Greenpath Ventures; "Inspirational" and "Visionary"

The cost of mental health problems to the economy in England is estimated to be £105 billion a year.

Centre for Mental Health (2011), The Economic and Social Costs of Mental Health Problems in 2009/10.

Greenpath Ventures (GV) works with many professionals and organisations, who simply "get it!"; being outside and involved with nature is good for both your mental and physical health. Here's some further information to confirm it! MIND Ecotherapy.

However, it's also very sad to say, the idea of offering people with mental health issues the opportunity to undertake bushcraft is not meet with enthusiasm on all sides! When we first started out and people asked what the individuals would be doing on our bushcraft days, and I explained; "firelighting, foraging, learning to use cutting tools, archery and maybe even shooting", quite a few professionals were very skeptical and sometimes even hostile.

Here's an example of some of the things that were said to me:
 

• "The activities are too dangerous for them; you can’t let mental patients use knives and fire”

•  “They have a history of arson, so don’t show them how to start fires”

• “We (as in the clinical staff) are responsible for them, they can't come, they may have an accident”

•  “We (as in the clinical staff) have to look after them and ensure they are safe”

• “They self harm, so shouldn’t be shown how to use knives or axes”

• “They have mental health problems, what would happen if people heard they had been shooting airguns?”

Now, I do understand some of the concerns and the reasoning behind some of these statements; I tried to explain that everything we did was under supervision and that we carried out risk assessments for every session, but sadly in the minds of some professionals, clients with  mental health issues could not be trusted enough to attend our courses. 

This smacks to me of sheer blatant discrimination against adults who actually have "mental capacity"!

The MCA says:

• Everyone has the right to make his or her own decisions. Health and care professionals should always assume an individual has the capacity to make a decision themselves, unless it is proved otherwise through a capacity assessment.
• Individuals must be given help to make a decision themselves. This might include, for example, providing the person with information in a format that is easier for them to understand. 
•  Just because someone makes what those caring for them consider to be an "unwise" decision, they should not be treated as lacking the capacity to make that decision. Everyone has the right to make their own life choices, where they have the capacity to do so.

The clients wanted to come, we were having fantastic feedback and the outcomes were exactly what clinicians would want. People were saying they felt responsible and trusted, it was improving their confidence & self-esteem and their mental health was improving. Regularly, people were saying our courses should be offered by the NHS as they were helping so much. How awful, that regardless of all these positives, people were often being denied the opportunity to attend because of the preconceived ideas of some health care professionals. So much for all the hyperbole of "client led services". 

This also smacks, to me, of encouraging "learnt helplessness"; when clients were on our courses professionals would continue to treat them as incapable of looking after themselves, telling them to put their jackets on because it was raining. How was this approach helping people learn to become more responsible for themselves? People were often being treated as helpless and this is itself disempowering. Very simply; we treated people like adults and they responded as adults.

Nevertheless, GV was on a role! Including going into schools we were working with over 1,000 people per year, everything was going well. We had been members of ATTEND, from our very beginning and we were invited to be a showcase project at their AGM at Westminster Palace, London.

Funders and partners were describing our charity as "visionary" and "inspirational".

Unfortunately, I was about to get some bad news which would dramatically affect GV.

Please take a look at our website and "like" us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/greenpathventures/

Knawing Self-Doubt

Worldwide, approximately 40 million children below the age of 15 are subjected to child abuse each year. (World Health Organization (WHO) 2001)

I started training to become a therapist, but felt a fraud. Could someone as damaged as I had been really become a counsellor or psychotherapist? The old feelings of not being good enough started to creep back in and undermine me.

Despite all the positive feedback I had from the tutors I had nagging doubts which I took to my counsellor. He said he saw the qualities I needed in me and that even if I couldn't trust myself, maybe, I could trust the trust others had in me. So I borrowed that for a while and continued.

I felt I needed to talk to one of my tutors openly about my reservations and doubts about myself. I disclosed my abuse and ongoing battle with the depression and OCD. The tutor said these issues should not prevent me becoming a therapist and that he had had the same history and conditions. For a while a huge weight was taken off my shoulders, I could do this I started to say to myself. I completed my 2 year Psychotherapy Certificate with a merit. 

The doubts remained; I felt I needed more training and continued adding one more course after another. Always dismissing the last one I had obtained, "If I had managed to get it, then it couldn't be that good or useful" I kept telling myself. The ruminations of self-doubt and lack of self-belief continued to haunt me. I had proven time and time again that I was capable of passing academic and vocational training, why then did this self-doubt persist? 

I feel this is one of the more insidious aspects of abuse, the ongoing lack of innate core self-belief & self-value and not placing any value in what you achieve. Always striving for something external to provide that recognition or affirmation that you are achieving or are "good enough". 

I sincerely hope the above does not simply sound like me whining away; the reality for many survivors is that these negative core beliefs continue to operate long after the abuse has finished. They have become part of our identity. We have held onto them for years and they were instrumental in our development into adulthood.

My counselling had come to an end and had helped me enormously, but now I needed more than ever to take what I had learnt from that process, live it, believe it and continue to claw back everything that had been taken away from me.

I had believed that completing the counselling would have meant completely recovering from abuse and that I would have no issues left. What I hadn't appreciated was that I would need to continue with the battles for many more years. There was more work to do and it seemed that many of the issues would only be dealt with through time and perseverance.   

I also came to the conclusion that recovery doesn't flow in the one positive direction; you bounce back and forward, from victim to survivor to thriver to victim. 

This is true for everyone, regardless of being abused or not; everyone has victim days;

"Why did I chose this shopping aisle?.... The other ones are always faster" 
"Why is it always the motorway lane that I'm in that gets congested?"
"This always happens to me!".

I often use the following diagram to see what voice is talking in my head.

It was during this period that it became clearer to me and my girlfriend that we were not happy at all living in London, I was still bumping into old friends (and their habits), it was the right time for us to move away and rebuild our lives.