Brighton & Hove Psychotherapy, Author at Brighton and Hove Psychotherapy

November 12, 2018 by Brighton & Hove Psychotherapy Leave a Comment

We want you – join our team!

Thank to ever increasing demand for our services, we are now looking to expand our in-house team of associates as well as set up a wider network of trusted psychotherapists we can refer to.

Established in 2008 and re-branded in 2014, Brighton and Hove Psychotherapy is a practice offering high-quality psychology and psychotherapy to residents in the Brighton & Hove and Lewes area.

We are comprised of 14 associates offering a range of psychological specialities and seeing individuals, couples, families and groups from children through to adults.

We are currently looking for skilled and experienced associates to join our team in either Hove or Lewes, or potentially both.

We are offering you the opportunity to take your private practice to the next level through our service and brand. With a full page profile on our website, referrals made trough our administrative team, high-quality consulting rooms with online bookings as well as the benefits of being a part of a clinical team with regular practice and reflective meetings, and cross-referrals, we are interested in hearing from clinicians who have been practicing for at least 5 years post-qualification and can work with a variety of client groups.

In addition, we are also seeking to establish a wider network of trusted practitioners who will feature on our website and be able to see clients across a wider area of East and West Sussex in their own consulting rooms.

With an average of over 100 enquiries per month for our services, we can offer you an opportunity to take your practice to the next level.

For further information or an informal chat, please contact us at admin@brightonandhovepsychotherapy.com.

November 5, 2018 by Brighton & Hove Psychotherapy Leave a Comment

Are criticism and anger good or bad for a happy relationship?

Studies of happy marriages find that anger and criticism are expressed rather than repressed. However the way that they are expressed matters.

Most of us are uncomfortable with expressing anger and being critical. Anger and criticism generate rejection and everyone hates rejection. More often than not criticizing and complaining create a climate of negative energy before they create positive energy.

Why does criticism feel like attack?

Historically criticism could lead to ostracism that may in turn lead to death. To ostracise someone meant to not speak with them, trade, or engage with them in any way. Being the subject of criticism therefore could threaten one’s livelihood and reputation as well as that of one’s family. Our genetic heritage made it functional to kill the criticiser before the criticiser killed us.

Female vs Male anger

In a study on sex differences, when observers were told that the infant they were observing was a boy they were more likely to interpret “his” emotional expression as anger; observers told the identical infant was a girl were more likely to interpret “her” emotional expression as fear.

When we interpret a woman’s emotion as fear the instinct is to protect, when the same emotion expressed in a man is interpreted as anger the instinct is to fight or flee.

It may be that a double standard has lodged itself in our mindset and translates into our feelings about how to criticize a man vs. a woman. It is more often the case that a man’s criticism of a woman is met with disapproval whilst a woman’s criticism of a man is approved of and approximated with empowerment.

Most men have learnt to express anger and criticism toward other men, but have been socialised to protect women, to argue outside the home (with men) not inside the home (with women). Withdrawal is not the way men do battle with men. It is the way they do battle with women.

Genetic heritage

For millions of years, women have biologically selected men who were heroes. The word “hero” derives from the Greek “serow” from which we get our words for “servant” “slave” and “protector.” Servants and slaves were not expected to express feelings but to repress them, just like heroes.

Our genetic heritage, the socialisation process that led women to marrying killer/provider men and men marrying beautiful women, thus selecting genes from which the next generation of children were born is still with us.

With all this genetic and social baggage in tow, is it possible to create a safe environment in which to both give and receive criticism without fear of annihilation? Couples are often afraid to understand their partner’s point of view for fear it will diminish or discount their own and demand too much by way of compromise. This is understandable in an evolutionary context where survival was more dependant on combat than compassion.

Moving forward

Perhaps it is useful to understand relational dynamics as an art, to be engaged with and navigated without blame or shame. Especially so at a time when our relationships have become the organising principle of our lives and the couple the chief organising unit.

This is easy to say, but if communicating effectively were easy, we’d already be doing it! In my next blog I shall be considering what relationship tools, language and intelligence might look and sound like, such that anger and criticism may be expressed and received in ways that promotes relational growth.

Gerry Gilmartin is an accredited, registered and experienced psychotherapeutic counsellor. She currently works with individuals (young people/adults) and couples in private practice from Hove.

October 29, 2018 by Brighton & Hove Psychotherapy Leave a Comment

Adolescence: the trials and tribulations

In this blog, I want to briefly outline some of the reasons I like working with adolescents and what are perhaps some of the key struggles faced by adolescents, their carers’ and those who work with or alongside them.

One of the most famous depictions of adolescents’ in my memory is probably Kevin, of Kevin and Perry fame, a very funny, exaggerated, but not unrecognizable depiction of a ‘teenager’. Kevin is by turns, childlike, demanding, exasperated at his parents, however reasonable they try and be, and genuinely struggling with the desire to experience the thrills adult world as he sees it and his unbearable lack of experience and shyness.

I think a good indicator of how it hits a note, is that some of the teenagers I know well, loved this depiction and found it hilarious.

What the characters focus is on the conflict the adolescent faces in needing to leave the world of childhood and its unquestioned dependence on caregivers, to somehow find their own identity. This can involve a painful, but perhaps temporary jettisoning of everything the parental figures seem to represent, however benign they may or may not be.

I think the pleasure and the pain of working with adolescents is how they remind us of some of the fundamental conflicts of, all of our lives, sometime ones, we have dealt with by; ‘letting sleeping dogs lie.’

Adolescents are suddenly faced with issues of what sex is, or means, how to belong or not and whether they may or may not want to. They are often in a position of having to make serious life choices, with only really a very limited knowledge of what those choices may mean.

The Psychotherapist Adam Phillips, writes, that in working with adolescents; “Violent feelings, dejection, sexual obsession, serious self-doubt and terrible self-image are something everyone who is at all awake can’t help but feel” …and that “Anyone who does this work with any real commitment will feel destabilised by it”.

So why do it?

I think because of precisely these issues, working with adolescents reminds us of what it is to be human, to be alive to the rawness of experience, the thrills, the highs and the lows. Adolescents’ are serious about this and often dedicate a great deal of thought about it, and finally as Phillips notes, that, ‘despite sometimes overwhelming feeling of powerlessness and disturbance,’, they can be, ‘committed pleasure seekers; something we as adults are not always so good at.’

Paul Salvage is Psychodynamic Psychotherapist trained to work with adolescents from 16-25 and adults across a wide range of specialisms including depression, anxiety, family issues, self awareness and relationship difficulties.

October 22, 2018 by Brighton & Hove Psychotherapy Leave a Comment

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton you might as well make it dance ( George Bernard Shaw)

In my practice as a systemic psychotherapist I have noticed that I am seeing more adult family groups typically 2 or 3 siblings with parents. This has started me reflecting on why this should be and various other things.

Sometimes the person making the enquiry has been in individual therapy and has reflected on a need to have some family therapy. This can mean that the referrer has a clear idea of what they’d like to get out of therapy and is dragging along some less enthusiastic family members.

So when someone makes contact to ask about therapy for a family group I’m always interested to know how the others feel about it. In a sense it could be said it’s about the ‘problem of the referring person’. In families there are multiple perspectives and these are brought into therapy, old patterns, hurts, roles and rivalries can immerge as families struggle to form a new narrative that includes past and present but also focuses on future hopes of the relationships. For these reasons therapy may not happen immediately.

In systemic work old redundant roles that no longer fit can be abandoned and rewritten, this change’s the way family members relate and new understandings are born. This may be liberating for some and more challenging for others –there is comfort in the ‘known’.

One of the challenges of working with adult family groups can be getting through the door. Therapy and mental health awareness is seen as positive for this generation, however in the past it was not necessarily seen in the same way. Older generations therefore can be more cautious about taking this step. It’s important to emphasise that we are not exploring or apportioning blame but rather thinking about family functioning to improve for now and for the next generation by modelling the willingness to attend and listen to each other, rethink roles and responsibilities and reflect on what you would like.

Angela Betteridge is an experienced systemic psychotherapist and supervisor with many years of experience in working with couples, children and families. She works from our Lewes practice.

October 8, 2018 by Brighton & Hove Psychotherapy Leave a Comment

Crisis of Meaning

We live in a complex world which, for the most part, seems to demand that we achieve certain things to ‘be someone’ and have a successful and happy life. These ‘certain things’ are the obvious trappings of society – having a good education, getting that well-paid job or rewarding career, finding that perfect relationship, having the right house and the right car, and so on. While these can bring certain levels of happiness and contentment for some people, those feelings are usually transitory and once the excitement of the achievement dies down, it leaves us with the yearning for the next thing on the list, the next achievement that will bring us happiness.

Materialistic society

This, of course, is how our materialistic society works. It is based on continued consumption of good and products, a continued movement towards bigger and better things, with very little time to sit and wonder what it is all about. When we do find the time to do so, we are often left with the nagging feeling that there must be more to life than this. Do we really want to spend our days working really hard, burning ourselves out to earn more money, just to buy more stuff? Is the purpose of our life just to make money, achieve some social status, maybe raise a family and then die? Is this truly and deeply where we want to be in our life?

When these sorts of questions start to arise, we can quickly face a crisis of meaning, which is arguable the epidemic of our times. While we can avoid thinking about these deeper issues for a while by living a busy life and staying at the surface level, these deeper questions with the unsettling feelings they can bring with them will keep bubbling up again and again. For many people this can manifest in a lack of motivation, a lack of joy or excitement in life, and indeed in depression.

What is a crisis of meaning?

So what can we do when we face a crisis of meaning? While there is no easy and straightforward answer to this we can consider two distinct ways of finding meaning in life. The first is to create meaning – to invest our time an energy in something that seems meaningful to us. Being a parent for example, can give some people a meaning in life, or doing some voluntary work, engaging in something that spreads positivity in the world, writing a book etc – all of these can give people meaning. The key is to engage in something that is bigger than you, that propagates out into the world and helps people in one way or another. While creating a meaning can be very satisfying, for many there is a deeper level still to this, and they want to find their true meaning in life – to answer the deeper question of ‘what are we here for?’ In order to find our meaning in life (rather than create it), takes quite a different approach. We need to spend time being with ourselves, listening to our inner voice, spending time in quiet contemplation. For some this will naturally lead in a spiritual direction, as contemplating the deeper recesses of our psyche will invariably move us to transcendental thinking. Engaging with spirituality, whether in an organised way by attending a spiritual or religious group, or just reading and thinking about it, can go a long way to helping us find meaning in life. It is also worth mentioning that spending time in quiet contemplation can also entail facing some of our inner demons, as we come in touch with our deeper emotional side. Understanding and resolving our deeper feelings can be fundamental to living a more contented and meaningful life.

Psychotherapy and meaning

Engaging in psychotherapy can be a very fruitful journey on the path to finding meaning in life. With your therapist you can find ways to face your inner fears, get in touch with your inner self and express the meaningful life that is yours.

Simon Cassar is an experienced integrative existential psychotherapist, superviser and academic, providing long and short-term psychotherapy to both individuals and couples at our practices in Hove and Lewes.