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In therapy the past repeats until it can be let go of

A foundational principle of depth therapy is that until mourned, the past is never truly past. It lives on in the present in our relationships shaping how we see others, how we see ourselves and in how others see us. In the consulting room, this process plays out much the same way as it does in our regular lives but here it can be thought about and worked with. We call it transference.

Transference defined?

Transference is the unconscious repetition of early relationships in the present. The patient unwittingly re-enacts old relational patterns with the therapist which gives the skilled therapist an insight and understanding of how the patient learnt to navigate their relationships as an infant and from there onwards. Put simply, these relational patterns were once necessary in order for the infant to get their needs met (to varying degrees) but over time they have harden into fixed ways of relating that restrict emotional freedom.

Freud saw this phenomenon as both the greatest obstacle to therapy and its most powerful tool describing transference as “the prototype of all love.” Transference shows how the mind repeats what is familiar, even when it causes suffering. The therapeutic relationship becomes the arena in which these repetitions can be recognised, thought about, and over time different relational patterns experimented with whereby the patient comes to see the therapist as someone who is different to those in their past.

Why do we repeat relational patterns?

The repetition of the past in the present is not accidental. We repeat what we cannot yet remember or think about with the unconsciously hope that we may eventually get a different outcome. The patient unconsciously assigns to the therapist the role of the critical parent, the unavailable caregiver, or the idealised rescuer, depending on where their relational trauma lies. And these roles cannot be mentalized until they are lived through in the therapeutic dyad.

In this way, the therapeutic relationship becomes both a mirror from the past and an opportunity for change. It reflects the patient’s inner world while providing a new relational context in which that world can evolve.

Working with the transference

A common misunderstanding is that the therapist’s role is to correct the patient’s distortions of reality, however this is unlikely to lead to any relational change as simple insight rarely does. Relational depth psychotherapy instead takes the view of observing what unfolds in the relationship, as a vital indictor of what has unfolded in the patient’s early primary relationship. But, instead of reacting to how they, the psychotherapist, feel in response to the transference, they instead use what is known as their counter-transference to work but the patient’s projections and to name the pain and grief locked within those relational patterns.

Freud called this process working through. It involves returning to these patterns again and again in the therapeutic relationship until their meaning becomes clear to the patient.

The aim is not insight for its own sake, but the gradual loosening of the grip that the past exerts on the present through mourning.

The therapist as separate to the patient

Over time, the work is such that the patient begins to experience the therapist not as a figure from their past, but as a real person with a separate mind. This marks a crucial developmental step which didn’t happen when the patient was growing up and has kept them relationally stuck. It is the developmental step of recognising that others exist independently of one’s own needs and projections.

Analytical psychotherapists call this capacity the two-person world. In this world, the therapist is neither idealised nor devalued but experienced as a whole separate person. The patient’s growing ability to recognise separateness opens the possibility of genuine relatedness in all their relationships.

The emotional demands of change

Transference is not an intellectual concept but an emotional event that is worked with leads to developmental change and psychological maturity. The feelings it stirs can be intense, confusing, and often painful and throughout he therapist’s task is to stay present, holding onto their thinking mind and to use these emotional currents to help the patient understand what happened to them.

For the patient, the process invariably involves mourning. Old hopes of finally being loved or rescued must give way to the reality that the past cannot be undone as its only by grieving what was not possible that a person becomes free to live differently in the present – the past can be let go of.

Why transference matters

Transference provides a living picture of the patient’s inner world and defines how they do relationships. It brings into the open what might otherwise has remained hidden in repetition throughout the patient’s life. Without transference, depth therapy is imply not possible and the therapeutic encounter remains insightful at best.

The goal therefore is not to eliminate transference but to firstly understand it and then help the patient work through it. This is not easy work for the therapist as they must not only be asking themselves ‘who do I represent in the transference?’ But must also survive the patient’s idealisation and hate. Resolution means recognising these patterns for what they are: echoes of earlier life and not the reality of the therapeutic relationship.

Relational freedom

When the transference has been worked through, the patient no longer needs the therapist to embody old roles and this becomes a felt experience in the encounter. The patient can tolerate the therapist as separate to them and neither perfect nor dreadful. The therapist can be disappointing to them in an ordinary way. This is what psychoanalysis calls relational freedom. The patient becomes able to love, to hate, to desire, and to depend, all while knowing that both self and other remain distinct.

Psychotherapy is not an intellectual exercise. It is a living relationship that requires both participants to learn to feel and to think together. The transference provides the raw material for transformation IF the therapist is skilled enough to hold it and work with it.

 

Mark Vahrmeyer is a UKCP-registered psychotherapist working in private practice in Hove and Lewes, East Sussex. He is trained in relational psychotherapy and uses an integrative approach of psychodynamic, attachment and body psychotherapy to facilitate change with clients.

 

Further reading by Mark Vahrmeyer –

AI psychosis: why depth therapy cannot be automated

All depth psychotherapy is trauma therapy – and the rest is marketing

Why there is no such thing as a patient

How AI tools between sessions are undermining the therapeutic relationship

Masochism and the impossibility of desire

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Holding difference: identity and the space between self and other

The formation of identity is never a solitary endeavour. From our earliest moments, we develop a sense of who we are through relationship—first with primary caregivers, then with siblings, peers, and the broader cultural world. Yet this process of coming to selfhood while remaining in relationship with others presents profound psychological challenges, particularly when differences of culture, family structure, or early attachment experiences complicate the developmental landscape.

The twin paradox of separation and connection

Psychoanalytic theory recognizes that healthy identity formation requires negotiating the tension between connection and separation. We need others to mirror and recognise us, yet we must also differentiate ourselves to develop authentic selfhood. This paradox becomes particularly complex in relationships characterised by intense early bonding, such as twin relationships, where the boundaries between self and other are initially blurred.

Dorothy Burlingham’s pioneering work on twins revealed how these individuals must develop attachments to both mother and twin simultaneously, creating unique communication patterns and what she termed ‘twin transference’— the transfer of feelings and experiences between siblings. This research illuminated how early relational templates profoundly shape our capacity for later intimate relationships, particularly our ability to tolerate both closeness and separateness.

The challenge extends beyond twin relationships to any early environment where merger and differentiation are complicated. When primary relationships involve inconsistent caregiving, cultural displacement, or family structures that don’t provide clear models for healthy separation, individuals may struggle throughout life with what Juliet Mitchell calls the ‘law of the mother’ —learning to manage the simultaneous drives toward fusion and annihilation that characterize intense relationships.

Cultural homelessness and multiple selves

For those who grow up between cultures, what Ruth Hill Useem termed ‘third culture kid’, identity formation involves additional layers of complexity. David Henderson’s concept of ‘cultural homelessness’ described not merely geographic displacement, but the psychological experience of living between cultural systems without complete belonging in any. This creates what he calls ‘multiple egos’ as different aspects of self that develop in relation to different cultural contexts.

Salman Akhtar’s work on immigration and identity outlined how cultural transitions force a ‘third individuation’, which indicates a reworking of identity across drives and affects, concepts of space and time, social affiliations, and intrapsychic organisation. This process involves mourning the loss of singular cultural identity while integrating diverse cultural elements into a coherent sense of self.

Rather than viewing this as pathology, we might understand multicultural identity formation as requiring particular psychological skills: comfort with ambiguity, flexibility in code-switching between contexts, and resilience in the face of belonging nowhere completely while participating everywhere partially. These capacities can become sources of strength, fostering empathy for others’ experiences of difference and facility in navigating complex social environments.

The intersubjective third

Jessica Benjamin’s concept of the ‘third’ offers a framework for understanding how identity develops – not through isolation, but through intersubjective recognition. Rather than seeing development as a process of separation from others, Benjamin emphasises the creation of a shared psychological space where both self and other can exist as separate subjects while remaining in meaningful relationships.

This ‘co-created third’ emerges from genuine encounter between individuals who can recognise each other’s separate subjectivity while creating something together that transcends either person’s individual contribution. It requires what she calls ‘mutuality’: the capacity to see others as separate centres of experience rather than extensions of our own needs or projections of our own fears.

The implications extend far beyond individual development to broader social questions about how we navigate differences in increasingly diverse societies. When differences of ethnicity, gender, class, or culture activate primitive fears of annihilation or merger, we may resort to defensive strategies— either attempting to eliminate difference through assimilation or creating rigid boundaries that prevent genuine encounter.

Difference as creative potential

Psychoanalytic thinking suggests that difference, rather than representing a threat to be managed, can become a source of creative potential. When we can tolerate the anxiety that difference initially provokes, we open possibilities for growth that would not exist in relationships characterised by sameness or merger.

This requires a capability to hold the discomfort of difference across relationships, tolerating not fully understanding another’s experience while remaining curious and engaged, rather than retreating into familiar categories or defensive assumptions.

The contemporary world presents unprecedented opportunities for encounter across difference alongside unprecedented anxieties about cultural change, migration, and shifting social structures. Psychoanalytic perspectives suggest that our capacity to create genuinely inclusive societies depends not on eliminating difference, but on developing psychological and social structures that can contain the anxiety difference initially provokes, while fostering the creative potential that emerges from authentic encounters between different ways of being human.

Identity formation then becomes, not about achieving a fixed sense of self, but about developing the capacity to remain authentically oneself while genuinely encountering others—thus creating spaces where difference enriches, rather than threatens, our shared humanity.

 

Shiraz El Showk is a Training Member of the Association for Group and Individual Psychotherapy (AGIP) and a registered Training member of the UKCP, She is experienced in Psychodynamic counselling and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy work with individuals, on both long and short term basis. Shiraz works from our Brighton and Hove practice, Lewes practice and online.

 

Further reading by Shiraz El Showk –

Reflections on training as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist: discovering the third space

The therapeutic journey – a pilgrimage to the soul?

Surviving family festivities: a psychoanalytic journey through the twelve days of Christmas

Parents – the ghosts and angels of our past

Is an AI therapist as good as a human one?

Related articles:

What is belonging and why does it matter?

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Understanding fawning: a compassionate look at survival and healing

Our early experiences can shape how we relate to ourselves and others in the present. Often, the survival strategies we developed in childhood can remain with us well into our adult life. One lesser-known but very important survival response is called ‘fawning’, and is often discussed in the context of the other well-known responses of ‘flight’, ‘fight’ and ‘freeze’. If you’ve ever found yourself going out of your way to please others at your own expense, or feeling compelled to keep the peace at all costs, you might be experiencing what’s known as ‘fawning’. It’s a way our nervous system adapts to overwhelming, unsafe, or traumatic environments, especially in cases of complex trauma.

What is fawning?

Fawning is a behavioural response aimed at avoiding conflict, punishment, or further trauma by pleasing, appeasing, or ingratiating oneself to others. Unlike ‘fight’ or ‘flight’, which prepare us to confront or escape danger, fawning is about ingrained habits of submission and people-pleasing. It’s often rooted in early experiences where safety depended on avoiding upsetting others. For example, childhood environments marked by neglect, abuse, or emotional chaos.

People who fawn tend to suppress their own needs and feelings to maintain the safety of connection within relationships. This might look like constantly agreeing with others, downplaying your own opinions, or going out of your way to make others feel comfortable, even at personal cost. While it may seem like a helpful social skill, fawning is actually a survival mechanism that developed when a person faced repeated threats or trauma.

Link to complex trauma

Fawning is especially common among individuals with complex trauma, which refers to prolonged or repeated exposure to traumatic events – often in childhood – such as neglect, emotional abuse, or domestic violence. Complex trauma can deeply alter how someone’s nervous system interprets safety and threat. The responses of fawning, freeze, fight, and flight are all embedded in our survival system, but fawning is unique due to its focus on connecting with others in a way that minimises danger, even if it sacrifices your own authenticity or well-being.

Recognising that this is a trauma response can be an essential step towards self-compassion. It allows you to understand that these behaviours are protective adaptations to difficult circumstances, strategies that once kept you safe, rather than flaws or character defects.

How fawning manifests

Fawning can manifest in numerous ways:

  • People-pleasing: going out of your way to make others happy, even if it means neglecting your own needs.
  • Over-compromising: agreeing to things you don’t want to do to avoid conflict.
  • Difficulty saying no: feeling guilty or anxious when setting boundaries.
  • Excessive apologising: constantly apologising—even when unnecessary.
  • Avoidance of conflict: suppressing your opinions or feelings to keep the peace.
  • Seeking validation: relying heavily on external approval to feel a sense of self-worth.

For some, fawning might be subtle, like avoiding eye contact or withdrawing rather than speaking up. For others, it might be more overt, like people-pleasing behaviours that sometimes dominate their relationships.

Working with fawning in psychotherapy

Healing from the patterns of fawning involves cultivating awareness, self-compassion, and practising new behaviours. As therapists, we approach this process gently, recognising that these responses served critical functions in the past in keeping you safe, even if they are no longer needed today.

Here are some ways to work with fawning:

  1. Building awareness: the first step is noticing these behaviours and understanding their roots. Journaling, mindfulness practices, and therapy can help you recognise when you are fawning and what triggers these responses.
  2. Developing self-compassion: many people who fawn carry feelings of shame or guilt. In therapy, we can look at these emotions with kindness and understanding, helping you see your behaviours as survival mechanisms rather than flaws.
  3. Setting boundaries: learning to say no and prioritise your own needs can feel frightening at first. Gradual exposure, role-play, and therapeutic support can empower you to practice healthy boundaries.
  4. Reintegrating authenticity: as safety increases within the therapeutic relationship and beyond, people often begin to rediscover their genuine feelings, preferences, and opinions, gradually restoring their authentic self.
  5. Addressing trauma: since fawning is linked to complex trauma, trauma-informed therapies like EMDR, Internal Family Systems (IFS), or Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) can be particularly helpful. These therapies help clients process and heal the underlying trauma that fuels fawning behaviours.

A path toward liberation and connection

Fawning might have once been an essential survival skill, but now it can hinder genuine connection and personal growth. The goal of therapy is to gently unravel these ingrained patterns and help you discover your true self—inherently worthy of love and respect, just as they are.

 

Dr Simon Cassar is an integrative existential therapist, trained in Person-Centred Therapy, Psychodynamic Therapy, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT), and Existential Psychotherapy. He is available at our Lewes clinic and also works online.

 

Further reading by Dr Simon Cassar

How to meet negative thoughts with compassion

Understanding exercise addiction

Can Buddhist thinking help with our emotions?

Exercise and mental health

Are you too sensitive?

More articles like this:

On Affect Regulation

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How AI tools between therapy sessions are undermining the therapeutic relationship

The space between psychotherapy sessions is not empty. It is saturated with psychic material such as fantasy, frustration, longing and resistance. It is where the work reverberates, where the transference lives on, where the unconscious continues its motion. Yet increasingly, this space is being colonised by something that feels helpful: AI therapy.

Apps that prompt, soothe, or mirror back “empathy” through an algorithm are now pitched as the perfect between-session companion. They offer structure, safety, even surrogate support. But what seems like a supportive bridge is, in psychoanalytic terms, a subtle sabotage. It redirects the patient’s libidinal energy away from the therapeutic relationship, diluting its potency. And it replaces the analytic third with a pseudo-subject that can only simulate understanding.

The therapeutic relationship is not interchangeable

Psychoanalytic psychotherapy is not about problem-solving or advice. It is about the patient’s relationship with the therapist—as a representative of their internal object world.

The real work unfolds within that living, breathing relationship, often shaped by longing, disappointment, anger, idealisation, eroticism, hate.

When a patient turns to AI between sessions to “process,” “journal,” or receive “support,” they may believe they are helping themselves stay connected to the therapy. In fact, they are often displacing the relationship, venting into a vacuum rather than containing the affect and bringing it back into the room.

This has consequences. Psychic energy that should charge the transference is siphoned off. The unconscious, which needs a real human mind to be received and thought about, is instead met with a programmed echo. A fantasy of self-sufficiency takes hold, and the very dependency that fuels therapeutic transformation is split off.

Containment versus substitution

One might argue that AI provides containment. It offers a holding function, particularly when the therapist is not available. But containment outside of relationship is not neutral. It begins to function as a substitution. The patient who journals into an AI app after a conflictual session may feel soothed but they are no longer metabolising that rupture with the therapist. They are metabolising it elsewhere, safely, sanitised, and in private.

This avoids the essential confrontation: bringing the frustration, confusion, or hurt back into the session and into the relationship. That is where meaning is made. That is where change occurs. Bypassing this moment not only flattens the affect, it reinforces the very defences the therapy is trying to loosen.

Undermining the transference

Psychoanalysis hinges on transference, not as an abstract concept, but as an embodied, lived experience between two people. The space between sessions is part of this structure. It is meant to generate feeling. Missing the therapist, resenting the wait, idealising or devaluing them in their absence—these are not problems. They are the
material.

AI, when used between sessions, acts as a relational decoy. It absorbs and deflects feelings that should be directed at the therapist. It creates a false container for transference affect, preventing it from returning to its source. The result is a therapeutic encounter increasingly starved of psychic charge that is clean, calm, and sterile.

This is not therapy. It is emotional outsourcing.

False self meets artificial other

For many patients, especially those with early relational trauma, therapy becomes the first place where a real self can begin to emerge in the presence of a reliable other. But when that process is interrupted by prematurely discharging affect into AI. A different relational dynamic takes hold: the false self meets the artificial other.

Here, the patient curates their affect. They perform emotionality for a system that cannot truly respond. And over time, the patient may come to prefer this safer interaction. The unpredictable, disappointing, demanding reality of the therapist feels intolerable in comparison. But growth does not come from comfort. It comes from staying in the real relationship, even when it hurts.

The psychotherapist’s absence is part of the frame

Therapy is bounded by time and structure. The session ends. The therapist is not available at all hours. This absence is not incidental, it is analytic. It creates space for projection, for fantasy, for psychic digestion. Patients are meant to feel the gap, to stew, to wish, to rage.

They are meant to wait.

AI collapses this space. It is always available, never absent, never unpredictable. It removes the limit. It flattens the emotional topography between sessions into a manageable plain. But in doing so, it erases the edge. There is no longing, no tension, no psychic residue. Just answers. Just relief.

The promise—and the poison

To be clear: this is not a purist rejection of technological support. Some tools may offer genuine help outside of therapy. But when these tools begin to replace the therapeutic relationship in the patient’s inner world, they no longer support the therapy. They displace it.

The promise is comfort and the poison is disconnection.

Therapy asks something different. It asks the patient to feel, to wait, to hold their experience and bring it not to an app, but to another human being who can sit in the mess with them. Who can disappoint them, hold them, survive their projections, and reflect something true.

Good psychotherapy demands the space between psychotherapeutic work unfolds not just in sessions, but between them. That space matters as it is where the unconscious stirs and something forms that has not yet been said. Where the patient discovers whether they can bear not-knowing, not-solving, not being rescued by words on a screen.

In filling that space with AI, we risk not only weakening the therapy, but we risk weakening the patient’s capacity to think, to feel, and to relate.

Between sessions is where the work deepens. Let’s not give that away to an algorithm.

 

Mark Vahrmeyer is a UKCP-registered psychotherapist working in private practice in Hove and Lewes, East Sussex. He is trained in relational psychotherapy and uses an integrative approach of psychodynamic, attachment and body psychotherapy to facilitate change with clients.

 

Further reading by Mark Vahrmeyer

Masochism and the Impossibility of Desire

Dissociative identity disorder: A rare trauma response, not a social trend

Can AI offer therapy?

Why staying in your chair is the key to being a good psychotherapist

What do dreams mean?

 

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Holding the frame: the role of boundaries in psychotherapy

Why psychotherapists must remain vigilant about boundaries

Despite training, supervision, and ethical guidelines, psychotherapists—like all human beings—remain vulnerable to lapses in judgment. At best, these take the form of clinical misattunements. At worst, they can result in serious boundary violations with lasting harm. Understanding the structural and psychological functions of boundaries is essential to safeguard both therapist and client.

Clients come to psychotherapy principally to work on their relationship with self and others. Usually these relationships are not working because of dysfunctional patterns that are learnt in childhood and repeated in adulthood.

These patterns invariably also show up in the relationship with the therapist, also called transference. The client transfers onto the therapist their past relationships and acts as if in the past with their family of origin. This manifests in a number of ways, and it is the job of the therapist to point this out and work with it – also called ‘working through’.

Awareness of how transference plays out both in therapy and in the client’s wider relationships is essential to stopping or reducing these unhelpful and dysfunctional patterns so that the client can live in the present and relate accordingly, instead of acting as if they were still back in the traumatic past.

Regardless of whether the therapeutic approach is relational, behavioural or analytic, understanding how transference shapes the therapeutic relationship is essential, and an ability to work with it is key in addressing the root causes of the client’s relational issues. Alongside transference, therapists must attend closely to their countertransference—the emotional and bodily responses elicited by the client. These responses can be fertile ground for insight or, if unexamined, a pathway to boundary violations.

Hence the importance of tight professional and ethical boundaries which can contain reenactments (repetitions) of the past in the present, and a framework which enables the client to work through painful losses, stuck belief systems, and destructive behavioural loops.

Failure to notice how the past manifests in the present can lead to all sorts of reenactments of the client’s past in the relationship with the therapist which can in turn lead to ethical breaches, poor therapy, and conduct which is unprofessional and harmful to the client. Here are some common examples:

How dual relationships undermine safety, blur roles, and risk psychological harm

Therapist enters into a personal or business relationship with their client. This is one of the most serious ethical breaches, the main source of complaints and the most harmful scenarios in a psychotherapy relationship. Clients are not supposed to gratify the therapist in any way, be it through a professional relationship other than the therapeutic one, or in a personal way through a romantic, sexual or friendship liaisons. Of course some situations are more harmful than others, but all entail a crossing of boundaries from which there is no return.

The moment these boundaries are crossed, the therapy has ceased to be helpful and has become harmful. Whether this takes place during the therapy or after it has ended has equal damaging consequences.

It is the job of the therapist to protect the work and treat the client as someone who is seeking the help and support of a professional who is safe, boundaries and professional. The therapist is in a position of power. Therefore these boundary breaches are an abuse of their power. 

Therapeutic relationships should always remain as such and the boundary held during and after the work, to protect the good work done. Some clients will wish for the relationship to become more. The therapist in his or her role becomes over time many things for the client: authority figure, mentor, teacher, parent, malevolent or benevolent figure, etc. These have to be held as projections and not-real. This isn’t to say that the rapport and good working relationship is not real, but the therapist has to be comfortable with being projected onto and hold these projections and feelings, whether positive or negative, with neutrality and not act on them.

When the therapist succumbs to impulses to gratify themselves or the client by changing the relationship into something else, the therapist has left their professional role and thereby their usefulness to the client. Moreover, it takes away from the client their opportunity to work through patterns that cause suffering. 

The Rule of Abstinence: resisting personal gratification in service of the client’s process

The rule of abstinence in psychoanalytic psychotherapy in simple terms entails not giving the client direct satisfaction, for instance by offering personal information or explanations that do not aid the therapy or furthers the client’s development. Psychotherapy is not about satisfying the curiosity of either client or therapist. Arguably, anything that goes against the rule of abstinence is not a useful intervention and therefore does not help the client. This is because direct satisfaction takes away from the client’s capacity to symbolise (Etchegoyen, 1999 p.12). Symbolic meaning is essential in any therapeutic work and what leads the client to a deeper understanding of their psyche and therefore of themselves. Developing the capacity to symbolise is essential in that it is what enables the client to observe, understand, think and reflect on their life situation, and ultimately what enables a person to change.

Therapists are human beings and therefore experience human responses to their clients all the time. Some of these feelings can lead them to feel compelled to explain themselves (different from accountability), answer personal questions, defend themselves or overshare. Unfortunately there are many cases where therapists have acted on strong feelings with disastrous consequences for the both the client and themselves.

Offering up information or answering certain direct questions without exploring the symbolic meaning behind the client’s curiosity, or the therapist’s motivation to share, bypasses an opportunity for both client and therapist to truly understand what is happening in the client’s inner-world. This isn’t to say that every question the client poses needs to be interpreted or analysed, but it is a skill to navigate through the different possibilities a client presents us with in every session. 

Some of the questions we need to ask of our interventions are:

  • Does it further the work?
  • What is the therapeutic use to the client?
  • Does it aid the client’s development?
  • Is this for my benefit or for the benefit of the client?

As Etchegoyen states: “The aim of Psychotherapy is to cure, and any process of communication that does not have this purpose will never be Psychotherapy”. 

Holding the frame in practice

Therapists must not only understand boundaries intellectually but embody them in their clinical stance. This means cultivating emotional neutrality, self-reflection, and supervision as ongoing supports in maintaining the therapeutic frame. Ultimately, boundaries are not barriers—they are the structure that makes healing possible.

 

Sam Jahara is a UKCP registered Psychotherapist, Supervisor and Executive Coach. She is also the co-founder of Brighton and Hove Psychotherapy. Sam works with individuals and couples from Hove and Lewes.

 

Further reading by Sam Jahara

The psychology of the cult leader

Why therapists need their own therapy?

Radical self-care as an antidote to overwhelm

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The cost of hiding your vulnerability: why emotional strength begins with openness

We can get confusing mixed messages when it comes to understanding vulnerability. Some people tell us that it’s vital to show our vulnerable side in our relationships, though for reasons that often seem less than clear to us. Whereas our typical response to vulnerability might more realistically be to run away as fast as we can. How can these opposing views make sense?

In this article we’re going to look at how we’ve historically been conditioned to view and deal with vulnerability, what our unconscious motivations might be, and the impact on our lives and relationships. We’ll end by reframing vulnerability in a way that might serve us more usefully.

The Illusion of Strength: Why We Learn to Hide Our Real Selves

From infancy onwards we receive unconscious messaging that we should aim to be strong and capable in the world, that this is the route to success and happiness. This in itself doesn’t seem an unreasonable strategy, right?

However, it turns out that this messaging is fundamentally flawed. This seemingly positive goal can make us work desperately hard to be seen as strong and invulnerable above all else. An additional consequence is that we unconsciously believe that being authentically ourselves is less important than the strong persona we present to the world – outer appearance over inner reality.

This develops into an ever-widening gap between the invulnerable version of us which strives to show no problems or flaws, and the real, inner us who lurks inside, feeling unwanted and unworthy. This is at the heart of our fear of being vulnerable – that this deeper part of us, which we have worked so hard to hide, will be seen and condemned. The illusion we try to create about being strong is not only a façade, at least in part, but it also fails to make us truly strong. Instead, it weakens us by making us scared of who we actually might be.

Wired to Protect: How Evolution Made Vulnerability Feel Dangerous

There is a further reason we avoid vulnerability. Humans have survived and evolved partly through successfully  avoiding existential harm – a survival response which comes from a more primitive environment when humans were hunted by bigger and more dangerous predators. In this sense, vulnerability can be associated with feeling existentially threatened, producing a powerful desire to escape.

And being a hypersocial species, we have always been deeply fearful of rejection by our tribe or social group. In more primitive times, this could equate to death. In our times, the threat is really more of a conditioning pressure, though it can feel existential. These reasons combine to help explain why we are likely to have powerful instincts to get away from vulnerable feelings at any cost.

And yet, if we don’t examine and come to understand these feelings, the impact can be negative and significant.

The Hidden Cost of Invulnerability: Disconnection, Anxiety, and Loneliness

The cost of us walking around the world presenting a strong and invulnerable persona can profoundly affect how we experience ourselves and our relationships. As a significant part of us is potentially hidden, it prevents the people we are in relationships with getting a full picture of who we are. In fact, the deeper and truer parts of us, which we’ve rejected and kept inside, unseen and unheard, are surely the very parts that make us who we are, and are the very parts that others want to see and connect with.

This keeping ourselves locked away can therefore create distance and disconnection from others, with the negative consequences of us feeling misunderstood and even isolated, potentially leading to issues such as social anxiety, depression, and feeling disconnected from our own lives. As profoundly social beings we need connection with others, just as we need food to survive.

The disconnection goes further because being disconnected from our own experience means we can lack self-understanding and reject hearing or learning from our experience. This can leave us struggling to deal with life’s problems or knowing how to make ourselves happy.

Reframing Vulnerability: A Path to Connection, Courage, and Self-Knowledge

Contrary to striving for an illusory defence of strength, we can reframe vulnerability as the route to getting to know ourselves at a deeper and more authentic level. Through opening to our own inner and vulnerable experiences we are able to access more vital parts of ourselves. This enables developing strength in being who we really are, gives us access to self-knowledge, and enables deeper and more meaningful connections to ourselves and others.

However, bearing in mind that we’ve spent much of our lives avoiding vulnerability, we will inevitably come up against our own deep-rooted patterns of avoidance and conditioned messaging to turn back to familiar safety – even when we know that the old ways are not working. It is for this reason that psychotherapy aims to create the conditions where you feel able to connect with your own experience step-by-step and allow your vulnerable feelings to unfold. This process aims to help you engage and prosper from experiencing the deep value of your own vulnerability.

To return to the title of this article, perhaps the question isn’t: do you want to feel vulnerable? But instead: can you afford not to?

 

To enquire about psychotherapy sessions with Thad Hickman, please contact him here, or to view our full clinical team, please click here.

Thad is an experienced psychotherapeutic counsellor and a registered member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP). He works long-term with individuals in our Lewes and Brighton and Hove practices.

 

Further reading by Thad Hickman

When life shifts without warning: finding your way through unwanted transitions

What is the role of creativity in psychotherapy?

No space to be heard?

Does your life story make sense?

When something has to change

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Interdependence: between independence and dependence

Why interdependence is a healthy middle ground for mental and emotional wellness

How often do you hear people encouraging others to be ‘independent’ and ‘self-reliant’? Maybe you’ve even been that person trying to motivate someone to ‘stand on your own two feet’ and ‘try not to lean on others’.

Sentiments like this might be expressed when there seems to be an extreme level of dependence. Looking to others to always meet our needs can be familiar and comfortable, but it can also prevent personal growth and foster feelings of inadequacy. Even if we have legitimate needs that require us to depend on others, being informed and making your own choices can greatly enhance the experience of relying on other people.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is the concept of independence. The Cambridge dictionary defines it as ‘the ability to live your life without being helped or influenced by other people.’ While the idea of not needing others can be appealing, especially when trust has been broken or past relationships have let us down, excessive independence can lead to isolation, stress, and burnout. Though we all benefit from achieving success on our own at times, we may start to feel alone if we neglect to build and maintain healthy relationships.

Finding a balance between dependence and independence can be challenging, but the concept of interdependence offers a healthy middle ground.

Interdependence: no man is an island

We know, from both observation and scientific research, that no living thing on Earth can exist in complete isolation. Bees need flowers for pollen, plants rely on bees for pollination, soil requires plants for microbial health, and plants need soil for nutrients… and so on.

Interdependence describes a balanced, healthy reliance on others without total dependence and with give and take. It allows for stepping away and coming back together with trust and mutual respect. The 17th-century poet John Donne famously said, ‘No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.’ His words emphasise the significance of our connection to others and the world around us.

The psychiatrist Donald Winnicott echoed this in his work with parents and infants, stating, ‘There is no such thing as an infant, meaning, of course, that whenever one finds an infant, one finds maternal care, and without maternal care there would be no infant.’ Winnicott highlighted the ideal bond between mother and child, suggesting that they cannot conceptually exist without each other. He believed this connection shapes the future relational experiences of the infant.

John Bowlby, the psychiatrist who pioneered attachment theory, also spoke to this, explaining that early relationships teach us how to form secure bonds later in life. A ‘secure base’ in relationships enables us to explore the world safely, with a stable place to return to when things become difficult, or we need rest and connection. This can be harder to develop in adulthood if it was not established in childhood.

Despite what can seem to be an emphasis on independence in our society, many social care and mental health services recognise the importance of relationships and connection in healing trauma and fostering fulfilling lives. One example of this in relation to interdependence is in therapeutic communities, designed for individuals often living with emotional distress and severe mental health challenges. These communities emphasise relational treatment, and the repair of early relational trauma through the experience of being with, doing with and, often, living with others. This, sometimes complex and difficult therapeutic process, creates space for belonging, connection and hope as members navigate conflict and care for one another through careful boundary setting and reflection. It offers an opportunity to relearn the value of healthy, supportive relationships.

I’ve witnessed first hand, in my work, how people can transform when they move from an isolated, independent, or dependent state to one of interdependence. Through this shift, individuals learn to establish and maintain boundaries, while fostering mutually supportive relationships and a sense of belonging. This approach can also be applied to social groups, workplaces, and families. Workplaces can even cultivate a resilient and secure workforce by nurturing a culture of interdependence.

Reflecting on your own relationship with independence and dependence

It can be helpful to reflect on your own patterns of independence and dependence by considering these questions:

  • Do you allow others to help you, and can you ask for help?
  • Do you prioritise helping others over helping yourself?
  • How do you cope when others are not around?
  • How could you cultivate more interdependent relationships in your life?
  • What do you offer others, and what do you truly need from them?

The answers to these questions may surprise you. You might find that some of your behaviours are rooted in deeper beliefs you have or experiences from the past. You might also identify areas where you want to make changes. If these questions stir up feelings of uncertainty or discomfort, it could be helpful to explore them further, whether on your own or, in the spirit of interdependence, with the support of others, to better understand and navigate these challenges.

 

Kirsty Toal is an experienced psychotherapist with a decade spent offering therapy, training and clinical supervision in a variety of settings. Kirsty offers short- and long-term psychodynamic and psychoanalytic psychotherapy to adults, in person in Lewes and online.

 

Further reading by Kirsty Toal

Understanding and managing the ‘green eyed-monster’

To be creative as an adult

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Why staying in your chair is the key to being a good psychotherapist

When working with trainees and supervisees, I frequently refer to the need for a psychotherapist to ‘stay in their chair’. Let me explain.

Psychotherapy is a relationship. It is a very intimate and unique relationship between the clinician and their patient, which is principally about the needs of the patient. This, however, does not mean that the psychotherapist acquiesces to every whim or request a patient may have. On the contrary.

The key to any successful relationship, whether a friendship, a romantic relationship or a parent-child relationship, is that there are clear boundaries. Often, if not always, when a patient comes into therapy it is because they have grown up in an environment where the boundaries were poor, inappropriate or non-existent. In other words, they grew up with relational deficiencies.

Poor boundaries create a psychological and at times physical environment, where there ceases to be a differentiation between self and other. This is often referred to as a merger. Where children grew up with a parent or parents with poor boundaries, the experience can be hugely impactful on their psychological and emotional development and, in attachment language, leads to insecure or disorganised attachment styles. In simple terms, it makes it very difficult for these individuals, once adults, to have healthy boundaries in two-person relationships; they are either at the mercy of the other, or conversely, make everything about themselves and fail to recognise the needs of the other.

As a psychotherapist with fifteen years of experience, I have yet to meet a single patient who crossed my threshold, who did not have issues with relationships and thus had attachment damage. It’s the work.

One of the primary roles of the psychotherapeutic relationship is to have a caring, loving relationship with the patient, that is in their best interests. It therefore is boundaried by definition.

One of the tenets of working as a psychotherapist is that it is always in the best interest of the patient for the clinician to hold the boundaries. Even if the patient pushes against these – and they will. Just as it is a parent’s role to hold the boundary with their child and hold their best interests in mind, since they cannot.

So, now we are coming to the meaning of ‘stay in your chair’ which I mean both literally and figuratively. Put simply it means stay in your role and hold the boundaries, because without boundaries, the psychotherapy ends.

Patients who have not grown up with clear and supportive boundaries will unconsciously try and recreate a familiar dynamic, generally stemming from their childhood, in the psychotherapy. Us clinicians refer to this as transference, which is a form of projection from the patient onto the clinician. The difference between projection and transference is that the role of the psychotherapist is to think about and understand the projection onto them, and within this to recognise the relational blueprint of the patient and whom the psychotherapist represents for the patient. In simple terms, the patient will attempt to ‘play out’ the most influential relational patterns from their childhood with their psychotherapist. And if this is not caught and thought about, then the therapy simply becomes a repeat of the patient’s childhood experience.

Whether a patient attacks or seduces, our role is to stay in our chair – to remain consistent and constant and to hold the boundaries. Patients will invariably ‘act out’, which is to say that they will embody and play out dynamics that are counter-productive to the therapy, but familiar to them. Our role as a clinician is to survive these acting outs and to protect the therapy at all costs, Sadly, the concept of psychotherapy has become increasingly diluted in the UK, in part due to a lack of differentiation between counselling and psychotherapy and a general ‘race to the bottom’ amongst training institutions. The result is that therapists increasingly have no concept of ‘staying in their chair’ and either move towards the patient when seduced into a collusion, or back away and abandon when attacked.

Lastly, this is not to say that as psychotherapists we should accept or ‘put up with’ attacks from patients. On the contrary, the boundaries are there to protect us too, and if a patient verbally attacks and cannot return to think alongside their therapist, then they may simply be unsuitable for the work, which is also a boundaried position to hold.

 

Mark Vahrmeyer is a UKCP-registered psychotherapist working in private practice in Hove and Lewes, East Sussex. He is trained in relational psychotherapy and uses an integrative approach of psychodynamic, attachment and body psychotherapy to facilitate change with clients.

 

Further reading by Mark Vahrmeyer –

What do dreams mean?

Is starting psychotherapy a good New Year’s resolution?

Twixtmas – surviving that dreaded time between Christmas and New Year

How to minimise Christmas stress if you are hosting

How do you get self esteem?

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Understanding and managing the ‘green-eyed monster’

As a psychotherapist, I sometimes encounter individuals struggling with the unsettling emotion of envy. While we might visualise the ‘green-eyed monster’ and make light of it, it can sometimes grow into a significant problem.

The socio-economic context 

Many of us face anxieties over whether what we have is enough. Today, even those who once felt financially secure are becoming more mindful of their spending, while those with more limited resources are stretched beyond their means, often to the point of poverty. Amidst this, we’re constantly bombarded with messages that we need more, the latest, and to seek some kind of perfection, especially from social media. This pursuit can leave us feeling dissatisfied, anxious, lacking, and often envious of others who seem to have what we desire.

The roots and impact of envy 

At its worst, envy can manifest as anger, resentment, and hatred towards others. It projects our unmet needs onto those who seem to have everything. This can lead to feelings of injustice, unworthiness, and resentment, fuelling negative beliefs about ourselves. It can be particularly confusing and distressing if we feel envy towards those we love, admire and care for.

These feelings often correlate with our childhood experiences of having our needs met. Envy, in its most basic form, reflects the mother and baby dynamic. Melanie Klein, a prominent psychoanalyst, described infant envy as a painful and powerful emotion marked by fury and hatred, where the mother has what the baby wants (care and nourishment), but it is not always instantly available so feels withheld from the baby.

Envy in mythology

Even the Greek goddess Aphrodite was envious of Psyche, a mortal whose incredible beauty shook Aphrodite’s sense of self. In hatred, she sent her son Eros to kill Psyche, but he fell in love with her instead. Aphrodite’s envy fuelled continuing efforts to cause Psyche great suffering in order to restore her own status and sense of superiority.

Envy and jealousy

It’s important to distinguish between envy and jealousy. Envy usually involves two people, while jealousy involves three and often relates to a baby’s desire to be the favoured one in a family unit, sometimes wanting to come between two parents. While both can be destructive, jealousy can be more helpful as it relates to our need for relationships and self-connection. Aphrodite likely experienced jealousy and loss as well as envy when her son favoured Psyche over her.

Envy and narcissism

Those deeply wounded and lacking in their upbringing may develop a false persona, seeking status and power to feel valuable, which can be deemed narcissistic.

Encountering someone with higher status can disturb their sense of self, creating immense fear and anxiety. They may blame the other person for their misery, viewing them as something to be hated. We all carry narcissistic wounds from early life when care might have been lacking or delayed, even if it was usually satisfactory. When our sense of self is threatened, we become vulnerable to envy, and this can happen
to all of us.

Managing envy

Understanding and managing envy can help emotional wellbeing. Chronic envy feels unbearable, and those affected often go to great lengths to relieve the pain. Many people find relief in religion, spiritual beliefs or community to feel valuable and worthy. There are many ways to foster a secure sense of self, usually involving
building healthy relationships with others and the self.

In therapy, through exploring self-awareness, understanding emotions, and examining relationships, you can begin to ease overwhelming feelings of envy. Envy can sometimes be unconsciously projected onto the therapist, as well as others, creating complex dynamics. This not unusual and building an understanding of these projections can address underlying feelings of inadequacy and deprivation. Everyone has a unique experience of envy, and everyone will find their own way of understanding what it means to them.

 

Kirsty Toal is an experienced psychotherapist with a decade spent offering therapy, training and clinical supervision in a variety of settings. Kirsty offers short- and long-term psychodynamic and psychoanalytic psychotherapy to adults, in person in Lewes and online.

 

Further reading by Kirsty Toal – 

To be creative as an adult

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Why do we repeat past failures again and again?

All of us make mistakes; we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t.

But some past failures or mistakes have a habit of being repeated time and time again. These could be work related, like promising yourself that you’ll hand in an assignment ahead of time, only to leave everything to the last minute and deliver something below your best.

Alternatively, patterns of failure can repeat in more serious ways, such as making poor financial decisions like overspending or getting into debt. They can repeat in behaviours like isolating yourself from those who care for you in a time of need. They can repeat in romantic endeavours, such as continually dating people who treat you badly.

Repeating past failures has the potential to provide endless frustration, confusion, and suffering. And on the surface, it seems completely counterintuitive and unhelpful; why would anyone want to relive their failures or traumas?

It’s possible that these repeated behaviours are not random mistakes that we temporarily forget we’ve learned, but actually our unconscious mind’s way of trying to overcome and solve unresolved problems from the past.

To try to understand this further, I turn to some of the insights presented by Freud’s 1920 paper ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’.

Mastery and control

Freud noted that one reason we repeat past failures is an attempt to gain mastery over an original experience or trauma. So by repeating this event in a new situation, that we’re in control of, it gives us an opportunity to try again in more favourable circumstances. A chance to do better than before and master the experience, as well as feel triumph and pleasure when we survive it.

So, to understand this, let’s revisit the example of the person who leaves their assignment to the last minute. Let’s call him John. It’s possible that John had a painful childhood experience where he’d been criticised or humiliated for failing to meet expectations or perform – perhaps at home or school. These painful emotions and memories are likely to remain unprocessed and alive within him, even when he’s not aware of them. So where there’s an opportunity to re-do this experience and master the feelings associated with it, like with his work assignment, he might unconsciously recreate it through performing poorly.

Process difficult emotions

Building on the idea of mastery, Freud also discovered that sometimes we unconsciously re-create past failures or painful experiences, to give ourselves another chance at understanding the emotions we couldn’t fully process when they first happened. When an event in the present echoes a past trauma, our mind could interpret it as an opportunity to work through what was once too overwhelming to face. Our unconscious mind has a frustrating habit of prioritising resolving past challenges, over helping us to succeed in the
now.

So, going back to John, let’s suggest he struggled to learn to read as a child, making him a target for teasing and criticism from his parents or siblings. Perhaps this continued throughout his schooling, where he didn’t perform well in tests at school. At the time, John may not have had the emotional tools to fully understand or process these experiences, so the pain remained unresolved. Now, as an adult, when faced with a challenging work assignment, John unknowingly finds himself procrastinating, leading to criticism from colleagues or managers for delivering subpar work. This new experience gives him another opportunity to process the emotions he couldn’t manage or understand as a young boy.

Resistance to change

We are all at times resistant to change, even when change is preferable for us. But past experiences, both negative and positive, often seem preferable to new experiences that have the potential to be worse. The expression ‘better the devil you know’ comes to mind. By repeating a past failure, we can reconnect with familiar feelings that make sense to us, rather than expose ourselves to a vulnerable unknown.

To explore this, let’s look at the example of the person who continually seeks partners who treat them badly. Let’s call her Penelope. It’s possible that her early experience was that of being mistreated by her parents some way. Perhaps she never received attention from her father or had a mother that criticised her a lot. So when Penelope has an opportunity for connection in later life, she might seek similar relationships with others, who are likely to treat her in the same way. Despite being painful, recreating these past relationships, where she’s criticised or ignored, feels familiar and safer than being treated with kindness or respect.

Self-destructiveness

Whilst we’re all naturally driven to seek pleasure, survival and creativity, there’s also a counterforce pulling us in the opposite direction, towards aggression, destruction and self-sabotage. Depending on our temperament and past experiences, some of us have a larger capacity for self-destruction than others, which can cause us to repeat behaviours that harm us and those around us.

Let’s link this back to Penelope. We all want and need people in our lives that love and care about us. But with her parental experience growing up, she didn’t get this feeling. Being criticised and ignored became her understanding of normal and safe. This might have caused her to take on the belief that she didn’t deserve to have others care about her. So when she’s in a situation where she needs support and care, she pushes others away, re-enacting her experience with her family in a self-sabotaging way.

Breaking the cycle

Unfortunately, repeating past failures is rarely a good strategy for stopping these cycles from happening again. It could be seen as an outdated method our brains use to cope with unprocessed and overwhelming past experiences. However, there are ways to break the cycle, one being long-term psychotherapy.

The work of psychotherapy is to identify these negative patterns of behaviour and look to understand what is being repeated and why it’s unresolved. Through processing these memories and emotions in a safe environment, within a reliable therapeutic relationship, we can attempt to build self-awareness, stop repeating the past and create a future where more healthy choices are possible.

 

Joseph Bailey is a psychodynamic psychotherapist, offering analytic therapy to individual adults in Brighton and Hove. He is registered with both the British Psychoanalytic Council (BPC) and the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP). Joseph is available at our Brighton & Hove Practice and online.

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How to minimise Christmas stress if you’re hosting

Christmas can be an emotionally challenging and difficult time for many of us. There is such expectation on how Christmas ‘should’ be, yet like the weather, it often fails to deliver on the ‘winter wonderland’ scenes on the TV adverts. For so many of us our family experience often falls far short of the loving idyllic family reunions depicted in those same snowy adverts. And if you are hosting, this can bring with it an added pressure to deliver the ‘perfect Christmas’.

There is lots of advice available on how best to organise yourself practically in advance in the big day, such as food prep hacks. However, I wonder if there is another way of not only coping but getting something from the day for yourself?

Think about your own needs first

An example that I often use in clinical practice when illustrating to patients how it is vital that they think of their own needs, is the pre-flight safety briefing that happens before a plane takes off.

Anyone who has flown has sat through at least one of these and there is a particular point in the briefing where the cabin crew explain what you should do if the cabin loses pressure, the oxygen masks drop down and you are travelling with a dependent. The correct approach is to attend to your own mask first and then your dependent, however, it is surprising how many people think that they should help their dependent fit their mask first, before attending to their own. Why is it this way around? Because if you try and help your dependent first and have not tended to your own needs, there will be two people in distress rather than one. And yet for so many of us the inclination is to ignore our own needs and attend to those of others.

Applying the same logic to Christmas, before deciding whom to invite and having any conversations with family and friends about the day itself, first think about your own wants and needs. What are your physical limitations and needs? What can you and can’t you do? How many people can you host without feeling overwhelmed? Who’s company do you enjoy and who is draining? What do you want to get from the day?

The next step is to think about what is negotiable and what is a firm boundary. For example, it may be that you are willing to cater for an additional number of people if you have help or support from others with cooking. Or, it may be that you are willing to tolerate the presence of someone you find contentious, if another member of the family assures you that they will help you manage that person. However, a firm boundary may be that you have a certain time by when you request everybody leaves (stated in advance).

Wants versus needs

The nature of Christmas combined with the pressure to host, can often mean that any consideration of what you may want from the day gets lost and the focus shifts to being one of ‘surviving the day’. What if it does not have to be like this? What if you could take some time to calmly consider how you would like not only to ‘host’ the day and cater for everybody, but to play an active role in creating the day that you would like? In other words, what if you were to value your own needs as much as you value everybody else’s?

Hosting does not mean sacrificing yourself

Consider how you do not need to sacrifice yourself in order to host an event for others. People who are worth being in relationship with (and therefore arguably worth spending Christmas with), should be people who are interested in your wellbeing and needs and will therefore be open to hearing about not only what you can and can’t offer on the day, but also what you would like from it. If they aren’t, then perhaps question whether they are really wanting to celebrate with you as a person, or are simply making use of what you can provide.

Support through relationship

Putting your needs into the mix can feel daunting if it is not something that you are used to doing. And it is generally only possible if we can rely on having an ally, or allies, by our side who are encouraging – this is often our partner or a close friend. If you are in a relationship, talk to your partner about your needs and wants of Christmas well before the day arrives.  Explain to them how you wish to approach hosting Christmas and risk asking for support – emotional as well as practical. This is something you can do with a friend, or friends, too.

It can also be really helpful to agree up front how you will ask for support on the actual day and how you would like your partner or friend(s) to support you. Examples may be anything from starting the day together and connecting, through to specific practical requests. You can demonstrate support for each other throughout the day through small reassuring gestures such as visually checking in with one another or making physical contact.

Reality testing

Christmas is only a day and that is really worth bearing that in mind. However the day goes, the world will keep on turning and in all likelihood, the relationships that matter will still be there for you. The expectations we feel in relation to Christmas are largely in our own head and can therefore be challenged.  By pausing and accepting that there is no such thing as a ‘fairy-tale Christmas’ we can gain a little space to see it for what it is. It does not have to be perfect nor is it likely to be. Is the goal a ‘picture perfect’ Christmas, or one in which you feel like you are connecting with loved ones and friends?

The past is not the present

For many, memories of past Christmases are difficult and they can reappear like ghosts. However, these ghosts need not dominate your experience in the here-and-now. Accept that it is a difficult time for you and know that it is for many others too, be compassionate with the feelings that the season evokes and remember it is only a day. Sometimes we feel strong emotions on particular days that are simply reminders of the past – echoes – and we actually have the power to create something different. The more you are able to anticipate your wants and needs ahead of Christmas, the less likely the ghosts of the past are to appear and dominate the day.

Alcohol generally makes things worse

Nobody is telling you not to drink on Christmas Day. However, if it is a day that evokes sadness or anxiety, alcohol will not improve these feelings for long. Once it wears off, they will be back with a vengeance and accompanied by a hangover. The opposite of using alcohol to self-soothe is to soothe through relationship. Even if you are not in a relationship with another, you are in a relationship with yourself and can hold yourself in mind.

Even if the day feels full and focused on others, it is always possible to take a few minutes out to calm yourself. You can breathe, come back to the here and now and remind yourself –  Christmas is only a day.

Listen to your body

This doesn’t mean act impulsively. It is more about listening for what the vulnerable part of you needs. This may be a hot bath with a good book, a warm drink by the fire, a nice home cooked meal or spending time with a supportive friend. It could also be a long run, or a dance or yoga class. Whatever self-care tool helps you feel well and connected should form part of your preparations for the day and be in place after the day.

 

Mark Vahrmeyer, UKCP Registered, BHP Co-founder is an integrative psychotherapist with a wide range of clinical experience from both the public and private sectors. He currently sees both individuals and couples, primarily for ongoing psychotherapy.  Mark is available at the Lewes and Brighton & Hove Practices.

 

Further reading by Mark Vahrmeyer – 

How do you get self esteem?

Why is psychotherapy generally weekly?

Why we should be disappointed

What is a growth mindset?

Don’t tear down psychological fences until you understand their purpose

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Surviving family festivities: a psychoanalytic journey through the twelve days of Christmas

As the holiday season descends upon us like a glittering, tinsel-laden avalanche, many find themselves navigating the tricky or sometimes treacherous emotional landscape of family gatherings. Fear not, dear reader, for psychoanalytic psychotherapy could offer a guiding star, a beacon of hope to lead you through the holiday chaos to that peaceful Nativity scene, stable and all.

On the first day of Christmas: recognising your inner child

Imagine the family Christmas as a complex psychological drama where every interaction is laden with unconscious meaning. Your mother’s passive-aggressive comment about your table decorations, cooking, Christmas jumper choice – a manifestation of unresolved childhood dynamics? Your father’s awkward attempt at connection and endless ‘dad jokes’ – a deep-seated need for validation?

Psychoanalytic therapy teaches us to unwrap these emotional presents, glimpsing beyond the shiny exterior to try to read or understand the deeper psychological mechanisms at play. Each family member arrives with a lifetime of unprocessed experiences, creating a psychological minefield more intricate than the most complicated Christmas light display.

On the second day of Christmas: projection and family dynamics

Watch as Uncle Bob projects his professional disappointments onto you, criticism masquerading as concern. Your sister’s seemingly innocent comments carry the weight of childhood rivalries. Psychoanalysis aims to help you recognize these projections, transforming you from a passive recipient of family narratives to an active interpreter of emotional scripts.

On the third day of Christmas: the unconscious holiday script

Your family gathering is not just a meal; it’s a carefully choreographed psychological performance. Each member plays a role established decades ago – the peacemaker, the black sheep, the golden child, the wise men, the angels and the shepherds. Psychoanalytic therapy can provide script analysis, helping you identify and grasp the inference in these deeply ingrained patterns.

On the fourth day of Christmas: transference and family interactions

Every interaction becomes a window into your unconscious processes. That tension with your mother… It’s rarely about the overcooked turkey. Is it perhaps related to those early attachment experiences, unresolved conflicts, and deep-seated emotional patterns that have been simmering in the realm of the unconscious since childhood, with a hint of the aroma of boiled sprouts?

On the fifth day of Christmas: breaking defensive mechanisms

Family gatherings trigger our most sophisticated psychological defence mechanisms. Humour becomes a shield, sarcasm a weapon, silence a fortress. Psychoanalysis can help you to recognise these hidden defences, encouraging an authentic emotional engagement beneath the festive veneer.

On the sixth day of Christmas: the unconscious holiday narrative

Your family’s holiday story is more complex than any Netflix drama. Unspoken traumas, generational patterns, and collective family myths create a narrative far more compelling than any Christmas special. Psychoanalytic therapy offers you the opportunity to re-write the director’s cut, helping you illuminate the deeper subtext of the storyline.

On the seventh day of Christmas: emotional archaeology

Each family interaction is an archaeological dig into your psychological landscape. Old wounds, repressed memories, unacknowledged traumas – they all resurface during the holidays. Psychoanalysis can provide the tools to gently excavate these emotional artefacts with as much care and compassion as you employ to slice and serve that extra special Christmas pavlova.

On the eighth day of Christmas: navigating emotional boundaries

Learn to establish psychological boundaries more robust than a gingerbread iced fortress. Psychoanalytic therapy empowers you to differentiate between your emotions and those projected onto you, creating a healthy emotional ecosystem amidst family chaos. A breadcrumb trail through the forest of the unconscious.

On the ninth day of Christmas: understanding repetition compulsion

Why do we find ourselves repeating the same family dynamics year after year? Psychoanalysis can reveal the unconscious drives which compel us to recreate familiar emotional landscapes, even when they’re painful and seemingly unavoidable. An Alka-Seltzer for those undigested issues.

On the tenth day of Christmas: the gift of self-awareness

Your greatest present this Christmas is self-understanding. Addressing and processing the unconscious elements we bury like a tangerine in the toe of our Christmas stocking, Psychoanalytic therapy can transform family gatherings from potential emotional minefields into opportunities for growth, insight and hopefully a family game of Uno that doesn’t descend into World War III.

On the eleventh day of Christmas: integrating the shadow

Embrace the parts of yourself and your family history you’d prefer to keep wrapped up. True healing comes from acknowledgment, not denial. Set a place at the table for all the ghosts of your Christmas’ past.

On the twelfth day of Christmas: transformation

As the holiday dust settles, you may emerge not just surviving, but psychologically transformed. Armed with insights from the psychoanalytic journey, you’ve navigated the complex emotional terrain of family dynamics, Prancer and Dancer would be most impressed!

Remember, dear reader: this Christmas, your most valuable gift is the journey of self-discovery.

 

Shiraz El Showk is a Training Member of the Association for Group and Individual Psychotherapy (AGIP) and a registered Training member of the UKCP, She is experienced in Psychodynamic counselling and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy work with individuals, on both long and short term basis. Shiraz works from our Brighton and Hove practice, Lewes practice and online.

 

Further reading by Shiraz El Showk –

Parents – the ghosts and angels of our past

Is an AI therapist as good as a human one?

What is the unconscious? (part one)

Why is three the magic number? Third spaces, secure bases and creative living (part two)

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What is the role of creativity in psychotherapy?

In this article, I discuss creativity as foundational to being human, how it enables an emotionally and psychologically fulfilling life, and its relationship with psychotherapy.

Everyday creativity

When we think of creativity we tend to think of world-renowned artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Picasso, Mozart. This, however, is a very narrow interpretation of creativity and perhaps illustrates an unfortunate common belief: that only a select few people are creative. This is simply not true. Though not everyone follows the path of the professional artist, all humans are nevertheless creative. This is powerfully illustrated by observing children at play, where curiosity and imaginative make-believe are both instinctive and joyful.

As we develop into adults, however, our relationship with creativity changes. Instead of playing inside a castle we’ve made out of bedsheets, our creativity often focuses on more practical issues, such as ideas for dinner using what’s in the fridge, how to find a holiday in the sun we can afford, how to deal with a friend we’ve fallen out with. This means that we spend much of the day using what we might call ‘everyday creativity’ to navigate the problems and opportunities we encounter.

And yet, even though we rely on this intrinsic creative ability, we often don’t see the crucial role it plays in getting us through the day and its influence on our fulfilment in life, which in turn often means we don’t fully explore our creative potential.

Self-understanding

To respond creatively in a way that enables us to thrive, we first need to understand ourselves: our experience, our needs, our problems. For example, how to make sense of challenging experiences we’ve tried hard to hide from ourselves? The confusing difficulty with an important relationship? Issues we repeatedly struggle with?

Without this self-understanding, we can try to respond creatively, but as we don’t know what need we’re trying to fulfil and we don’t know how we’ve been going wrong to date, we’re likely to keep trying new solutions which don’t make us feel better.

This has the mistaken side-effect of making us believe that our creativity doesn’t provide the answers we need.

Creativity enabled

But if we develop self-knowledge, our innate creativity can start to work better for us and get our needs met. For example, we might start creatively exploring deeper questions such as childhood trauma. This in turn could change our relationship with the trauma and its impact on our lives now. Or we might come to understand what we’re not happy about in a long-term relationship and creatively explore ways of improving or changing that relationship.

How therapy can help

Psychotherapy embraces creativity in two fundamental ways. Firstly, it aims to help you understand yourself better – to connect with your authentic, creative self. This is the inherent part of you that makes you you, and enables you to respond to life in ways that are aligned with what you believe or feel to be true.

Secondly, psychotherapy develops creativity through its own creative process: where you learn to explore and be open to your own internal world of experience, thoughts, and feelings. And you learn to be open to new possibilities within yourself, developing into a new self-understanding.

It is from here that deeper resources of creativity often come online: seeing experiences and relationships in fresh ways, being more open to emerging experience, responding spontaneously to the moment, being less held back by habitual fears and more prepared to try something new.

The potential impact

The impact of being more tuned into and aware of your own experience and more connected to your creative self are significant and multiple. You will likely be more resilient to problems you encounter, know more about what is and isn’t working for you, and trust and listen to your own internal creative responses. This can positively affect your relationships, your own mental health and wellbeing, and your own fulfilment in life as you positively engage with the creative process of personal change and growth.

What’s the takeaway?

Psychotherapy aims to help you establish and deepen a connection with your creative self which enables you to be more you, to use your own powerful and innate creative resources, which in turn enables you to respond to life in a way that better meets your needs.

 

To enquire about psychotherapy sessions with Thad Hickman, please contact him here, or to view our full clinical team, please click here.

Thad is an experienced psychotherapeutic counsellor and a registered member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP). He works long-term with individuals in our Lewes and Brighton and Hove practices.

 

Further reading by Thad Hickman – 

No space to be heard?

Does your life story make sense?

When something has to change

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In support of vulnerability

What does vulnerability mean to you? Is it part of being human, something to acknowledge and embrace, or do you find ourselves shying away from it?

Vulnerability is part of what connects us to others. By being open, revealing something of ourselves and seeing that in others, we build connections. It’s not a given and we all have to feel that it’s appropriate to be open and vulnerable. We can all think of a time when we have been vulnerable, and it has felt challenging.  Whether we felt physically or emotionally unsafe, we know that it is something that we wouldn’t chose to return to and might find it hard to think about.

When it is hard to be vulnerable

From an early age we know what it is to feel vulnerable, because we depend on others for our safety and wellbeing. These formative relationships are how we develop a sense of how we allow ourselves to be vulnerable. Do we learn that we connect through being vulnerable, or that is it is to be avoided? Are we able to feel safe, when we feel vulnerable, or does it feel that being vulnerable isn’t possible or acceptable? Being vulnerable and it not feeling safe or acceptable, builds the sense that it is best avoided. The fear of being vulnerable, stops us.

The case for vulnerability

The awareness that we build relationships with others through vulnerability means that finding it hard to express our vulnerability can impact our capacity to connect. Do we let people see us or are we wary and therefore feel less connected? Building trust between people is about the interplay between them, allowing openness when it feels safe. By understanding that we can be vulnerable, we can build closer and deeper connections to others. We can be open with them, and they with us.

Being vulnerable in relation to others is about being able to share our emotions. When we have developed a sense that being vulnerable isn’t possible how do our emotions get expressed? Do we hold them in, deny their existence, hope that they go dormant, or act them out through behaviour? Holding on to our emotions, in effect a defence against feeling vulnerable, is challenging. It is hard to feel full of emotion and feel unable to express it. At this point vulnerability feels impossible, however desirable it might be.

Being able to express one’s emotions and form deeper connections with others can feel beyond the realms of possibility. It can be desirable, yet unthinkable, leaving the feeling that one is stuck in a pattern that repeats throughout life. The development of the capacity to be vulnerable is part of how these patterns can be challenged. Old habits and ways of being can shift, and one can feel able to experience both one’s own emotions and those of others.

Being vulnerable in psychotherapy

In talking therapy there is an understanding that one is going to be exploring emotions and that this can bring with it strong feelings of being vulnerable. The challenge that this presents is understood and as therapists it is about building a working relationship with a client that can make being vulnerable possible. The therapeutic relationship is one in which vulnerability is always possible, and that the thoughts that make it feel difficult can be explored. The therapist is not only bringing their knowledge and experience to the relationship, but is also invested in the individual.

 

David Work is a BACP registered psychotherapist working with adults, offering long term individual psychotherapy. He works with individuals in Hove . To enquire about psychotherapy sessions with David , please contact him here, or to view our full clinical team, please click here.

 

Further reading by David Work –

Trauma and the use of pornography

Reflections on bereavement

Compulsive use of pornography

Mental health in retirement

Subjective perception, shared experience

In support of being average

 

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Trauma and the use of pornography

I explored the use of pornography and its presence in society in previous blog. In thinking about pornography, there is the question of why some people might become habitual users. What part might childhood trauma play in the development of compulsive use of pornography?

Trauma, attachment and anxiety

The experience of trauma in formative years can have a marked impact on the individual when they become sexually active and might be using pornography. Trauma can take various forms and can lead to feelings of difficulty expressing emotions and in forming close relationships.

The connection between trauma and the difficulty in forming close relationships, originates in how the child who experiences trauma is related to. The experience that the caregivers are not able to hear and support the child in expressing and exploring their emotions, shapes the child’s sense of the bond that exists between them. When this bond, or attachment, is not good and secure, the child feels that they are not worthy of care, love and attention and of being ‘attached’. This is when they learn that close relations are not reliable and so are to be avoided. In the sexually active adult, the expression of this may well be that sexual intimacy feels difficult.

The vulnerability that is present when being sexually intimate can feel overwhelming and make such encounters difficult, if not impossible. The desire is there, but the anxiety that it induces makes it something to be avoided.

Pornography: the reliable relationship

Looking at the adult who has experienced trauma in childhood and finds close relationships difficult, how might we conceptualise their relationship with pornography? Against the background of trauma and the resulting poor attachment do we seek out reliable relationships? Looking for something that meets the need for sexual intimacy, yet doesn’t have associated anxiety about that comes with closeness?

Pornography could be seen to meet that need. It is intimate, yet it is impersonal. One can be sexually potent, engaged and satisfied without the anxiety that closeness brings. Pornography becomes the reliable and safe relationship. It meets the demands of libidinous urges, without demanding more of the individual. The use of
pornography also relates with the feelings of low self-esteem, that this might be the only form of sexual interaction that the individual deserves. Feelings of guilt, shame and unworthiness all get acted out in the use of pornography. It is secretive, private, personal and can controlled by the user. Pornography ultimately becomes the way in which anxiety is managed.

Psychotherapy and pornography

When thinking about the compulsive use of pornography from a therapeutic perspective, we are considering both the idea that its use can be a choice, but also exploring the origins of the compulsion. Can we be curious about what has happened in the past? How experiences that might have been traumatic and disruptive to the attachment to others, shaped the relationship with pornography. The capacity to imagine oneself as someone who can make choices around the use of pornography and feel more able to be form intimate relationships. All of this is present when working with the compulsion to use pornography and in helping the client to change their relationship with it.

 

David Work is a BACP registered psychotherapist working with adults, offering long term individual psychotherapy. He works with individuals in Hove . To enquire about psychotherapy sessions with David , please contact him here, or to view our full clinical team, please click here.

 

Further reading by David Work –

Reflections on bereavement

Compulsive use of pornography

Mental health in retirement

Subjective perception, shared experience

In support of being average

Collective grief

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