Trackdown

How often have you watched a film, or maybe read or listened to a book where you strongly identified with the main protagonist or another key character.

Many of us will have a favourite character in a book or film from our childhood that feels like us in some way or maybe you haven’t ever thought about it like that and yet now when you think back there maybe someone fictional or real that feels familiar in some way.

If so have a think about the storyline or threads of these stories and if there are underlying themes playing out. Do these reflect any themes at play in your life to date? Is that why you feel some sort of connection?

Personally, I have always felt a little like Dorothy in the ‘Wizard of Oz’ and also like Penny Robinson in the original ‘Lost in Space’ and when I was training I was taught a model to explore recurrent threads and my relationship to these characters and to my family by Trevor Silvester at The Quest Institute, some of which is also based on the model of Transactional analysis which helps us to understand how we filter and respond to the world around us by breaking down our behaviours and of those around us into parent, adult and child behaviours.

It really helped me to understand my relationships with my family better and what I liked or didn’t like about them and how they may have felt about me. Those family stories which become part and parcel of who we are and how we relate to the world around us. How we know we are OK….or not and how we can use this.

The original Penny was creative, intelligent and prone to getting lost in her imagination. This often got her in trouble. I could also see the same in Dorothy. It has given me a base to look at myself in ways that have given me more objectivity both outwardly from myself and inwardly from those around me. It can be surprisingly useful with my clients too and has opened the door to many insights for us both.

Just one of the many tools and techniques I have learned in my training and in practice to help us know ourselves better and therefore to understand that our behaviours are not who we are, and use this as a basis for change.