Therapy Duo

Psychotherapy & Counselling for Individuals & Couples

Category: Therapeutic Method

Articles on Therapeutic Method

  • Relationship in Confinement

    Relationship in Confinement

    The Challenge

    In this post we want to look at relationship in confinement, particularly for intimate relationships, and the potential dynamics between the partners.

    With the difficulties of COVID-19, these dynamics can be an extra challenge, because many of us are forced to be in closer contact with our partners than would normally be the case. So points of friction, which we might otherwise have swept under the carpet (or fled from) can become exacerbated.

    We’ll look at this from a depth-psychology viewpoint, which is a useful model for the complexities that occur.

    The Depth-Psychology View of Relationships

    The image above shows a depth-psychology view of a relationship, especially of an intimate relationship between two people (of same or different genders). Each arrow (all 6 of them) presents a form of the relationship that gets invoked.

    A book could be written about the model above, but we thought we would try to distill it for the current circumstance.

    (Note, as with all psychological models, they are only that, models to help us understand. Reality itself is always far more nuanced and complex than any model describes.)

    These six relationships mean 12 points of relating, across the two people, only 2 of which are completely conscious (and 4 partially conscious). No wonder things sometimes go wrong!

    Let’s look at the four kinds of relationship, marked 1 to 4 in the image above.

    (1) Ego with Ego

    Ego is the conscious sense of self – the subject of our experience. Ego is the one we present to ourselves and to others as the “real deal” (however, it may not be quite that simple).

    The Ego has its “public relations” component, the persona, or mask, that we use to adapt to others and make a statement we’d like to make, that feels appropriate in a particular situation.

    It’s the persona particularly that may be challenged in our interactions during unusual circumstances, such as the COVID-19 lock-down. It’s hard to be a senior executive when you must also be tutoring your kids or doing the laundry, all in the same workday.

    We may have to reflect on our ego, and how the egos of the others we are living with are affecting us.

    (2) Ego with our own Unconscious

    This is a huge topic, one we can only skim over here. It’s the subject of all deep psychological work: How can we have a dialogue, an open two-way relationship between our conscious ego and the vast (99% at least) of the psyche that remains unconscious to us?

    Suffice it to say that successful work on ourselves is the precursor and best predictor of effective work on a relationship. We can work to change ourselves; we cannot work to change the other, for if we attempt to do this we will have fallen into the potential difficulties described in (3) below.

    The Unconscious has an important historical component: much that has happened to us, good and bad, from childhood onward (and prior to our birth, as collective memory) is held unconsciously. It is these historical components that can hold sway over us, and can affect the functioning of the Ego.

    (3) Our Unconscious with Ego of the Other

    A feature of the Unconscious is that it holds these repressed elements, as we mentioned above. Another feature is that it continually involves itself in projection.

    “Projection is a psychic mechanism that occurs whenever a vital aspect of our personality of which we are unaware is activated. When something is projected we see it outside of us, as though it belongs to someone else and has nothing to do with us. Projection is an unconscious mechanism.

    We do not decide to project something, it happens automatically. If we decided to project something it would be conscious to us and then, precisely because it is conscious to us, it could not be projected. Only unconscious contents are projected; once something has become conscious projection ceases.” †

    Projection is a huge factor in the flavour of the Unconscious-Ego relationship, especially in an intimate relationship. We can never be without projection. But what we can do is start to become aware of what we projecting onto others.

    There are levels in this: at a “micro” level we might be continually expecting our partner to behave in ways that we have programmed in from our childhood experiences with our own parents or siblings; or how things “naturally” work in society (“women do the housework”).

    But at a “macro” level there the danger that the work we should be doing, we do not do: instead we project our lack in this area onto the other partner.

    An example at this macro level is when a man has had a negative experience with his mother, and his feminine unconscious side (the so-called anima in Jungian language) has been wounded as a consequence.

    Instead of investigating this resulting internal misogyny, he projects the  “problem woman” out onto his partner – seeing her as lacking and negative in various ways.

    Another factor that comes into play here is the contra-sexual side of each of us. Often we are not in contact with this, and it can play havoc in the Unconscious-Ego interactions.

    “The contra-sexual element within us is so psychologically elusive that it escapes our complete awareness, therefore it always is projected, at least in part.” ‡

    So a woman may project her “Shining White Knight” onto the man of her dreams, and only too late find that he is a primarily money-focused achiever who cannot give her what she wants (which is, actually, to have a relationship with that Knight living in her unconscious).

    (Note this is unrelated to the genders of the partners – it applies in same sex as well as different sex relationships: we are usually, at some level, mainly at an unconscious level, trying to work out and redeem our contra-sexual side.)

    (4) Our Unconscious with the other’s Unconscious

    In the example given, of the man projecting his negative mother onto women, the story does not end there.

    She in turn, due to her unconscious predisposition, may “take on” this projection, feeling the very things that are projected onto her. (This is called projective identification.) So her ego response changes, as she begins to feel worthless.

    However, that is probably not the end of the subject, because unconsciously she is probably bitterly disappointed and angry and will reap her revenge on her partner (again, unconsciously).

    We are now talking of interactions that are unconscious with unconscious, and these are difficult to investigate, since neither party knows what’s happening! This is exactly when a third party such as a therapist can assist as they may see the dynamic playing out, because they are not personally involved (and have seen it before).

    “There is little doubt that such projective identifications occur. They feel wonderful when one senses that one has come home through the agency of the Other; they feel diabolical if one feels possessed by the Other.

    How many pogroms, martyrdoms, burnings, mass hysterias have scarred history, destroyed lives, because of … contamination between [the unconscious of two people]?” §

    Wrapping Up

    It is our intention here to offer a model for the complexities of relationships, which may in this difficult time be more in evidence.

    The good news is that, often, if couples address issues they are having before there is a crisis, good work can be done in exploring some of the “skeletons in the closet”, and enabling the couple to feel relieved and better able to tackle the difficulties of the world they are facing.

    As the psychiatrist and psychotherapist Iain McGilchrist says, you can take a poisonous gas (chlorine) and a dull reactive metal (sodium) and combine them chemically to form a harmless but very necessary white substance – salt!

    A relationship, too, can undergo such an alchemical miracle, made from two possibly quite odd components!

    If you wish are seeking to make a change in your relationship feel free to reach out to us for support.

    † John A Sanford – The Invisible Partners, p10
    ‡ John A Sanford – The Invisible Partners, p11
    § James Hollis – The Eden Project, p54

  • Couples Work and “The Third”

    Couples Work and “The Third”

    Couples Work as More than Conflict Resolution

    At Therapy Duo, in Couples therapy, we often take a psycho-educational role and offer very practical tips for resolving couple conflicts. But we are also always aware of another level operating in the couple relationships we see.

    This level can be hard to pin down and define, and yet we as therapists often have a real sense of its presence and how it might be accessed further to transform a relationship. In this blog post we will try to say a little about this other level (“the third”).

    The Legacy of Scientific Thinking

    Culturally and educationally, society is swayed by a scientific view of things. The rise of science since the end of the seventeenth century has been extraordinary, and no-one would deny the tremendous gains that have come from this.

    Science is an exacting lens on nature, a champion of the “cause and effect” paradigm (i.e. that all effects have causes, which are previous to them in time). Science has brought about amazing devices such as our computers and smartphones.

    It’s interesting to note though, that at about the time of the beginning of the rise of science, another world view was dying out in the West. This was the world of (Western) alchemy, and it works in an opposite direction to science.

    While science was starting to become a study of material life, and how matter changes over time (by a disembodied subject), alchemy was always a science of the soul.  Although some still see alchemy as just a primitive version of chemistry, other current thinking is that in fact they were diametrically opposed disciplines, in their intended goals, operating within two markedly different paradigms.

    Science wants to (and has been very successful at) demarcating a split between subject and object. It enables subjects (people) to successfully manipulate objects (nature). Yet, with science we are at a crossroads now: this process cannot continue unabated without destroying the earth, through climate change and species extinction. We could say that science has been a victim of its extraordinary success.

    Alchemy: The Other Discipline

    Some commentators are now starting to look closely at Western alchemy again, and to wonder whether in fact we threw too much out when we assigned it to the dustbin of history.

    For what was it trying to do? Alchemy insisted that subject and object are always linked (evidence that quantum physics is now corroborating); that soul exists as an inner life that moves by its own rules, independent of cause and effect, independent of time. That synchronicities exist, and that they order reality. And that this discipline is a proper subject for psychology (for psyche, soul).

    For soul, cause and effect are irrelevant. What is deeply relevant to soul is relationships, and the quality of relationships. (These relationships can be between parts of a single person, between people, or between a person and the so-called material realm – the environment.)

    For this reason Western alchemy talked at length about opposites, their combinations and their resolutions as transformative processes.

    The Subtle Body in Alchemy

    Alchemy liked to keep this idea of relationship living by considering the subtle body. This was the third element, the realm between two opposites (such as matter and soul, subject and object, two people in a relationship) and it had a reality as an intermediate realm.

    While this may sound obscure and unlikely, it is good to remember the words of Claude Levi-Strauss on the dangers of dominant thought systems:

    Every civilisation tends to overestimate the objective orientation of its thought and this tendency is never absent. (The Savage Mind, p3.)

    Relationship as “The Third”

    We have written on this blog in the past about the value in seeing that any couple have the relationship itself as “The Third”. (Here, for example, on The Life of The Relationship as a third entity. Or here, in relation to neurobiology: relationship itself is a third reality.)

    We are suggesting again in this post that there is good evidence for taking the concept of “The Third” very seriously in couples work. We see this play out in the therapy room sometimes when two people, who have been attacking each other (and continually defending themselves), are able to “stand aside” and watch the life of “The Third”, in the room, at that moment – and for them to realise that they have this important Third on which mutually to work – which is the Relationship itself!

    We in the therapy room can then sometimes all detect a change that happens; there is a sense of rightness and of hope for transformation. Which, of course, was what alchemy was all about, the transformation of opposites to form a higher state, neither inner nor outer (which science would insist be one or the other!) but of a third realm: the “subtle body” of the relationship.

    …they have this important Third on which mutually to work – which is the Relationship itself!

    Relationships Under Duress

    We could argue that due to our very scientifically-oriented culture we are sometimes doing relationships under duress. There is potentially a large part of the world of relationships for which an effective language of discourse no longer exists. And the right words are often needed before the deeper experience can be had.

    It may be better to stand back in couples work, from love vs hate, attack vs defense, good vs evil, mind vs body, left-brain vs right-brain, love vs power, and sit with the alchemical idea of essence, something that pervades all of reality and connects the opposites; something that can have real presence in couples work if it is allowed in.

    Couples work could then be a microcosm of what we must also do collectively in the outer world, as we find new paradigms to save the planet from destruction; paradigms that see ourselves as part of the one subtle body of nature, rather than as subjects exploiting nature.

    Schwartz-Salant on the Alchemical Paradigm

    Here are two quotations from Nathan Schwartz-Salant’s The Mystery of Human Relationships, speaking of the alchemical attitude in relational therapy:

    …one becomes focused upon relations, on the nature of the ‘third realm’ between people, and not on what people are doing to one another. …A major principle of the alchemical attitude is that it is not hierarchical. No matter how much one person seems to be doing something negative or objectionable to another, one still looks for the ‘unconscious couple’ the two people share. (p17)

    Another major feature of the alchemical attitude is the respect for chaos. In a sense alchemical thinking parallels the recent discoveries in Chaos Theory in science….chaos has always been central to alchemy. The alchemical attitude learns to embrace and suffer chaos without reaching into reason to dispel and dissociate from it. Moreover, the alchemical attitude recognises a transcendent dimension of existence without which the process of transformation cannot proceed. (p17)

    (We plan to tease out these ideas further, in future pages on the site, when we discuss the alchemical work Rosarium Philosophorum.)

    The Image: Plate 2 of the Rosarium Philosophorum

    The image at the top of this post is Plate 2 of the Rosarium Philosophorum, an alchemical text that was a favourite of C.G. Jung, and that describes stages in a relational alchemical process (either between two people, or between two parts of an individual).

    Plate 2 shows the start of the process. (There are 20 plates.) The image is sometimes referred to as the “Left-handed Contact”, because the couple hold hands with their left hand: they are unconscious of much of their connection (a situation which can be fraught with difficulties).

    We say in this situation that the Family of Origin issues that the two people have brought into the relationship are alive and activated (and are often out of the awareness of both people).

    Yet, some kind of structure is already in place (the crossed branches), and a holy dove is shown descending: some kind of illumination is possible, but is not yet in effect between the persons of the relationship. There is hope!

  • 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.

  • Introducing Our Adult Attachment Primer

    Introducing Our Adult Attachment Primer

    We’ve been wanting a simple primer for attachment theory for a while, and while there are several really good books around, not everyone wants to read a whole book on the subject to get an idea of what it’s about.

    We also wanted to give our view of this topic, after ten years of working with couples, and increasingly finding attachment theory to be a useful model for understanding what goes on in the sometimes mysterious interactions between partners in an intimate relationship.

    So we’ve added a new page to the web site: An Adult Attachment Primer.

    Fighting About How They Fight

    Couples often fight about how they fight. In doing this, they’re not usually fighting about the actual issues in the relationship. They come to therapy speaking of the “communication” issues that they have. This is often a pointer to the fact that they’re “spinning their wheels” on secondary concerns, while below the surface the the primary attachment issues are playing out and are remaining unaddressed.

    These primary issues are often about how people handle stress and conflict in an intimate relationship.

    The Primer

    The Adult Attachment Primer doesn’t describe everything we do with couples. Attachment theory offers just one model, but it can be a very useful one, particularly when two people’s attachment styles are very different (and even when they are the same).

    The model can be very useful when two people’s attachment styles are different

    For example, it can help to see how one person in a relationship might be driven to repair a disruption with the other, while the other person might be driven to withdraw from contact to reduce stress. The partners can start to see what the drivers are for themselves and for the other person.

    Click here for The Primer, which explains the diagram at the top of this post.

    If you’d like to understand how these issues may be playing out in your relationship, please give us a call.

  • The Large and the Small Cog Wheels

    The Large and the Small Cog Wheels

    Therapy Duo at the GANZ Conference

    We’re just back from the GANZ (Gestalt Australia and New Zealand) conference in Canberra where we gave a presentation on our eclectic approach to couples therapy.

    It was gratifying to receive such positive feedback on our way of working, and a great opportunity for us to reflect on how we work and what it is that makes our approach to therapy so effective.

    Not to be underestimated is the years of work we’ve done to achieve a quiet and grounded sense of happiness and security in our own relationship, and to see that something of that can “rub off” on the couples we work with.

    In intimate relationships, so much of the interactions are rooted in out-of-awareness states, and this can work for couples in a positive way, grounding them in a real sense of couple security; as well as in a negative way when these interactions trigger disruptive patterns and cause suffering.

    So here’s some background from the slide on “the cogwheels”, one that a member of the audience asked us to write more about.

    It’s a simplified model that we find helps couples to figure out what’s going on in tense moments.

    The “Two Brains”

    The large touching circles above represent the two partners in a couple interaction. Also shown is the cerebral cortex and the amygdala in each – the so-called two brains.

    The cerebral cortex is the mammalian, developed, “adult” brain, responsible for higher functions such as sensory perception. It’s where we want to be in a couple interaction! The amygdala, on the other hand, is the primitive, reptilian brain, responsible for “fight, flight, freeze” reactions: it’s not where we want to be when interacting with our partner. (It’s the source of the “trigger” response, also called the “pathway of fear”.)

    Lastly what’s shown in the diagram is the sensory thalamus: this processes incoming sensory data and decides whether there’s a threat involved.

    The Small Cog Wheel

    If one partner experiences some kind of threat or danger in the interaction, the sensory thalamus can be quick to reroute nerve impulses to the amygdala. We say this person is “triggered”, and their behaviour is then usually a fast and reactive combination that is primarily defensive.

    We say that one partner has taken the path of the “small cog wheel” (shown as the smaller dotted red line above). They’ve switched from large cog wheel to small.

    The person is “triggered”, and their behaviour is then usually defensive.

    The problem with this reaction (as well as the suffering it causes the person who’s switched) is that the reaction is quickly picked up by the other person, causing them to potentially also switch from large to small cog wheel. The situation quickly escalates and the intimate system becomes threatened (fighting).

    The Large Cog Wheel

    When all’s going well, the “happy path” is shown by the larger dotted red line: the large cog wheel. A couple in this dynamic is doing well and both partners are enjoying their contact and interaction. The thalamus detects no threats on either side.

    What to Do?

    We can “catch” what’s happening in these couple interactions.

    An important part of what we do in couples therapy is to “catch” what’s happening in the couple interactions, to bring these patterns into awareness, and to support the couple to use pacing and self-support to slow these interactions; to give the neocortex time to operate and to prevent amygdala reactions from controlling the scene. The experiential approach of Gestalt is well suited for this work.

    (The cog-wheel diagram is adapted and simplified from Seidenfaden & Draiby, The Vibrant Relationship.)

  • How Long Will it Take?

    How Long Will it Take?

    Changing Habits is Hard

    How Long Will it Take? This is a question that many starting therapy, or any new endeavour, may ask themselves. The answer’s not straightforward, but having said that there are some guidelines.

    Let’s assume you’re coming to therapy to work on your relationship (or an addiction, depression, or other ongoing issue) and that you’ve tried what you can to fix the problem – and still feel stuck. You are probably coming as a last resort rather than as the first thing you’ve tried.

    And in a world of fast paced work and rapid transfer of information we all tend to expect quick results. We might otherwise feel we’re failing, or that the process isn’t working.

    But the reality is: changing bad or entrenched habits is hard.

    You may’ve been doing these things for a long time and the research suggests that habits form brain patterns that are hard to break. It takes time and concerted, conscious, consistent effort to change.

    New Neural Pathways

    The good news is that we can change. Neuroscience talks of creating new neural pathways. New pathways allow you to change and create new behaviours, over time, that serve you better than the old ones did. It takes work and time to create these changes. No matter how well you do at first, if you don’t keep up the good efforts you can easily slip back into old behaviours.

    You have to really want the change. Changing because someone else wants you to change, or because it seems like a good idea, will not create the desired result. You have to want it enough to do whatever it takes to get there.

    The latest research suggests that it takes 6-9 months to create the new neural pathways that support a long term change in behaviour. That sounds scary but it’s really not so bad.

    The Benefits Start Now

    Just because it will take time to cement change, doesn’t mean you’ll not experience benefits immediately. If you are able to stop the vicious arguments with your partner, are able to stop smoking or to eat more healthily you will usually notice great benefits quickly. What we want is for you to sustain those changes over the long term.

    When you notice benefits it makes it easier to stay with the work required. But there are other hidden factors too.

    Unpacking Why You Do What Do

    Your current behaviour is there for a reason, or you wouldn’t be doing it. This can be hard to swallow, but it’s true. Whether you’re a workaholic, 10 kilos overweight, or have anger management issues — your current situation is serving you somehow.

    So take some time to think about this. Whether the need is relaxation but the behaviour is binge drinking, or the need is recognition but the behaviour is overwork, you first need to identify what need is being served by your current behaviour.

    Once you have the answer, you can work out how to meet this need in another way, smoothing the path to change.

    Support and Commitment

    Therapy can create a supportive environment to explore what you really want, what you need to change, and ways to do exactly that.

    It is also important to recognise change and progress as it happens. There will be many steps along the path to your goal and it is important to integrate the changes and build on your successes. It will keep you more focused on the target.

    It’s known from positive psychology and neuroscience, that you’ll have more success when you move towards something positive than away from something negative.

    Let Us Help Along the Way

    Since we are only human too we know what it’s like to struggle with an issue and have to put in hard work to change. We know this both from personal experience and from the clients we have worked with.

    If you are willing to put the effort in we are happy to help support you in your change process.

    (Image: The Mahatmas Present Standing Point, Series II, No. 2a, 1920, by Hilma af Klint)

  • From Duel to Duet

    From Duel to Duet

    We’ve Come a Long Way

    We’ve come a long way in our approach to resolving differences between partners in couple relationships. For example, it was not until the 16th century that judicial marital duels began to die out, within Germanic culture. Here is one set of instructions for such a brutal duel:

    The man should be armed with three wooden clubs. He was to be up to his waist in a three-foot wide hole dug in the ground, with one hand tied behind his back. The woman was to be armed with three rocks, each weighing between one and five pounds, and each one wrapped in cloth in form of a small sack. The man could not leave his hole but the woman was free to run around the edge of the pit. If the man touched the edge of the pit with either his hand or his arm, he had to surrender one of his clubs to the judges. If the woman hit him with a rock while he was doing so, she forfeited one of her stones. … If the woman won, the man was executed; if the man won, the woman was buried alive.

    But time and time again in our counselling practice we see couples that are exhausting themselves in verbal versions of these brutal duels, trying to cut the other down with attacking words. It’s true to say we’ve evolved in relationships – but maybe not far enough. So it’s interesting to wonder what the next stage is in the evolution of the resolution of couple differences.

    The Importance of Emotion

    The view from recent neuropsychology is, in a word: emotion. Here is what Sue Johnston, a well-known exponent of Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) has to say:

    We are now at a point where emotion – the apparently crazy, irresponsible sleazebag of the psyche – has been identified as an inherently organizing force, essential to survival and the foundation of key elements of civilized society, such as moral judgment and empathy. Emotion shapes and organizes our experience and our connection to others. It readies us for actions; it is the great motivator. As the Latin word for emotion, emovere (move, displace) suggests, it literally moves us to approach, to avoid, to act.

    (From Singing in the marrow bone: Harnessing the power of emotion in couple therapy, Sue Johnson, Psychotherapy in Australia, vol. 19 no. 3, May 2013.)

    There are differences in opinion amongst experts on what the basic emotions actually are, but they’re often given as the following: anger, sadness, joy, surprise, shame and fear. Of course all of these states begin as internal to us; but, soon after their arising, they become external in our display of the emotion. It’s unlikely that emotion can stay hidden – the energy wants to move. What we want to do in therapy is raise awareness and harness this emotion, this power for change and growth.

    In an intimate relationship, it’s the external show of emotion that causes a reaction in our partner – often almost instantaneous, outside of our control, and possibly even unnoticed to ourselves. It’s usually the old part of the brain (the amygdala) that’s reacting, a primitive reaction of fight, flight or freeze. This reaction feels negative and starts a chain reaction – often an argument.

    An Example from our Practice

    Joe is quite private about his business affairs, and Sarah finds this difficult. Sarah picks her time and tries to ask Joe about how the business is going. Joe hears her questioning as “strong” and “annoying” and feels that Sarah is not trusting him to run the business correctly. He’s hurt and quickly (though subtly) withdraws from the conversation. Sarah of course, picks up on this and thinks “this is what he always does and I’m tired of it”. She can feel her anger rising. Joe detects her anger immediately, and now he feels attacked and undermined in his ability to run the business effectively. He unleashes a tirade of abuse and leaves the room. Sarah is mortified. She feels disrespected, humiliated, misunderstood – and lashes out even more strongly. Joe leaves the house angrily and doesn’t return for hours. During that time, Sarah feels abandoned and becomes depressed. It takes them a long time to recover, but they don’t resolve the conflict. So when it comes up again the feelings are heightened.

    What just happened is a “an emotional duel”, a fast-acting, painful system of attack and response that is played out on the edges of conscious thinking. It’s debilitating and hurtful, and while it doesn’t cause physical loss of limb (or life), as in the 16th century marital duel, it’s a not that far advanced. Each are trying to cut the other person down and stop the attack while still looking for the soft spot in the other person to hurt. These sort of interactions can’t have a positive result.

    What We Do in Counselling

    What we do in counselling is pick apart such an interaction, trying to get to the “micro” level of what’s happening for each in the duel: even down to the increases in heart rate, the body tensions, the ideas and meanings that each partner is quickly and repeatedly attributing to the other in the interaction, that fuel the emotions and subsequent responses of the other. By accessing the underlying emotions, we can know when we are on track with this work. Emotions show us where the energy is. Usually we get stuck in the content of the augment and lose the real reason we are fighting. This is a benefit in therapy – staying with the real issue until getting to an understanding or resolution.

    Sometimes a couple will bring with them to therapy an example of such an argument; other times an emotional duel will show itself while the couple is in the therapy room. Given that both partners in the couple want to understand the duel, and given that they are both prepared to step aside from blame, it’s usually inevitable that an understanding of what’s really happening will reveal itself. And understanding what’s happening can sometimes be enough to shift the duel into a positive “duet”. It can take only a small shift to change significantly a complex, emotion-based system.

    The Duel Becomes the Duet

    The idea is that in a duet we can see that each has a part to play – a part in the song or dance (the dynamic of the couple). Once the duet is seen as a possibility, things can be rearranged and new ways of being, communicating and understanding can take the place of the old ways that caused pain.

    Learning about how your own couple duels play out can be a powerful tool for change. If you would like find out more feel free to contact us.

  • 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.

  • Download Our Paper

    Our Paper Working with Couple Interactions

    We’ve been busy this Easter and are pleased to report that our paper Working with Couple Interactions is now available for download as a PDF document. The paper describes a model we successfully use with couples to examine and improve the quality of their interactions.

    To get the paper, sign up for emails on the home page on our web site Therapy Duo.

    Once you’ve signed up, we’ll send you occasional articles on our practice and on psychotherapy in general.

    (We’ll treat your email address as private and will never provide it to other parties.)