Therapy or change work does not always have to be restricted to the therapy couch or counselling room.

Many of us have good friends who have great advice or push our buttons in a way that makes us reflect on what we are doing in certain aspects of our lives.

It’s not always what we want to hear but for me it’s not always the advice but how we react and then how we constructively respond that moves us forward.

Something I know I do is over analysis or counter argue ideas or facts.

This can be great in some ways because I can see other perspectives. The problem comes when it keeps me stuck.

Something I noticed on reflection yesterday was how when a good friend was breaking my balls, was my internal response to her ‘humble opinion’ as she put it.

My first line of defence was attack.

My heckles went up and I got all the physical feelings of being under attack, which often shows, what the person has said resonates with you at some level!

I’m a big believer in writing your rage down because it traps it and stops it running around in your head and winding you up even more! I call it ‘thought fly paper’.

However in this instance I wasn’t capturing my thoughts, I was building my defence.

I grabbed my pad and went to work on my response.

One of the things that occurred to me after I had written my argument winning response and theories that would make me right, was that I was spending all my time and creative juices in attack but still staying stuck.

I thought if I spent this time – (an hour of angry writing) – on finding out  what I do want, and what it is at this present moment that is making me want to fight, then that’s got to be a better idea.

I was spending my time trying to be right, rather than looking at how I could be better.

Many of us see the world from our own perspective and it’s easy to make others wrong.

We can spend our time blaming people and circumstances and wind up in a spiral of self-destruction, anger and resentment.

It’s certainly a lot easier to blame others and victimise ourselves, but I found yesterday it was a lot less tiring when I stopped attacking and started looking internally at what was really going on for me and how I could change it to get a positive outcome.