Celebrating is searching for and appreciating those things about yourself that are positive--qualities, skills, parts of your body or mind, successes you've had. Celebrating will usually take the form of listing and enjoying whatever you are focusing on. Celebration is a positive focus technique, a way of working from strengths. It will act to strengthen a person's self esteem and enable them to have their strengths and skills more readily available for use.
Ask most people to spend three minutes talking about their skills and strengths and they have difficulty lasting one minute. Why is this? Well ,try it for yourself and see what makes it difficult for you. What are the interfering thoughts?
Whatever the reasons, most people seem to find it easier to concentrate on the negatives about themselves and to devalue themselves--in thought, word and deed. This applies even to many who appear outwardly successful and confident. Examined from the point of view of an outside observer, these devaluations usually appear irrational. They also actively take time and attention away from whatever the person is trying to do, acting as interference.
This interference means that whenever you notice yourself spending time thinking such things as: "I'm a slow learner," "Other people must be fed up/ impatient with me," "I'm not going to get it done in time," then you will be doing a worse job than you are actually capable of. In addition, you will probably spend time afterwards reliving all the ways in which you made a mess of things, even when you cannot change them. This time spent being distressed will be taken from other tasks or pleasures.
By noticing and celebrating your skills and successes you will enable yourself to use all your abilities to the full. The techniques for doing this are all varieties of self validation. It is important to realise that they do not have to produce Discharge to be effective, though they will do so at times. To celebrate yourself, formulate an unqualified appreciation of yourself. This doesn't mean it has to be 100% true; anything that is more than 50% true can be used.
Celebration is useful both at the beginning and end of a co-counselling session: at the beginning it will help ensure that you are tackling your distress from a position of strength; at the end of a session celebration will help you return to the present time and to tackling your life with vigour and enjoyment. Celebration need not be restricted to sessions; use it whenever you notice you are thinking or saying things which devalue yourself.
USE YOUR NAME. Associate your name with your strengths; get used to saying it every time you validate or celebrate yourself. E.g. "I'm Richard, I'm CARING, CREATIVE, COMPETENT." Your name will then become an easily available reminder of your strengths, and enable you to call on them in difficult situations. If your name at the moment is really associated with a lot of negative distress, then try CHANGING it. Otherwise every time you hear your name you will be reminded of distress.
Start celebrating with the things about yourself that you feel most happy with, even if that isn't saying much. Concentrate on one at a time and work on noticing and removing the qualifications that you put in. These may be words like, "usually," "sometimes," "except when ..." or they may be non-verbal--snorts, sniffs, inaudible voice, drooping posture etc.
You can gradually celebrate more and more about yourself. When in your life you notice something worth celebrating about yourself, write it down. It's amazing how easily the old negative approach induces forgetting of the positives. Keep a diary perhaps just for 'News and Goods' and celebrations of yourself. Make celebratory posters with your name and all the celebrations you can think of noted on them. We always enjoy the colourful variety and ingenuity when we ask people to do them on courses. Many people are surprised by the artistic talents they show. Note, however, that composing the posters is not intended as an artistic competition. Nor should interpretations of your own or of other's posters be offered. (Examples of celebration posters done by us in March 1981 appear below; we do them frequently)
Find out the things you like about your body and begin celebrating. Take different parts of your body and try to find something you like about each one; your body works very hard for you and it will function even better if you appreciate it. We have taught our daughter to appreciate her body, explaining how pain isn't the fault of the piece that's hurting. It will be trying to do a good job of healing what is wrong. This healing can be helped by being appreciative of what your body is doing and hindered by being nasty to ourselves and complaining about the part that hurts.
Do not forget your mind. Celebrate that too. Everyone has the ability to learn new things, to remember far more than they need and to be creative, or at least, that's how they are born. If you want to recover more of these abilities then start celebrating your mind.
Celebrating others is a powerful aid to use with your client when you are counsellor, but can also be powerful to use as friend, colleague, or parent. Our culture makes it permissible to focus on the dreadful things in life and leave the pleasant things unsaid. Check this out with yourself. How frequently do you verbalise appreciations of others and how frequently do you criticise and put others down?
We found that we had to learn the skills of celebrating others. We suddenly became aware that we had always appreciated our daughter, from her birth, but didn't do the same with each other. An important point is that celebrating others does not mean being insincere or pretending, but searching for the things that can be appreciated about that person.
One way to use a co-counselling group to practice celebrating others is to set up a CELEBRATION CIRCLE. This will help everyone concerned to push against the Patterns which stop us doing more of this in everyday life. You form a circle, and someone celebrates the person on their left. That person then celebrates the person on their left, and so on, all round the circle.
When you are doing the celebrating, take time to think carefully and caringly; remember that even when you are more aware of the Patterns than of the Person, the Person is definitely there. When you are receiving the celebration take time to savour and appreciate. Experiment by saying "Of course," warmly, confidently, openly, and let any laughter escape. If you do think what you've received is inaccurate, don't argue, note the topic for later counselling.
Celebrating differences is a highly subversive idea. Differences are usually threatening: differences of opinions, of cultures, of organisation. We seem to live in a culture where everything has to be graded as superior or inferior, we win or we lose; there is no concept of peerness in any area of life. Again this is not saying that differences of skills and strengths should be ignored or ironed out, but that everyone should be encouraged to fully develop themselves.
How is it possible to give more than lip service to individual differences--to celebrate those differences? The first requirement is to be able to celebrate ourselves. This will enable us to develop a strong self which is not dependent on the approval of others for support. Only from a base of this kind is it possible to be safe and unthreatened by differences and to begin to delight in sharing the richness of differences with others. Only when we are able to celebrate our differences can we really have a sense of unity, rather than conformity to social norms arising from threat of punishment.
Special Place exercises, which are described in Part IV, are also important in celebrating our strengths and making them readily available in times of crisis.
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