Chris Warren-Dickins - Beyond Your Confines

BEYOND YOUR CONFINES

The Key to Free Your Mind

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Chris Warren-Dickins LLB MA LPC

A Zero Labels Book

All people described in this book are fictional for illustrative purposes only. No name, characteristic, or similarity should be taken as a reference to any actual person, living or dead.

Disclaimer: The contents of this book are for informational and supportive purposes only and are not intended to replace the services of a mental health or medical professional. Should you have any questions about the material set out in this book, contact your clinician or doctor. If you need immediate help and you are in crisis, seek immediate, professional help. Here are your options: Call 911 (if it is available in your area), take yourself to the emergency room of your nearest hospital, call a friend or family member, and ask them to take you to the nearest emergency room, call the National Suicide Helpline on 988 or https://988lifeline.org/

Beyond Your Confines

The Key to Free Your Mind

Copyright 2022 Chris Warren-Dickins LLB MA LPC

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the author except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed via the Contact page at

Print ISBN: 979-8-9851024-3-7 (Hardback)

Print ISBN: 979-8-9851024-2-0 (Paperback)

Printed in the United States of America

First printing edition 2022

Published by Zero Labels LLC

143 E Ridgewood Ave, #1484, Ridgewood, NJ 07450

Cover design by Anabeth Bostrup

Images in cover photo used under license from Shutterstock.com

Editing by Sophia Dembling

Headshot photo of Chris Warren-Dickins by Jean Terman Photography

PRAISE FOR BEYOND YOUR CONFINES

"This book is not only timely but critical reading for anyone looking for greater understanding of themselves and the unique and challenging times we are in. Chris's keen insights and focus on interconnectivity have provided a basis to begin healing through our own well-being and healthier relationships. This is indeed a roadmap to freedom.'"

- Dr Pamela Brodie

If anyone still feels trapped since the pandemic began, Beyond Your Confines is certainly a key to free your mind. Chris Warren-Dickins adopts a novel approach to challenges to our mental health, and threads together the most pressing societal issues of our time.

But dont just read Beyond Your Confines. As Chris encourages their readers to do, use this book to strike up a dialogue with others about how we can use our inner resources and wisdom to heal ourselves, each other, and the planet that we are living in. Reach Beyond Your Confines today.

- Monty Moncrieff MBE

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DEDICATION

For Julie Arliss and Nadia OConnor ,

who each helped me reach beyond the confines of my mind.

Without their help, I would never have found the world of love that is

Mike and my two daughters, Lucille and Willow.

CONTENTS

Terminology

As you make your way through Beyond Your Confines, you may find that my use of labels does not quite reflect your own experience, or even inadvertently offends you by failing to be inclusive. I have made every effort to avoid this, but if this happens, please let me know via the contact page on my website, www.chriswarrendickins.com

If You Are in Crisis

If you are in crisis , you must seek immediate, professional help.

Here are some of the ways you can seek help.

I will repeat these in Appendix Crisis, set out at the end of this book:

• Call 911 (if it is available in your area).
• Take yourself to the emergency room of your nearest hospital.
• Call a friend or family member and ask them to take you to the nearest emergency room.
• Call the National Suicide Helpline on 988 or https://988lifeline.org/

Know that when you are in crisis, your brain is less likely to function optimally. This means that you might only consider a limited list of options when there might be more ways to resolve the problems you are experiencing. For this reason, you should seek help so a trained professional can ensure your safety and help you get out of your current state of crisis.

We are all jailors in a prison of our own creation.

Sebastian Jones peered out from his apartment and flinched when he saw the children playing ball on the street below. He could remember a time when life was that simple, and it cut him deeply to know that such innocence was lost beyond his reach. He could almost taste it on his lips, the salty air of free summers at the shore, and the indulgence of sugary treats that tasted so much better when shared. Those days before the bills, before the career prospects (or lack of them), and before the in-fighting at work and within his family. And no matter how hard he had worked at school and college, he could not decipher the mystical subtext that was scratched beneath the surface of his interactionsthose sidewards glances and unspoken words he was supposed to interpret in the heat of the moment. He knew he was missing some of the cues, large chunks of important information that got lost in translation. In response, he was starting to retreat. Too many nights were spent wide-eyed and helpless until the morning chorus of birds signaled another day of exhaustion. He was closing in on himself as if his vision was slowly dimming, the fading light of hope dwindling so subtly that it might be extinguished with the next wind of change. And there had been abundant winds of late. Since the pandemic he could no longer find the outposts of stabilitythose occasional moments of calm where he could rest from challenges without and within. When he looked back on what he had once known, it was unrecognizable through the squall. He was tired of fighting within himself as much as he was fighting with other people, tired of looking for solutions that seemed endlessly out of reach. From within his confines he could not discern whether this was something of his own creation or circumstances that had been imposed on him.

What could explain the stagnation Sebastian found himself in, fueling endless nights of cursing himself for missed opportunities? Whatever it was, it seemed too deeply entrenched to be a quirk, a matter of unique circumstances coinciding, as illusive an explanation as fate. This wasnt a one-off moment of misfortune that might soon blow over, this was a common thread running through his entire life, whether it was his intimate relationships, his friendships, the relationships he had with his family, his work life, or his self-image. All domains were distorted by the same something that was trapping him from within. And this is not just about Sebastian; this thread runs through the lives of all of us.

Within, a prison of our own creation

We are quite inventive beings. For a species that created the Large Hadron Collider, nuclear bomb, light bulb, and augmented reality, we have a considerable depth of imagination. And for all its positive feats, that imagination also has no bounds when it comes to the labyrinthian prisons we create to confine ourselves. We claim to know so much about our thoughts that we short-circuit logic, creating further traps out of imprisoning thought patterns . We claim to know so much about our emotions that we overreact or underreact, like an unsteady pilot lurching the plane from one extreme to another. And we claim to know more than our inner wounded child so that we end up perpetuating the shame and imprisoning messages that were given to us during an adverse childhood. We claim to know so much that we create for ourselves an Internal Prison, a steel-bar certainty to guard against our innate aversion to uncertainty. As hunter-gatherers, uncertainty once posed a threat to our survival, and yet now, even though uncertainty might take the more innocuous forms of questions over a career direction or the exit to take on a highway, the same parts of the brain react in the same way: We fear it, and we fill the gap of uncertainty with (sometimes) half-baked knowledge. This knowledge will inevitably be half-baked because we are constantly evolving , and to evolve, we need to rely on the information other people give us, which we do not always have time to verify. And so these Internal Prisons, these mental prisons, are reinforced when we get confirmation from othersconfirmation about who we are and how we should be in the world.