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The Pain of Decision-Making

Our decisions navigate us through, and throughout, our lives. This blog is not intended to be a comprehensive explanation about decision making, neither is it a guide for how to make better decisions. I simply offer some thoughts about what I see as some of the reasons that decision-making can feel hard or even painful. And why some of us avoid or delay making decisions or get paralysed in the process.

Either/Or

There may be times when a decision is a stark choice between two different things. However, often what happens is we create an either/or split in our minds when making a decision, particularly when we’re anxious.

It is from Melanie Klein’s work that we get the concept of paranoid-schizoid position. This refers to a very early life stage when – as small infants – we were overwhelmed with intense anxiety and developed protective mechanisms, for e.g. splitting experiences into opposing good or bad. Klein thought that this stage never left us and in times of stress and high anxiety we tend to return to this paranoid-schizoid ‘position’. When we’re in this state of mind we return to defences such as polarising. Of course, far from helping our anxiety this kind of stark splitting generally makes decisions harder to make.

The referendum on Brexit is a good example of an either/or paranoid schizoid type of decision that was created possibly to manage, but more to avoid, complex and painful issues the UK and its government was (and of course still is) facing.

Loss

Some decisions are easier than others. Usually this is either because they don’t have a significant role in the shape of our future, or they are reversable, or repeatable. Generally, these decisions don’t put us in touch with profound feelings about loss.

Life decisions particularly stir intense feelings, and quite real experiences, of loss. Each step we take in one direction involves relinquishing those leading us in others. The older we get the more our lives narrow in direction and focus as we need to accept giving up ‘other’ options. This parallels a growing awareness of our own mortality.

How painful and paralysing the loss of ‘other’ life choices is will partly depend on our relationship with loss and whether or how we are able to tolerate the feelings stirred up by it.

Regret

Our decisions are our responsibility. We can all look back on certain choices we’ve made in our lives and wish we had taken a different option.

Bound up with our feelings about this is our relationship to regret. Regret can be a very frightening prospect for some people. This is because of the way they might punish themselves if they feel they’ve made a mistake or got something wrong.

Freud called the part of us that can be self-punishing, the Super-Ego. This is the rule-bound, conscientious part of us and is developed in the main from early experiences of authority figures, particularly parents. We will all normally experience our super-ego at times as restrictive – in a way this is its job. Ideas about

the super-ego have developed over the years to understand how persecutory it can be at certain times and for some people more than others. The degree and constancy to which we feel punished or even tormented by our super-ego will affect how frightening it can feel to us. This fear might generate such an anxiety about making mistakes that it can paralyse us from making even the smallest decisions.

Conclusion

We are making decisions all the time, often without thinking about it. Some decisions are obviously more significant than others and need to be considered carefully. This process can be painful as it means taking responsibility for our choices and sometimes accepting losses. We don’t help matters when we allow our anxiety about this to polarise our options with either/or thinking or attack ourselves with our regrets about past choices.

Claire Barnes is an experienced UKCP registered psychotherapist and group analyst offering psychodynamic counselling and psychotherapy to individuals and groups at our Hove practice.

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What is loneliness?

Loneliness is an experience that people coming into psychotherapy often talk about struggling with. It is an uncomfortable and often painful state and usually linked with feelings of sadness, loss and emptiness.

But maybe loneliness isn’t necessarily just a bad experience. Below, I will explore possible causes and suggest there are some positive and helpful aspects to feeling lonely.

Loneliness through circumstances

Loneliness could be characterised as feeling disconnected from others and profoundly alone. This might well be circumstantial – for e.g. someone who has just moved to a new city and doesn’t know many people could reasonably be expected to feel lonely. Their loneliness might indeed help push and motivate them into making some social connections and friendships.

Feelings of loneliness can also be triggered by losing a significant other through separation or death. In these circumstances loneliness will feel bound up with the loss of this person and part of the experience of grieving.

In both these examples we would think a loneliness as a normal response to circumstances of being suddenly alone or losing someone close.

Loneliness and disconnection

Chronic loneliness is often caused by an intense and ongoing sense of disconnection from others. This may not necessarily bear any relation to the presence of other people. In fact, it is often reported that this kind of loneliness is most painfully felt in the company of others.

Becoming so disconnected and lonely is usually linked to a history of emotional withdrawal. Often this comes about originally as a form of self-protection. Self-isolation can be a way of avoiding the painful and difficult feelings that interactions with others can bring. This defensive strategy might start early in life and create its own momentum. It may be deployed all the time – leading to extreme isolation – or at certain times or in more nuanced ways.

In some people, this emotional withdrawal might be obvious, e.g. a literal keeping away from others. In many cases though the withdrawal is more of an internal distancing which may not be obvious at all, even to the person themselves. So, although the individual may have relationships, the quality of all or most of these relationships – i.e. the level of intimacy and genuine closeness – may not be enough to create or sustain feelings of real connection.

While this describes more entrenched or extreme experiences of chronic emotional disconnection and loneliness, it’s important to say that of course we can all find ourselves at times emotionally withdrawing from others and becoming lonely as a result.

Can loneliness be healthy?

Loneliness can be a horrible even desolating experience, but it can also be helpful to pay attention to it.

Earlier, I suggested it might motivate someone to seek out social connections in a new situation. On a socio-political level, a general state of loneliness can be generated by living in an, arguably, increasingly alienated and alienating world. Recognising our own experiences of social disconnection may move us to reach out to others in local and wider communities.

In my view, loneliness most importantly reveals a longing for greater intimacy and closeness and at the same time the absence or loss of this. Loneliness reminds us of our innate connectivity as human beings and its importance to our wellbeing. Where people have a pattern of disconnecting or withdrawing internally to deal with emotional pain, an awareness of lonely feelings can be a positive sign. It can mean the beginnings of a realisation that defensive distancing is no longer working.

Loneliness can indicate something needs to change, or is already starting to.

Claire Barnes is an experienced UKCP registered psychotherapist and group analyst offering psychodynamic counselling and psychotherapy to individuals and groups at our Hove practice.Facebooktwitter

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What is Sibling Rivalry? – Part 2

Over two blogs I have focussed on one area of sibling relationships, namely rivalry. In part 1, I looked at some aspects of sibling rivalry as they can surface in childhood. In part 2, I will suggest how these might impact on ongoing struggles in adult life, before suggesting ways in which problematic issues with rivalry can be helped.

Sibling Rivalry in Adulthood

Feelings of competition and rivalry are perfectly normal and to be expected in adulthood. However, when childhood rivalry has been particularly problematic and unresolved, this can shape and lead to intense struggles later in life. Below are some thoughts about sibling rivalry and adulthood.

An obvious impact is in relationships to competition. Difficulties might particularly arise at work, socially, in educational settings, or any other situation where competitive feelings are heightened. This might lead to over competitiveness at the expense of other experiences – for example friendship, fun, comradeship etc. The rivalrous person may be driven towards success, however, often these feelings just seem to cause paralysis, procrastination, and low-self-esteem, as the individual constantly measures themselves against others.

As siblings are the earliest relationships they become a kind of template for later relationships. If feelings have never really got beyond negative experiences of aggression and dislike, this can make it hard to establish positive, caring and cooperative adult relationships.

Siblings who hold onto intensely rivalrous feelings, may be unable to establish a good adult relationship with each other. They therefore lose out on what these uniquely close alliances can potentially offer.

Sometimes sibling rivalry that’s not overt in childhood later manifests in adulthood. This can often be triggered through a change in the family dynamic. The most common is the serious illness or death of one or both parents. In these circumstances, feelings of rivalry can intensify or, if latent, can suddenly manifest. This is particularly common if there are issues around sharing responsibility or care for the parent, or around inheritance.

Fair shares and mutual concerns

Dennis Brown, a group analyst, wrote a paper entitled ‘Fair shares and mutual concern: The role of sibling relationships’ (1998). He explored how these rivalrous battles with siblings belong to an early stage in the individual’s development and that in healthy childhood psychological growth there is a shift to a more cooperative position towards siblings and therefore later relationships.

Our relationships with our siblings are usually the earliest experiences of grappling with love and hate for our peers. It’s important that aggression, jealousy and rivalry can be countered by experiences of love, companionship, and affection. Achieving this in childhood helps this balance of positive and negative feelings in later relationships.

The potential for change

But if this change hasn’t taken place in childhood can anything be done in adulthood? Below are some suggestions of how to work towards resolving the more crippling preoccupations with ‘fair shares’ towards a greater feeling of ‘mutual concern’ for and with others.

One way forward is to try and develop an adult relationship with your adult sibling. Sometimes family members get stuck in a narrative belonging to the past. We carry the child templates of our siblings inside us without perhaps getting to know the adult version. This is particularly compounded if relationships don’t develop outside of the family environment, for example when siblings only ever see each other in the presence of the rest of the family, particularly parents.

During or after times when you find yourself preoccupied with doing better than others, or having painful feelings of inadequacy or exclusion, it can help to reflect on links between this experience and what you may have felt as a child in your family. This can help you step away and separate from those past dynamics, reminding you that this is no longer the actual situation you find yourself in.

I mentioned earlier that sibling rivalry can worsen or manifest after a major family dynamic change such as brought on by the illness or death of a parent. Sometimes the opposite shift can happen. For example, the loss of one or both parents, or other family events, can suddenly bring problems of historic rivalry between some siblings to a natural end.

The Role of Group Psychotherapy

Group psychotherapy is particularly helpful in working through the difficulties arising from unresolved sibling rivalry.

Being in a therapy group stirs feelings of rivalry for everyone in it. In this way, it tackles rivalry in a way that individual therapy (where you have all the attention to yourself) can’t. Bringing these feelings alive and to the foreground means they can be worked with head on in the safety of a therapeutic environment.

In a therapy group, members find that each other remind them of their siblings, some more obviously than others. This offers an opportunity for working through difficulties that they may have had growing up with actual siblings. Members can then develop the kind of affection and closeness with rivals that might not have felt possible growing up or since.

Group members often find that the group feels a bit like an alternative family. This gives the opportunity for everyone – including ‘only’ children – to have different kinds of ‘sibling’ experiences than those they grew up with.

Conclusion

Preoccupation with ‘fair shares’ is symptomatic of a world where we feel pitched against each other and encouraged to see ourselves as alone. These feelings can be particularly heightened if the conflicts of our earliest peer relationships have not been resolved. Psychotherapy and counselling give the opportunity to explore and understand these deep rooted and painful experiences and how they may continue to have impact. Psychotherapy groups emphasise our connectivity as human beings. This challenges the notion that we are on our own, offering a direct release from the paralysing grip of rivalrous conflicts, towards greater co-operation, affection, and ‘mutual concern’ in our relationships.

Claire Barnes is an experienced UKCP registered psychotherapist and group analyst offering psychodynamic counselling and psychotherapy to individuals and groups at our Hove practice.Facebooktwitter

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What is Sibling Rivalry? – Part 1

The importance and role of sibling rivalry

Siblings are the longest standing relationships in most of our lives. As we grow older they increasingly serve to keep a connection to our families of origin, reminding us of our parents and our younger selves. Most of us share genetic material and family histories with our siblings. They have a significant place in our origins and narratives and an important role in shaping us. We don’t choose our siblings in the way we do our friends and sexual partners but, in many ways, they are our closest peers.

Over two blogs I have focussed one area of sibling relationships, namely rivalry. In part 1, I will look at some aspects of sibling rivalry as they can surface in childhood. In part 2, I will think about how these might impact on ongoing struggles in adult life, before suggesting ways in which problematic issues with rivalry can be helped.

Sibling rivalry in childhood

Sibling rivalry is part of growing up. Children who have sibling/s share their parent’s love and attention, and feelings of rivalry are naturally going to arise. While squabbling and fighting can disturb the family atmosphere, it is important that we are aware these feelings and struggles are normal. These conflicts around competition are also ways in which young children prepare for managing later peer relationships.

However, feelings of rivalry can become particularly exacerbated for different reasons. For example, if there are unresolved difficulties in the parent’s relationship to competition and rivalry. Fighting between siblings that gets out of control or dominates the family can be often be traced back to some difficulty for one or both parents.

Other family dynamics may also play a part in complicating and exacerbating rivalry. Below are some examples where sibling rivalry might become heightened, and complex.

  • One example is when a parent is particularly enmeshed with one child. This means all other relationships, including other children, are pushed outside of this unhealthy coupling. This can create huge difficulties for everyone in the family and can heighten and complicate rivalrous feelings between the siblings.
  • A large age gapmight mitigate rivalry in some ways but not in others. It may be particularly hard for the older sibling to allow or express jealousy or rivalrous feelings towards a much younger sister or brother. This younger sibling may be getting a kind of affection that the older brother or sister has had to relinquish but still misses.
  • The much younger sibling can feel the older one is closer to the parent/s as they’ve perhaps reached an age where they are being treated on more equal terms. This can also become bound up with the difference in capabilities due to age-difference. So, rivalry can feel linked with feelings of inadequacy.
  • Children who are born close in age may have had to share their mother’s/main care-giver’s attention and care as babies. Feelings of competition and rivalry may be experienced on a primal level – originating very early in life –  and this could make them particularly hard to articulate.
  • Children who have siblings with a disability or illnessmay feel ashamed and guilty for having negative feelings towards the sibling/s. This dynamic gets further compounded by the extra attention the sick or disabled sibling may well get from parents and others.
  • Harder still to express, manage, or even feel, is the rivalry and jealousy that might be felt towards a sibling who has died. In the psychotherapy field there is particular concern about children who may have been conceived to ‘replace’ a child who has died, and the very particular – often unconscious – pressures they come under.
  • Relationships and rivalry between half and step siblings can sometimes be less intense if, for example, they do not live with each other. There will likely be a parent the child can claim as their own who is not shared biologically and emotionally. However, these half/step sibling relationships can also feel complex and painful, as they are often bound up with parents’ separation and families splitting into ‘new’ and ‘old’.
  • One of the more unconscious ways families often manage rivalry is by assigning different roles and attributes amongst siblings. For example, the ‘clever’, ‘sporty’, ‘artistic’ ‘musical’ one; or ‘quiet’, ‘sociable’, ‘troubled’ etc. These might work to mitigate rivalry some of the time, in some families, and for some individuals. However, they can also stir up further complex feelings of rivalry, imbuing them with restrictive self-expectations and feelings of inadequacy.

Do only children have it easier?

Based on the accounts above we could think that the only child is the most fortunate. Certainly, ‘only’ children do not usually have to compete with early peer relationships for their parents’ love and attention and therefore avoid some of these more painful and destructive experiences of sibling rivalry. However, those who have grown up as only children often report a pervasive feeling of loneliness and isolation. Being the sole focus of parents’ love (and often therefore need) can feel very burdensome as a child and an adult. It is also no coincidence that only children often describe particularly acute difficulties starting nursery or school where they suddenly encounter the rough and tumble of peer relationships and rivalry.

The jostling and competing for space and attention that siblings engage with, prepares them for later experiences. However, it is important that children are also able to develop feelings of concern and companionship towards their siblings. In this way the intense and more hateful feelings of rivalry can be moderated and managed. While feelings of sibling rivalry never fully go away they need to be resolved enough to establish healthy relationships with peers in adulthood.

In part 2, I will the potential impact of unresolved sibling rivalry in adulthood and look at ways of helping.

Claire Barnes is an experienced UKCP registered psychotherapist and group analyst offering psychodynamic counselling and psychotherapy to individuals and groups at our Hove practice.Facebooktwitter

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50 years on, how free are we from homophobia?

This year has marked the 50th anniversary of the (partial) decriminalisation of male homosexuality in the UK. This has been responded to with a slew of television and radio programmes exploring current and past personal and political experiences of LGBT individuals and communities in the UK and elsewhere. This output has been matched by a large number of broadsheet and online articles on this subject. Some of these commentaries have pointed out how in our celebration of social progress we shouldn’t overlook the social and state owned prejudices that have caused much harm and damage to LGBT people.

For those interested and sensitive to these matters, it is perhaps clear that trans-phobia is still very much alive in our society. However, increased acceptance of homosexuality could give an impression that homophobia may no longer be an issue for people with same-sex identities and orientations in the UK.

This blog focuses on the continual difficulties for specifically LGB identified people due to past and continued impact of homophobia. Prejudices have become more submerged and hidden. There is now an added challenge for therapists to continue to recognise how these might be interplaying and undermining their LGB clients’ social and internal worlds.

Homophobia today

While open hatred towards lesbians and gay men is now less widespread, as a recent BBC documentary testified, it still exists.

Violent attacks aside, people in same sex relationships will still scan their environment before doing something as natural as holding hands in public. In many parts of the UK, being affectionate in this way with a same sex partner is still not deemed either comfortable or even safe enough. In other parts of the world, being openly gay is still very problematic. In some places, it is criminalised and extremely dangerous.

Homophobia refers to hateful (and possibly fearful) feelings towards people with homosexual orientation. When we talk about homophobia, we perhaps think about it being overt. However, this kind of social discrimination operates on many levels. More subtle, and sometimes unconscious, expressions and feelings of homophobia can be harder to tackle, understand, and talk about.

Despite social and legal progress, people with homosexual identities and orientations continue to feel excluded, marginalised, and unseen in this society because relationships are still regarded in the mainstream as heterosexual. How this continues to operate on a social level is complex and often unconscious. This mechanism is known as ‘heteronormativity’, meaning the norm is assumed to be heterosexual.

These social processes are similar to ways in which other groups can be discriminated against, for example on the basis of gender, ethnicity, disability, etc. These prejudices operate in such a socially ingrained way that they are mostly only visible to those in the minority group (and not always to them.) This makes it very hard to challenge or change them.

Internalised homophobia

Broadly speaking, internalised homophobia refers to homosexual self-hatred in relation to sexual orientation. These feelings have been absorbed, like everybody else’s, by living in a homophobic, heteronormative world.

Many LGB people still struggle with overt negative feelings towards their sexual orientation. These feelings might be particularly heightened prior to or grappling with ‘coming out.’ However, feelings of self-hatred, self-disgust, inadequacy and low self-esteem in relation to sexuality can surface at any time in the lives of those with same-sex desires or identities.

Like homophobia, internalised homophobia often seems to be discussed in terms of overt feelings. It is important that we are able to think about these internal processes on a more complex level to understand the less visible ways in which they may continue to undermine the well-being and confidence of gay and bisexual people. LGB individuals living in our current society may well find themselves struggling with less conscious sources of self-hatred that they may not recognise as having any link to homophobia.

This level of internalised homophobia is very difficult to tackle, as it seems likely that it begins early in childhood. In contemporary psychoanalytic thinking about sexuality, theories have emerged that support the idea that our sexualities begin to shape and orientate very early on in our lives (Lemma, Lynch 2015). In this context, it is suggested that responses from parents will heavily influence how all individuals feel about their expressions of sexuality at a young age. These parental attitudes may well be unconscious and shaped by prevailing social prejudices which again can be covert.

Impact and trauma

For some journalists writing on this subject in recent months, the damage has already been done. While things have improved in this country, past state and social attacks through criminalisation, arrests, unequal legal rights, stigmatisation and verbal and physical abuse have left individuals and communities hurt, angry and traumatised. In this way, we might think about the post-traumatic distress that some LGB people may still be struggling with.

Even without these traumatic after-shocks of the past, the negative impact of being gay in a modern society which still consciously or unconsciously operates as if everybody is straight should not be underestimated. Living in a world that marginalises or ignores who you are and who you love can be stressful and tap into earlier experiences of feeling unseen and overlooked.

While ‘coming out’ is less obviously problematic for gay people than it used to be, the experience of many working in specialist services is that it continues to be a struggle for many. Acceptance of one’s self may or may not be echoed by acceptance of friends and family. Cultural and religious differences may also continue to make this more of an ordeal for some than others.

We also certainly know that young people who identify as gay continue to be a highly vulnerable group in relation to homophobic bullying. This can lead to an increased risk of  self-harm, suicide, and the misuse of drugs and alcohol.

LGB people who have accepted their sexual orientation and worked through overt negative feelings are not invulnerable to social forces of internalised homophobia working unconsciously. These internalised feelings can exacerbate and complicate other difficulties such as shame, anxiety, anger, problems around sexual drives and body image. It is widely thought that homophobia can also play an important part in difficulties for same-sex couples.

Therapists working with homophobia

It seems to me in these more liberal and sexually fluid times, therapists need to be even more alert to the ways prejudices and other repressive forces continue to undermine our LGB clients. Homophobia and hetero-normativity operate on multiple levels in our societies. The internalisation of past and current social scapegoating, marginalisation and hatred can be emotionally problematic for even the most confident individual.

An increasing number of lesbians and gay men who come for therapy these days do not regard their sexual identity or orientation as a major problem. However, it is important that we bear in mind the social context in which they are experiencing the difficulties they do bring. These social mechanisms need to be understood as operating both externally and internally and on complex and often unconscious levels. While they may not need to be the focus of therapeutic work, there are likely to be areas where their influence will need to be recognised and actively engaged with.

Many lesbians and gay men continue to feel caution about the potential sensitivity and understanding of therapists towards sexual difference when seeking psychotherapy. Of course, any therapist seeing clients with same-sex desires and identities needs to be very aware of the ways in which homophobia might operate within themselves – whatever their sexual orientation.

In my view, affirming and supporting an LGB client’s sexual identity is essential but insufficient without being also vigilant to the hidden and sophisticated ways that homophobic processes, outside and within the individual, might work to exacerbate or create obstacles to their emotional development and wellbeing.

Claire Barnes is an experienced UKCP registered psychotherapist and group analyst offering psychodynamic counselling and psychotherapy to individuals and groups at our Hove practice.

Reference: Sexualities. Eds  Lemma, Lynch 2015

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