversation between the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus happens again, and it goes back, and it strengthens that behaviour, strengthens that behaviour, strengthens that behaviour and before you know it that’s become an ingrained habit that you have very little control over. It’s just something that you are doing to cope with these situations. Now, obviously my dysfunctional behaviour was unhealthy on mass levels. It wasn’t good for my mental health because I actually wasn’t ever dealing with the issues that I needed to deal with. But on the other side of it, it led to obesity and I was very, very obese. From a UK perspective, the heaviest I got to was 18 stone 8, which I think in pounds is about 260 pounds, and I’m only five foot one, so I’m very short. I was incredibly, incredibly unhealthy physically and mentally. If you put on top of that the fact that I still had this issue with never fitting in in life, I went through mental health issues with regards to anxiety, depression, agoraphobia, burnout, you can imagine I was not in a good place.

For all of those coping mechanisms, and even though I’ve said many times, I created 8Wise^TM in order to help me manage my mental health, the one thing I struggled with the most, and I was able to implement lots of other strategies with regards to balancing all eight elements of my wellness spectrum to get better, I really did, but the one I really, really struggled with, the hardest one for me was the physical wellness element linked directly to food and exercise because it wasn’t just a case of me not knowing what to eat, I’ve been on a diet for about 40 years. I knew what good nutrition was. I knew what eating healthy was. I wasn’t ignorant. I wasn’t this ignorant, fat, lazy person. None of us are so for those of you may be listening to this thinking that people who are obese are just lazy and ignorant, that’s not true. That is absolutely not true. They probably know more about how to eat healthy than most people because they know every diet inside out. They’ve read every diet inside out. They know how to exercise because they’ve read everything you can imagine. They’ve watched every YouTube video on it. There’s no such thing as an obese person necessarily being just lazy and ignorant. There is a lot more going on and, as someone who was there, I am telling you directly I was definitely someone who had a lot more going on. I have a Facebook group with over 2000 people in it of obese people who are fighting that battle every single day. And they have so much more going on than anything that people thought about. So that’s a shout out to my Weight Wise group actually. You’re a wonderful, wonderful bunch of people and I love you dearly. You’ve helped me dramatically. You’ve opened my eyes dramatically and I couldn’t be more grateful to have you in my life.

But what then happened for me is I got to a stage where I couldn’t walk anymore. I went on a lovely family holiday and I couldn’t walk and I was absolutely gutted. I was walking along the beach and I had to stop every five minutes because my weight had got so bad, my lower back couldn’t cope anymore.

So I started to see a therapist to say “right, I’ve got these dysfunctional eating habits. I know they’re dysfunctional. I know they’re not right. I need help. I need some help to create better behaviours” and that’s actually where I learned that I had disordered eating and, to be honest, it was disordered eating with a binge eating disorder. I’d gone from having just disordered eating and I’d moved into a binge eating disorder. Binge eating disorder is the most used eating disorder across the world. When we think of eating disorders, we tend to think about anorexia and bulimia because they are the most commonly used languages when it comes to eating disorders whereas actually, binge eating disorder is the most common eating disorder amongst people and I am definitely someone who experienced binge eating disorder. I would be that person who ate and ate and ate to excess and just couldn’t stop, just absolutely couldn’t stop. And what I learned through my therapist is what I share with people that I work with now, if you want to understand why you choose food to cover up whatever you are trying to cover up to beat those symptoms, then it’s going to be really hard to resolve the issue that lies at the core.

For me, I was at this desperate stage of losing the weight, and therapy was fantastic, it opened my eyes. But what therapy couldn’t do was help me lose the weight quick enough to become healthy. This was in the middle of a pandemic. We were being told all the time that Covid, obese people are the most at high risk. I never left the house. I was absolutely petrified. I wouldn’t leave the house, in my head is if I get this covid, I will die, and I didn’t want that. That was triggering my health anxiety that I fought so hard to beat in the first place.

So, the therapy was fantastic. It made me realize that I had disordered eating, an eating disorder and that I needed to deal with that. But I also knew that I had to deal with losing the weight really quickly and I knew I couldn’t do both and get both outcomes at the same time, at the same pace. Being obese was a major health risk, so I had to deal with that. I made the decision, the controversial decision, because I know a lot of people find it controversial, but I made the decision to have bariatric surgery.

The bariatric surgery is weight loss surgery where you have some form of surgery on your stomach area to change the way that you digest food. For me, I chose to have what is known as a gastric sleeve, which means that they cut a percentage of my stomach away, leaving a very simple sleeve. A sleeve style space left so nutritiously all the food still goes in the same way. I get all the same nutrition from the foods that I eat. I just can’t eat as much.

It was a huge decision, an absolutely huge decision but, for me, it was a case of I can deal with these dysfunctional behaviours, but it’s going to take a long time to deal with them and whilst I’m dealing with them, there’s no guarantee it’s going to stop me overeating. It’s not going to stop me binge eating straight away. What if I get bigger and bigger and bigger whilst I’m working on the psychological stuff. So that was my theory. My theory was that I need to lose the weight, so I need something that helps me do that and I had tried everything else. I had literally tried everything else and the strange thing is I’m genuinely very happy for the surgery because not only have I lost weight, but when they did the surgery, they found out I had a mass hernia in my stomach as well, which I wouldn’t have known about, and that could have caused major issues later on down the line with lots of other things. So I was very lucky that my surgeon made the decision that when he did the surgery, he also removed the hernia so I became a lot healthier almost immediately.

Now I appreciate this isn’t the process for everybody to do, and I’m not saying this is a strategy that everybody should go for, but this was the right one for me and I’m not even telling you this to justify it because I don’t feel like anybody needs to justify the choices they made to make themselves healthier. I did my research, I knew what I needed to do and I knew very clearly what I had to do to do it. And I also knew that it was only going to deal with helping me reduce how much food I could put in, so I couldn’t binge anymore, which is what I needed. I needed to stop the binge eating, and it stopped me from being able to indulge in those foods that I had navigated towards through dysfunctional behaviours. So, no more icing sugar, no more chocolate. None of those things because they make me incredibly ill if I do. This was my personal choice on how to tackle my obesity.

But it didn’t tackle the issue itself. I still needed to learn to understand why I had this dysfunctional behaviour, what was there at my core, triggering me, making me feel so uncomfortable with these symptoms that I felt the need to live by this dysfunctional behaviour of overeating, emotional eating, stress eating, disordered eating, and ultimately eating disorder.

The truth of the matter is, if you are eating to cover up pain, if you are drinking to cover up pain, if you are taking drugs to cover up pain, if you are doing anything that is helping you to suppress the feelings and the emotions of pain that you are feeling, that’s dysfunctional. It doesn’t have to be food, it can be anything. Anything that you are choosing to do instead of facing the actual thing that is causing the pain that you’re trying to cover up. So, and I talk to my clients about this in so many ways, until you stop taking the drug of your choice, which is part of my dysfunctional behaviour, food is my drug of choice, you don’t know what you’re covering up.

After surgery, surgery’s gone great. hernia has been removed, I’m in a great place, I’m learning how to connect with food in a different way again, I’m making the effort to deal with the psychological challenges, suddenly I can’t cover the pain up with food anymore and suddenly all of these thoughts start coming through. Those feelings start coming through. The things that I had been suppressing for 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, things with regards to my childhood, things with regards to my twenties, conversations I’ve had, comments people have made, all of this stuff that happens in our lives that rather than me actually sitting and ever dealing with it and processing it, I had buried it, buried it, and buried it, and then had eaten mountains and mountains of food to cover it up, I couldn’t cover it up anymore. I had no option then, I had no choice but to face it head on, absolutely head on. The second I started to face it, don’t get me wrong it’s a difficult process and I’m not saying it’s easy for anybody and for anybody who’s preparing to go through this, I’m telling you now, be prepared to have it slap you in the face, but when it slaps you in the face you are back in control of it. The second you’re back in control of it, you can start processing it. You can start processing why those feelings are there. You can start processing those old experiences you had with a different set of eyes, a different maturity, a different perspective. That’s how you can move through these things. You can start showing yourself some compassion and letting go of some of the shame and the guilt that you have felt over the years with regards to situations you’ve been in or how you’ve coped and how you’ve handled them and that’s how I managed to, or am managing to, master the art of overcoming my dysfunctional behaviour.

As soon as they popped up, I started to sit with them and it’s uncomfortable, but I used the tools that I talk about in my book, I used the tools that are available on my website and they’re still there. My favourite tool being the emotions wheel. When something pops up in my head, and it might be a memory from school, for example when I was losing weight I remember my friend, I’m not going to name complete names but I will name the first names, I remember walking up to my friend Jane when I was in school and she was sat there with a guy called Ricardo and I didn’t really know him in any way, shape or form and he had just turned around and said to me, out of the blue “have you ever heard of Weight Watchers”. That was it, that’s all he said to me and it destroyed me. Now, I was a stubborn girl then and I’m a stubborn girl now, and I must have been probably 14 at the time that he said this. My friend didn’t say a damn thing. She just sat there because he was her friend, and he was quite a cool kid in school. She didn’t say a damn thing, and instead, what I just did as I always do, is I just pretended it didn’t bother me. I just laughed it off. Probably called him some name and walked away, but I was crushed, absolutely crushed. That stays with me all the time that that was in my head then forever, that when people see me the first thing they see is my obesity. I am judged on my obesity. So that was one of those things that I suppressed. I probably went home and ate and ate and ate to make that feeling that it created go away, which I know doesn’t make sense logically when you’ve just been told basically you’re fat, why are you going home and making it worse, but that’s how we cope with it. So all of those people out there who think screaming and shouting and bullying people into losing weight, you’re, in the nicest way, you are the dumb one. That’s not how psychology works. That’s not how obesity works. That is not how dysfunctional behaviours work. What you are doing is providing more reason for that person to go and do the thing they’re doing that, by the way, is killing them. So for all of you who are out there thinking that bullying somebody into losing weight is the right way, actually you’re making the situation worse. Worst case scenario, you’re leading them to an early death. So maybe change your approach rather than just constantly expecting somebody else to be the person who changes. It takes both parts of society to make things different and better.

These are the types of things that started to pop through my mind, and that’s just one of the many.

And it wasn’t just about being fat. There were hundreds of things that would come through, the way I’d been treated by people, the way I’d allowed myself to be treated, things that I had done to people. Lots of things. And we all have it, we all have these experiences in our lives that cause us these challenging moments, these stressful moments, these unhappy moments, but I ate to try and prevent them from hurting me as much as they probably would’ve done at the time. So as soon as I’d had my surgery and I started to lose the weight, which is fantastic and I’m so grateful that I’ve done that, all of these memories, all of these thoughts, kept popping up and as uncomfortable as they were, I made the decision to use a different cycle. So instead of a dysfunctional cycle, I made it a more functional cycle.

What now happens for me, I use exactly the same process and emotion happens that is triggered through an event. That will then trigger a thinking pattern, and that thinking pattern leads to a feeling. Those feelings lead to a set of symptoms and at that time, I step in and I go “okay, something’s happening. What is happening, let’s have a look at what my day has done. What has just happened today, what has just happened in the moment that makes me feel like this” and sometimes I have to reduce my anxiety. So, I use some very, very basic breathing techniques that help me to just regulate my breathing because I know as soon as I’ve regulated my breathing, I get all the right oxygen back to my brain, which means I can engage my brain and balance out my emotional and my rational mindset. I get to that Wise mindset that I talk so much about and the concept of 8Wise^TM is being able to use the Wise mindset of everything we do and I can start to look at things. I will use the emotions wheel, so “what am I feeling, why am I feeling it, what situation triggered me today and what do I need to do to change the situation or problem solve the situation so I don’t get myself into a cycle with this”. What I don’t do anymore is go “I’ve got these uncomfortable feelings, go and get the chocolate” which is what I used to do. I don’t sit there on the weekends anymore going “let’s go get the chocolate and the crisps and the takeaway and everything else”, and binge my way through a weekend. I don’t do that anymore. I can’t do that, thank you very much surgery, it really is a tool, but I don’t do it because my brain also doesn’t take me there anymore. Don’t get me wrong, there are moments where my brain still wants to take me there, but I now implement functional coping mechanisms, functional behaviours that help me to manage my stress, help me to manage my difficult situations, help me keep my wellness spectrum balanced so that I am healthy body, healthy mind, a better quality of life.

Now we are all different. We are absolutely all different. We all have different coping mechanisms. It was mine that just happened to be food but, like I said, other people will create dysfunctional behaviours as well. Some people might be, as soon as they’re having a bad day, they want to go out, they want to drink with their buddies, and they get absolutely off their faces on alcohol. If alcohol isn’t causing you any major problem in life, then doing that every now and again is not the worst thing in the world you can do. But, if you are using that to cope with stress all the time, then before you know it you are doing that more regularly because there are going to be periods of your life where life is incredibly stressful and you can’t drink your way through it. You don’t want to be in that situation where it’s, first of all it’s dysfunctional behaviour, it’s a disordered behaviour, and then it becomes an issue such as addiction. Same with any form of drug or smoking or any of those things. It’s about how you are using them and why you are using them and if you are using them in order to numb the pain of situations or deal with the stress in your life, then they have become dysfunctional for you. They’re no longer recreational. They’re a coping mechanism for life and that, my friends, is dysfunctional behaviours. They’re not the only ones either. Lots of things are dysfunctional. If you’re somebody who goes to the gym and then you go to the gym 3, 4, 5 times a day just to cope with stress, that is no longer a healthy behaviour, that is a dysfunctional behaviour.

What I recommend you do is just take a moment in your life to actually look at “how do I cope with stress and is it the healthiest way that I can cope with stress. Am I allowing myself to experience the functional behaviour of coping by facing the truth of things. Do I allow myself to experience my emotions, understand the thought patterns that link to them, making them these uncomfortable feelings. Do I understand my own symptoms enough that I could read them as soon as they happen and change that cycle to implement something that is more or better for me”. My mechanisms now are, I’ll do all sorts of things, I’ll have a conversation with someone, I’ll go and do something in the house, I will play a certain type of game on my phone for 10 minutes. I’ll go and do something else. I’ll come and do a podcast, I’ll go and write an article for work. I will do something else other than go into the fridge and make that bowl of icing sugar because that bowl of icing sugar pattern of behaviour destroyed my younger years. I was unhappy, I was unhealthy, I disliked myself. I allowed other people in my life to treat me terribly because I thought I deserved it, and I thought I deserved it because I was rattled with so much pain. So much shame. So much guilt and truly felt that I was an ugly, ugly person and that I deserve to be treated any way just to have somebody in my life and that’s my strong message to any one of you. We have the control over the coping mechanisms we choose to have, and if we are choosing coping mechanisms that make us unhappier in our life, then we need to address them now, not tomorrow, not the day after, not in a week’s time, now.

So, take the time to reflect. Are you coping effectively, are you coping in a way that is healthier for your life, are you coping in a way that might be difficult for a very short moment in time, but enhances the quality of your life. If the answer is you are not doing that, then start to make that change now.

That, my lovelies, is my first introduction to you with regards to dysfunctional behaviours, giving you some insight into my dysfunctional behaviours.

If there is anybody listening to this who has had bariatric surgery, or is thinking of having bariatric surgery and would like some support with the psychological side of it because, I promise you the majority of the process is psychological, then please do get in touch with me and I will give you the link to my private Facebook group, which is called Weight Wise. It’s a private Facebook group where we have a support group running in there. We have tools in there, we have training in there. We have lots of things in there purely aimed at supporting people with bariatric surgery and if you are thinking about surgery, you are still welcome into that group. There is a fountain of knowledge in there, amazing people in there who will be more than happy to guide you, support you through the process that you’re going to have.

For those of you who may have had surgery a long time ago and you know you’re wanting to bring your tool back into full worth again, then please do feel free to join us. We would love to have you there. I’d love to see you on one of those groups.

As always though, if you are struggling with your mental health and your psychological wellbeing in general, and you are looking for some support, then please get in touch with me.  I do work with clients on a one-to-one. I work with a very small group of clients one to one, but if I’m available and I can help you, then I will. If I’m not available, then I will happily help you find people that you can work with, but if one-to-one isn’t for you, then feel free to come and join one of my training courses.

In the next couple of weeks I have a free masterclass about 8Wise^TM running. It’s running on the 5th of October at midday UK time, and also on the 14th of October at UK midday time. That is a 90 minute online masterclass telling you all about 8Wise^TM. I will be delivering it myself so you’ll hear it directly from the horse’s mouth. It’s really about introducing you to the entire topic with a bit more detail with lots of diagrams. So, you’ve got a lot of visuals to go with it, and you’ll be able to meet lots of people while you’re doing it as well. If you can get to one of those, then that will be great.

After that, I will have two new 8Wise^TM courses starting. We have got the 8Wise^TM discovery, which is a short course basically taking you through the process that’s in the book in a very practical way. So we’ll go through in a lot more detail each of the eight elements and help you to identify where you need to start. It’s about creating your strategy for Living the 8Wise^TM Way so you can go away and do that. You can go away and create your strategy, you can create your action plan, you will know what to do. So it’s literally taking you through those first few stages of 8Wise^TM of assessing yourself, understanding why you’re assessing yourself, understanding how to identify what your core issues are right now linked to those eight elements, and then implementing strategies.

If you are somebody who really does want the full end to end support, then the 8Wise^TM accelerator is starting in January. This will be online, so you can do this anywhere in the world. It’ll be an online course delivered directly with me where we will take you through 12 modules, where step by step I will take you through exactly how you use 8Wise^TM, and I will also help you to create your own bespoke action plan and strategy moving forward. Finding the tools that help you find the techniques that help you, so you’ve got those things to work on. It really is how I would work with you in a one-to-one if I could work with everybody in a one-to-one, but I can’t work with everybody so I put the accelerator together so you can get the same system, you can get the same process and you can actually have that psychotherapeutic experience in a format that works for you and that’s going to come in January. What will happen in January, it will run for 12 weeks and the way we would do it is each week we cover a module. It gives you a week to implement the elements of those modules of that particular module, and then we start the next module the next week.

So, if you are interested in that, then please feel free to get in touch with me directly. All the email links are in the comments and notes below, so get in touch with me and keep an eye out on all of my social media because I will be putting everything out on social media there.

To register for any of my courses, you can register on Eventbrite. If you want to, you can actually go and follow my 8Wise^TM page on Eventbrite now, and then you’ll get updated when all of these new courses come out.

Now, of course, if you don’t want to come and work with me one to one or you don’t want to come and work with the training, but you’d like to learn more, then you can access the book 8Wise^TM Ways to a Healthier, Happier Mind anywhere that sells books online and you can order them to go to the shops that you choose to buy them from as well, so you can get the book anywhere 8Wise^TM Ways to a Healthier, Happier Mind. Alongside the book, you can also get a copy of the 12-week journal, which allows you to set a very specific goal and focus purely on that goal for 12 weeks.

If you are somebody who wants to commit a bit more than the first 12 weeks, then you’ve also got an option to get the 12-month planner, which really is about helping you to Live the 8Wise^TM Way for the next year. Then for those of you who just want to be able to share some information about this with your friends, family, colleagues, your staff, whatever it might be, there is the 8Wise^TM Ways Pocketbook of Wellness, which is literally tools and techniques that you can use, or they could use, to just implement little things every single day to help with their mental health and wellbeing.

So feel free to go and get any of those, and if you want more information on any of those then head to my website www.8wise.co.uk and if you’re wanting to head to my social media, then you can find me on Instagram @8Wisekim, you can find @8Wisetherapy on Facebook and and we’ve also got the 8Wise^TM Wellness Cafe on Facebook, which is where we put all of our 8Wise^TM challenges. They’re all for free, you can come in and learn to Live the 8Wise^TM Way there as well. But feel free to link up with me on Instagram, on Facebook, on Twitter, and also on LinkedIn. On LinkedIn it’s just Kim Rutherford. Everywhere else is @8Wisetherapy or @8Wisekim.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode about dysfunctional behaviour using my own experience with dysfunctional behaviours to explain it a bit better. I hope you take the time to learn yours, and I hope you take the time to master the art of creating more functional coping mechanisms for the stressful experiences you will definitely have in your life. If you’ve liked the episode please click like, please share it, please subscribe to it. I would appreciate all of those things. I created 8Wise^TM so that I could help as many people as possible who struggle with their psychological wellbeing. I set up the podcast so that I could reach as many people as possible to help with their psychological wellbeing and so people can have a better quality of life and I can’t do that without you. So, if you don’t mind liking, sharing and subscribing, that would be great. Let’s help as many people as we can.

Thank you very much for listening today. It’d be great if I can see you on the masterclass. It’d be great if I could see you on any of the training and please, if you’ve got any questions or queries, feel free to contact me. Details are all in the comments and the notes below, and I look forward to catching up with you on episode 19 next week.

Until then, take care of yourselves, look after yourselves, and I will speak to you all very, very soon. Bye for now.