F**k It Therapy

by John C. Parkin

  Shift your perspective. Just realizing that the very idea of long-long-term relationships is, practically speaking, quite a new one, and the reality is, statistically speaking, pretty grim, shifts your perspective. Shift your perspective, too, from backward or forward looking (either looking back at your dodgy past relationship experiences or creating weighty expectations of future relationships) to present looking, just seeing how things are now, and working with that.

  Tune in and listen to yourself and the reality of relationships. What are you really feeling about this relationship and your role in it? Tune into your partner, too. Start (if you don’t already) talking to them about how you and they feel, but generally and about your relationship. If you really, consciously, gently, tune in, you’ll get a huge amount of information about what’s going on.

  Trust the messages you get. If when you finally slow down and tune in to how you feel about your relationship, every part of you screams with fury about how hopeless and miserable you are in this place, then trust the irrefutable truth of this. It’s time to stop ignoring it. And the opposite holds, too. If you spend your days bickering with each other, but when you tune in (to yourself and each other), you find you really still love your partner deeply, then listen to that, trust that, and work out ways to sort out that bickering.

  Follow wherever these messages take you. And this takes a lot of F**k It courage. Following might well take you right out of a dysfunctional, miserable relationship. Doing so might well mean you saying F**k It to what others might think of you, or what will happen to your partner, or what will happen to you outside of the relationship. But sometimes it needs to be done. If kids are involved, it clearly becomes even more difficult and painful. But we know many people who have left families, or been left with the kids, who are doing fine, and often better in the new situation than they were in the old. The kids, too; it’s always difficult to judge, but we all know how difficult it must be to grow up with warring parents. And following (what you’re trusting is the strong message you get when you tune in) might also lead you deeper into the present relationship, bringing freshness, and new ideas, acceptance, and renewal.

  There are no rules. There’s just a process.

  Us? We certainly don’t have an idyllic relationship, as some people might believe. They see the best of us, usually. But we do love each other very much. We do live with the underlying assumption that we’re together for better or for worse. We do, even in the crappy bits, know that we’ll come through it together.

  But none of this means it’s easy.

  Yesterday we pretty much despised each other. Neither of us could really imagine how it could work. Everything we do drives the other one barmy. Whatever we talk about bores the other one silly. Gaia lives in a different world from me. She has different priorities. She’s heart; I’m head. She’s late; I’m punctual. She’s spontaneous; I plan. She is sad when I’m happy. And she’s happy when I’m sad. Her yin resents my yang. My yang tramples on her yin. Her yang ignores my yin. My yin is drowned out by her yang. It’s all gone to shit. There’s no hope.

  And today we realize that we love each other deeply. And all that stuff from yesterday seems like a distant bad dream, as if someone else was saying and feeling it. How could I have felt something so deeply, so painfully, yesterday, but don’t feel any of it today? It feels now like that was surface disturbance on a pool that is deep and lovely and fine.

  We realized, as we talked about it this morning, that we both, at times, get into our own particular deepest fears, and then see the fear manifesting before us in the form of the other person. So, not only are we presented with our deepest fears manifest, but also they’re manifested in the form of our partner, to whom we’re practically inextricably bound. And as I wrote that I had a peculiar image. It’s like being allergic to feathers and worrying all the time that somehow you’ll come into contact with feathers, then realizing that you’re married to a duck. Or, in the image that I had in my head (which is not unpleasant, I have to say), of my partner covered in feathers. ‘Achoo,’ but ‘he-llo.’

  So Gaia was playing out the behavior that I most fear in someone. And I was playing out hers. As we look back on it, we realize that the very fear of it amplified the behavior in the other that was triggering the fear. A vicious circle of fear of feathers, feathers sprouting, and sneezing.

  Nice ending? Who knows? It feels great today, but tomorrow? F**k It, that’s all part of the game. Who knows?

  BEING FREE IN WELLBEING TOWN

  Bloody hell, I’m starting to write this chapter while stuffing my face with a bar of chocolate. Bad boy, John. At least grab a salad leaf if you’re going to be writing about wellbeing. But I don’t have any at hand. All I have is the rest of this choccie bar. And I can’t have it lying around. It’ll melt, or something dangerous like that.

  Wellbeing. That a funny construction, isn’t it? I wonder how that came about? (I’m not Wi-Fi’d up at the moment, so I can’t Google it, sorry). Someone sitting there thinking there’s really no word for the whole wide area of wellness, feeling well… something that denotes a state of mind as well as body… of really being well… aha, I know WELLBEING. And why has no one else picked up on this snappy construction? Sexybeing, coolbeing, hotbeing… ah, that’s why.

  I’m sitting here writing this right next to a ‘Wellbeing Center’ – a spa, really. Though when I’m in there I do feel really well. You can’t help it while lolling around in hot water or steam, or being massaged, or sitting on a strong jet in the hot tub.

  Now, I’m going to do something I haven’t (intentionally) done much of in this book: refer back to the original F**k It book. I’ve avoided references because a) I wanted those of you who hadn’t read the first one to be able to read this one happily without thinking you had to buy and read the first one in a kind of subtle sales pitch (I don’t do subtle: That First F**k It Book is Totally Excellent and Makes the Perfect Companion to This One. After all, 250,000 PEOPLE CAN’T BE WRONG! SMILEY. LOL. EXCLAMATION MARK. SMILEY.)

  And b) because I didn’t want those of you who had read the first book (available in all good bookstores and, of course, on Amazon) to think we were going over the same ground.

  The thing is, what I wrote in the first one about food, health, and wellbeing was pretty good, but I’ve since had seven years’ experience with how it all works in reality. And I’m going to share that now.

  So, in a nutshell, I basically said that the best thing to do is to lose your tension around the whole wellbeing thing (and, thanks to the guy who invented that phrase, we can roll into this heading: exercise, food, health issues, etc.). With food, for example, it’s the tension around the thought that we’re too heavy (or too light, but usually too heavy) that makes us do the silly things we all do; namely, subject ourselves to difficult-to-keep eating regimes, then break them and eat the cupboards and refrigerator bare. We yo-yo because we’re so-so tense about our weight.

  Say no-no to yo-yo.

  The idea was that, if we could only relax around food, our weight might stabilize. Sure, we probably wouldn’t lose a huge amount of weight (though we might lose some), but we wouldn’t put on any more weight either. This was the F**k It Diet. It didn’t mean saying F**k It and eating the contents of the house until you’re fat as a house. It meant chilling out about food, chilled and heated.

  And the same went for exercise. It’s the tension around exercise – the thought that we feel we really OUGHT to do more exercise (or do some exercise) – that creates the same start–stop mentality. We don’t exercise because we like exercising, we do so because we think we have to. Just like a diet, we do it for a while, because we have the best intentions. But the pain is too hard to bear over a long period, so we stop altogether. Look at the business models of gyms if you want confirmation of how most people approach exercise. Gyms make the most of people’s good intentions (by getting them to sign up with hefty join-up fees and binding monthly payments) and still milk it when the e
nthusiasm has long gone (because stopping your membership shows you’ve given up). It’s a beautiful business model based on the triumph of hope over reality. They cash in on your wonderful, positive hope that, this time, it will be different.

  So, I invited the readers to relax around this feeling of obligation to exercise… to give up on the idea that you have to do it, and to see instead when you want to do it. To see if, when you do only the exercise you really fancy doing, you might actually exercise more than you do than when you commit yourself to a get-fit regime.

  And when it came to health issues, I told my story: I desperately wanted to be well for years, had tried everything, I’d even moved countries in order to fix my health. But that this very desire to be well (or ‘whole,’ as the holistic nomenclature would have it) created a tension in me that, very likely, helped keep me in tension. The moment (and it was a specific moment) that I said F**k It to the idea of being completely well in my life, when I realized that my life was pretty good anyway, that I had a lot to be grateful for, and should stop putting off happiness until something rather unlikely had happened…then something rather unlikely happened – I got better. Dramatically better. Within six months I was better than I had been in 20 years. I wrote F**k It that summer, sitting in the relief and loveliness of being fully well for the first time since I was a teenager.

  That’s what I wrote. And here’s what I’ve learned since.

  FOOD

  Eating what I wanted, when I wanted, meant that my diet became pretty balanced. I moved from yo-yo nutrition (periods of very healthy to periods of snack rubbish) to balanced nutrition. I would eat snacks occasionally, burgers occasionally, a can of cola occasionally, but generally maintained a very balanced diet. My weight moved up slightly and remained pretty much consistent when I was eating the F**k It Diet. Whenever I did any kind of diet, it would drop down then shoot up higher than where I’d started. I found that F**k It Eating was a great maintenance diet actually (contrary to what you might think of it, as a sure-fire way to weight gain).

  Here’s the thing, though. I decided that I did want to be thinner, permanently. So I decided to apply F**k It ideas to dieting. I decided to say F**k It and really go for it with diets. If a diet didn’t work for me, I’d dump it and try another one. And I’ve found that most diets don’t really work for me, smiley, LOL, that my weight always shoots up. The most effective thing I found was Alternate Day Fasting, where you do what it says on the label (i.e. ,The can says Eat Me one day, but Don’t Eat Me the next). It’s apparently very, very good for your body (and if you’re a mouse or rat it means you live a lot longer than you otherwise would). But it’s BLOODY difficult to do. I thought it was easier at the beginning – the idea is that you squeeze your diet pain into a limited period, then relax on the other day. But that one day of fasting is very hard. Break it and, given that you’re eating more calories on the eating day, it all goes askew again. Anyway, I liked that one, but I just couldn’t stick to it for more than a couple of weeks. And my weight would then drift up again immediately.

  So I consciously gave up again. And put out the message for a new way of eating to land on my doorstep (preferably next to a steaming pizza delivery box). And one did. It involves food combining (i.e., not combining proteins and carbs) and a host of other stuff. It involves eating as much as you want, as long at you stick to certain principles. And any diet that involves the same words as you’d find on the window of a downtown, downmarket Chinese buffet restaurant – EAT AS MUCH AS YOU WANT – has my vote. And it works. It really does. I lost weight, slacked off, put a bit back on, but my weight has now leveled out at a lower level. But I like this one. It’s something I can do, isn’t too painful (it’s not super-easy either), and works. Next time I write a book I’ll tell you how it went in the long-term.

  So, we now have two F**k It approaches to food:

  The F**k It eating regime, which may not make you any lighter but will probably help you to maintain your weight and get you out of that nasty yo-yo merry-go-round (a mixing of metaphors there that could make for quite an interesting evening out – using long-stringed yo-yos on fast-moving merry-go-rounds)…

  The F**k It, I WILL find a way that works for me to lose some of these extra pounds (the F**k It quality there, as well as in the determination, is to refuse to be a victim and settle for repeated defeats – ‘Oh, diets just don’t work for me, it has to be my genes’ – but to keep at it until you find something that’s perfect for you).

  EXERCISE

  It works. Since doing what I wanted, exercise-wise, I’ve done more. Sometimes I exercise very inconsistently, but I’ve certainly done more. I got into running. I loved it. But didn’t feel like it in the winter, so I stopped. But I really felt like it again the next spring. I didn’t go out again because I felt I had to, or because I’d decided I was now a runner (even if just a fair-weather one), but because I just wanted to… I couldn’t really stop myself, actually; I just wanted to run. Like I now really fancy going for a walk for an hour, so I will.

  I’m back. Try it. This is F**k It in action (literally, in action and inaction). This is putting the six principles into action: you open to a new way of exercising; you relax around the obligation to exercise; you shift your perspective and realize it could work just as well; you tune in and only exercise when you fancy and how you fancy; you trust that that message has value, and you follow it up by getting off your arse when the whim takes you; and staying on your arse when that whim takes you.

  AND HEALTH

  Well, that was tough. I’ll tell you what happened. I loved being well. Even though I seemed to have gotten to the point of being well by accepting the state I was in, it was obviously so much better being well. So, of course, I got scared that I’d get sick again. I knew there was this lingering tension and fear that I’d get sick. I got through another winter and summer feeling great… but then the next winter, I got really sick again. Crikey, what a shock. It hit me hard. I wondered if that was it, if the spell was broken, if I’d now return to being chronically sick again. But, come spring, I got better again and was clear all summer. So now I was thinking, Ah, this is a winter thing then, oh well, and I got tense again as we went into September. But I was fine, completely fine. In fact, since then I’ve been pretty well. During the winter, if I work too hard, I might relapse a little. But generally things are okay. And after seven years I suppose that the fear of returning to the bad old days has dissipated, too. And, of course, because I’m more relaxed about it, I’m more likely to stay well.

  One thing I did notice – and I’ve talked to other people with similar healing experiences who say the same thing – is that I’ve constantly tried to reconstruct why I got better so dramatically in the first place. Was it really just because I’d let go? Or was it a combination of that and the diet I was on at the time? Or was it the place we were staying? I’d wrack my brain trying to piece together the exact circumstances so that I could reproduce them if required. And when the need arose, i.e., when I got sick again, I did try to re-create some of those circumstances again. But nothing seemed to work in the same way. I realized – though it took me a while – that you couldn’t re-create anything in the same way ever again. My body was different by the time it got sick again, my mind was different, and my environment was subtly different. I had changed and the world had changed. And though the sickness was similar (it was never, in truth, exactly the same), the ways to alleviate the sickness would always have to be different.

  As I think about it now, I suppose the learning for me has been that – yes, the ‘letting go’ was very important – probably critical at that time – but the ongoing lesson is that nothing specific is the answer. It’s a combination of just ‘being there’ to what’s going on in the moment, and then listening to any strong messages that arise in that moment.

  And, funnily enough, this book represents that shift, too: from the idea that F**k It is about letting go and relaxing (which it is, of course) to a
wider idea that F**k It is an all-embracing presence in the face of whatever’s happening (tension, relaxation, good, bad, wellness, and sickness).

  I said ‘F**k It’ – and lost weight

  Diets do not work. I have tried all of them. Been there, done that: tons of cabbage soup, Atkins, metabolic balance… In fact, I was on my first diet at six months old – my family already thought I was too big. And this ran like a thread through my adolescence, puberty, and up to my 30s. A beautiful girl BUT with too much gold on her hips and her belly… I have never felt beautiful, just miserable about my weight and not being strong enough to slim down… misery!

  Then the book F**k It. The Ultimate Spiritual Way came to me by chance. When I read ‘say F**k It to dieting,’ my first thought was that this would never work… but I was so tired of trying hard that I gave the idea of just letting go and eating what I wanted a chance.

  I started to just say F**k It and swore to myself never ever to go on a f**king diet again in my life. It was not easy at the beginning – my fear was I’d grow fat until I looked like a stranded whale… but the relief of never dieting again was bigger and my fear slowly turned into confidence… And I also started to tell myself how beautiful, lovable, adorable, wonderful, and sexy I am… that actually I AM gorgeous and perfect the way I am!

  So… at first I gained some more kilos (no panic), but then, slowly, step-by-step, my body started to change. And the kilos started to come off… And in total I have lost 7kg just by saying F**k it!