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Riviera Counselling Service, 12 Dickeson Lane, Bairnsdale (2026)

03/10/2026

This weekend I am attending the Glasser International Conference. I realised in talking to people that many had missed the information that I have created a music album of songs based squarely in Choice Theory. I was asked to post it again. This music is designed to be a relaxing reminder on choice theory principles, but has enough meat in it to be used as an excellent adjunct to the teaching of choice theory. We all need to remember that people learn in many ways and learning through songs and music is often over looked for adults. Happy listening and with my blessings, please use this with anyone you would like to share the concepts of choice theory.

03/10/2026

The Middle Way to Deal With Cancer
From this week’s Gippsland Weekend column, if you like this post, please share with others. You can read many more useful articles for free. Click here to find articles in my Blog. https://rivieracounselling.com.au/snippets-of-useful.../

Long term readers will know I have metastatic prostate cancer. My PSA levels are steadily worsening and unless something changes, and perhaps a new cure is found, this disease will shorten my life. I don't like that reality, but pretending it isn't there won't change it, the middle way involves acceptance.

Living with cancer has taught me something about the choices we make when confronted by circumstances we cannot control. At one extreme, it would be easy to give in. I could spend my days thinking about cancer, frightening myself about what might happen next, becoming angry at the unfairness of it all or gradually withdrawing from the things that make life worthwhile. I could throw in the towel, reach for alcohol or drugs to blur the anxiety and allow cancer to take over my life long before it takes my life. At the other extreme is the equally understandable temptation to become desperate to find a cure.

The internet provides an almost endless supply of supposed cures, supplements, special diets, herbs, fasting regimes and treatments that someone claims will cure cancer. When you're dealing with a life-threatening condition, the words "this might save your life" are enormously tempting. There is always one more person who knows best what you should do and is quick to tell you, even though it is very unhelpful and can add to the stress. Desperation can send us floundering from one supposed answer to another, spending money, worrying constantly and measuring our lives by the latest blood test. I think there is a middle way.

Acceptance means taking my cancer seriously without allowing it to become the central purpose of my life. I stay informed, I monitor my PSA and I talk with my doctors. I exercise, eat well and take an interest in credible research and new treatments. There are things I can do that improve my health and perhaps my prospects, so I choose to do them, but then I get on with living. I still work, write, exercise, ride my bike, run and kayak. I spend time with people I care about. I am involved in projects that excite me and hopefully contribute something useful to other people's lives. Cancer comes along for the ride, but I don't intend to let it drive the car.

None of this means I am endlessly positive. There are times when another worsening PSA result causes a sinking feeling in my stomach. Of course I have thoughts about what lies ahead and I would much rather not have cancer, but there is an important distinction between acknowledging those feelings and building my life around them. I cannot choose whether I have cancer today. I cannot control what my next PSA result will be, nor can I control what eventually happens to me. What I do have considerably more influence over is what I do with today.

That is the middle way: neither surrendering to cancer nor spending every waking hour desperately trying to defeat it. Life has always been uncertain for all of us, cancer simply makes that uncertainty much more immediate and impossible to ignore. While I will continue doing sensible things to stay alive, I don't intend to become so preoccupied with staying alive that I forget to live, and today I still have a life worth living.

28/09/2026

Why Do We Take Things So Personally?

From the latest East Regional View newspaper column, if you like this post, please share with others. You can read many more useful articles for free. Click here to find articles in my Blog. https://rivieracounselling.com.au/snippets-of-useful.../

Thanks for the question J. Have you ever walked into a room, said hello to someone and received little more than a grunt in return? What did you think when they did that? Perhaps, What have I done? Why is she upset with me? Or maybe, Well, if that's the way he wants to be, I won't bother talking to him either. Then, sometime later, you discover that the person had just received some bad news, had a splitting headache or was simply having a terrible day, it had nothing at all to do with you.

We humans are remarkably good at taking things personally. Someone doesn't return our call, disagrees with something we've said, doesn't invite us somewhere or seems unusually quiet, and we quickly construct a story about what it means. The interesting thing is that we don't respond directly to what happened, we respond to what we think happened. Someone not returning my call is simply someone not returning my call. Everything after that, they're ignoring me, they're angry with me, they don't value me, is my interpretation, and many interpretations are wrong.

Of course, sometimes behaviour definitely is directed at us. Someone may criticise us, reject us or say something deliberately hurtful, but even then we have choices about what we do next. One of the traps we fall into is allowing another person's opinion of us to become our opinion of ourselves. If someone thinks I'm selfish, that doesn’t automatically make me selfish. If someone doesn't like me, that doesn’t mean I'm unlikeable and if someone disagrees with me, does one of us have to be in the wrong?
Everyone sees the world through their own experiences, beliefs, expectations and wants, just as we do. Their judgement of me tells me something about how they see me, it doesn't tell me who I am.

This becomes particularly important in close relationships. When our partner is unhappy, we can immediately become defensive because we hear their unhappiness as criticism. Instead of listening to “I felt hurt when that happened,” we hear “You're a bad partner.” they are two very different statements. If we can resist the urge to defend ourselves, we might instead ask them to, “Tell me what upset you.” That response can completely change the conversation.

Perhaps the biggest issue is to find out why we take things personally in the first place, often it is because something important to us feels threatened. We want to belong, we want to feel loved, respected, capable and significant. When someone's behaviour appears to challenge any of those things, our emotional response can be surprisingly strong.

The answer isn't to stop caring what anybody thinks, relationships matter and sometimes what others have to say is valuable. The skill is learning to find useful information in what they are saying, even if it seems to be criticism, blame or judgement. We can't control what other people think about us, what mood they're in or what they say, but we do have considerable influence over what happens next. Sometimes the most useful thing we can choose is simply not to make somebody else's behaviour all about us.

21/09/2026

Have We Forgotten How to Tolerate Discomfort?
From this week’s Gippsland Weekend column, if you like this post, please share with others. You can read many more useful articles for free. Click here to find articles in my Blog. https://rivieracounselling.com.au/snippets-of-useful.../

We spend an enormous amount of time trying to make ourselves comfortable. We heat our homes when we're cold, cool them when we're hot, take tablets when something hurts and reach for our phones the moment we're bored. If something leads to us feeling anxious, uncomfortable or unhappy, our learned reaction is often to try to make the feeling go away. There is nothing particularly wrong with wanting to be comfortable, the problem occurs when we start believing that being uncomfortable means something is wrong.

Life is uncomfortable sometimes. Relationships can be uncomfortable, learning something new can also be uncomfortable, exercise can be uncomfortable. Being told something we don't want to hear is uncomfortable, as is apologising, admitting we were wrong, waiting for something we want, dealing with disappointment or having a difficult conversation. One of the most important skills anyone can learn is not how to avoid discomfort, but how to successfully deal with it.
I wonder if, in our understandable desire to protect ourselves and others from distress, we have begun to confuse discomfort with harm. They are not the same thing. A child who loses a game may be disappointed, but disappointment isn't harmful. A teenager who isn't invited to a party may feel rejected, but removing every possibility of rejection won't prepare them for adult life. An employee receiving respectful feedback may feel uncomfortable, but that feedback may be exactly what helps them grow. The same applies to relationships.

If my partner says something I disagree with, I don't have to immediately convince them they're wrong. If they are unhappy with something I've done, I don't have to defend myself before I've even listened. I can tolerate the discomfort long enough to become curious, I can ask "Tell me more. Why is this important to you?" That's a very different response from trying to make the uncomfortable feeling disappear. We have far more control over our own behaviour than we have over the world around us. We can't guarantee that people will like us, agree with us, include us or behave as we would like them to. We can't arrange life so that we never experience disappointment, frustration, sadness or uncertainty. What we can do is learn how to respond to those experiences.

Confidence and resilience don't usually develop before we face something difficult, they develop because we face it. Each time we experience discomfort and discover that we can manage it, we add another little piece of evidence that says, “I can handle this.”

This is particularly important for parents, our instinct can be to rescue our children when they are struggling. Sometimes they genuinely need our help, but often the greatest gift we can give them is our confidence that they can work through the difficulty themselves. We can support without rescuing. The goal isn't to deliberately make life difficult, nor is it to ignore genuine distress or harm. It is simply to recognise that an uncomfortable feeling isn't necessarily an emergency. Sometimes discomfort is simply the feeling of growing. Instead of always asking, "How can I make this feeling go away?" a more useful question might be: "What can I learn about myself from how I choose to deal with it?"

21/09/2026

This is a just released paperback edition of my ebook "Becoming a High Quality Leader" It is available now on Amazon.

15/09/2026

Should I Try to Make My Children Happy?
From the latest East Regional View newspaper column, if you like this post, please share with others. You can read many more useful articles for free. Click here to find articles in my Blog. https://rivieracounselling.com.au/snippets-of-useful.../

Thanks for the Question G. Most parents would probably say that they want their children, no matter how old they are, to be happy. It sounds like a wonderful goal, but perhaps we need to think carefully what we mean by it. There is a big difference between wanting our children to have happy, fulfilling lives, and believing it is our job to make them happy.

If we take responsibility for our children's happiness, we can easily find ourselves trying to remove anything they are unhappy about. We solve their problems, protect them from disappointment, give in when they become upset and sometimes fight battles they could and probably should have fought themselves. We do it with the very best of intentions, but the problem is that this is not really helpful to them in the long run.
Our children will experience disappointment, they won't always be chosen for the team, friends will sometimes let them down, or they will fail at things they desperately wanted to succeed at. Someone else will get the job they wanted, eventually, they may even fall in love with someone who doesn't love them back the way they do. We can't prevent these things, and I'm not sure we should try. Our job isn't to make our children happy, but to help them learn how to create a satisfying life for themselves.

That starts very, very early. When a young child says, “I'm bored”, we don't necessarily need to find something for them to do. When they don't get invited to a birthday party, we can comfort them without trying to fix it. When they forget their homework, experiencing the consequences teaches them more than Mum or Dad rushing back to school with it to save them. This doesn't mean abandoning children to deal with everything alone. Children need enormous amounts of love, security, guidance and support and they also need reasonable boundaries, but they need something else as well. They need to learn to take responsibility for their own lives.

One of the greatest gifts we can give children is the understanding that while they cannot always choose what happens to them, they do have a choice about what they do next. Instead of immediately solving a problem for them, we might ask, “What do you think you could do?” Instead of trying to stop them feeling disappointed, we can listen, love them and allow them to be disappointed. Instead of saying, “I'll sort this out”, perhaps we can ask, “Can I help you work out what you want to do?” The important message underneath all those responses is “I believe you are capable.” Ironically, constantly trying to make children happy will unintentionally communicate the opposite: “You can't cope with this, so I need to fix it for you.”

Children don't develop resilience through never experiencing difficulty, they develop it by discovering that difficulty is uncomfortable, but manageable. Clearly then, the goal of parenting isn't to keep a child happy. It is gradually helping that dependent little person become a capable adult who can love and be loved, make decisions, cope with disappointment, enjoy life, take responsibility and find their own way through difficult times and experience plenty of happiness as they do. Ultimately happiness isn't something we can give our children, but we can give them the skills, relationships and confidence that help them discover how to create happiness for themselves. See less

06/09/2026

Are We Using Boundaries to Avoid Learning How to Get Along?From this week’s Gippsland Weekend column, if you like this post, please share with others. You can read many more useful articles for free. Click here to find articles in my Blog. https://rivieracounselling.com.au/snippets-of-useful.../

Are We Using Boundaries to Avoid Learning How to Get Along?
The word boundary has become part of our everyday language. We are encouraged to set boundaries with our partners, our children, our parents, our friends and even our workmates. Generally speaking, this is a good thing. Healthy boundaries are important, but I believe we sometimes misunderstand what a boundary actually is.

A genuine boundary is about what I will do, not about controlling what you must do. Consider these two statements: “You aren't allowed to speak to me like that.” Or “If we're shouting at each other, I'm going to stop the conversation and try again when we're calmer.” They sound similar, but there is an important difference. The first is really a direction to the other person: You must change your behaviour. The second is a decision about my own behaviour: This is what I am going to do. That might seem like splitting hairs, but it goes to the heart of how we get along with other people.

We live in a world full of people who don't always behave the way we would like them to. Our partners will sometimes disappoint us, friends will occasionally let us down, family members will say things we disagree with, workmates will irritate us. That's called being human. Increasingly however, I hear people describe almost any uncomfortable interaction as someone “crossing my boundaries”. Sometimes they clearly have. Abuse, intimidation, coercion, persistent disrespect and unwanted physical or sexual behaviour are obvious examples where strong boundaries are essential, but being disagreed with isn't a boundary violation. Neither is being disappointed, challenged, annoyed or hearing something we don't particularly want to hear.

Sometimes what we are experiencing is simply conflict, and conflict is an inevitable part of every relationship. No two people need or want exactly the same things or think exactly the same way or see every situation from exactly the same perspective. The danger comes when boundaries become walls. If every disagreement results in us protecting our position by blocking someone, walking away or removing people from our lives, we may become very good at avoiding conflict without ever becoming particularly good at resolving it. Strong relationships aren't built by two people who never upset each other. They are built by people who gradually learn how to disagree, listen, negotiate, apologise, forgive and repair.

When we think that someone has crossed a boundary we could ask ourselves, “Am I protecting myself from genuinely harmful behaviour, or am I trying to make this person behave the way I want them to?” There is an enormous difference, I can't control what you say, think, believe or do. I can though, tell you what I need, and I can explain how your behaviour impacts me. I can also ask whether we can find a better way forward, but ultimately I need to decide what I will do. That's my boundary. Everything else is simply an attempt to control someone else dressed up in fashionable language. The healthiest boundaries aren’t about keeping people out, instead they help us learn how to live together.

30/08/2026

When Perfect Gets in the Way of Love
From this week’s East Regional View newspaper column, if you like this post, please share with others. You can read many more useful articles for free. Click here to find articles in my Blog. https://rivieracounselling.com.au/snippets-of-useful.../

Q Am I enough? Thanks for the question F, I had a client who shared with me that their partner had listed a huge number of admirable traits… but finished stating that wasn’t enough for them. I started thinking about the damage that perfectionism does to relationships, because this wasn’t the first example I have come across. Most of us have some idea of the person we would like to share our life with. We want someone kind, trustworthy, interesting and affectionate, someone who shares enough of our values to make life together enjoyable. There is nothing wrong with having such a picture, the problem occurs when this becomes perfectionism.

Perfectionism makes finding a partner extraordinarily difficult because we stop asking, “Could I build a happy life with this person?” and start asking, “Do they tick every box?” And there is always another box! They are attractive, but not quite attractive enough. They are caring, but perhaps a little too quiet. They have a good job, but don't earn quite enough. They make us laugh, but we don't share all the same interests. They are wonderful in ten different ways, but we focus on the eleventh that isn't quite right. The trouble is that we end up spending our lives searching for someone who doesn't exist.

Everyone carries around an internal picture of the people, experiences and things we believe will make our lives satisfying. The closer someone seems to fit that picture, the more attracted we are likely to feel towards them, but that picture isn't reality. Real people come with strengths, weaknesses, habits, histories and irritating little quirks, and so do we.

Perfectionism will cause even more problems once we are in a relationship. We may begin with the thought, “I love this person,” but gradually move towards, “I would be happier if only they would change. “If only they were tidier, more affectionate, communicated better, were more ambitious, more organised, more spontaneous or more like us. And that is when perfectionism becomes controlling. We begin criticising, nagging, complaining, blaming or withdrawing affection in an attempt to push our partner towards our preferred version of them.

Unfortunately, the more we try to change another person, the more likely they are to resist us. The relationship slowly becomes a battleground over who the other person should be.
Healthy relationships require us to distinguish between what really matters and what we would simply prefer. Kindness matters, trust matters, respect matters, feeling physically and emotionally safe matters and being able to talk through differences matters. Whether someone stacks the dishwasher exactly the way we do doesn't.

Successful couples are not two perfectly matched people, they are two imperfect people who have learned how to accept their differences while continuing to value what they have together. This doesn't mean accepting behaviour that is destructive or abandoning our own needs. It means recognising that we cannot create the perfect partner by changing another person. We can only decide how we will behave within the relationship.

Perhaps one of the most useful questions we can ask ourselves is not, “Is this person everything I want?” It is: “Is what we have together worth valuing, nurturing and building upon?” Searching for the perfect relationship prevents us from recognising the very good one sitting right in front of us.

25/08/2026

How Volunteering is Good for Everyone
From this week’s East Regional View newspaper column, if you like this post, please share with others. You can read many more useful articles for free. Click here to find articles in my Blog. https://rivieracounselling.com.au/snippets-of-useful.../

With the retirement of Aaron Lee from his position of Captain of the Bairnsdale Fire Brigade, I began to ponder the role of volunteers in our community. We often think of volunteering as something we do for other people, we give our time to the local sporting club, CFA, school, community organisation, op shop or service group because somebody needs to do the work. What we sometimes overlook is that we receive just as much as the people we are helping.

Human beings have some very basic needs. We need to feel that we belong, that we matter, that we have some influence over our lives, that we can enjoy ourselves and that we have a degree of freedom to make our own choices. Volunteering can help satisfy every one of these needs. Perhaps the most obvious is our need for connection and belonging. When we volunteer, we become part of something. We meet people we may never otherwise have met and work alongside people of different ages, occupations and backgrounds. Over time acquaintances often become friends and the organisation becomes part of our social world.

Research supports what many volunteers already know from experience. Volunteering is associated with greater life satisfaction, happiness, self-esteem and mental wellbeing, with social connection and a sense of purpose appearing to be particularly important. There is also something very satisfying about knowing we are useful. We all need to experience a sense of personal worth and achievement. Being able to say, “I helped make that happen,” whether it was running a junior football match, helping at a school fete, fighting a bushfire or simply making someone a cup of tea, can give us a genuine sense of purpose. Interestingly, research in rural Victoria found that volunteers described exactly these sorts of benefits: stronger social connections, a greater sense of belonging, opportunities to give something back and the feeling of being part of something bigger than themselves, but volunteering doesn't just benefit the volunteer.

Strong communities are built through relationships. Every time people work together voluntarily, they create connections between people who might otherwise remain strangers. Those connections gradually build trust. We begin to recognise one another, understand one another and develop the feeling that this is our community and we look after each other. That is what we mean by community cohesion. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare identifies volunteering as one of the important ways people connect with others and contribute to their communities. Social connection, belonging and community involvement are themselves important contributors to wellbeing.

This becomes particularly important during difficult times. Communities with strong networks of volunteers already have relationships, trust and ways of working together. When fires, floods, personal tragedy or other challenges arrive, those connections matter enormously. Of course, volunteering needs to remain a choice, if people feel pressured, taken for granted or overloaded, something valuable can quickly become another burden. Successful volunteer organisations recognise this, they value people, give them meaningful choices and make volunteering enjoyable.

To Aaron and all of the other volunteers in our community I say a heartfelt thank you. Without you there would be no community, just a collection of strangers living near each other, and all of our lives would be much worse off.

19/08/2026

We love each other, so why do we fight?
One of the things that often saddens couples is how they can genuinely love each other yet fight so bitterly. We tend to assume that if we really loved each other we wouldn't fight, but the truth is often quite different. It is probably impossible to have a close relationship without conflict, fortunately, it is very possible to have one without fighting.

We are all different, while we share the same five basic needs of survival, love and belonging, power or achievement, freedom and fun, we don't experience them to the same degree. We also develop very different pictures in our minds of how we would like our needs to be met and our lives to be. One person may have a high need for love and belonging and want to spend lots of time together, while their partner may have a stronger need for freedom and value time alone. One may want to save every spare dollar while the other wants to travel and enjoy life while they can. Neither is necessarily right or wrong, they simply want different things and that is where conflict arises.

The real trouble begins when we decide that the way to resolve our differences is to change the other person, we call this external control, and most of us have been practising it all of our lives. We criticise, blame, complain, nag, threaten, punish or sometimes withdraw from the other person, unconsciously thinking that if we apply enough pressure they will eventually see things our way. Of course while we are busy trying to control them, they are equally busy trying to control us, so now we have a fight. Interestingly, the fight is often no longer about the original problem, it becomes about winning. Being right, defending ourselves, or proving that the other person is wrong becomes the priority. Unfortunately, even if we win those battles, our relationship usually loses.

There is another way. Instead of thinking, “How do I get you to do what I want?”, we can ask, “How can we find a way forward that respects what both of us want?” That doesn't mean giving in and it doesn't mean pretending something doesn't matter when it does, nor does it mean avoiding difficult conversations. Good relationships require us to talk about difficult things.

The difference is that we stop seeing our partner as the problem and begin seeing the issue as something we need to solve together. Conflict handled this way can actually strengthen a relationship. Each time we manage a disagreement without attacking, blaming or trying to control each other, we learn something very important about our relationship. We learn that it is safe and normal to disagree. We discover that I can tell you what matters to me, you can tell me what matters to you, and neither of us needs to destroy the other person's position in order to protect our own. That builds trust, and trust allows love to grow.

Instead of measuring a successful relationship by how rarely couples disagree we should look at how rarely they fight. People who share their lives are going to have different needs, wants and opinions, conflict is inevitable, but fighting isn't.
The important question isn't whether we disagree. It is whether, when we do, we can remain friendly, fair and respectful enough to remember that the person sitting opposite us isn't our enemy, they are the person we love.

Riviera Counselling Service

03/10/2026

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