By Kevin Murphy, M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist
Dublin, Ireland.
Once a week I work in a prison with offenders who have committed various crimes. With sex offenders a common thing they talk about is the fear of committing the same or similar crime when they get released. There might have been an element of pleasure in whatever crime they committed before they ended up in prison but for most of them the thought of once again facing arrest, a court of law and a heavier prison sentence is a very real fear. For some, even the thought of re-committing the act itself can be riddled with anxiety.
This fear of committing the same crime again doesn’t fit with most people’s ideas of sex offenders. Yet the people I see have elected to seek therapy because of it. They have also come because the stress of being in prison, or 'doing the time', is getting to them.
I am not offering them a State-run sex offender’s programme where they are forced to attend as part of their court sentence. Nor are they promised the chance of early release for attending. The treatment I offer them is not set out into modules where they learn to accept what they did, train their minds not to do it again and learn to identify and avoid risk situations. But before I go any further, perhaps a little reality might be useful.
The most recent statistics suggest that sex offenders avoid official rehab programmes. In September, Government figures revealed that only a tiny fraction of convicted sex offenders in Ireland are completing rehab. Just 42 of the 578 sex offenders released from prison in the past five years have completed the Sex Offender Rehabilitation Programme.
Now that has to be a very worrying trend. Is it something in the programmes themselves? Or is it something in the offenders? It could be a bit of both. One very real problem is the fear sex offenders in prison have of being identified by the ‘ordinary decent criminals’. Signing up for such a course could bring the risk of this happening a little closer. And if it happens it will lead to a beating or worse.
Or it could be that serious sex offenders - by which I mean unrepentant, serial offenders - don’t believe they have a problem. Some child abusers, for example, are characterised by their full belief and willingness to proclaim that the enjoyment of children for sexual purposes is natural and that they are doing nothing wrong. They are also characterised by their unwillingness to submit to therapy, which may lie behind the disturbing statistics mentioned above.
The low uptake of official rehab is indicative of another characteristic. Predatory sex offenders gain their power from allowing their victims believe that is was ‘they’ who were somehow at fault. Signing up for rehab is, among other things, an admission of guilt. Sex predators and those with sexual perversions thrive on other people’s sense of guilt so that their own remains untouched.
The men who come to me are prepared to submit themselves to therapy even though they are promised nothing tangible in return. They are not being forced to be there. They come in the hope they can somehow make sense of what it is they have done and what kind of person they are to have done it.
It is a different mind-set and it indicates a desire for treatment which no-one else had to put into their heads. They are not preached at, or indoctrinated or ‘mind-trained’ in any way. But they are helped analyse their crime, their lives up to the point of the offence, the impact on their victims, their own belief systems when they were breaking the law and, hopefully, their own ways and means of avoiding a repeat offence.
When someone elects to undergo that kind of therapy, it is not to try and ‘beat the system’. If they are it eventually becomes easily distinguishable from those who genuinely want to change their lives. In therapy, particularly psychoanalytical psychotherapy, there really is nowhere to hide.
And we must be mindful that not all crossing of sexual boundaries ends up in a prison sentence. I spoke with someone recently who described an early sexual encounter that left little doubt but that they had been raped. Yet this person told themselves for years that it was a genuinely consensual encounter.
I met a woman recently who had a man touch her under the table throughout a meal at a social occasion. She had been too shocked to say anything about it to those present. And now she felt angry and upset.
When sexual boundaries are crossed by those who know what they are doing, the acid test is the confusion the perpetrator leaves behind. The victim is always left confused and compromised by what took place. It is one of the reasons why so many rapes and sexual assaults go unreported.
Similarly, the acid test of whether social sex pests and the more serious sex offenders are genuine about changing their ways is when they make the choice themselves to seek therapy and remain in it no matter how challenging it gets.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
The Reality of the Dream Relationship
By Kevin Murphy, M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist
Dublin, Ireland.
The world turns on relationships. The ideal way of living is within a relationship. The most successful people in the world have relationships which, in turn, are most successful. Without a relationship life is empty and we feel isolated and different from everyone else. If we don’t find someone to share our lives, then not only are we doomed to loneliness but a very clear message goes out to all around us that we are ‘different’ in a negative kind of way. A partner is our comfort, our companion, lover, friend and, ultimately, our assurance to the rest of society that we are ‘ok’ people.
You’ll probably have found a lot of common sense in the above passage. But, equally, when you reality test it, there are certain things that stand out as being not necessarily true. The world doesn’t turn on relationships. It carries on turning whether we have relationships or not. It might be an ideal way of living for most people but not necessarily for all people, particularly if the relationship is bad. The most successful people in the world can often have disastrous personal relationships. Without a relationship life can sometimes be lonely but we are not ‘doomed’; there is such a thing as independent living. People around us can start wondering why we don’t have a relationship but that is as much our own sensitivity as anything else. And we don’t, or rather shouldn’t, need a partner to show society that we are ‘ok’.
The first set of views I presented above stem from an idealised belief that relationships are always good and always beneficial. But relationships have two sides. They are not all trouble free, personally empowering, psychologically fulfilling, or a full time joy. They can have a problematic side to them too.
In the therapy room I work with people who have difficulty with relationships that have ended, usually badly and usually leaving them with more questions than answers.
It is not always women who are mourning the loss of a partner either. Men, too, have an equally hard time when relationships end that they had hoped would succeed.
Part of the problem lies in the expectations that have been disappointed. The ideal image of the ‘whole person’ in contemporary society is one who has a good relationship with a partner, from which both can draw love, happiness, support and fulfilment. It would be trivial to suggest that we sometimes see having a partner as a commodity but in analytic work it is not unusual to hear the concept of ‘partner’ talked about in the same checklist for lifestyle perfection as the career and the apartment.
And so the reality of the relationship becomes based on an imaginary ideal. We all need ideals, goals, objectives and dreams for the future. I’m not disputing that. But the reality of relationships can be very different from the ideal. They involve two people, either same sex or opposite sex, who come together often from widely differing life experiences and with equally differing inner lives and desires. Love, as we know it, is the ingredient that can blend these differences together and place them on a shared path. But love has its obstacles too.
For some people the act of loving involves too much giving to the other. They can be carrying wounds from previous relationships or life experiences; they can have unrealistically high demands on their partners; they can have issues with intimacy; or they can simply be unwilling to let themselves go emotionally because it means loss of control. Either way the devastation that failed relationships cause is all too real.
When we love, we invest part of ourselves in another person. This energy and emotion is now cut loose from the one we loved and sends us into a tail spin of emotions. Therapy is a way of gathering in that energy so that the sense of pain and loss can be healed and the person can eventually move forward again.
This can be either a lengthy or relatively short process depending on the circumstances of the break-up and the presence or otherwise of extra burdens that the break-up represents. Here I’m thinking about issues such as excessive dependency, self esteem, the factor of infidelity, or physical or emotional abuse.
A common way of dealing with the pain of break up is to find another relationship quickly. There is a prevalent view that relationships are things we can jump in and out of with ease, starting another when the previous one ends. But pain, like all energy, has to go somewhere. And if it is not dissipated properly it accumulates and moves with us into our future relationships.
When a relationship fails we need time to make sense of that failure and often that means taking time out to come to some kind of understanding of what has happened. In that way we can be made stronger by the experience rather than weakened by it.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist
Dublin, Ireland.
The world turns on relationships. The ideal way of living is within a relationship. The most successful people in the world have relationships which, in turn, are most successful. Without a relationship life is empty and we feel isolated and different from everyone else. If we don’t find someone to share our lives, then not only are we doomed to loneliness but a very clear message goes out to all around us that we are ‘different’ in a negative kind of way. A partner is our comfort, our companion, lover, friend and, ultimately, our assurance to the rest of society that we are ‘ok’ people.
You’ll probably have found a lot of common sense in the above passage. But, equally, when you reality test it, there are certain things that stand out as being not necessarily true. The world doesn’t turn on relationships. It carries on turning whether we have relationships or not. It might be an ideal way of living for most people but not necessarily for all people, particularly if the relationship is bad. The most successful people in the world can often have disastrous personal relationships. Without a relationship life can sometimes be lonely but we are not ‘doomed’; there is such a thing as independent living. People around us can start wondering why we don’t have a relationship but that is as much our own sensitivity as anything else. And we don’t, or rather shouldn’t, need a partner to show society that we are ‘ok’.
The first set of views I presented above stem from an idealised belief that relationships are always good and always beneficial. But relationships have two sides. They are not all trouble free, personally empowering, psychologically fulfilling, or a full time joy. They can have a problematic side to them too.
In the therapy room I work with people who have difficulty with relationships that have ended, usually badly and usually leaving them with more questions than answers.
It is not always women who are mourning the loss of a partner either. Men, too, have an equally hard time when relationships end that they had hoped would succeed.
Part of the problem lies in the expectations that have been disappointed. The ideal image of the ‘whole person’ in contemporary society is one who has a good relationship with a partner, from which both can draw love, happiness, support and fulfilment. It would be trivial to suggest that we sometimes see having a partner as a commodity but in analytic work it is not unusual to hear the concept of ‘partner’ talked about in the same checklist for lifestyle perfection as the career and the apartment.
And so the reality of the relationship becomes based on an imaginary ideal. We all need ideals, goals, objectives and dreams for the future. I’m not disputing that. But the reality of relationships can be very different from the ideal. They involve two people, either same sex or opposite sex, who come together often from widely differing life experiences and with equally differing inner lives and desires. Love, as we know it, is the ingredient that can blend these differences together and place them on a shared path. But love has its obstacles too.
For some people the act of loving involves too much giving to the other. They can be carrying wounds from previous relationships or life experiences; they can have unrealistically high demands on their partners; they can have issues with intimacy; or they can simply be unwilling to let themselves go emotionally because it means loss of control. Either way the devastation that failed relationships cause is all too real.
When we love, we invest part of ourselves in another person. This energy and emotion is now cut loose from the one we loved and sends us into a tail spin of emotions. Therapy is a way of gathering in that energy so that the sense of pain and loss can be healed and the person can eventually move forward again.
This can be either a lengthy or relatively short process depending on the circumstances of the break-up and the presence or otherwise of extra burdens that the break-up represents. Here I’m thinking about issues such as excessive dependency, self esteem, the factor of infidelity, or physical or emotional abuse.
A common way of dealing with the pain of break up is to find another relationship quickly. There is a prevalent view that relationships are things we can jump in and out of with ease, starting another when the previous one ends. But pain, like all energy, has to go somewhere. And if it is not dissipated properly it accumulates and moves with us into our future relationships.
When a relationship fails we need time to make sense of that failure and often that means taking time out to come to some kind of understanding of what has happened. In that way we can be made stronger by the experience rather than weakened by it.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
The Family and Society
By Kevin Murphy, M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist
Dublin, Ireland.
I was invited to speak briefly this week at the Céifin Conference which is held every year in Ennis, Co. Clare. It puts the emphasis on what it terms ‘values-led change’ by shining a light on the quality of our social, political, economic and spiritual lives.
Organised by Fr Harry Bohan, a sociologist, Director of Pastoral Planning of the Diocese of Killaloe, a parish priest and the founder of the Céifin Centre, this year’s theme was ‘Family Life Today: The Greatest Revolution’.
I spoke as a father rather than a psychoanalytic psychotherapist about the notion of the family as the basic unit of society, a position that is enshrined in our Constitution. As such, the integrity of the family must be protected because otherwise the fabric of society will be threatened. No one can find any argument with that.
The family is the cradle out of which the individual emerges; the individual is the basic component of society and therefore society is enriched or impoverished depending on the health or otherwise of the family.
I made the point that the burden on the contemporary family – of doing this particular job on behalf of society – is becoming too heavy. The family as we know it today is not just the basic unit of society but the ‘isolated’ basic unit of society.
The growth of urbanisation, the fragmentation of communities, the economic realities that force extended families to live apart, and the changing attitudes to ideas such as neighbourliness, community and belonging are all factors that contribute to this.
Naturally, this trend is also happening against a backdrop of wider cultural movements. Increasing secularisation with decreasing spiritual values and the growth in the ‘isolationist’ trend towards self-sufficiency and independence from a shared reliance on others are part of the picture also. And that’s before we consider political action, and to an even greater extent inaction, when it comes to supporting family life.
I mentioned in passing that some years ago ‘individualisation’ of tax was brought in to favour those stay-at-home spouses who went out of the home to join in and contribute to the booming economy. Despite the pro-family rhetoric, sometimes even blatant anti-family measures slip under the radar unnoticed.
My point, however, was that the family is only strong because of the quality of its connections to other families through communities that share sustainable and sustaining values. This is what guarantees the family’s strength and its ability to function properly.
If the job of the family is to raise well rounded children who are capable of facing the challenges of life, then perhaps at a macro level the modern family is doing a good job. But if you take the old African saying, once quoted on the Oprah Winfrey TV show, that ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ then a new perspective emerges.
Our western idea is that a two-parent or one-parent family is an ideal model. That’s an idea that suits our system, if you like. Since industrialisation, western societies have needed workers for its industries so social living moved from the land to the cities, from communities to geographic or postal locations. The nuclear family is an ideal model for mobility to go where the work is. Now we are so used to it that it seems as if it is the most natural way in the world.
Yet it puts a heavy burden on two parents, and often times on just one, of being the sole providers of guidance, of elder relationships, of mediator with the outside world, as well as the basic requirements of providing love, care and security.
There is only a small place in our model of the nuclear family now for aunts, uncles, grandparents, neighbours or friends to have any hand, act or part in how our children should be raised. In fact, more often than not we actively discourage it as interference.
When was the last time you saw someone in the street telling a child that wasn’t theirs to behave? There is no authority behind such an act anymore and so it rarely happens. If it does, it has little effect.
When it comes to the therapy room, this modern phenomenon brings some interesting features with it, especially for people who are suffering the effects of a damaging family life.
Each person’s situation is unique but a common element is the intensity of the primary relationships that exist and have existed in their family. There have been little or no outside influences from extended family members, little dilution of the tension, little alternative or substitute relationships and practically no getting away from this intensity if the relationship was not good.
And so a bad situation continued to get worse until these people’s lives became unmanageable. This is not about blaming parents for problems. They are as much a part of this cultural system as their children. But before we can talk about change we must recognise the problem. And so far there has been nothing to suggest we have started to do that.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist
Dublin, Ireland.
I was invited to speak briefly this week at the Céifin Conference which is held every year in Ennis, Co. Clare. It puts the emphasis on what it terms ‘values-led change’ by shining a light on the quality of our social, political, economic and spiritual lives.
Organised by Fr Harry Bohan, a sociologist, Director of Pastoral Planning of the Diocese of Killaloe, a parish priest and the founder of the Céifin Centre, this year’s theme was ‘Family Life Today: The Greatest Revolution’.
I spoke as a father rather than a psychoanalytic psychotherapist about the notion of the family as the basic unit of society, a position that is enshrined in our Constitution. As such, the integrity of the family must be protected because otherwise the fabric of society will be threatened. No one can find any argument with that.
The family is the cradle out of which the individual emerges; the individual is the basic component of society and therefore society is enriched or impoverished depending on the health or otherwise of the family.
I made the point that the burden on the contemporary family – of doing this particular job on behalf of society – is becoming too heavy. The family as we know it today is not just the basic unit of society but the ‘isolated’ basic unit of society.
The growth of urbanisation, the fragmentation of communities, the economic realities that force extended families to live apart, and the changing attitudes to ideas such as neighbourliness, community and belonging are all factors that contribute to this.
Naturally, this trend is also happening against a backdrop of wider cultural movements. Increasing secularisation with decreasing spiritual values and the growth in the ‘isolationist’ trend towards self-sufficiency and independence from a shared reliance on others are part of the picture also. And that’s before we consider political action, and to an even greater extent inaction, when it comes to supporting family life.
I mentioned in passing that some years ago ‘individualisation’ of tax was brought in to favour those stay-at-home spouses who went out of the home to join in and contribute to the booming economy. Despite the pro-family rhetoric, sometimes even blatant anti-family measures slip under the radar unnoticed.
My point, however, was that the family is only strong because of the quality of its connections to other families through communities that share sustainable and sustaining values. This is what guarantees the family’s strength and its ability to function properly.
If the job of the family is to raise well rounded children who are capable of facing the challenges of life, then perhaps at a macro level the modern family is doing a good job. But if you take the old African saying, once quoted on the Oprah Winfrey TV show, that ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ then a new perspective emerges.
Our western idea is that a two-parent or one-parent family is an ideal model. That’s an idea that suits our system, if you like. Since industrialisation, western societies have needed workers for its industries so social living moved from the land to the cities, from communities to geographic or postal locations. The nuclear family is an ideal model for mobility to go where the work is. Now we are so used to it that it seems as if it is the most natural way in the world.
Yet it puts a heavy burden on two parents, and often times on just one, of being the sole providers of guidance, of elder relationships, of mediator with the outside world, as well as the basic requirements of providing love, care and security.
There is only a small place in our model of the nuclear family now for aunts, uncles, grandparents, neighbours or friends to have any hand, act or part in how our children should be raised. In fact, more often than not we actively discourage it as interference.
When was the last time you saw someone in the street telling a child that wasn’t theirs to behave? There is no authority behind such an act anymore and so it rarely happens. If it does, it has little effect.
When it comes to the therapy room, this modern phenomenon brings some interesting features with it, especially for people who are suffering the effects of a damaging family life.
Each person’s situation is unique but a common element is the intensity of the primary relationships that exist and have existed in their family. There have been little or no outside influences from extended family members, little dilution of the tension, little alternative or substitute relationships and practically no getting away from this intensity if the relationship was not good.
And so a bad situation continued to get worse until these people’s lives became unmanageable. This is not about blaming parents for problems. They are as much a part of this cultural system as their children. But before we can talk about change we must recognise the problem. And so far there has been nothing to suggest we have started to do that.
Monday, October 27, 2008
Coming to Terms with Grief
By Kevin Murphy, M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist
Dublin, Ireland.
As a culture, we don’t have much room for death. By that I mean we don’t have anything in the way of preparatory rituals or public discussions on the subject. Certainly there is a process once we die, of funeral arrangements and so on, but that’s about it. In this regard the late author Nuala O’Faolain’s radio interview with RTE’s Marian Finucane on April 12 of this year was both brave and ground-breaking and worth a listen for anyone who can access it. It is the voice of woman talking about her own impending death.
Death is hard for everyone. For those who are about to die and for those who will be left behind. But what is probably hardest of all is the lack of guidance that our culture gives us in terms of how we should prepare for, deal with and cope afterwards with the death of loved ones. It is an interesting concept considering that death is the final stage for each and every one of us.
In the western world we have technologies that can put people into the farthest reaches of space. We can see inside the human cell. But we have no technology to help us deal with the reality of death. Instead we shy away from death and everything to do with it. It is as though we want to ignore that it has happened as quickly as possible and get on with our lives.
You could say we have evolved a culture that doesn’t so much promote living as shun the notion of dying. For a very long time we even took it further and treated old age, the stage before death if you like, as something decidedly unattractive and unworthy of our attention. As a cultural attitude, it was a curious way to live considering that sooner or later we would experience the death of someone close to us.
I had a client recently who was coping with the sudden death of their partner. A major burden in this client’s grief was the attitude of those in the outside community. After the burial, it was as if things should get back to normal as quickly as possible. But that is not the way it is with death. There is no set time in which someone should ‘get over’ the death of a loved one. Often it can take a long time, particularly if the death has been unexpected.
You find the famous five-stage grief model of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and the four-stage model of John Bowlby misinterpreted again and again in this respect. In Kubler-Ross’s case, the Swiss doctor was actually describing the stages the dying person went through, not the bereaved who is left behind. But yet you find people coming to therapy with a knowledge that they are in the ‘denial’ stage or the ‘anger’ stage. That is a useful model if you have been diagnosed with terminal illness but not so much if you are the one left behind.
Certainly there is shock, denial, anger and eventually acceptance when we lose someone. And yes the Bowlby model does offer an insight with its ‘phase of numbing’ or its ‘phase of yearning and searching’ for the lost person that can last several years. But it would be a mistake to assume that grieving is like moving through a check list. We don’t pass through phases like an automaton, ticking boxes and then arriving at acceptance when all the pain is over. Grief is messy and confusing and because our culture has no room for it or no idea how to alleviate the burden of it, it has to be done in private, away from the public gaze. So it is isolating as well as everything else. And despite people’s best intentions, it is only when you are ‘better’ that are you welcome back in society again.
But the bereaved person needs an opportunity to fully honour the one who is lost to them, to relive their life in stories and memories, to feel they are beside them once more, to let them ‘live’ again in whatever way they can. Grief is worked through not by forgetting or ‘getting over’. It is worked through by re-experiencing, by remembering, by re-telling the stories of the dead person’s life again and again, by admitting the loss that their death represents and by celebrating their lives and their contribution to the lives of others. This would be in line with Sigmund Freud’s concept that he outlined in his famous 1917 paper ‘On Mourning and Melancholia’.
And yet it is this very place that our developed western culture lets us down. We have chosen to embrace life while at the same time ignoring the place of death in all our lives. While good friends and family provide a vital role in making up for this lack, therapy too takes up where society leaves off. Grieving is the process whereby someone we love is lost to us. It is a painful and sometimes lengthy way of coming to terms with that loss. Our culture’s desire for it to be quick and unobtrusive is unhelpful.
Sometimes the loss comes at the end of a long and painful illness. Sometimes it comes out of the blue. Whatever way it comes, it leaves us searching for meaning, for a way of understanding what has taken place and for a way of coping with it in order to move forward. In our increasingly secular world religion offers fewer people comfort in the face of death and so the business of making sense of it becomes even harder. But patience, openness, a listening ear and the recognition that grief is not some form of illness to be hidden away can all help it reach a natural end and allow something new to grow in its place.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist
Dublin, Ireland.
As a culture, we don’t have much room for death. By that I mean we don’t have anything in the way of preparatory rituals or public discussions on the subject. Certainly there is a process once we die, of funeral arrangements and so on, but that’s about it. In this regard the late author Nuala O’Faolain’s radio interview with RTE’s Marian Finucane on April 12 of this year was both brave and ground-breaking and worth a listen for anyone who can access it. It is the voice of woman talking about her own impending death.
Death is hard for everyone. For those who are about to die and for those who will be left behind. But what is probably hardest of all is the lack of guidance that our culture gives us in terms of how we should prepare for, deal with and cope afterwards with the death of loved ones. It is an interesting concept considering that death is the final stage for each and every one of us.
In the western world we have technologies that can put people into the farthest reaches of space. We can see inside the human cell. But we have no technology to help us deal with the reality of death. Instead we shy away from death and everything to do with it. It is as though we want to ignore that it has happened as quickly as possible and get on with our lives.
You could say we have evolved a culture that doesn’t so much promote living as shun the notion of dying. For a very long time we even took it further and treated old age, the stage before death if you like, as something decidedly unattractive and unworthy of our attention. As a cultural attitude, it was a curious way to live considering that sooner or later we would experience the death of someone close to us.
I had a client recently who was coping with the sudden death of their partner. A major burden in this client’s grief was the attitude of those in the outside community. After the burial, it was as if things should get back to normal as quickly as possible. But that is not the way it is with death. There is no set time in which someone should ‘get over’ the death of a loved one. Often it can take a long time, particularly if the death has been unexpected.
You find the famous five-stage grief model of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and the four-stage model of John Bowlby misinterpreted again and again in this respect. In Kubler-Ross’s case, the Swiss doctor was actually describing the stages the dying person went through, not the bereaved who is left behind. But yet you find people coming to therapy with a knowledge that they are in the ‘denial’ stage or the ‘anger’ stage. That is a useful model if you have been diagnosed with terminal illness but not so much if you are the one left behind.
Certainly there is shock, denial, anger and eventually acceptance when we lose someone. And yes the Bowlby model does offer an insight with its ‘phase of numbing’ or its ‘phase of yearning and searching’ for the lost person that can last several years. But it would be a mistake to assume that grieving is like moving through a check list. We don’t pass through phases like an automaton, ticking boxes and then arriving at acceptance when all the pain is over. Grief is messy and confusing and because our culture has no room for it or no idea how to alleviate the burden of it, it has to be done in private, away from the public gaze. So it is isolating as well as everything else. And despite people’s best intentions, it is only when you are ‘better’ that are you welcome back in society again.
But the bereaved person needs an opportunity to fully honour the one who is lost to them, to relive their life in stories and memories, to feel they are beside them once more, to let them ‘live’ again in whatever way they can. Grief is worked through not by forgetting or ‘getting over’. It is worked through by re-experiencing, by remembering, by re-telling the stories of the dead person’s life again and again, by admitting the loss that their death represents and by celebrating their lives and their contribution to the lives of others. This would be in line with Sigmund Freud’s concept that he outlined in his famous 1917 paper ‘On Mourning and Melancholia’.
And yet it is this very place that our developed western culture lets us down. We have chosen to embrace life while at the same time ignoring the place of death in all our lives. While good friends and family provide a vital role in making up for this lack, therapy too takes up where society leaves off. Grieving is the process whereby someone we love is lost to us. It is a painful and sometimes lengthy way of coming to terms with that loss. Our culture’s desire for it to be quick and unobtrusive is unhelpful.
Sometimes the loss comes at the end of a long and painful illness. Sometimes it comes out of the blue. Whatever way it comes, it leaves us searching for meaning, for a way of understanding what has taken place and for a way of coping with it in order to move forward. In our increasingly secular world religion offers fewer people comfort in the face of death and so the business of making sense of it becomes even harder. But patience, openness, a listening ear and the recognition that grief is not some form of illness to be hidden away can all help it reach a natural end and allow something new to grow in its place.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
How to be a Resistance Fighter
By Kevin Murphy, M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist
Dublin, Ireland.
I was talking to a woman some time ago who told me that she had been to a psychiatrist. She had been suffering from depression and had gone to see if she could get some help. She described the experience as useful but then, for a reason she didn’t quite understand, she decided to break off the treatment and didn’t go back. When I asked her why she did this she said she ‘had just felt stupid lying there not knowing what to say’.
That was that, she moved on and, as it turned out, someone else joined our conversation so I didn’t get the chance to discuss it further. But something about what she said has stayed with me since.
Psychoanalytic psychotherapy tends to focus on what people say, the words they use, in order to probe for a deeper understanding of what is going on ‘behind the scenes’. The reason this woman gave for breaking off her treatment was, on the one hand, short and seemingly straightforward. But looking a little further it has an underlying richness that illuminates a central element in the therapeutic process.
She said she had felt stupid lying there not knowing what to say. What she was actually describing, without realising it, was a moment that has a fundamental role in analysis. It was the moment of resistance. Sigmund Freud made this a central element of his classical psychoanalytic theory. It is the moment when forces within us fight against our competing desire to get something out. It is the irresistible force meeting an immoveable object that physics likes to speak about. The result is inertia, a dumbing silence in which nothing is said and nothing can be said. The experience from the client’s perspective is one of not having anything to say.
We repress thoughts and ideas that give rise to unpleasure. It happens in all of us and it happens often without us having to consciously think about it. It’s not all bad either, sometimes repression is necessary in order to allow us survive certain experiences and situations. But once something is repressed it has a tendency to return either as a direct memory or in other more diverse routes. And since it was usually unpleasurable to begin with, our automatic reaction is to keep it repressed. This activity of keeping something repressed is called resistance.
So how do we know this ‘resistance’ when it occurs? Well, as I said, it is when a client reaches a point in their story where there are no more words, when they fall into silence, when they become acutely aware of the therapist's presence and when they see a picture in their mind and tell themselves ‘no I will not talk about that’. A great many people come to therapy and censor out what they will and will not talk about. At least at first they do, until they get comfortable with the process, trust their therapist and realise they are wasting their money if they are not going to be honest with themselves.
I don’t mean to be puritanical about this. Every one of us experiences resistance in the consulting room at various times when we are the client. Sometimes we win over it, and sometimes it wins over us. But that is part of the challenge of therapy, returning again and again to see if we can overcome this inherent desire to keep things buried, if we can get to new things, throw new light into our dark corners.
Resistance also surfaces in the way some people tell themselves why things should remain hidden and out of sight: it will upset us, it will bring back bad memories, there is no need to go into all that old stuff again in order to move forward. All of these are very reasonable reasons. Modern psychoanalytic practice, particularly Lacanian theory, believes that each session should follow the path that the client decides to speak about with only minimal interruption or direction from the therapist. It does not dictate that a client’s history should always be forensically sifted in every session. It does not demand that the scene of trauma or unpleasant experience be revisited relentlessly. The pace is set by the client and each session grows out of those things the client wishes to speak about. The rationale is that if something repressed is trying to find expression it will eventually makes itself known either directly or indirectly.
Resistance also makes itself heard in the inner voice that tells us not to enter into or continue with therapy, as my example above showed. Resistance emanates from within and is designed to stop us doing the work of therapy, of asking questions of ourselves, of sorting through the experiences of our lives, of undertaking any kind of work that will question the very things which resistance is trying keep hidden. In short, it has succeeded when it brings therapy to a halt before it has reached its goal.
The woman mentioned above said she felt stupid lying there with nothing to say. Not only had resistance brought her to a stop in what she wanted to say, it then heaped a sense of embarrassment and humiliation on top for good measure. It didn’t really matter what ploys she unwittingly used against herself, the end result was exactly what the unconscious part of her wanted. She walked away from therapy with her questions unanswered and her dark corners comfortably unperturbed.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist
Dublin, Ireland.
I was talking to a woman some time ago who told me that she had been to a psychiatrist. She had been suffering from depression and had gone to see if she could get some help. She described the experience as useful but then, for a reason she didn’t quite understand, she decided to break off the treatment and didn’t go back. When I asked her why she did this she said she ‘had just felt stupid lying there not knowing what to say’.
That was that, she moved on and, as it turned out, someone else joined our conversation so I didn’t get the chance to discuss it further. But something about what she said has stayed with me since.
Psychoanalytic psychotherapy tends to focus on what people say, the words they use, in order to probe for a deeper understanding of what is going on ‘behind the scenes’. The reason this woman gave for breaking off her treatment was, on the one hand, short and seemingly straightforward. But looking a little further it has an underlying richness that illuminates a central element in the therapeutic process.
She said she had felt stupid lying there not knowing what to say. What she was actually describing, without realising it, was a moment that has a fundamental role in analysis. It was the moment of resistance. Sigmund Freud made this a central element of his classical psychoanalytic theory. It is the moment when forces within us fight against our competing desire to get something out. It is the irresistible force meeting an immoveable object that physics likes to speak about. The result is inertia, a dumbing silence in which nothing is said and nothing can be said. The experience from the client’s perspective is one of not having anything to say.
We repress thoughts and ideas that give rise to unpleasure. It happens in all of us and it happens often without us having to consciously think about it. It’s not all bad either, sometimes repression is necessary in order to allow us survive certain experiences and situations. But once something is repressed it has a tendency to return either as a direct memory or in other more diverse routes. And since it was usually unpleasurable to begin with, our automatic reaction is to keep it repressed. This activity of keeping something repressed is called resistance.
So how do we know this ‘resistance’ when it occurs? Well, as I said, it is when a client reaches a point in their story where there are no more words, when they fall into silence, when they become acutely aware of the therapist's presence and when they see a picture in their mind and tell themselves ‘no I will not talk about that’. A great many people come to therapy and censor out what they will and will not talk about. At least at first they do, until they get comfortable with the process, trust their therapist and realise they are wasting their money if they are not going to be honest with themselves.
I don’t mean to be puritanical about this. Every one of us experiences resistance in the consulting room at various times when we are the client. Sometimes we win over it, and sometimes it wins over us. But that is part of the challenge of therapy, returning again and again to see if we can overcome this inherent desire to keep things buried, if we can get to new things, throw new light into our dark corners.
Resistance also surfaces in the way some people tell themselves why things should remain hidden and out of sight: it will upset us, it will bring back bad memories, there is no need to go into all that old stuff again in order to move forward. All of these are very reasonable reasons. Modern psychoanalytic practice, particularly Lacanian theory, believes that each session should follow the path that the client decides to speak about with only minimal interruption or direction from the therapist. It does not dictate that a client’s history should always be forensically sifted in every session. It does not demand that the scene of trauma or unpleasant experience be revisited relentlessly. The pace is set by the client and each session grows out of those things the client wishes to speak about. The rationale is that if something repressed is trying to find expression it will eventually makes itself known either directly or indirectly.
Resistance also makes itself heard in the inner voice that tells us not to enter into or continue with therapy, as my example above showed. Resistance emanates from within and is designed to stop us doing the work of therapy, of asking questions of ourselves, of sorting through the experiences of our lives, of undertaking any kind of work that will question the very things which resistance is trying keep hidden. In short, it has succeeded when it brings therapy to a halt before it has reached its goal.
The woman mentioned above said she felt stupid lying there with nothing to say. Not only had resistance brought her to a stop in what she wanted to say, it then heaped a sense of embarrassment and humiliation on top for good measure. It didn’t really matter what ploys she unwittingly used against herself, the end result was exactly what the unconscious part of her wanted. She walked away from therapy with her questions unanswered and her dark corners comfortably unperturbed.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
The Lure of the Norm – 2
By Kevin Murphy, M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist
Dublin, Ireland.
Last week I wrote about the effect that norms have on our lives. I’ve come back to the issue this week because there are a number of other important ways in which norms impinge on us, and not always in a positive way.
A client of mine has lived as a single person for many years and even though they would ideally like a partner and a companion, this client nevertheless leads a productive and fulfilled life. The group of friends this client socialises with are all in couples and any who do become single don’t remain so for very long. My client, therefore, is often the only one who is single in a more or less continuous way.
The interesting thing is that this client can sustain two very different positions at the same time. On the one hand there are moments when life can be lonely and when a companion, lover, partner, is something that would make all the difference. On the other hand, this client can lead a full and productive life, always engaging in new projects, living a financially independent lifestyle with a good circle of friends and with the freedom to do what they wish, when they wish.
The norm of being in a relationship is something that this client is aware of, particularly from the examples of friends and, indeed, from the wider society. Movies, books, TV and magazines are also brimming with the message that completeness and happiness lie within the human relationship. This is the culture in which this client, no more than the rest of us, belongs and that is something to be accepted.
Occasionally one of this client’s friends will offer a helpful suggestion as to ways that a partner could be attracted: a different style of presenting oneself, a different method of socialising, a different ‘look’ and so on. Curiously, it is times like this that my client finds most upsetting. Living as a single person; being different to the norm; the day to day realities of earning a living; socialising as a single person and dealing with life’s ups and downs without the benefit of a supportive other, are all manageable.
But when friends verbally apply the norm of the dual relationship lifestyle in the form of ‘helpful’ advice then it becomes problematic. By suggesting ways in which my client can ‘fix’ their single situation there is the implicit message that it is a wrong or flawed or unsatisfactory way to live. Now the norm is being actively applied rather than just passively accepted.
The effect is, as I mentioned last week, to create an insider-outsider way of thinking. Anyone who complies with the norm is on the inside and therefore is ‘ok’. Anyone outside the norm is made to feel as if there is something wrong with them.
An interesting question arises from this: why is it that those outside the so-called norm appear to have a greater understanding of issues such as diversity and pluralism than those inside it? We can all agree with the liberal viewpoint that there are many ways of living one’s life but in practise we can be quite conservative and prescriptive about how it should be done.
The lure of the norm can have an effect not only on the way we see others but on the way we see ourselves. When someone comes to therapy you often find that they tell their story in broad strokes. They will describe things they have done or said or thought or felt in terms of it being ‘just the way other people’ do or say or think or feel. There is a comfort in this. It makes them feel normal, just like everybody else.
But there is also a negative side to it. When we are like everybody else we stop being ourselves. And that is what psychoanalytic psychotherapy is searching for: the person behind the complex of identifications and projections that make up our social selves. For behind our social selves there is another us; the one that is not being heard, the one whose life is not being lived; the one whose needs are not being met.
The only way of finding out who this person is and what this person truly wants is to stop imagining that we are ‘just like everyone else’. In broad terms yes we are but in a particular sense we most definitely are not. And so the business of therapy is to find the vocabulary, the words, to describe this person more accurately and more precisely; to use fresh, new words that do not apply to everyone else in general or anyone else in particular.
We are looking for the words that refer only to the client’s uniquely individual life. It is what is often referred to in the text books as the search for ‘subjective truth’. It is the furthest thing from cliché or normative descriptions or hand-me-down opinions of oneself that you can get. That is the goal of therapy; that something new and unique is found where something old and general used to be.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist
Dublin, Ireland.
Last week I wrote about the effect that norms have on our lives. I’ve come back to the issue this week because there are a number of other important ways in which norms impinge on us, and not always in a positive way.
A client of mine has lived as a single person for many years and even though they would ideally like a partner and a companion, this client nevertheless leads a productive and fulfilled life. The group of friends this client socialises with are all in couples and any who do become single don’t remain so for very long. My client, therefore, is often the only one who is single in a more or less continuous way.
The interesting thing is that this client can sustain two very different positions at the same time. On the one hand there are moments when life can be lonely and when a companion, lover, partner, is something that would make all the difference. On the other hand, this client can lead a full and productive life, always engaging in new projects, living a financially independent lifestyle with a good circle of friends and with the freedom to do what they wish, when they wish.
The norm of being in a relationship is something that this client is aware of, particularly from the examples of friends and, indeed, from the wider society. Movies, books, TV and magazines are also brimming with the message that completeness and happiness lie within the human relationship. This is the culture in which this client, no more than the rest of us, belongs and that is something to be accepted.
Occasionally one of this client’s friends will offer a helpful suggestion as to ways that a partner could be attracted: a different style of presenting oneself, a different method of socialising, a different ‘look’ and so on. Curiously, it is times like this that my client finds most upsetting. Living as a single person; being different to the norm; the day to day realities of earning a living; socialising as a single person and dealing with life’s ups and downs without the benefit of a supportive other, are all manageable.
But when friends verbally apply the norm of the dual relationship lifestyle in the form of ‘helpful’ advice then it becomes problematic. By suggesting ways in which my client can ‘fix’ their single situation there is the implicit message that it is a wrong or flawed or unsatisfactory way to live. Now the norm is being actively applied rather than just passively accepted.
The effect is, as I mentioned last week, to create an insider-outsider way of thinking. Anyone who complies with the norm is on the inside and therefore is ‘ok’. Anyone outside the norm is made to feel as if there is something wrong with them.
An interesting question arises from this: why is it that those outside the so-called norm appear to have a greater understanding of issues such as diversity and pluralism than those inside it? We can all agree with the liberal viewpoint that there are many ways of living one’s life but in practise we can be quite conservative and prescriptive about how it should be done.
The lure of the norm can have an effect not only on the way we see others but on the way we see ourselves. When someone comes to therapy you often find that they tell their story in broad strokes. They will describe things they have done or said or thought or felt in terms of it being ‘just the way other people’ do or say or think or feel. There is a comfort in this. It makes them feel normal, just like everybody else.
But there is also a negative side to it. When we are like everybody else we stop being ourselves. And that is what psychoanalytic psychotherapy is searching for: the person behind the complex of identifications and projections that make up our social selves. For behind our social selves there is another us; the one that is not being heard, the one whose life is not being lived; the one whose needs are not being met.
The only way of finding out who this person is and what this person truly wants is to stop imagining that we are ‘just like everyone else’. In broad terms yes we are but in a particular sense we most definitely are not. And so the business of therapy is to find the vocabulary, the words, to describe this person more accurately and more precisely; to use fresh, new words that do not apply to everyone else in general or anyone else in particular.
We are looking for the words that refer only to the client’s uniquely individual life. It is what is often referred to in the text books as the search for ‘subjective truth’. It is the furthest thing from cliché or normative descriptions or hand-me-down opinions of oneself that you can get. That is the goal of therapy; that something new and unique is found where something old and general used to be.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
The Lure of the Norm - 1
By Kevin Murphy, M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
It’s good to feel like everyone else. The world seems so much more understandable. Things fit where they should fit and fall into their proper place. If we think and act like everyone else then we have evidence that what we think and do is ok. Why is it ok? Because everyone else does it, so it must be ok.
As circular thinking goes, the idea of a norm to which we can all aspire, and from which we can all direct our lives, is a comforting thought. Apart from giving us a sense of who we are and where we belong, norms can also give us a very useful way of judging unacceptable behaviour in ourselves and others. It is impossible to imagine murder becoming an acceptable norm. Or violence, or crime, or physical abuse, and you can probably make an even bigger list.
Norms have their uses. But there is another side to them. You often hear distressed people say,‘I just want to be normal, lead a normal life, do normal things’. It is the verbal expression of the desire to live the way others seem to live, without difficulty or fear or depression or addiction or phobias or oppression or discomfort with whatever the norm happens to be. As a desire, it makes sense. We move towards norms quite naturally. Sometimes we do it so well there is almost a homogenization of personality going on. Look at clubs or gangs or other tightly knit groupings within society.
But what if we don’t match the norms? Those who don’t are often made to feel like outcasts, sometimes bullied, or victimized or made to suffer varying forms of injustice. Those who don’t accept, or who cannot comply with the norm due to physical, emotional or intellectual limitations are judged harshly. If someone doesn’t fit that standard, then they can’t belong. Equally, those who actively choose not belong deserve what they get.
Different people can find themselves outside 'the norm' at different times in their lives. Sometimes they know why they are there but sometimes they don’t. Some cope by denying what is happening and you find this in addictions of all kinds and in some personality disorders. Others will believe they are unworthy to belong and you find this in anxiety and mood disorders. Some believe the norms are just plain wrong and continue to live as they believe they should. You see this most clearly in the area of sexuality and gender identity.
Does that mean that anyone outside the norm is wrong? No, throughout history there have been plenty of examples of norms that are not just or equitable or appropriate. Even in contemporary society you can see examples of this. Think of sub-sectors of society where physical appearance is paramount, or financial wealth, or liberal sexual values, or personal and corporate greed, or even drug or alcohol use.
If you look hard enough you can even find norms that are publicly accepted yet privately rejected. Enjoying good mental health is one such. It has a paradoxical relationship with society. Everyone agrees that it is a good idea and an essential requirement for a full life. And yet ensuring it through therapy is more often than not seen as a sign of weakness rather than strength.
New norms are continuously being devised and old ones discarded but we have yet to embrace the norm of personal enquiry into our own psychical lives. That would involve a true examination of the norms by which we live.
Next week I'm going to return to this topic in order to look at one or two other ways in which norms effect our lives, in sometimes negative ways.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
It’s good to feel like everyone else. The world seems so much more understandable. Things fit where they should fit and fall into their proper place. If we think and act like everyone else then we have evidence that what we think and do is ok. Why is it ok? Because everyone else does it, so it must be ok.
As circular thinking goes, the idea of a norm to which we can all aspire, and from which we can all direct our lives, is a comforting thought. Apart from giving us a sense of who we are and where we belong, norms can also give us a very useful way of judging unacceptable behaviour in ourselves and others. It is impossible to imagine murder becoming an acceptable norm. Or violence, or crime, or physical abuse, and you can probably make an even bigger list.
Norms have their uses. But there is another side to them. You often hear distressed people say,‘I just want to be normal, lead a normal life, do normal things’. It is the verbal expression of the desire to live the way others seem to live, without difficulty or fear or depression or addiction or phobias or oppression or discomfort with whatever the norm happens to be. As a desire, it makes sense. We move towards norms quite naturally. Sometimes we do it so well there is almost a homogenization of personality going on. Look at clubs or gangs or other tightly knit groupings within society.
But what if we don’t match the norms? Those who don’t are often made to feel like outcasts, sometimes bullied, or victimized or made to suffer varying forms of injustice. Those who don’t accept, or who cannot comply with the norm due to physical, emotional or intellectual limitations are judged harshly. If someone doesn’t fit that standard, then they can’t belong. Equally, those who actively choose not belong deserve what they get.
Different people can find themselves outside 'the norm' at different times in their lives. Sometimes they know why they are there but sometimes they don’t. Some cope by denying what is happening and you find this in addictions of all kinds and in some personality disorders. Others will believe they are unworthy to belong and you find this in anxiety and mood disorders. Some believe the norms are just plain wrong and continue to live as they believe they should. You see this most clearly in the area of sexuality and gender identity.
Does that mean that anyone outside the norm is wrong? No, throughout history there have been plenty of examples of norms that are not just or equitable or appropriate. Even in contemporary society you can see examples of this. Think of sub-sectors of society where physical appearance is paramount, or financial wealth, or liberal sexual values, or personal and corporate greed, or even drug or alcohol use.
If you look hard enough you can even find norms that are publicly accepted yet privately rejected. Enjoying good mental health is one such. It has a paradoxical relationship with society. Everyone agrees that it is a good idea and an essential requirement for a full life. And yet ensuring it through therapy is more often than not seen as a sign of weakness rather than strength.
New norms are continuously being devised and old ones discarded but we have yet to embrace the norm of personal enquiry into our own psychical lives. That would involve a true examination of the norms by which we live.
Next week I'm going to return to this topic in order to look at one or two other ways in which norms effect our lives, in sometimes negative ways.
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