Alice through the Looking Glass

Gok Wan is someone who, when I first came across his shows, I thought was a typical fashionista with very little going on. How wrong can first impressions be. Having thought more deeply and having listened to him more often here is a man who really does care about other people. Particularly people with challenges, mainly deep rooted psychological challenges. His latest television project will without doubt have some people in real throes of emotion as they see their own lives being played out on the television in someone else's body.

I see many young people like this who often use the escape mechanism of alcohol or drugs to overcome the negative effects psychological and physical bullying has upon them. The fact that alcohol reduces inhibitions means that it allows the inner self to come out. It can manifest in chronic depression it can manifest in outlandish stunts or it can manifest in violence towards another as the Mercurial flip takes place from what the game face presents to the wider world.

Alcohol is very dangerous in this situation because the sheer nature of the neurophysiology behind the poison interacting with overload of negativity from external sources will often lead to over compensation as our inhibitions are removed.

However it is a false image when we talk about overcompensation for what actually happens is the release of the safety catches holding on the society developed game face allowing the real you to come forward. This masking of emotion that we put out to the world is now revealed and we become even more vulnerable.

So when we see young people behaving in an abnormal way because they are intoxicated it is actually young people showing their true inner self to the world. Why do we find that ugly sometimes, well it is because we as a society are not very good at investing in our young people's psychological health and we have helped create this challenge and now we don't like it. Divorce, money worries, lack of time due to work commitments, lack of extended family support often mean that we do not support our children as effectively as we think we do. Children not wanting to upset the apple cart will often blame themselves and in doing so start to build barriers and act in a way that is 'expected'. They then use alcohol as a way of coping and returning to the way of wanting to show the world how they feel.  The world just sees that as trouble or booze causing the problem and in doing so they miss the point.

What Gok Wan is doing is a good thing because in helping people to be themselves, in other words allowing them take off their game face and feel confident to reveal who they are, in a safe space,  then hopefully it will help some teenagers and young people to not seek solace in the bottom of a vodka bottle.

Bless you Gok, may you continue to shine.