Gerry Gilmartin Blogs - Brighton and Hove Psychotherapy

The Passage of Time and the Discipline of Attention

January 3, 2022 by BHP Leave a Comment

Reflections on freedom and security in a turbulent year

What a strange and disquieting time 2021 has been. We might all be advised to pause and reflect upon its impact, personally and socially, individually and collectively, locally and globally. A significant theme running throughout, it strikes me, from the family to the global stage is the ever present one of freedom and security, the indispensable if not immediately compatible conditions of humane society. The tension between these paradoxical pillars of existence remains piercingly topical in the current climate of political, economic, environmental and relational change. It is a time when our attention should be aimed in a continuous, laser like fashion toward this balance, our critical thinking (and re-thinking) active and honed in its preservation. When we fail in the task we run the risk of collapsing into fundamentalist thinking and all that proceeds it, an entirely more toxic proposition.

Fundamentalism

Polarised thinking can exist on all sides of the political and religious spectrum. When we are caught in its vice we adopt an “either/or” approach to issues that might be better served (though less easily talked about or solved) with degrees of nuance and ambiguity. Whilst fundamentalist groups can meet real and genuine needs for human connection and community, they will more often do so in ways that are regressive. The price of belonging often requires blind loyalty to the group and submission to “group think” with a consequent relinquishing of complexity.

When we close our minds to complexity we will fail to evaluate data independently and objectively. Since the group is always right there is no need to consider other points of view or indeed how other people might feel, especially when doing so might threaten our own experience of belonging. Children who have grown up feeling powerless and uncared for may become adults who find comfort and protection in authoritarian structures. For many, submitting to something or someone more powerful than their chaotic and fragmented selves will create the illusion of safety, power and purpose.

Social Media

From the American election to Brexit to the seismic impact of the coronavirus and too numerous to mention severe and unusual weather events the issues of freedom and security abound. Truth and objectivity are up for grabs in an information overload economy. Many of todays culture wars are incubated and permeated through the channels of social media. Algorithms that tap into our negativity bias’s push them to the top of our Twitter, Facebook and You Tube feeds. Slowly, slowly, click by click social media serves to amplify our very worst qualities. Our dopamine guided appetite for push notifications and news feeds is akin to addiction and this it something that should rightly concern us. We should all beware entering the echo chamber and the uncomfortable truth is that we all linger somewhere in its corridors. Culture wars are driven by emotions and derive their power from being unconscious and out of awareness, they depend on primitive and childlike forms of thinking and the inability to fully value or acknowledge different points of view. The battleground is the power to define reality.

One planet

Our contemporary dramas, Covid and climate change amongst them, now play out on a global stage. Recognition of our inter-dependence in respect of our present as well as our future is crucial. Nothing we do or fail to do can be indifferent to the fate of anyone else. All of us who share the planet depend upon each other for our present and our future. None can remain untouched by the storms (viral or otherwise) that originate in any part of the globe. So as the New year beckons may we consider how our psychological and moral capacities are inextricably entwined. May we (re)claim and care for our minds, may we hold space for the minds of others, may we be sure to pay attention to the development of young minds. The freedom and security of the planet may depend on it.

To enquire about psychotherapy sessions with Gerry Gilmartin, please contact her here, or to view our full clinical team, please click here.

Further reading by Gerry Gilmartin –

The Passage of Time and the Discipline of Attention

November 15, 2021 by BHP Leave a Comment

Reflections on getting back to normal

In living with Coronavirus we have shared (to greater and lesser degrees) in a collective experience of trauma. We have had to learn to be separate from friends and family. We have had to live, die and give birth in isolation. We have had to grieve in isolation too. The Covid virus has brought many changes to our lives, on an individual, collective and global scale. It is likely that its shock waves will be felt for generations to come. We have had to adapt and learn to live differently in many ways. Uncertainty and an increasing exposure to our own vulnerability and the reality of our mortality have been forced into the conscious foreground. We have been newly confronted with questions surrounding values and what really matters to us now. These are important questions. As restrictions ease and we embrace the desire to “get back to normal” we might well pause for thought, to consider what normal really means, or perhaps what normality has involved us in up to this point?

Individualism as isolation

Whatever the lessons of Covid may be, it has shown us how irrevocably bound and interdependent we truly are. Caring about others is what makes us fully human. We depend upon these bonds not just for our survival but for our very being. Modern Western society has resisted this fundamental truth, valuing independence above all things. Autonomy is King in the modern world. Small children, the sick and aged are permitted exceptions, but we are all dependent creatures, right to our core. Individualism and its pursuit is a relatively new phenomenon. My space, my desire, my identity, my need….we are increasingly siloed in our own progress myths, side tracked by the ever increasing burdens of self.

Kindness and its shadow

The world of work has changed beyond recognition in recent years (pre and post Covid). Stable careers (“jobs for life”) have been replaced by freelance or contract work, many demanding long hours, enforced mobility and chronic insecurity. The shape and nature of communities built around stable home and work relationships have crumbled under such changes. A competitive society that divides people into winners and losers also breeds unkindness. Kindness and caring may be natural human capacities, but so too are cruelty and aggression. When people are subject to unremitting pressure they become estranged from each other. When we feel coerced by circumstance we fight back or collapse. When communal bonds weaken tribal loyalties ascend, kindness and caring become a mugs game in a dog eat dog world.

Kindness as vulnerability

There are many accounts, philosophical, biological, psychological and evolutionary of mankind’s innate instinct for self interest, we are it seems unfailingly ruthless and selfish creatures.

History is riven with accounts of mans’ inhumanity to man. We cannot and must not deny our darkest nature, but neither must we believe our selfishness to be the whole story, for this too would be a dangerous state of affairs. The feelings of connection and reciprocity that we can know…deep in our bones, are amongst the greatest pleasures available to human kind. Let us approach kindness and care not as acts of sacrifice or indeed (albeit unconscious) of vanity, for these are surely self serving. Let us approach kindness instead as an act of including ourselves with others, as an intimate act that reminds us in the clearest way that we are vulnerable and dependent creatures who have no better resource than each other.

To enquire about psychotherapy sessions with Gerry Gilmartin, please contact her here, or to view our full clinical team, please click here.

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September 13, 2021 by BHP Leave a Comment

The Passage of Time

Being human means living with the knowledge that we will one day die and that those we love will die too. As mortal beings we are the children of time and none of us are spared its reckoning. Time makes playthings of us all and we are powerless in its passage. A healer it may be but ultimately we do not escape the fatal wound inflicted upon us by time’s passing hours and minutes. There is no cure for time and this is the difficult truth that we must all live with. Religion and philosophy offer sustenance in the form of faith and knowledge. Science and medicine continually develop to improve our life expectancy but time flows relentlessly on…. we may transfigure time we cannot deny or destroy it.

Me, myself and I

Our mind shapes every experience we have, it is our greatest asset and our greatest tormentor. We spend most of our time literally lost in thought and when we are lost in thought we are by implication elsewhere and not in the present moment/reality (psychosis by another measure). It has long been understood in many contemplative traditions that being distracted by thought is the fundamental source of human suffering. It is not so much that our thoughts themselves are problematic but rather the way in which we identify with them. It is hard to truly recognise just how distracted we are and how much of the time, thoughts bond with feelings and feelings reinforce thoughts, both drag us from the present moment and hold us hostage to time…time which ticks on regardless, immune to our suffering.

“There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”

Occasionally a crack opens up in time (or at least that might be a way of putting it) in which we have an experience akin to non time or timelessness. What characterises these moments is an experience of merger, probably best expressed through paradox and poetic imagery, as in Leonard Cohen’s evocative lyric. Love is one of these experiences. Love helps us look death in the face. Beyond pleasure and pain (and it is both) love is intensity. It cannot vanquish death but it makes it an integral part of life. Love cannot protect or preserve us from the risks inherent in living, no love ultimately escapes the ravages of time, age and ill health. Wherever there is rapture there will be rupture and like all the great creations of human kind, love is twofold, both joy and sorrow, an instant and an eternity.

Doorways

In order to become less identified with the tyranny of our thoughts and the drama of our own lives we might well be advised to consider cultivating new disciplines of attention. How might we allow for a crack in our convictions and cognitions such that a light may shine through? A sure fire way of busting through the doors of perception would be to ingest a powerful dose of a psychedelic substance such as psilocybin. For better or worse in such a state we would have a different experience of time and space, and a sense of total immersion in the present moment. (It goes without saying that if such an experience were to be truly useful the set and setting would be of fundamental importance.) Such an experience might shine a powerful light on the mind’s potential, far from that which might be available during the course of normal waking consciousness. However, a Peak experience is exactly that, fleeting in its nature and as such not coincident with everyday waking life (which presumably must go on). Meditation offers another potential way of breaking the spell of identification with thought and the persistent cycle of rumination and reactivity that so many of us are caught in so much of the time. Cultivating awareness via one intentional discipline or another seems, on balance, a useful proposition. A psychotherapeutic dialogue can be of significant value in helping to ground and integrate new insights and awareness into our everyday lives.

To enquire about psychotherapy sessions with Gerry Gilmartin, please contact her here, or to view our full clinical team, please click here.

Further reading by Gerry Gilmartin

April 26, 2021 by BHP Leave a Comment

Intimacy: pillars and obstacles

Our capacity for intimacy as adults is widely understood to be shaped by our early relational experiences. Theorists from diverse orientations emphasise the link between early attachment patterns and subsequent adult love relationships. When our formative experience is one of loving reciprocity with our caregivers, our abilities to give and receive love freely and fully later in life are enhanced. Children who experience themselves as loved and valued in the context of a harmonious parent/child dyad are more likely to develop a secure sense of self and will have a more robust relationship to (their own and others) autonomy and dependence.

We all struggle to find a balance between a need to be a part of something greater than ourselves and a need to be apart from – to be separate. Some of us will navigate the continuum between proximity and distance with fluidity and ease. Others will experience greater comfort at one end of the continuum or another. For all of us our capacity to experience intimacy will reflect in some measure our abilities to risk closeness and separateness.

Separateness

The growing infant internalises their primary care giver(s) through the process of separation-individuation. A parent’s recognition and validation of the baby’s unique self will initially be expressed in the child’s specific preferences for being held, soothed and fed. The feedback loop between child and caregiver as the child seeks to explore the world beyond (m)other is critical. When attuned, the child will learn that separation is both pleasurable and manageable and that it will not entail the loss of the love object. The process of separation-individuation is repeated throughout the life cycle, in adolescence, in marriage and in parenthood. At each stage there is an opportunity to rework or repeat old patterns and to adopt either old or new solutions.

Mutuality

To give, to receive and to share in the spirit of joint reciprocal endeavour is the cornerstone of mutuality, another pillar of successful intimacy. Once again it is understood that the capacity for mutuality is rooted in our early experiences with a “good enough” caregiver. The infant develops trust and confidence through interactive engagement with an attentive other. Through this exchange expectations of safety, effectiveness and pleasure are cultivated or impaired.

Successful intimacy requires the capacity to regress and be dependent, and in an adult partnership, for each individual to be able to tolerate these states in both themselves and the other. This requires a secure sense of individuation on both sides so that closeness is not experienced as an engulfing fusion and a threat to a cohesive sense of self, and separation is not experienced as a catastrophic rejection or abandonment.

Empathy

Feeling what another person feels whilst maintaining psychological separateness is the essence of empathy. It involves the capacity to immerse oneself in the emotional life of another, temporarily leaving one’s own world without experiencing a loss of self. As such it is fraught with difficulty and risk for the individual who is not securely individuated. Empathy is a two way process in which each partner must have an investment in both understanding and being understood. Early developmental deficits or excesses will inevitably interfere with our capacity for empathy and mature intimacy in our adult pairings.

Viable Intimacy

Intimacy can evoke fear ( conscious or unconscious) in any relationship. Fear of loss or merger, fear of shame, fear of attack or of one’s own aggressive impulse, fear of disappointment and fear of needing. The path to intimacy is complicated and fraught with risk, never more so when we bring our unattended psychic wounds to our adult partnerships in hope of healing. For intimacy to be viable it will probably help to have an idea of our appetites for closeness and distance. Armed with this self understanding and willing to understand the appetites of our partners we will be better positioned to navigate and negotiate this most foundational relational terrain.

To enquire about psychotherapy sessions with Gerry Gilmartin, please contact her here, or to view our full clinical team, please click here.

Further reading by Gerry Gilmartin –

January 11, 2021 by BHP Leave a Comment

Love and family

The family is our first social group. It is the crucible in which our passions are born and our capacities to love and to live are shaped – and misshaped. The family imbues its members with its own specific culture, habits and attitudes.

As an organism, it too is shaped by the cultural moment and the social environment, the hopes, fears and attitudes of the day. It is the bedrock of our most durable and intense emotions and the fertile soil of our satisfactions and discontents. The family reconfigures with each new life that enters and exits. Constantly changing, constantly staying the same it is both dynamic and flexible, coded and predictable. We are all indelibly touched, one way or another by its authority. We learn to love in the context of ‘family’, each in our own idiosyncratic way. Every family has its own cast of characters ((step)parents, grandparents, (step) siblings, aunts, uncles etc). All players in a unique drama. Family is a stage where universal themes are navigated, power, sex and money, hierarchy and democracy, passion and ambivalence, in all their dark, tumultuous, devastating and innocuous glory.

Universal themes

From Greek myth to Shakespearean tragedy, the depths and breadth of family relations provide a turbulent, brooding backdrop to moral, ethical and philosophical considerations of a universal scale. So often in these epic tales, we are reminded what an unruly emotion love is, indeed how uncomfortably close it resides to its shadowy counterpoint hate. Disowning his most beloved youngest daughter Cordelia, King Lear in a fit of vanity and rage is consumed by vengeful hate, abdicating love and reason in its wake he casts her out. Her failure to satisfy his insatiable need for flattery and primacy, to go against her own nature, disrupts their bond, unleashes chaos and eventual tragedy. This is an epic tale of family conflicts, of power, love and greed. Most family dramas do not play out on such a grand scale, but remain hidden in the shadows of secrecy, shame and trauma, creating a legacy that can trickle (or cascade) down through generations to come.

Changing Families

Whilst the major human themes endure in families across generations, the architecture of family life and living is continually changing with the socio-political and economic tides. Every generation spawns its own raft of experts on the family and its constituent members, from the institutions of religion, state, medical and social science and philosophy. The current moment, in particular, is one in which the couple is the central organising pillar upon which the success of the family depends. Bred in ever smaller numbers, the modern child is also a major focus of scrutiny and opinion. As the birth rate has decreased so children’s value has increased. Parents invest heavily in their offspring financially, emotionally, educationally etc. We dedicate ourselves to their health and happiness, often discounting our own in the process. As an antidote to our high tech fast-moving, demanding lives we create a utopia of childhood and perhaps (without knowing) locate many of our own unmet hopes and passions in our beloved and precious innocents.

Love them or hate them (and indeed it is within our families that we learn about both) idealise or reject them it is within the context of the family that we learn about the social world and our place in it. It is in this original grouping that we have our first experience of grief and loss, it is where we learn to trust (or not) and to express (or inhibit) our desires. Family life is fraught with misunderstandings and pain and is the vessel in which our virtues are forged, kindness, loyalty generosity and fortitude. Interestingly, even when we grow up and leave them we will most often seek out another with whom we wish to form a family. At this very particular COVID moment, we are all forced to reconsider what family means to us.

To enquire about psychotherapy sessions with Gerry Gilmartin, please contact her here, or to view our full clinical team, please click here.

Further reading by Gerry Gilmartin

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November 23, 2020 by BHP Leave a Comment

Understanding Sexual Fantasy

The exploration of sexual preference and fantasy in therapy can be a portal to our inner psychological landscape. Unlocking the unconscious logic of sexual fantasy is one way of casting a light on our internal world and of understanding the emotional and psychological difficulties that may have prompted us to seek therapy in the first instance.

Our sexual scripts are formed in infancy, long before the onset of mature sexual desire. Our early attachment experiences and the familial and cultural context into which we are born inform the psychological maps and templates for being (in the world) to which we both consciously and unconsciously refer as we develop and grow. We are evolutionarily wired and sensitively attuned to the moods and feeling states of our caregivers absorbing them all through a process of psychological osmosis.

The conflict of growing up

Whilst our lust and capacity for pleasure (according to the Freudian account) are instinctual, the road to pleasure is more often than not a complicated one. We are likely to experience myriad obstacles along the way (many that will later inform our sexual fantasies) guilt, shame, fear, rejection may all stand in the way of our experience of pleasure. We all (consciously or otherwise) feel guilty about something. Life is fraught with conflict – and from the get go. The conflict (for example) between our attachment to our families and to the developmental imperative to grow up, individuate and leave them is fraught with guilt and worry. We bring these unresolved and largely unconscious conflicts into our erotic lives.

The creativity of fantasy

The child of a depressed parent may grow up with a powerful sensitivity to and identification with the sadness of others. It may be hard for such an individual to fully connect to their own aliveness and vitality as sexual excitement is fundamentally incompatible with depression. In the imaginative realm of fantasy such an individual may be released from the burden of caring by populating their fantasies with dynamic carefree people, aroused, excited and turned on. It is not hard to understand, in this scenario, that when everyone is having a great time (and no one is depressed) the fantasy serves as a creative permission to connect, without guilt or shame to one’s own desire.

An antidote to trauma

Many sexual fantasies can seem puzzling and hard to understand. One person’s turn on is another’s turn off after all. Arousal for some may come through being tied up and whipped, another’s from phone sex, group sex, sex with a stranger(s), etc, etc. All are plots of desire, many are attempts to draw on and transform past trauma. When someone is cruel or aggressive in their sexual fantasy or practice it is not because they are inherently sadistic but rather that they are trying to solve a problem. It may be useful and illuminating to consider and understand why the normal pursuit of pleasure may require a particular imaginative scenario in order to be safely experienced.

Empathy and ruthlessness are important aspects of a healthy sexual relationship. Too much empathy (for the other) may be a dampener to our own desire and too much ruthlessness may render sex mechanical and devoid of emotion. Sexual fantasies can be attempts to counteract or transform beliefs and feelings that may interfere with sexual arousal and can provide an elegant ( if not always politically correct) solution to the problems of ruthlessness , guilt and shame.

When we understand our sexuality we understand ourselves.

Further reading by Gerry Gilmartin

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August 10, 2020 by BHP Leave a Comment

Fear and hope in the time of Covid

The coronavirus pandemic has interrupted our lives and disrupted the status quo – that which confers normalcy and (feels like) security. As we have in recent months reorganised and adapted our lives to halt the virus in its destructive tracks we have been derailed from our personal and collective sense of forward motion (progression). Forced sideways into new territories (socially, emotionally, physically and economically) some of us find our individual plans compromised and in many instances, in tatters. Confronted by an inescapable sense of uncertainty our coping mechanisms have been given a significant stress test. The covid ‘reset’ has demanded a refocusing of our priorities and our attentions.

Disrupted from our familiar rhythms and rituals and suddenly with multiple roles overlapping (and potentially conflicting) parent, teacher, partner, carer etc, most of us have experienced a significant blurring of more familiar boundaries. Under ‘normal’ circumstances different parts of our identity have different social settings, work, school, gym etc. Without the scope for differentiation that all these settings and contexts confer we may feel somewhat untethered, cast adrift. “Who am I now?”

The illusion of individualism

The comforting illusion that we may be masters of our own destiny is now creaking beneath the weight of new and uncomfortable evidence. Our interdependence and connectedness were never more clear. When we experience a loss of control and feel the fear that it evokes we are confronted by our best and worst selves. We have all witnessed (in recent weeks) and been moved by, acts of supreme neighbourliness, altruism and humanity. We may have experienced these capacities newly in ourselves and felt enlivened by our capacity to express them. More disquieting, lurking somewhere in the dark recesses of our individual and collective psyches (activated by the same fear) lives its shadowy xenophobic counterpart, suspicious, wary and often hostile…. to difference, to change, to ‘the other.’

The uncontrollability of the corona virus may reflect something of the uncontrollability of a globalised world. Both highlight our mutual dependence and by implication our mutual vulnerability. At a time when a sense of universal unity might be prescient it is also a time at which it seems extremely unlikely. In a state of fear the instinct is to contract mentally and physically, to batten down the hatches against a real or imagined enemy. In a state of fear we may abandon our capacities for hope and for trust…. on a global as well as an individual level.

The necessity of conversation

The truth (about anything) may only emerge at the end of a long conversation (always subject to review). That is to say, a genuine conversation, not a series of scripted monologues (in disguise) masquerading as conversation. A genuine conversation is one in which neither party is certain of knowing what the end will be, since in the process of conversation each party is shaped by the other.

This notion seems antithetical to current political discourse. At a time when our political leaders seem unable to agree on a path ahead how important it is that we steady ourselves in the face of such polarisation and uncertainty.

What are the conversations we need to begin having…..with ourselves, with our partners, our children, our families and our community? How might these conversations become fertile explorations of what matters now? Whilst the disruption caused by the virus has undoubtedly brought tragedy to many, perhaps (in spite of itself) it might also bring opportunity. Fear and hope are inextricably linked, each counterbalancing the other. When there is no easy path ahead how do we retain a sense of equanimity and trust? How might we stay open to the important conversations that need to be had without closing down… our minds and our hearts. How do we retain our humanity when we fear for our lives. How do we hold on to hope?

Further reading by Gerry Gilmartin

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March 9, 2020 by Brighton & Hove Psychotherapy Leave a Comment

Relationships, networks and connections

How many of us are seldom more than an arms length from our mobile phone? Our bags, clothing, even our sports wear is designed with special pockets for its’ safe keeping. For most of us it has infiltrated every sphere of life, a constant companion. Staying connected has never been so easy. Mobiles are for people (like us) on the move – always contactable – but never confined. As long as we are never too far from a power source and a signal we can bridge the gap between together and apart. It is a familiar modern experience to encounter, in a public space, a café, a bus, a pedestrian walkway, others, eyes down ensconced in their device. For many of us it feels jarring, not least because we know that we are not immune to the same behaviour. We no longer seek the eyes as a point of entry into the world of another.

Virtual proximity

Ours is a time when proximity no longer requires physical closeness just as physical closeness no longer determines proximity. Virtual proximity renders human connection simultaneously more frequent and more shallow, more intense and more brief. Getting in touch is no obstacle to staying apart. Notions of community have shifted with the tides of of socio political, economic and technological time. So too has our relationship to home. We now slip into our separate houses, more often our separate room’s bypassing the shared spaces, seeking ‘our own space’. The virtual ‘network’ is now the place we gather, the new village square, the new community, residing behind each closed door. We are lonelier than ever… more connected than ever.

Reflection

This is not a a condemnation of technology or technological innovation, how ignorant and foolish that would be. Rather it is an expression of concern about a gradual erosion of social and relational skills, of face to face, up front and personal human interaction. The more our attentions are absorbed in a virtual kind of proximity do we risk losing these skills ? Might we fail to learn them in the first place or reject them all together. Are we choosing to replace intimate proximal partnerships with virtual networks – and where may it lead us?

Quantity v quality

The language of ‘connections’ subtly usurps the language of ‘relationships’. Connections are ‘virtual relations’ entered and exited at the press of a button. In a virtual network connecting and disconnecting share the same status, are made on demand and broken at will. In a virtual network we are free to roam as we please and to terminate those connections which no longer interest or satisfy us. The old fashioned networks of ‘kinship’ and ‘partnership’ and ‘committed relationship’ are far more slow moving, clunky and messy than their virtual counterparts and certainly far more difficult to exit. Turnover is the cardinal measure of success in the consumer world. Consumer life favours lightness and speed. Variety and novelty are valued over durability. Commitment and sharing in this context lose their meaning and our appetites for interpersonal risk taking (relating) decline.

There is no doubt that in infinite ways technology improves and enhances our lives as individuals and communities. It is true too that wherever there is something gained there is inevitably something lost. So let us all remember to keep the bonds of human connection alive. Look up, make eye contact, maybe smile or say hello to the next person we stand next to in a queue or a lift. Face time for real! Let’s switch off our devices from time to time and not automatically grant them space at our tables when we commune with real life friends and family. And let’s leave them outside the bedroom door at the end of the day and reclaim that space for rest, restoration and good old human connection.

Further reading by Gerry Gilmartin –

Love, commitment and desire in the age of choice

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October 28, 2019 by Brighton & Hove Psychotherapy Leave a Comment

Is Love a Tameable Force?

Death like birth is a one off life event. We cannot learn through our experience of either to “get it right” next time. Love on the other hand (or the act of ‘falling in love’) is an event amenable to repetition. As such it is also available for re-definition by the forces of culture – political, philosophical and economic.

We no longer imagine or indeed contract for that (romantic) notion of love “till death do us part.” A vision in part predicated on (now outdated) kin-ship structures. These days it seems we care less to tie ourselves into lifetime contracts, or at least not without the freedom to change provider.

Love in a consumer age

One factor involved in the consideration of any investment is the risk attached. The ‘hookup’ model of relationship is a way of keeping (emotional) risk to a minimum. Its strategic focus is on convenience and short term satisfaction. It requires a particular vigilance to any (unruly) emotional undercurrents, with cost/benefit analysis consistently calculated and reviewed. When the initial (emotional ) investment is small there is protection against future insecurity in what can be a highly volatile market.

In his book, ‘The Art of Loving’, Erich Fromm describes how satisfaction in love cannot be attained “…without true humility, courage, faith and discipline” a vision at odds with the consumer age. Now the structures and forces of the market place promise something different. We can barely move for ‘expert’ relationship advice and books, articles and podcasts abound to coach us in the practice of relationship consciousness. In the online marketplace, the otherwise busy consumer may choose from an extensive menu of mouthwatering relational options. Available with an ease of access (and exit) and an abundance of choice, previously unknown. The new ideal of instant satisfaction takes the wait out of wanting with all risk insurance and money back guarantees there to catch us if we fall.

Love and uncertainty (uncomfortable bedfellows)

Love though is an unruly force and resists attempts at mastery or design. Love finds its own meaning in a continual state of becoming. Its creative forces are fraught with risk and like any creative force, we may never be sure where it will end. When we ‘fall’ in love, we enter into a great unknown, we feel untethered from our usual moorings and suddenly vulnerable in the force field of another’s freedom. Indeed, love navigates a fine line between security and freedom and is threatened by both. ‘Too much security’ may feel like fusion or possession, stifling the creative urge. ‘Too much freedom’ (and a deficit of security) may lead to an overwhelming and agoraphobic sense of uncertainty.

There is then an inescapable duality in love and any attempt to surmount it ends only in its destruction. This paradox lies at the heart of loving. Eros forever haunted by Thanatos like an iron hand clad in a velvet glove.

Love seduces and emboldens us (at least in its opening gambit) to dive into the uncharted waters of ‘otherness’ and engage with the unknown. Love as an antidote to death soothes the ever present human dilemma of separateness. The blessing and the curse of individuality makes a mockery of us and all lovers seek to foreclose the space that separates them from their beloved. It is though in this very act that the death knell to love is sounded. Whatever else love might be a commitment to it inevitably involves the certainty of uncertainty.

To love is to risk and there is no algorithm to square that particular existential circle. The last word on love may perhaps always be best left to the poets.

Source – Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving(1957; Thomson’s, 1995)

Further reading by Gerry Gilmartin –

Love, commitment and desire in the age of choice

Face to Face and Online Therapy Help Available Now

August 12, 2019 by Brighton & Hove Psychotherapy Leave a Comment

Paying attention to stress

We are evolutionarily wired for stress. For our early ancestors, inhabiting a natural world beset with predatory dangers the flight/fight response was crucial to survival. The same alarm system exists today for the same survival purpose evolution originally intended.

What is different is that today the more likely sources of threat (at least for those of us living in the industrialised world) are emotional. Our biology, psychology and physiology are interlinked in subtle and complex ways, all with implications for our health and well being.

A stress response is activated when an event, physical or emotional is perceived as threatening. As human beings we make multiple assessments via our central nervous system to interpret a stimulus and prepare ourselves to respond. Our response will be a combination of physiological and behavioural adjustments commensurate with the perceived degree of threat. What is “commensurate” varies from person to person. Each stress event is experienced in the moment but may have resonance from the past. Our personal histories as well as our dispositions influence our response to a stressful event.

Acute v chronic stress

Whilst on the one hand stress can be understood as a physiological event vital to survival, on the other it is increasingly understood to have a corrosive effect that impacts negatively on our long term health. Here it is important to distinguish between acute and chronic stress.

Acute stress triggers immediate discharges in the nervous, hormonal and immune systems, activating flight or fight reactions that help us survive imminent danger. These are highly adaptive and highly effective responses. In the case of chronic stress, the same systems are activated(over and over) but without resolution. The effect is elevated cortisol and adrenaline levels which can damage tissue, raise blood pressure and undermine the integrity of our immune functioning.

For many people, functioning with chronically elevated cortisol and stress hormones is normal. The circumstances of our early lives, including our attachments may have necessitated a state of hyper arousal and vigilance. Without any conscious awareness our bodies stress responses can remain highly active. Indeed it may be the absence of stress that creates unease in the individual habituated to its hormonal high but such a state of addiction to our own stress hormones may have serious implications for our long term immune functioning and health.

When we are unaware of what is happening in our bodies we are unable to act in self preserving ways. The same is true of our emotional states. If we are unable to identify what it is we feel, we will struggle to communicate it. Our capacity to identify our emotional states will largely depend upon the messages that were conveyed to us early on by significant others. A child may conclude that “I am not ok when I am angry” for instance, based on the blatant or subtle (verbal and non verbal) responses of a parent/ group of which they are a part. In order to prevent the threat of rejection or shame the child will learn to shutdown or repress the unacceptable expression of anger. This repression if it is to remain successful will require constant vigil and adaptation, such that overtime the legitimate expression of anger will be compromised and confused.

Self awareness

We need to develop a degree of emotional competence and fluency in order to protect against the hidden stresses that can pose such a (ticking time bomb) threat to our health. This means being able to identify and express our emotions effectively, to assert our needs and maintain healthy (physical and emotional) boundaries. It means being able to distinguish between past and present realities such that we cultivate awareness (and compassion) for unmet childhood needs. Remaining disconnected with these aspects of our personal histories can contribute to hidden stress with potentially serious implications for our physical and emotional health and well being.

Further reading by Gerry Gilmartin –

Love, commitment and desire in the age of choice

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May 13, 2019 by Brighton & Hove Psychotherapy Leave a Comment

Why does empathy matter?

When you begin therapy you enter into a particular (perhaps peculiar) type of relationship, one with well-defined boundaries and ethics. Beyond its method and structure, at the very heart of this relationship lies empathy.

As a therapist empathy means doing all you can to understand your client from inside their own experience. It requires an ability to communicate this understanding in ways that are sensitive, meaningful and useful, both verbal and non-verbal.

It is a powerful experience to feel understood, listened to, cared for and respected. Over time it can make it easier to have empathy for yourself, to take your own personal pain and suffering seriously, to judge it less, as trivial, stupid or simply a product of your own personal weakness.

When we begin to take our own struggles seriously, we gain access to another layer of empathy: compassion for the child that we were, often a child who made sense of what troubled them by deciding that there must be something wrong with them – that they were the problem. In the context of an authentic and empathic connection with another human being the shame or disgust or guilt that has become so entangled in our sense of self can begin to make way for new feelings. Sadness (perhaps) for what was lost and loving regard for the child who did the best they could at the time. When there is more space in our imaginations for the reality of our own struggle, we can begin to see other people differently too. When we experience the power of feeling understood we may also experience greater internal space for new thoughts and feelings, both about ourselves and about others.

The therapist as the client

All psychotherapists have had their own experience of being a client in therapy. Sharing the most intimate and often painful moments of someone’s life is made possible when you have felt and expressed your own. It is not that as a therapist you become an expert on life (not even your own) but that having undergone your own therapy you will be more equipped with the clarity to differentiate your separate self and experience from that of another. To understand whose feelings are whose and to have the versatility and flexibility to step into and out of another person’s shoes.

The circuitry of empathy

Empathy is a complex system of mutual cues and responses that regulates each persons experience of self and others. We observe this very clearly in parent/ infant interactions. How attuned a parent is to the (myriad/micro) communications of an infant will inform the infant’s reciprocal response to the parent.

It is not that in ideal world infants and young children would be perfectly attuned to at all times. Over-attunement can be stifling and intrusive. What’s more important is the experience of an ongoing relationship in which misunderstandings and mis-attunements can be repaired.

Emotional neglect and emotional intrusion are flip sides of the same coin. Anyone who has suffered either will have good reason to believe that they may never be understood.

As a therapist we cannot “know it all” for our clients, we cannot tell someone how it is they feel or what is true for them. What we can provide is an open-ended, respectful curiosity for our clients and a willingness to share in the important project of “getting it.” Paying close attention to the unique form of connection that exists with each client means understanding empathy as a mutually influencing system. From this perspective, the communication of empathy becomes much more a mystery to engage with than a tool to master.

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March 18, 2019 by Brighton & Hove Psychotherapy Leave a Comment

What is Relational therapy?

A central idea of relational psychotherapy is that our thoughts, feelings and behaviours (healthy and unhealthy) are directly related to our interpersonal relationships. It is therefore about our self-with-other experience. We are all creatures of familial, social and political contexts, continuously formed (and forming) through our interactions with others.

Relational therapy can be an effective treatment for a whole range of psychological and emotional problems, understanding as it does that so many of them are rooted in troubled relationships past and present. Telling one’s own relational story in the presence of a carefully attuned empathic listener can be a powerful experience, generating shifts in self-understanding and ultimately in symptoms.

Not a medical model.

A relational therapist is not a doctor, there to administer a cure to someone’s emotional pain. This may seem disappointing to some clients. Rather s/he is a fellow human being, ready to engage with and understand the longings and the losses, the hopes, fears and struggles that might have brought a client into therapy.

Not individualism.

Relational therapy does not hold with the notion that each of us is responsible for our own happiness. It rejects the tyranny of self-help models that suggest that it is only by “working” on ourselves will we claim our power, increase our self-esteem, become fully evolved etc.

Instead it believes that we all need good connections with others in order to feel good about ourselves. Individual power, agency and wellbeing are only achieved in the context of healthy interpersonal connections.

Not Rationalism.

Relational therapy does not subscribe to rational, linear, cause and effect explanations of how change happens. We are complex systems of thoughts, feelings, beliefs, self-states and energies, all interconnected. Relational therapy takes a systemic, non-linear view of change. Having a new experience of oneself in the context of the therapeutic relationship may lead to new experiences of self and others outside of therapy as well.

Who needs Relational Therapy?

Anyone who has questions like “How do others see me?” “Am I good enough for them?” “Am I worthy enough?” might consider seeking a relationally oriented therapeutic approach. When your own answers to the questions above aren’t good, you feel bad about yourself and when you feel bad about yourself you are diminished.

A relational therapy will look at your everyday relationships with people in your life right now and seek to understand what it is that happens there that leaves you feeling bad about yourself.

Understanding the (repetitive) patterns of feeling bad in your life might be a reminder of earlier relationships. Consideration of these earlier relationships may help in developing an understanding of the sense you made of them, the sense of who you are and what you’re worth.

The here and now relationship between therapist and client is also kept in mind and attended to as part of a relational approach. As a relational practitioner I am always noticing the subtle shifts within and between myself and my client(s). The moments when a client might feel misunderstood or judged by me are important to “catch.” Understanding what goes on between “us” might be useful in understanding what goes on “out there” with “them.”

Therapy offers the possibility to reflect on what forms us and to make room for the changes we hope for. A relational approach understands the relationship itself between client and therapist to be a fundamentally important element in realising such change.

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January 2, 2019 by Brighton & Hove Psychotherapy Leave a Comment

Finding Intent in Criticism in Couple Communication

Cultural context

We are at a particular moment in our cultural and political narratives of relationship and identity where democracy itself seems under threat.

The assertion in some spheres of the perceived “right” to not be offended is at odds with the right (principle) of free speech in which there is always a risk of offence. We live increasingly in an age of “safe spaces” “trigger warnings” and narratives of victim hood and oppression. Now more than ever we need a relationship culture in which giving and receiving criticism is understood as a way to deepen connection and intimacy whilst simultaneously fostering emotional and psychological resilience.

In my last blog I wrote about the evolutionary context of criticism. How criticism could lead to ostracism, posing a threat to livelihood and even life itself. Whilst killing the criticiser is part of an evolutionary survival instinct, so open and compassionate listening in response to criticism is now an essential part of our evolutionary future.

In myriad subtle ways as social beings we organise ourselves to avoid the (life threatening)sting of criticism. We seek approval from our social groups through acts of conformity or denial. It is more often in our most intimate relationships that we reserve the right to unleash our most critical and savage selves… all in the name of love. Where there is love there is dependence and where there is dependence there is power.Understanding the balance and imbalance of power as a fact of life and love is important.

Power dynamics

Focusing solely on the content of our routine and familiar arguments with our partners is a way of missing the expressions of power and the underlying vulnerabilities they obscure. A major theme often at play is that of fear. For some this will translate as fear of losing the other(abandonment) whilst for others the fear will be of losing themselves (engulfment). This may translate into a relational dynamic in which one person, fearing abandonment is more likely to pursue or demand more (contact,closeness etc) from their partner whilst the other, fearing intrusion (exploitation) is more likely to maintain distance. We all emerge from our childhoods with different tolerances for connection.

When we perceive criticism from our partner it is all too easy (natural) to react defensively. How, in these moments might we become less reactive and more reflective, less combative and more collaborative? Firstly of course you have to decide that this is indeed what you would like to do…to lay down your weapons, so to speak, to relinquish the need to be “right” in favour of the desire to understand and value the other such that you might deepen your connection rather than remain locked in a state of division. When this becomes your shared intent you each take your responsibility for the health and well-being of your relationship.

Relational practice

When in conflict with your partner try holding in mind their best intent, hear them out , resist interruption or the desire for distortion. One voice at a time. Keep your energy on your partners story rather than your own defences. Imagine that your partner cares! Check that you have heard them by clarifying what you have understood. Be aware of your body language….are you listening or pseudo listening? Notice what happens, energetically ,in you, in your partner.

None of this is easy, but all of the above are relational tools that require practice to refine. Of course they also have the potential to become weapons to deploy. We are less under threat from criticism perhaps then we are of our failures to listen to the communications beneath. If we value democracy we need to practice it in our relationships.

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

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

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

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

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

Why does criticism feel like attack?

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

Female vs Male anger

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

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

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

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

Genetic heritage

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

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

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

Moving forward

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

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

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

Face to Face and Online Therapy Help Available Now