Therapy Duo

Psychotherapy & Counselling for Individuals & Couples

Category: Existentialism

Articles about Existentialism

  • What is Soul? … and Does it Matter?

    What is Soul? … and Does it Matter?

    The Material World – Where and What is Soul?

    Ours is said to be an age predominantly of materialism. We’ve deconstructed so many stories and beliefs and, with the aid of science, have commonly settled on the view that the world is dead matter and available for use in almost any way.

    A problem is that this “use” knows no limits – it is not sustainable. It has been proposed that in forty years there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish.

    What about the idea of soul? Is it an outmoded idea or one that still has value? This post offers some views on soul as an antidote to materialism, and as highly relevant to contemporary life.

    Myth

    We are used to hearing the word “myth” as synonymous for “commonly held erroneous belief” and are in danger of losing an older, possibly less comfortable view of the word. We meet this older view when we talk about, and dialogue with, the Greek and other ancient myths.

    We can think of this older view of “myth” as non-material fact – as living fact, as what takes place outside of the material realm. This realm is the psychic, the poetic.

    Clothed in facts
    truth feels oppressed,
    in the garb of poetry
    it moves easy and free. (Rabindranath Tagore)

    Terrible things can happen in myths, and it’s understandable that we might want to defend against the dark worlds they can present. Materialism can be seen as a defense against these realms, a way to live without fear.

    There is a view that we ignore myths at our peril, because they speak of a largely non-rational, unconscious side of ourselves that leaves us ungrounded if we do not explore it. We can see soulmaking for what we do when we inquire into this side of ourselves, so that no longer “truth feels oppressed”.

    Myth is story, and story can be lived through, can be a way in which soul finds and nurtures itself in chaotic life. As James Hillman says:

    Platonists long ago and Jung more recently pointed out the therapeutic value of the great myths for bringing order to the chaotic, fragmented aspect of fantasy. The main body of biblical and classical tales directs fantasy into organized, deeply life-giving psychological patterns…(from A Note on Story, in Loose Ends)

    The Storyteller & Trauma

    Donald Kalsched, in his book Trauma and the Soul, speaks of the image at the top of this post: an Inuit bone carving of The Storyteller. Kalsched says about The Storyteller (relating to how we can work with trauma):

    With one eye closed, focused on the inner worlds of dreams and the mytho-poetic images of the imagination, and one eye open, focused outwardly on the hard edges of material reality… [the carving] gives dramatic expression to the two worlds that I feel must be kept in view if a genuine and compelling story of trauma is to be told.

    This reverence for the mytho-poetic realm, in the service of healing trauma, is Kalsched’s way of talking about and working with soul.

    Reverie

    Gaston Bachelard in his Poetics of Reverie (in the chapter Reveries Toward Childhood) makes the distinction between soul and mind:

    As soon as the past is situated within a network of human values, within the inner values of a person who does not forget, it appears with the double force of the mind that remembers and the soul that feasts upon its faithfulness. The soul and the mind do not have the same memory… It is only when the soul and the mind are united in a reverie by the reverie that we benefit from the union of imagination and memory. In such a union we can say that we are reliving our past. Our past being imagines itself living again.

    Bachelard argues for an imaginative basis for our lives and for the relationship to our memories. Soul is like a fabric woven from these memories into a living reverie that eschews the material, that becomes a safeguard against it – a “soul that feasts”.

    Hillman and the Soul Perspective

    James Hillman was a strong advocate for the recovery of a soul perspective in contemporary psychotherapy. He defined soul as follows:

    By soul I mean, first of all, a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself. This perspective is reflective; it mediates events and make differences between ourselves and everything that happens. Between us and events, between the doer and the deed, there is a reflective moment—and soulmaking means differentiating the middle ground. (Re-visioning Psychology)

    Hillman’s middle ground lies between the mystery of ourselves and the material realm. This is the “reflective moment”, that is captured in all creative acts, no matter how humble. (And later in his career, Hillman also spoke more about anima mundi, “soul in the world”; that matter is itself ensouled.)

    Ultimate Concern

    Another lens on soul is that of Paul Tillich, who wrote of the concept of ultimate concern.

    We can each ask ourselves “What is my ultimate concern?” and sit with the answers that come (or may not immediately come). For Tillich, this question allows a investigation into the dynamics of personal life. To have an ultimate concern was his definition of faith (which he said applied to people who were atheists as well as believers).

    We all (except the very psychologically unwell) have some ultimate concern, and finding out what this is can guide us. We can see his question and the process of exploring the answer as another path to soulmaking.

    Tillich also spoke of the “ecstatic”. This beautiful word encapsulates the idea of standing outside ourselves, yet still being present to ourselves. We are like the Storyteller (the carving above) who can open and close each eye in turn, getting new and different views of himself. We can make soul from both the outer and the inner worlds.

    Creating Our Own Cultures

    We need to create our own, personal cultures of soul. These could inhabit dark, unseen places. As Clark Strand says:

    If someone asked me why I rise and walk at night, I couldn’t answer except to say I do it for its own sake, for the sake of rising and walking and praying in the dark. ..It creates its own culture on the soul. But in the last hundred years, that inner culture – that soul space – has become increasingly well lit. (Waking Up to the Dark)

    We are looking for pointers – meaningful depths, and meaningful to the depths already within ourselves – whatever these might look like or whether they might potentially be judged by others. The place in which we ensoul our lives might be secret, hidden from the light of day.

    Hillman And Suicide

    For James Hillman writing about suicide, the tragedy of a bodily suicide might be the end result of a life in which the person defended against the multiple and progressive symbolic suicides that the psyche yearned to take, in creating a life more dedicated to soul – but was unable to take due to egoic adherences to materialism.

    If these healing, multiple, symbolic suicides had been able to occur over  an extended period, then the tragic, literal, bodily suicide may not have needed to take place.

    The biography of the soul concerns experience. It seems not to follow the one-way direction of the flow of time, and it is reported best by emotions, dreams, and fantasies. (Suicide and the Soul)

    Play

    And we must not forget play. As Hillman says (Suicide and the Soul again) “The soul imagines and plays” and “We cannot get a soul history through a case history.”

    This thought is echoed in a beautiful poem by Rabindranath Tagore:

    On the seashore of endless worlds is the great meeting of children.

    Tempest roams in the pathless sky, ships are wrecked in the trackless water, death is abroad and children play. (From On the Seashore)

    An Undefinable

    Soul is what always remains – after we’ve dealt with the mundane requirements of commerce, with our survival and with our status in the social world.

    It is the experience of ourselves as free creatures, able to turn to what draws us out into the world, into company with others, yet also into inner, possibly hidden, creative worlds – in whatever form they may take.

    In our soulmaking we are attempting to express something related to an essential part of ourselves, that wants to live fully; to express an ineffable sense that we cannot ever really define, but choose nonetheless to label with that old-fashioned word soul.

  • Questioning our Doublethink

    Questioning our Doublethink

    The Clocks Strike Thirteen

    It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

    So goes the well-known opening sentence of George Orwell’s classic novel 1984. The novel remains a extraordinary description of a future that Orwell feared and, although written in 1949, remains a future that some would say we are relentlessly approaching.

    With the ubiquity of highly targeted on-line marketing, with the weaponising of social media, with fake news and the rise of radicalised global influencers, the novel remains a stark warning of where we could be heading.

    Orwell’s description of the clocks striking thirteen is clever in that, although we know what this means (1pm on the 24 hour clock) the sentence is enough to jolt us into the possibility that something very different is going on, that society is matching to a different drum from what we are used to. We perhaps need to be questioning our doublethink.

    A Different Drum

    In the Afterword to this novel ( written in 1961), the psychologist Erich Fromm describes this different drum in detail. He writes of how we have lost traditional certainties: we can now control nature in sophisticated ways (to both positive and negative effect); traditional religions no longer hold the sway they used to over the collective consciousness; technology brings the risk of soulless automation and a diminution of the human spirit.

    To Fromm, what we have lost is the possibility of faith, embedded within historical mores and contexts.

    In 1961 one of Fromm’s deep concerns was nuclear proliferation; he does not of course mention climate change nor species loss. Yet these are now further factors in the bewildering sense of powerlessness and hopelessness that many people feel.

    Doublethink

    Much of the power of 1984 hinges on the way doublethink plays out in the lives of the protagonists. Orwell’s definition of doublethink is:

    …the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them…. This process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision. But it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.

    It’s interesting to note that the first part of this definition is widely quoted (do a Google image search for “doublethink”, for example!) yet the second part (which appears further down the page in the original) is less commonly quoted.

    As psychotherapists, it’s this second part that is especially interesting, because it’s the doublethink we don’t know we’re involved in that’s particularly damaging.

    In the novel, we see the process of doublethink come to successful fruition when, over the course of his re-indoctrination, the protagonist Winston Smith comes to truly believe that two plus two equals five. And as Fromm says in his Afterword:

    ..if [a person] has surrendered his independence and his integrity completely, if he experiences himself as a thing which belongs either to the state, the party or the corporation, then two plus two are five, or “Slavery is Freedom”, and he feels free because there is no longer any awareness of the discrepancy between truth and falsehood.

    The Threat of Big Brother

    The novel ends with the following lines:

    But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

    Orwell is of course making the point that it is not all right, that Winston Smith has been so thoroughly indoctrinated and brainwashed that he is at home only with doublethink.

    This is the victory of Big Brother in the novel.

    Who is to Be the Victor in Our Lives?

    Given the loss of traditions for many people today, where are they to turn? The solution will be different for each person who wants to question the potential indoctrinations they slip into, in order to fill the void; the person who wants to find a way to live authentically and with poise in a complex and fractured world.

    The process of psychotherapy can be one such approach: inquiring as to whether we hold fake news internally. What, alternatively, is the “real news” of our psyche?

    By gentle yet deep questioning of ourselves, (using such techniques as dialogue, dreams, fantasies, reflections and attending to our symptoms), we can travel a road back into the fertile soil of ourselves, from which true creativity can then spring.

    Many people are now questioning the “news” by which they live their lives – questioning relationships, belief systems, commitments to systems and organisations, sexuality.

    What, alternatively, is the “real news” of our psyche?

    Yes, we have lost many of the collective means of obtaining a sense of belonging and may have lost societal and family bonds; and yes, we may need to depend on ourselves as individuals (rather than on a collective) to find a unique way; yet in the dialogue of the psychotherapeutic encounter we can be supported – and find we are not completely alone in our inquiry.

    At the very least we may find we are less likely to fall victim to doublethink, less likely for Big Brother to be the victor.

    Working with Us

    If any of this strokes a chord with you, you may like to contact us to partake in a psychotherapeutic dialogue that is meaningful for you.

  • Catching Things at the Beginning

    Catching Things at the Beginning

    Triggers

    Something we’ve found very useful when working with clients is getting them to tune into themselves to understand when they are getting triggered. We use the word “triggered” to identify when someone has an emotional reaction which may be unproductive (and is usually based on old patterns), in any situation, and then acts based on that trigger.

    The best way to start dealing with this is to raise awareness about where the trigger comes from, what is most likely to be a trigger for a particular person, and then, of course, what to do about it.

    This post is about how to notice things before they blow out of proportion and how to address them – to catch them at the beginning.

    The Tao Te Ching

    Continuing the theme from our last post on Wu-Wei, there’s a nice Taoist background to this. In Chapter 63 of the Tao Te Ching it says:

    The difficult problems of the world
    Must be dealt with while they are yet easy;
    The great problems of the world
    Must be dealt with while they are yet small.

    And in Chapter 64:

    Deal with a thing before it is there;
    Check disorder before it is rife.

    Starting at the Beginning…

    Sometimes it helps to understand where triggers come from. Looking to the beginning of our life might be a way to uncover how we operate in the world. But for the most part we can just work with what is here now, and not have to dig to find the origins (if in fact there is even a single cause).

    (This latter way of working, in the here-and-now, is more the Gestalt approach.)

    Working with the here-and-now we can start with each beginning: the beginning of a feeling, the first thought that arises that is negative, the first sensation that tells us we are uncomfortable. When we get awareness around this then there is a possibility of a different action. A new choice becomes available to us.

    The Picture

    Looking at the picture (above) that we took in Tasmania, we see a quiet perfection. This we could say is our natural state. Many things through a life can pollute our sense of ourselves or the environment and change how we perceive and react to our world. This photo represents for us a canvas on which we project our lives and concerns.

    If we take stock and can find a sense of our natural state (through therapy, meditation, art) then we can notice the disruptions to this natural state. We can watch for the changes no matter how minuscule they may appear. Attend now.

    When we see the faintest ripple on the water, check in. If we notice an intrusion to the natural scene, check in. We need to do this with ourselves and, if in relationship, with the other person.

    Practical Techniques

    You may be interested to read about some practical ways of exploring this internally and in relationship by reading our Three Simple Sentences post and our page on Meanings and Behaviours.

    Once we understand that there will always be ripples that come and go then we can attend to looking deeper and can make choices to do something different (or just let the ripples settle), rather than letting things build up or reacting too quickly.

    This is a creative process and it can become a habit that is well worth practicing.

    We suggest this as an alternative to working on “anger management”; an alternative to feeling disconnected, feeling resentment and experiencing a range of other problems that we see in therapy – when people have just let feelings and thoughts go unchecked and unnoticed.

    The Tao Te Ching translation is by Lin Yutang.

  • Looking for Living Waters

    Looking for Living Waters

    The Medieval Experience

    Living waters are a powerful symbol in ancient texts. Not just texts of language either: above is an image I took earlier this year of one of the pediments to the South Transept at Chartres Cathedral. It’s a detail of the Porch of Martyrs with Saints Theodore, Stephen, Pope Clement and Saint Lawrence. After the martyrdom of Clement (by being thrown into the sea attached to an anchor) legend has it that a divinely created shrine appeared under the waters. In this pediment at Chartres, stone “waters” engulf his shrine.

    All of Chartres has been called a Mutus Liber, a “Mute Book”. As Emile Male says in The Gothic Image:

    Victor Hugo said: “In the Middle Ages men had no great thought that they did not write down in stone.”

    And here’s more from Emile Male on what it meant to a person of the Middle Ages to enter such a cathedral:

    Side by side with the story of this vast universe, man’s own history is written. He learns that life must be a conflict, a struggle with nature in every month of the year, a struggle with himself at every moment, an endless psychomachia. And to those who have fought a good fight the angels in the heavens above hold out crowns. Where is there room for doubt or even for disquietude of mind?

    On entering the cathedral it is the sublimity of the great vertical lines which first affects his soul. The nave at Amiens gives an inevitable sense of purification, for by its very beauty the great church acts as a sacrament. Here again it is an image of the world. The cathedral like the plain or the forest has atmosphere and perfume, splendour, and twilight, and gloom. The great rose-window behind which sinks the western sun, seems in the evening hours to be the sun itself about to vanish at the edge of a marvellous forest. But this is a transfigured world, where light shines more brightly and where shadows have more mystery than in the world of fact.

    Already he feels himself in the heart of the heavenly Jerusalem, and tastes the profound peace of the city of the future. The storm of life breaks on the walls of the sanctuary, and is heard merely as a distant rumbling. Here indeed is the indestructible ark against which the winds shall not prevail. No place in the world fills men with a deeper feeling of security.

    How much more vividly must this have been felt by the men of the Middle Ages. To them the cathedral was the sum of revelation. In it all the arts combined, speech, music, the living drama of the Mysteries and the mute drama of sculpture.

    To Find This Taste Today

    To find this “taste of the profound peace of the city of the future”, a beautiful and powerful phrase, is one equally relevant to us today. It reminds us of Zen statements on Realization, on the Absolute Principle. This taste is one that we look for with intensity, whether we know it or not. We look for living waters.

    How can we continually find intensity in life – without resorting to acting out in ways that we ultimately realize cheat us – such as with sex and/or drug addiction? How can we continually re-encounter living waters? We know we are destined for inner intensity, it is our real life; despite what this materialistic, violent culture might suggest. Isn’t violence in thought and deed just another addictive substitute for an inner intensity of being that we dearly long to experience?

    Saint John of the Cross said:

    The soul now feels that it is all inflamed in the divine union, its palate is all bathed in glory and love, that in the intimate part of its substance it is flooded with no less than rivers of glory, abounding in delights, and from its depths flow rivers of living water, which the Son of God declared will rise up in such souls.

    And in John 7:38, to which St John refers above, we have:

    Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’

    It’s the experience of “entering the cathedral” that contemporary women and men crave, an experience of the “sum of revelation”. An increasingly corporatised world tells us this is not important – that fulfilling our outer “lacks” is what is the important and the pressing concern.

    We don’t have to belong to a particular religion to find this taste. But we have to be open to the power of symbol as it acts and lives in our hearts.

    To stay connected with living waters (or with another symbol that suits you) is the great challenge of our time. And this is something that a deep and open investigation, possibly in therapy and counselling, is sometimes able to provide.

  • Depression, Addictions and Guilt/Shame Cycles

    Depression, Addictions and Guilt/Shame Cycles

    A Model Both Old and New

    Here’s a model that can help in understanding depression, addictions and self-esteem issues. The model’s both old and new, deriving from ancient reflective practices, as well as from Jung and beyond, up to contemporary psychotherapy.

    Although the model may not be the one answer to (for example) substance addiction (which is, potentially, a complex response to external as well as genetic and psychodynamic factors) it’s presented as an invitation to reflect on whether there’s value in it for you. And it could form part of an inquiry undertaken in personal counselling or therapy.

    depression guilt shame cycle
    Depression, Guilt, Shame Cycle

    Following through the steps in the diagram:

    Separation from Self

    Spiritual traditions both East and West have spoken for millennia, in different ways, of the “Self” – as the Ground of Being, as Source, Tao, the Divine, Brahman. In this view, our (largely unconscious) oneness with the Self is a deeply loving embrace, a primordial unity of the individual sense of ourselves with an Infinity that is unnameable and deeply grounding. It’s a sense of absolute peace and completeness.

    What can go wrong? Well, it seems that for us as baby humans, this sense of Self needs to be mirrored back to us by those closest to us in the world. We need to feel that we are loved by those figures from whom we have not yet psychologically separated: our parents and/or care-givers. A wounding of this loving embrace, the hurt of not being truly met, is enough to cause us loss of this sense of Self.

    This loss can be very deep for the infant. The infant may begin to develop strategies to make such unbearable loss bearable.  They may begin to make up an identity for themselves, one that better fits their world.  This making of an identity, as different from what is naturally ours, we could call “going it alone” (or attempting to do so), without the backing of the Self. For example, an infant could choose to not have needs, or could choose to be avoidant of contact with others. This is how psychological disorders can develop.

    When the infant or child decides to “go it alone”, they depend upon strategies of their own making for psychological survival, rather than upon the primordial peace that still envelops them.

    It’s not that the child has actually lost their ground; the problem is that they believe that it’s been lost.

    Unconscious Guilt, Shame

    This “going it alone” can be experienced by some as a contraction (the world is on my shoulders), felt so strongly (but not understood for what it is) that it causes a deep sense of guilt over what they have done – which was to deny their primordial peace and completeness. A guilt so disagreeable in fact that the individual pushes the guilt out of their awareness – where it lives an unconscious life, as an energy ready to be activated.

    The person is left with an indefinable sense of great loss; a sadness that can never be fully understood because its activating roots have been pushed so far out of awareness. This sadness can play out in many ways in the world, not all of which may look sad!

    One of the ways it can play out is as a grinding sense of shame. Where guilt says “I did something wrong”, shame says “I am Wrong”. Some practitioners use the term “ground shame” to refer to a shame that has lost all contact with specific scenarios or experiences: what’s left is just an endless “knowing” of wrongness.

    Projection

    One way out of this painful situation for the individual is via the psychological mechanism of projection.

    We can attempt to alleviate the negative effects of guilt and shame by judging others, by projecting the awful feelings as far away from ourselves as possible. We can develop an endless system of judging others and judging events in the world.

    The Victim Stance

    We end up exacting our grievances on anything we consider to be “outside” of ourselves. It becomes the song of our everyday consciousness. We learn the stance of “victim of the world”. Everything would be better if just this … (outside of me) would change. Then I would no longer be a victim of it.

    Acting out our grievances is very likely – using violence, depression, or even our sexuality, as examples.

    More Guilt, Shame

    At some level (usually, again, unconscious) we feel guilty for all this finger pointing or acting out we’re doing. It leaves us with a bad taste. We decide we’re “not a good person” for habitually doing this. Our original unconscious guilt and shame for having left Home is compounded by our actions to cover up what we originally did.

    Expectation of Punishment

    Burdened by this sense of guilt, it’s a small step to expecting that we’ll be punished for what we did. Doesn’t the whole world work on the basis of punishment following crime? On revenge?

    Fear

    So we live in fear; again, not in a fear we can necessarily put our finger on, but maybe with a lingering sense of anxiety; or with a protracted depression; or with an acting out in addictions or in an eating disorder.

    The Cycle

    In acting out our fears we undertake more projections and more judgements. How can we get clear of these habitual negativities? Only (we think) by more of the same behaviour.

    We think that maybe the “good” is out there in the drug, the drink, the food (projections). Maybe (we think) by consuming this “good” I can have back the primordial Good – that which I already had at the beginning, my original Home (which in fact I actually still have, but I don’t realise this to be the case).

    A Way Back

    In our counselling practice, our experience is that people can find a way back to Self. They can find relief from this negative cycle of guilt, shame, fear and projection. And it sometimes takes just a willingness to investigate habitual defenses to find relief.

    There’s potential magic in reflecting upon these habitual defense systems, and in bringing them to the light of conscious awareness. The shared space of the psychotherapy / counselling setting can be the ideal place for exploration.

  • The Perils of Character Development

    Creative Character Development

    In Gestalt we’re often working with the Here and Now, with what’s arising in the present moment. But of course, what’s arising is often affected by our habitual patterns of coping, on our creative adaptations (as they’re termed in Gestalt).

    We call these adaptations “creative” because they have enabled us to accommodate to the social environment as a child.

    Outside the field of Gestalt, several of the character-analytic theorists have described five distinct stages in the development of character. It’s in this process of deleopment that they see the formation of character occurring.

    This post is a short introduction to this approach to understanding character. We can use it as a kind of checklist for ourselves, for how we feel we’ve navigated the perils of the social environment in our past and how they may still inform our lives today. We sometimes use this model in our work with individuals and with couples.

    The Stages of Character Development

    Character Development

    Stage 1: Self-Affirmation

    This is the initial expression of our natural, instinctual needs. Maybe these involve dancing, singing, throwing mud, loving without fear!

    Stage 2: Negative Environmental Response

    The social environment (for example family, school) is often completely unconcerned for the developing individual’s needs and reacts in a way that frustrates or blocks those needs.

    Stage 3: Organismic Reaction

    The bewildered individual responds in sometimes quite extreme and instinctual ways: experiencing and often expressing rage, terror, and grief at the loss of being authentically seen.

    Stage 4: Self-Negation

    Here is where the character-theorists consider the work of character formation to occur. It is the place where neuroses begin: through a sophisticated means of adaptation and denial of authenticity.

    Self-negation involves not only a denial and blocking of the original action of Self-Affirmation (Stage 1), but also a denial and blocking of the unendurable pain of Organismic Reaction (Stage 3).

    So begins what is often a lifetime process of setting the person against him/her self. Much work has been done on how these blocks become held in the body (for example), even causing postural distortions. (Wilhelm Reich did significant work on this.) Deeply held blocks such as these are resistant to change, because they serve to avoid anxieties about being hurt again.

    A significant point here is that these deeply held blocks are often related to the parents; the deeply held blocks are themselves held like “parents” in the unconscious, and hence are relational.

    This is where Gestalt, an inherently relational modality of psychotherapy, can be powerful in bringing these difficult states to consciousness.

    Stage 5: Adjustment

    In the final stage the individual does whatever is necessary to adjust to this difficult ground. (It’s here that the British psychologist D.W. Winnicott talked about the creation of the false self.)

    The individual develops a compromise solution in adapting to the environment, sculpting his/her character using the methods described here: either or both of suppression (Stage 4) and exaggeration (Stage 5); accommodating unnaturally to the environment (to avoid pain) while maintaining some level of contact.

    (Narcissism is an example of such a method.)

    Summary

    The character-analytic approach can give us insight into the myriad ways in which we have modified our natural state (and continue to do so) using neuroses and psychopathologies. This we can call “character“. A relational approach such as Gestalt can offer real healing, because it is a therapy involving a genuine relationship between therapist and client, focusing on adaptation and denial of authenticity.

    For more information on this topic – which is both theoretical and based on research (but not dry) – see Stephen M. Johnson’s book Character Styles.

  • Riding the Horse of Fear

    Fear

    Fear is something we all, to some degree, have a relationship with. And we spoke in our last post about the brain’s bias towards negativity (see Understanding the Emotional Brain).

    Much has been written in the field of psychotherapy about this subject and how it plays out in our lives, whether consciously or unconsciously. The view of the existentialist psychotherapists (of whom Irvin Yalom is a great example) is that at the root of all fears are the four ultimate concerns: death, isolation, freedom and meaninglessness.
    Riding the Horse of Fear

    But What’s Our Relationship to Fear?

    The power of psychotherapy is in the investigation of our moment-to-moment relationship to what’s happening now. In the case of fear, we can ask in psychotherapy (repeatedly, if necessary) what our relationship is to it?

    One common such relationship is of resistance: we resist the experience of fear (by one or more of a range of potential strategies and addictions); we are afraid of fear itself.

    The Alternative to Resistance: One Person’s Experience

    Here’s a quote from Vicky Woodyard, a woman who has suffered greatly in losing both her 7 year old daughter and her husband to cancer.

    Fear is a part of the human condition – yours, mine and everyone else’s. But here is the challenge and the solution rolled into one. Ride the horse of fear consciously. Choose it. Resistance to fear is what perpetuates it. We all know this. It doesn’t matter whether your challenge is cancer or not, ride the horse of fear by your own choice.

    We highly recommend Vicky’s book LIFE WITH A HOLE IN IT: That’s How the Light Gets In – The Wisdom of an Awakened Heart for its fearless stance in relation to her experiences and to fear itself.