It’s never too late for older people to tackle personal issues

A new book by Operation Transformation’s Dr Eddie Murphy helps older people to come to terms with emotional struggles, says Margaret Jennings.

LOTS of us go through life pretending to be someone else — hiding behind a mask, afraid to be real — but it’s never too late to take that disguise off, according to RTÉ’s Operation Transformation clinical psychologist, Dr Eddie Murphy.

In between that mask and the ‘real’ person is a gap that is a breeding ground for negative emotions — which is why people end up struggling with a variety of issues in life.

In his new book Becoming Your Real Self: A practical toolkit for managing life’s challenges, he lists those main emotional struggles as stress, depression, anxiety, anger, low self-esteem, social anxiety, and emotional eating.

And while offering readers a hopeful message with self-help tools to change, he argues that being emotionally unwell is the underlying factor to a lot of physical illness and pain, with 50% of all GP visits being psychological in origin.

For older people who may be afraid to seek out therapy, he has a particular message of hope: “Some of the biggest changes I have seen made are from those who come later in life.”

He mentions one 78-year-old woman who had been so unhappy she told him she had a rope in her shed, ready to use when the opportunity arose. “This woman had experienced a lot of trauma in her life and had been hospitalised over the years for depression. She came to therapy because of memory loss — which can be linked to anxiety — and she also presented with low mood.

“She spoke of being hurt by an adult as a child and had been treated for depression all her life, when it was in fact the trauma that was there all along. When she opened up about it, the depression lifted significantly.”

With this woman’s treatment, Murphy said he applied some of the tools from his book — building an authentic relationship, listening to her life story, sifting through her thinking patterns, and encouraging her to be compassionate to herself.

His book, Dr Murphy says, is an attempt to give readers an opportunity to be privy to what happens in his therapy room; slowing down, taking off the mask, so that they can “look inside”.

“The work in the therapy rooms is about shifting people away from an array of negative emotions — fear, sadness, low confidence, stress, anger, low self-esteem — to a place where they are free, authentic, contented, powerful, confident, humble, wise, and compassionate,” he says.

However, quite often older people need a trigger to get them to cross that therapy threshold. Unlike younger people who tend to Google issues and have a desire to “fix it”, he says, those aged 50 and upwards, who might for instance have had bouts of depression, hold the belief that it’s part of their life; that change isn’t possible.

In the book, he offers “pathways” of transformation, from stress to relaxation; from depression to hope; anxiety to freedom; anger to calm; low self-esteem to self-worth; social anxiety to confidence; and emotional eating to self-control.

Many present with grief or loss late in life. It could be the suicide of an adult child or the loss of a partner or parent.

“Then there are parents who are carrying the stresses of their older children. They may have taken out a loan on their behalf — very prevalent at the moment. Or the employed adult children who aren’t contributing to the household and the mother gets roared at when she challenges the situation.”

This involves “teasing out a pathway to assertiveness, through the complex family issues”.

“There are also women who are left caring for their grandchildren. They love them, but they don’t want to be committed to minding them — but they don’t know how to negotiate the situation. They don’t know how to express it, so they suppress it and then they get quite angry.

But for the many who suffer in silence and pain, Dr Murphy says: “The key is that it’s never too late. With older people who have mental and emotional issues, they sometimes have put them into a box and wrapped it up and put it into a back room.

“They are afraid to open it up because they have come from a history — from their parents or grandparents, where there was a stigma attached to being unwell. And they definitely won’t go near it because they are afraid it will only get worse.

“However older people do very well in therapy. They can bring wisdom, resources, a capacity to be more reflective, and good social supports.”

And of course a starting point to gently easing that mask off might be to read his forthcoming self-help guide.

* Becoming Your Real Self, published by Penguin Ireland, €16.99, is available on February 26