Donna Maria Bottomley

he story that my brain constructed for this event based on what it knows from my prior experience is a variation of impostor syndrome.

e cannot alter the fact that our brain makes predictions, but we can start to change why it predicts things in that way, and we can decide how we interpret the effects of that prediction.

Thank you for being so patient over the past year as I stressed about this book! You are my world and I love you very much.

I would also like to acknowledge the clients I have had the honour of sitting with over the years. You may think I have forgotten you but I have not. I often think of you and wonder how you are.

LIST OF FIGURES
AND TABLES

Imagine placing a lemon onto a chopping board and slicing your knife through the bulging yellow belly of the fruit. You cut the lemon in half, and then half again. Then you pick up one of the quarters and bring it to your lips, biting into the sharp flesh and sucking the juice. Pause there. What do you notice in your body right now? Is there a little bit more saliva in your mouth? Did you move your lips slightly, or pucker them? Did your upper body pull back at the thought of biting into the lemon? Notice these small events that are happening in your body right now.

Where is the lemon? It doesn’t exist: you imagined it; you visualized it. Yet your body reacted as if it were real.

Your brain just made a ‘simulation’. It represented what you deliberately imagined and what you know about lemons to simulate the experience of biting into that slice of lemon. You may have had other thoughts or memories pop up. For example, I’ve just had a memory of throwing out some bad lemons that were green and powdery. But when I wrote the first draft of this paragraph a tasty memory of the smell and feeling

There has been some research showing that the brain gets a hit of dopamine (the reward chemical) when we put something off.

There have been damning statistics showing that black men are judged much more harshly by the psychiatric system, and as a result are logically going to find it very difficult to seek help.

particularly a fear of judgement (Topkaya, 2015)

Sadly, the way that the brain then retrieves memories where we have had the same feeling, means that we are likely to have other thoughts and images and feelings which we may label as ‘failure’ and then this can colour the way we see the present. We can then become stuck in low mood and feeling like everything we do is a failure.

We also need more emotional ‘granularity’ (Barrett, 2017): more words for describing how we feel, so we can choose from a wider range. At the moment we have a limited vocabulary to use to describe our struggles.