Creative Status is a podcast about using creativity as a vehicle for improving your life by deconstructing ego, integrating the shadow self, and designing and manifesting a real life.
Every episode explores how the creative process can help you GROW REAL by moving towards wholeness in yourself by making the unconscious conscious.
In this compelling episode of Creative Status, we plunge into the depths of mental health and the power of self-awareness with the insightful Barry Winbolt, a seasoned therapist and writer.
As we navigate the turbulent waters of life, Barry shares his profound understanding of depression, the traps of our own minds, and the transformative potential of facing our challenges head-on.
The Illusion of Stasis: Barry dissects the deceptive nature of depression, illuminating how it convinces us of our own immobility and the necessity of challenging its narrative to rediscover life’s shore.
The Art of Letting Go: We discuss the liberating act of releasing our ego and the false identities that shackle us, enabling a return to the flow of existence and the pursuit of a life aligned with our truest selves.
From Learned Passivity to Proactive Living: Uncover the steps to break free from the paralysis of inaction and how, by embracing humility and the transient nature of life, we can reclaim our innate power to change.
Creative Status: Where Realness Guides the Way
Join us on a voyage towards REALNESS, as we learn to shed the weight of our misconceptions and sail back to the shores of authenticity and purposeful living.
Stay real out there,
Oli Anderson
(www.olianderson.co.uk)
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Episode Links:
Barry’s website: http://www.barrywinbolt.com
Barry on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/barrywinbolt
Podcast: Get a Better Handle on Life (Available on Spotify, Apple, Google, and more)
Creative Status Links:
The Creative Performance Transformation Lab: olianderson.co.uk/creativeperformance
Follow me on Instagram: instagram.com/olijanderson
My YouTube channel: youtube.com/olianderson
Get my books on Amazon: amazon.com/author/oli
7-Day Personality Transplant System Shock for Realness and Life Purpose: olianderson.co.uk/systemshock
Free one hour creative workshop to take your creative brand or project to the next level: olianderson.co.uk/creativeworkshop
Free 90-Day Journal Challenge: olianderson.co.uk/journal
The Law of Attraction for Realness (mini-course): olianderson.co.uk/lawofattraction
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Navigating the Ocean of Self (Show Transcript)
Intro
Oli Anderson: Oh, hi there, Oli Anderson here. You’re listening to Creative Status. This is a podcast about using the creative process as a vehicle for growing more real. More real just means that you’re moving to a place of deeper acceptance: Acceptance of yourself, acceptance of other people and the world, acceptance of life and the way that it works.
If you can do that, then you can put yourself in a place where your unconscious mind and your conscious mind are pointing in the same direction instead of pulling you in different directions and, making your life miserable.
Ultimately, that’s how I now see the creative process. It’s about making the unconscious conscious because it brings up things that we’ve been hiding. It helps us to face life, helps us to see how we can move in a way that is life enhancing instead of life denying.
Anyway, today’s interview is with Barry Winbolt. Barry is a therapist and a writer. he’s been doing this kind of work for a very, very long time. And he has some amazing insights about just mental health in general, how we can look after ourselves, how we can avoid depression and those kind of unsavoury emotions we break down why people may get depressed in the first place, what we can do about it.
And ultimately, this is really just a conversation about how sometimes life asks us to face difficult things and that we may be tempted to run away from them because of our programming and, our habitual ways of identifying. But if we can face them, we can really dissolve a lot of our own inattention and get back into the flow of life.
So, Barry, this was a good one. Thank you so much for your time and energy and all your insight that you’ve, garnered over the years. Everybody else, thank you for listening. Hope this helps. Here we go.Boom.
Interview
Oli Anderson: Oh, hi there, Barry. Thank you for joining me on today’s episode of Creative Status. This is gonna be. Sorry, sorry.
Barry Winbolt: Cut you off in full flow there.
Oli Anderson: It’s okay. I like to just dive right into the start and just ramble over my guests.
Barry Winbolt: Yeah. you did that very, very proficiently.
Oli Anderson: Well, thanks. I’ve had a lot of practise now.
Barry Winbolt: Yeah. Well, look, this, Oli, it’s a real privilege and a joy to be here. Absolutely. Genuinely, because to be on the delivery end and not having to do all the stuff you’re doing to get this into a podcast, it’s. I do what I prefer to do what I like doing most, which is speaking. So thank you for the opportunity.
Oli Anderson: Well, thank you for being here. What I was about to say in my little ramble was that this could, be one of those conversations that goes in absolutely any direction. I’m not quite sure where we’re going to end up. before we start kind of conversing and exploring things, do you feel like introducing yourself, telling people what you’re all about, what you do, what you care about, and also what you personally want to get out of this conversation that we’re about to have?
Barry Winbolt: Can I start with what I personally would like to get out of the conversation? It is the engagement with you. It is the meeting of minds which, not to say grand or special minds, but I am a firm believer in the fact that when people converse, when people speak, something else happens. It’s kind of like we create a meta-mind to include both of our minds and new ideas emerge. I’m looking for, I’m not actually looking, but I’m open to any sort of inspiration, new ideas, freshening up of my ideas, and adding to them that we might produce together.
That’s kind of a rather nebulous way of saying it, but I’m looking forward to it because I think good things happen when you talk, basically. And the next thing I, I’d say is that about me? Well, the short answer is I’m a psychologist, therapist, coach, conflict resolver. That’s kind, but what actually, Sorry, you’ll have to cut that bit out. I needed to clear my throat.
What it actually is, I do. Let’s start with the podcast because I’ve been, for 30 odd years I’ve been a trainer, psychologist, coach, all of those things. I’ve shied away from too many labels, but obviously I’ve needed the label of therapists. That’s been a lot of my work. And consultant has been in organisations and training, done a lot of training of people, both professionals, counsellors and social workers and people like that and also corporate people like employees, managers and so forth. That’s how I’ve earned my living for 30 odd years.
About ten years ago I thought this travelling is no fun anymore, bit less than ten years. And I decided to how can I make a living by thinking, I thought. So I googled that and there was no satisfactory answer so I had to come up with it myself. but it’s kind of morphed into that. I sit and think and then I talk and I do some radio, I do a podcast and I still see clients. And my philosophy now is if somebody stumbles across my path and I can be of use reasonably speaking, I have to protect myself as well, not just take on anything, but when therapeutically speaking somebody is there who can benefit, I think, and we start a conversation and that’s the way I work and some of those pay me and some don’t, you know, I’m working with somebody from Ukraine at the moment.
I’ve worked with people all over the world in that capacity and that people find me by various means because I’ve been around a good few years. and I suppose really my mission is, as I said summed up in the podcast, which is life doesn’t have to be like that, or get a better handle on life. Choose which title you like. The podcast title is Get A Better Handle On Life.
What really drives me is when I see how we, including me, and I’ve got an example of that, how we all screw up, but for the want of a bit of awareness or a bit of knowledge. And where I think this really shows up is in the idea that you have to be qualified to help your neighbour if it involves anything from the neck up, you know, so when people, I have met so many people, and a man in the gym sort of got me going down this path about twelve years ago, he said, no, I’ve been asked to work for victim support as a volunteer and I’d really like to do it, but I think I’m not qualified. And my hackles went up when I heard not qualified.
And I said, well, since when were you not qualified to be a human being? You know, and you’ll get training for all the rest, don’t worry about that. But compassion, support, guidance, mentorship, role model, whatever role you take in that capacity of working for victim support, you will be a role model and you will be a human being. So that kind of got me started. Now that’s a very long answer to a short question, but I hope I’ve given enough of a drift on that.
Oli Anderson: Yeah, I thought that was a great answer. You’ve opened up so many different avenues for exploration in this conversation. There’s a couple of things I love that you’ve said is this idea of not having to be qualified to be a human being. One thing I’m always saying is that real always works. Like ultimately human beings are just looking for that human connection and we can give that to others by just being real.
Ultimately, that’s all anyone is looking for, like a real connection, real experience. And there’s a kind of issue, I guess, in our culture where people buy into credentialism they think they need a certificate or a diploma or, you know, whatever it is, like a scholarship or something like that, so that they can feel qualified in the way you said, to just be human and to help people when the opportunities arise.
So 100%, there’s something there. But I think also this little phrase that you’ve thrown out there, which is kind of connected about life doesn’t always have to be like that. Life doesn’t have to be like that. Ultimately, that’s the theme of this podcast, life doesn’t have to be like that. And I think we need to clarify what we mean by that. But ultimately, I think a lot of people, they buy into all these unreal ideas because they lack awareness, ultimately, because they’re just running through life on autopilot and just following the promptings of all this cultural stuff that tells them they need to be qualified or they need to be something else other than what they are. And it causes all kinds of problems.
So maybe we can bring all this together. Like now I’m running a little bit, but what do you mean? Let’s start with that. When you say life doesn’t have to be like that, what are you talking about specifically?
Barry Winbolt: Right. With my clients, I’ll start with 30 odd years ago, I became a therapist, among other things. Excuse me. And I’ve always had kind of two parallel or two strings to my bow at any given time that don’t seem capable of just doing one thing. So I was training, in therapy, first of all, various forms, for about ten years, actually. I was very lucky for various reasons. I got exposed to all sorts of stuff, because the other string to my boat at that time was publishing and with a colleague, I’d started a psychology kind of professional journal called the therapist at the time.
And, so we got lots of offers to go places and do stuff. I was exposed to many things, and that’s very valuable when you’re training in these sort of human skills. I always say to trainees, look over the fence. People tend to buy into a model of therapy, and there are over 400 and counting, so people tend to buy into their preferred model. Initially, they become a bit evangelistic, and they want to save everybody, and they think, and I did this, of course, and then we gradually calm down and get a bit more realistic, bit more balanced. And I always say to people, look over the fence.
Don’t just buy into one model. That’s the first thing. so that was how I came to this. But I very quickly started to see people that who, but for want of a bit of knowledge, were suffering? so let’s take depression because that’s a really big problem. And I’ve specialised in depression, all my working, all my therapeutic working life, mainly because I was very fortunate to be trained to, attend a number of trainees, but principally by a guy called Doctor Michael Yapko in the states.
And he just gave me a picture that I could understand. And I’ve had depression in my life earlier when I was a teenager and after that for probably good reason. But anyway, I think I was probably depressed. but I, and I’ve had several life events when I’ve had great opportunities to be depressed, but I’ve chosen not to be because I’ve got kind of the tools now.
And so I think I can speak in a qualified way, having worked with it for 30 years. And most of what let’s just talk about the lowlands of depression, the early days, you know, the mood change, the low mood that people can’t shake off, lack, of motivation and the various other indicators, if I can call it that, one might say maybe I’m depressed, maybe I’m not. This sort of thing now at that point, social contact activity, we know what works and what works is not therapy and it’s not doctors necessarily. It is social and it’s making sure your life is balanced.
And all the stuff you talk about, Oli, you know, social, connection, being with the right people, clearing up your life. I brought this down to. It was a joke at the time when I was doing my seminars, but more and more, and I did this 20 years ago, I came up with this and more and more. I think it’s an element of truth in it, in a rather clumsy way.
And I’d say to people at the beginning of the seminar, look, I’m going to tell you how to be happy. I guarantee that I can give you the recipe. Whether you choose to use it or not is another matter. But after 30 years of experience, blah, blah, blah, I give him the big build up. 20 years, what it was at that time. And it was a joke, but it was a bit of a cliffhanger to keep people paying attention. And then right at the end of the day I would say, oh yes, by the way, and I forgot a couple of times and somebody would actually come to me and say, you forgot to tell us.
So I said, “Oh, yeah, it comes down to two simple questions or two simple steps, really, in theory”. Simple, yeah. Find out what’s bugging you and do something about it. And that, you know, jocular joking though it is. I mean, actually, you know, there’s a grain of truth in it, isn’t there? So. And I was seeing people in my clinical practise who were, bothered by something but not able to do anything about it.
Yeah, very often because they didn’t realise they could. And so their life was like that, you know, in the doldrums or one, woman I spoke to had been diagnosed with a terminal illness. you know, they crossed the board. Another person with, alcohol dependency problems, more. Less serious. Perhaps somebody wanted to stop smoking. People with relationship problems and they didn’t realise that the starting point for most of these things might only be a decision, go and get help. It might be something technical like get the right sort of help. It might be read a good, self-help book or something.
But they had kind of, relinquished responsibility for themselves because they didn’t. They didn’t realise that they could actually, If they have a conversation with the right sort of person. And it doesn’t have to be a therapist by any means, they can actually start to improve their outlook. But that conversation has to happen a certain way. or more to the point, it mustn’t happen the way they so often happen. It has to be forward looking, it has to be, curious and inquiring on the part of the person speaking to them and so forth.
So my view is, I’ve been peddling this for about ten years now, that if we could get more of this information out among people, and it’s happening in some countries, you know, they’re using sort of folk therapists in Nigeria, in India, you can find all these things on YouTube, because they haven’t got enough psychiatric or psychologically trained people. They’re training people from the village or people from the township or wherever it happens to be. And those people, for one example, is they have friendliness or friendship benches.
I’ve forgotten which African country it is. And every day at a certain time or every week, the wise woman of the village who’s been trained will pitch up and sit. Typically a woman pitch up and sit and anybody who comes along and talks to them, they get some support. Now, a large part of that we know from research is being heard. That’s the first thing. And then there may be some strategic. Well, have you tried this or have you thought about that? Have you actually said this to the person? That sort of thing. Low level stuff, common sense, day to day stuff, but oriented in such a way that it’s a bit more valuable than what your mates tell you down the pub, but beyond that it’s pretty much the same. And that’s so people find themselves in a difficult situation and that’s the. Like that, okay?
And I want to say to them, and do say to them, life doesn’t have to be like that. You can stick your head up above the parapet and look around you, but first you have to believe, and goodness knows it’s easy now with the Internet, not so easy to get the right stuff, but easy to get information. Somebody somewhere in the world has solved your problem. Find them. So when I was grieving a number of years ago, my late wife died after a long illness, and I was in a pretty unhappy state, as you can imagine. And I was getting all sorts of very unpleasant physical symptoms.
And I thought at age 20 years, give you an example. I was teaching in London at the time, at the, ah, university, and I in the afternoons, and I got the train up to London from where I live, which is about two hour train ride. I got to the Victoria station and I couldn’t stand, I saw, this is really embarrassing… I’m going to have to ask somebody to help me stand up and walk off the train. And finally, after about five minutes, I managed it.
So I was getting all these weird symptoms and eventually I found a psychiatrist, a psychologist in America, who said she understood it, she’d done research and she said it’s only with women. But you’re describing exactly the same symptoms, which is really basically the somatization of emotion that I couldn’t otherwise accept or deal with. And that doesn’t make me a failure, it’s just I have locked gate mechanism in my mind.
You give me a little bit of crap and I’ll deal with that. And then just so I’m feeling okay, it’ll hit me with some more. But in my case it tends to be physical and I’ve been through that process twice since one sort of now because my mother in law died, but that triggers all sorts of other stuff, and supporting my wife. So, you know, and I know now that if I start to get physical symptoms, I know where that is.
Oli Anderson: Yeah.
Barry Winbolt: Doesn’t mean they don’t need checking out, but I don’t panic. And so that was my little bit of, it didn’t have to be like that. I know it’s a process of time, I know that I will get over it, if you can use that term. and so on and so forth. So that’s what meant by life doesn’t have to be like that. And it’s partly driven by frustration in a society where we can’t get help anyway, and yet people still try and look for help and it’s not available, or they just don’t realise that this, and this is very common. They just don’t realise that actually there is something that could be done to help them.
Oli Anderson: Yeah, amazing. And in a way, what it comes down to is being human and embracing the human condition. And I think a lot of the time when we’re stuck in that gap between finding out what’s bugging us and doing something about it, and, getting caught up in the kind of learned passivity that comes from that, the only reason we stay stuck there is because with we’re identifying with some narrative in our heads, ultimately that’s telling us that our situation is so unique or so complex or, so convoluted that there’s nothing we can do about it. And ultimately it comes down to what you said, like, no problem is a singular thing, ultimately.
Like, first of all, there’s a state of interdependence between us and everybody else. So if we reach out for help, then we can get moving, or there are going to be people out there that have already been through the same thing and we can learn from their experiences and we can see that actually there is a way forward. And so the thing that I’ve found that keeps people stuck in a life like that is this learned sense of passivity, ultimately, which means they’re not taking action because they’re identifying with some emotional thing, let’s say, that’s causing them to hold back from the flow of life.
Or they have kind of blown everything out of proportion, again, because of some underlying emotional stuff. And it’s causing them to forget about their own power, ultimately, the power to actually get back into the flow of life by taking action, like those small steps day by day, they’re actually going to start moving them again towards flow and freedom.
For me, I think that a lot of the time when people are depressed, it’s exactly like you said. They’ve got caught up, in, that gap between finding out what’s actually bugging them or taking a good look at it, at least, and then figuring out what to do about it. They caught in that gap and it’s basically taking them away from a sense of kind of purpose and movement and momentum. But actually, when we’ve been real, that purpose and movement and momentum is always there. And so anytime we take ourselves out of it. Reality continues to move without us, but we’re basically in this state where we’re fighting against it in a passive way because of our unconscious stuff. And so if we can unblock, it by taking a good look first of all, at what’s bugging us and then deciding, right, what am I going to do about it?
We can put ourselves back into that flow. So I suppose the question for you is, does that align with how you see things and how can people, I suppose it’s a twofold question. How do people learn to be passive in the way that we’re talking about or the way that I’m ranting about? And how can they kind of decondition themselves so they can start taking action again and trusting that that’s the way forward?
Barry Winbolt: I rightly say, it’s also been called depression, the selfish disease by Michael Yapko. Because we become so self-centred, me, me, and we think nobody knows how we feel and well, nobody knows how we feel in life generally, really. But you know, we get so absorbed with our uniqueness in our pain and our self-pity and I don’t want to, I don’t want it to sound like I’m putting depression down.
I’ve been there, I’ve lived for a very long time with somebody who was depressed and I’ve watched it as a clinician and a partner. So you, you know, I’ve had close hand, including those close to me and one in particular. So I’m not judging people who get depressed, but I am frustrated by the hold it has on our societies. It’s on the increase worldwide in all developed and developing countries. And this is not explained by being a medical illness. Okay, let’s get that out of the way straight away.
It’s a sociological and cognitive syndrome, if you like, as much as anything else. Now that’s not to say that some people don’t get depressed for clinical other, you know, it’s comorbidity with something else. They get depressed because something bad has happened to them. But even that. So let’s take a man I saw some months ago had a heart attack. 53 years old, had a heart attack.
Understandably, the poor guy’s depressed because suddenly he’s learned about his own vulnerability. Active sportsman, you know, all this stuff and suddenly he’s got to rewrite his maps and how he lives his life. So quite reasonable to be depressed at a time like that. It goes on for six months, for a year maybe. It’s not so reasonable anymore. Maybe he could do something about it. But to say that that was a choice of his, to be depressed. Of course it wasn’t. It was a, if you like, it’s an evolutionary development. He needed to be at that time to withdraw and reflect and remap his terrain. But that doesn’t mean that he can trust his thoughts. And that’s what I mean by the logic of depression, that depression lies to you. You know, it’s quite clear, and it tells you all of those things we’ve talked about.
You know, you’re unique. It’s your problem. Da da da. So I think to some extent, we have to understand the metaphor I’ve used lately, because I was speaking to somebody, we lived near the sea. So I speak to somebody who was a bit boaty. And I said, well, have you ever been rowing, out on the water in some way in a hand powered craft, a boat or a kayak? And you can see the shore, but the current’s against you or the tide is against it. Doesn’t matter how hard you paddle.
You can see the shore. So, you know, eventually, if you’ve got any familiarity, that you’ll either find a way of zigzagging, tacking, or the type will change or something will happen and you’ve still got hope. You will get to the shore because you can see it but as soon as you’re out of sight, as soon as you’re over the horizon, it’s a much more hopeless situation and I think that’s what depression is like.
When I was very depressed after my lake rift died, I knew the shore was there. I wasn’t on it, and I didn’t feel like going to it. Because that’s the other thing about depression. It’s very persuasive. But I knew it was there. it’s kind of like I had a handhold on something, an alternative way of life. But truly, seriously, deeply depressed people don’t even know there is another place to be, another way of being. They’ve forgotten that.
Oli Anderson: Yeah.
Barry Winbolt: You know, they would have been like it all their lives. They would have had moments where they were not depressed. But they will be unable to grasp that, or remember it or relive it, because if they could, they could start to move towards it. And that’s really the role of therapy, I think so. I seem to be talking a lot. So have I answered the question?
Oli Anderson: Yeah, I think so. The question ultimately was like, how do people find themselves in that gap where they’ve basically learned a kind of passivity that stops them from kind of paddling back towards that shore. And I think, you’ve said that there’s various reasons why that can be.
Like, ultimately, there is an evolutionary advantage to being depressed in the short term. but then eventually we can identify, I think, too much with all of the thoughts and the distortions and the resistance just getting back to the shore that the depression shows us. And for me, that’s why it always comes down to the same thing, which is that when we’re depressed or we’re anxious or we’ve got some emotional thing going on inside of us that doesn’t feel that good for a prolonged period, then we’ve ultimately lost our view of reality.
So I suppose in the metaphor that you just shared, reality is just the shot. It’s always there. Like, it’s always, always there. Like, reality can’t go anywhere. But if we’re lost in our thoughts and the ocean of emotional stuff that’s kind of holding us back, then the situation just gets worse and worse and worse. The more that we cling to the boat, so to speak, and try and stay where we are. And I think the only way out is exactly what you said.
To start to basically remember that the shore is there and to find a path back to it. And I think therapy can help if it’s not just one of those therapeutic, interventions where people are just talking about the problem. So it’s like, you know, what does the boat look like and how disagreeable. Yeah, all that stuff. We need a vision, basically, is how I see it. We need a vision for what we want to do. Let’s say once we’ve returned to the shore. The reason the vision is so important is because we can design it based around what we remember about who we are in our most real moments, like our true values and our true intentions and all that stuff.
It puts us back into the flow of life. I keep using this phrase, or the flux of life. Like, life is always, always moving. We’re always moving towards wholeness, but we block it behind cognitive concepts and identifications, basically, that put obstacles in the path that actually aren’t there. There’s something that we’ve thrown in our own path, basically as a way of surviving in the short term.
But in the long term, if we stay out at sea for too long, then we’re basically just going to deplete in terms of our energy levels and our motivation and everything. And, life becomes like that. And so I suppose the question now is, how do you think we can get back to the shore without therapy and things like that? Is it even possible, as you understand it? Like, in my own life, I’ve been really depressed, like, at times, and I’ve never had therapy or anything like that. Like, never.
I’ve had some coaching and things, but in general, I’ve never done the talking therapy thing or anything like that. And I’ve found just by, I suppose, taking responsibility for my life is the short version, and just incrementally building a bridge, let’s say, back to the shore, then I’ve been able to get to a place where I feel better than ever, ultimately. But obviously what worked for me isn’t going to work for everyone. It’s not like a one size fits all thing. But I suppose, yeah, like, how do we get back to the shore? How do we start getting back to the shore?
Barry Winbolt: Well, first of all. Sorry.
Oli Anderson: Sorry. No, no, I was just going to say by ourselves, if possible.
Barry Winbolt: Yeah, if by ourselves, or possibly with our close ones, with our families or, you know, people we trust, that type of thing. I think you’ve really nailed it, actually. We use slightly different language, but the first thing is understanding. I call it getting over ourselves. you’re nothing. While I was writing my first book, I couldn’t finish it. I couldn’t even start it. I’d spent the advance, until I persuaded myself. I suddenly realised one day that probably nobody’s going to read it. And then I just. I flew through it.
It was some sort of I didn’t know what it was. It was being intimidated by the idea of putting this stuff on paper. It was a non-fiction book, by the way. It was about photography, so it was hardly great, art. And once I got a perspective. Look, this is a small publisher who’s going to buy this book. I’ve been paid for it. Just do the job, deliver the goods and take the money. M and so once I got that in my head, so I got a perspective.
And, you know, the Buddhist idea that we’re all great grains of sand, I think, or that were insignificant in the universe. It’s good to remember that. It’s good to be humble about our own sense of place in the world, which is nowhere, you know, nobody cares. Nothing cares about you. And now that sounds very harsh and blunt, but it’s not a bad starting point. I would certainly say that of myself.
Now, I know I’ve got people who care for me, but if I’m so full of myself that I think that I am important and I deserve stuff. I only deserve stuff on my own merit. I deserve stuff that I work towards, you know, I mean, you might say that I deserve respect of other people. I think we’d all like to say that. Yeah, but you don’t get respect unless you are respectful. You know, it’s not something you get with your job position or a title or a bigger car. You get respect not from people who matter anyway. You get respect because you’ve earned it.
And so, you know, that’s where I’m coming from when I’m saying getting over ourselves, just getting a sense of how minute we are in the grand scheme of things, and spending some time with ourselves and thinking what it is, our, true values. How do we want to show up in the world, as people say these days, and what do we want to represent and what fits with our values? And to come back to a question, you know, how do we get from what’s being called this sleepwalking state or this sleep and this state of non-awareness?
And I want to make it clear, I’m not talking about depression anymore at this point because, as I said, I think it’s a slightly special case because it’s harder to break free from, because of the logic of depression that goes with it, that’s constantly trying to keep you stuck where you are. And I really do present it often to clients as an adversarial position. I don’t like terms about beating or winning, but negativity loves, you know, I mean, what is it? What do they say? I don’t know, something about negativity loves company or something like that.
Oli Anderson: Misery loves company.
Barry Winbolt: Yeah, that’s the one. Yeah. And so it is in ourselves, you know, depression wants us to stay where we are. Thank you very much. And so we do have to do something, to break away from it.
Oli Anderson: Yeah.
Barry Winbolt: Now I was speaking to a guy yesterday who is 24. He’s a, motivational guy in Denmark called, Daniel Hauger. And very impressive guy. 24 years old, history. Father died at 13. He mentioned at the end, because I asked him about his support structure and he said his mum and his little brother. Now this guy has made such a transformation in his own life from being a druggie 16 year old to having an epiphany to doing what he does now at 24. And I naturally wanted to know how he’d done that. And he did it; I think he used sport quite a lot.
He did it through, a decision he looked forward into the life he wanted. He wanted a good, quality life and he wanted to. Not a mediocre life, as he described it. And he knew the path he was on was potentially disastrous. So he took the decision to change. And he said it wasn’t easy. I had to change my friends, had to change the people I hung around with. I slipped back a few times. I read every self help book I could, get. I enlisted my mother and my brother, who were very, very helpful and supportive. Best mother and brother in the world, he said.
So it was a slog, but it started with him realising, even if he couldn’t see the shore, he knew it was there. And then he took the steps. So I think if I’ve understood the question, then there’s only one place to start, and that’s with yourself. And that’s with being brave enough to think. Maybe everything I’ve thought up until now, or anything I’ve thought up to now, maybe that’s not the only way. And once again, life doesn’t have to be like that. What if. A really powerful question is what if, you know, if you can’t see a different life? And I use this a lot in my work.
Well, you know, this, that and the other, and nothing is any good, and blah, blah, blah. Well, what if it was? Well, it wouldn’t be, would it? Because blah, blah, blah. Yeah, but what if it was? And just keep going with what if it was? And not everybody can do it. Actually, some people are so sort of blocked up that they can’t get there and they just get irritated. And irritated isn’t bad either, by the way, but. So I think we have to realise there is a different way of being. We don’t know about how to get to it yet, but we have to accept that our, current reality is not serving us well. Does that answer the question?
Oli Anderson: Yeah, very well. I think it all comes down to this idea that you have to lose yourself to find yourself. I think depression is a special case, like you said. But the reason it’s special is because the volume on the problem has been turned all the way up. And what I mean by that is the main problem that stops us from returning to the shore or moving towards the life that we actually want to be living. That is possible in many cases, is our ego, the false self-image that we have picked up because of underlying shame, guilt and trauma and all this stuff that causes us to become fragmented within ourselves.
The more strongly we are attached to that image, the more we end up falling into the self-centred nature of depression, as you described it earlier. And ultimately the reason we become self-centred when we depressed m in the clinical sense or in the extreme sense, we become self, centred. Because ultimately, the battle that you’ve mentioned between this idea in our minds that’s causing us to believe that we’re stuck, that everything is static, that we can’t grow, we can’t change, there’s no hope, all of those kind of things. That battle is actually just our old identity fighting to keep its hold over us, even though reality is calling us to move in a different direction.
And the more we cling to that identity, the more friction that we bring between ourselves and ourselves, between ourselves and others and between ourselves and life itself. But because people are scared to kind of lose themselves, to find themselves and then get back in the flow, that battle ultimately causes them to freeze up. And, that’s how you get the learned passivity and all the stuff that we’ve been talking about. And so the way forward, ultimately, is humility.
Like, you kind of alluded to this in your answer. Like, ultimately, humility means, I believe now at least accepting the truth about life. The truth is embracing all of these kind of facts that I, like the one you mentioned. Like, ultimately, we are a lot more insignificant than we may originally believe. At first, when we become aware of that and have to start accepting it, it seems kind of terrifying. Like, oh, my God, I’m insignificant, people don’t care, whatever, blah, blah, blah.
Actually, it’s a gift. Like, if you’re insignificant, like, you’ve learned in your own case with the writing, you can free yourself up because you don’t have to worry about being judged. Another one is that we’re all going to die one day. Like, at first that seems like a kind of depressing thing, but actually, if we’re going to die one day, then again, we can kind of loosen up a little bit because we realise, okay, things are changing, I need to grow with it and I can let go of this and I can let go of that, etcetera.
It’s all about stepping into the humility of accepting that life keeps changing, that it’s not within our control. And so we don’t need to be a big hero who’s in charge of everything, nor do we need to be like a victim who rolls over and kind of tries to escape from these facts. And the humility, basically is putting is in alignment with not being omniscient, not being omnipotent, but kind of learning to trust and go with the flow in the way that you’ve kind of talked about.
So we can get to the other side of the, ocean, so to speak, and find the shore again. And I think it all comes down to identity, basically, if you attach to your identity too much, then when something bad happens, you’re going to get very depressed because you’re not going to go through the grieving process. But if you can let go of it and get over yourself, then probably things are going to be okay because you’ll put yourself back in touch with reality and then you can be responding, you can be responsive with life. Sorry. Rather than just reacting to it based on all that old conditioning, something like that. That’s how I see it, in it.
Barry Winbolt: Well, I think, you know, that. That’s all. I’d agree with all of that. And I think the thing about it is that, ah, we come back to this fundamental idea of non-awareness. You know, many people, well, first of all, in this country, particularly the UK, I’m m talking about now, we pooh pooh the idea of personal development. We’re terrified of psychology.
I’d go to a party, I’d never tell anybody I’m a psychologist or a counsellor, because the first thing they do is they find the other counsellor in the room and chances are we’ll be diametrically approached to each other in our thinking because the other one will be somebody who thinks it’s great to talk about the problem ad nauseam. Which I think is fundamentally immoral, actually. If people want to talk about the problem, that’s fine. But every time they repeat it, repeat it, repeat the story, you know what happens. So it just gets reinforced.
So I think that’s not to say there aren’t some very good analytical therapists out there. I don’t mean that, I don’t mean to pooh pooh it, but, you know, a bit light heartedly when I say, but it has happened several times. Oh. So and so is a therapist or a coach, you must meet them. And, chances are we got nothing to talk about because we’re all pretty individual in our…We’re all trying to carve off a furrow of a living somewhere, and we very readily see competition where it isn’t and all that. So I think, quite often, people, when you say you’re a psychological therapist, people think they put meanings onto that, like, oh, you’re going to analyse me, are you? No.
There are so many different types of psychologists anyway; it’s just a natural term. so I think, yes, I certainly agree with those ideas, but the thing I hear is notions of responsibility, people very quickly get into, and don’t ask me how they make the leap, because I never have in my own life.
If you imply there’s a choice somehow to some people that equates to blame, that they’re not doing something right, and it’s blameworthy, which is part of the problem, of course, that you’re describing, which is all the baggage they bring with them and that sort of thing, you have to be open to realising that whatever the words that are used, the concept, you know, change the words, fine, you don’t like responsibility, use self-awareness or whatever, but, you know, it’s, don’t rebel against a bit of language when basically the idea is a good one. And I do think, too, that there’s been a tendency.
There is still a tendency, probably, but I’m not as active out there in the world as I was. I do most of my work online now, so I don’t go to conferences as much as I did and that sort of thing. But there is a tendency to, over sympathise, over empathise with people’s plight. And of course, when we see a person who has a plight, whatever it is, or is in plight, whatever the expression is, we lay straight away our own interpretation of that.
So I had a scary health related event not so long ago, and I remember when my late wife died, soon shared the diagnosis, and, that meant probably she wasn’t going to be very well for quite a long time, probably would die, although we didn’t know that at the time. Straight away, she got the address book out and she put a red line through about 50% of it and said, I’m not going to speak to these people for the duration of this illness, because I know they won’t deal with it, because what do people do?
They start telling you, you tell somebody, oh, I’ve had a condition. Oh, is it cancer? Oh, yeah, my sister in law had that. She died, and these sorts of. And I think it’s probably stress or worry on their part, but all the wrong stuff comes out. And so she quickly weeded them out. And I think there is a tendency when we put forward our vulnerability, our, you know, the thing we fear, and there may be a lot of shame under it, there may be trauma, as you say, we’ve spent a lifetime keeping it at arm’s length, or mostly. And of course, that’s very tiring as well.
Oli Anderson: Yeah.
Barry Winbolt: You know, it’s burning up energy for nothing, fighting with ourselves. And the moment you open your arms and welcome it in. Sounds terrifying, but works for me every time because suddenly it’s not such a big problem.
Oli Anderson: Yeah.
Barry Winbolt: And then it can start to become something to deal with.
Oli Anderson: That’s an amazing way to sum all this up. There’s a quote that I loved by Joseph Campbell. He said, well, I think he was quoting like, an old proverb or something, but anyway, he said, when the angel of death appears, it’s terrifying, but when it reaches you, it’s bliss. And I think that’s ultimately what’s going on in a lot of these cases.
Like, things are calling for us to start moving again and it seems terrifying because of what’s going on beneath the surface. But when we do actually reach the shore to keep this metaphor going, it is bliss because we get back in the flow of light.
So, Barry, we’ve covered a lot to say we didn’t know where we were going to go. Can you quickly tell people where they can find you online?
Barry Winbolt: Certainly. yes, thank you. My website is barrywindbolt.com, and that’s Winbolt, w I n for November, bolt.com, because occasionally people put an m in. Well, often they do. That’s Winbolt, and, barrywinbolt.com, that’s my website, YouTube. You’ll find me same name, Barry Wimble. the podcast is called get a better handle on life and that is on the usual platform, Spotify, Apple, Google, that sort of thing.
But if you google it, it’ll come up and. But you’d probably better to say get a better handle podcast. Better handle on Life podcast to Google because otherwise all sorts of other stuff comes up. So that’s where you can find me. And, you know, I’m always happy to chat to people if they want to chew, over some of these ideas.
Oli Anderson: That’s awesome. I’ll share all your links in the show notes as well, so it’ll be easier for people to find. But Barry, thank you so much for this conversation. It’s been a good one. And, let’s keep paddling to the shore, so to speak, and, staying real. So thanks again.
Barry Winbolt: Well, thanks for the opportunity, Oli. It’s really, really, I was going to say inspiring. Well, it is, but it gets overused, doesn’t it? But it’s true. So thank you. I’ve enjoyed the conversation immensely.
Oli Anderson: Thank you again.