Gerry Gilmartin Archives | Brighton and Hove Psychotherapy

April 23, 2018 by Brighton & Hove Psychotherapy Leave a Comment

Is Psychotherapy about Questions or Answers?

People often arrive in therapy looking for answers to life’s difficulties. This might seem like a reasonable proposition. However, it pre-supposes that there might be such a thing as a simple answer to any of the thorny challenges life presents, and, indeed, that the therapist is an “expert” on life, uniquely qualified in their provision. Solutions are at best only ever partial and must always remain subject to review. I believe that it is often more useful to attend to the nature and quality of our questions. A good question is generous and generative and often far more useful than a tidy answer, alluring as the latter might seem.

The Art of Listening

Remaining curious and open to the humanity of another which lies behind their words is an art to be cultivated through listening. Learning to listen is more than simply being quiet while another person speaks, waiting your turn to say your piece. Listening at its best is a willingness to be vulnerable, to be open to surprise, to relinquish assumption and to enter the realm of ambiguity.

Arguments so often have a quality of familiarity about them, in civic as well as personal life. Culturally, as is so prevalent in current political discourse, conversations polarise around notions of right and wrong and winning and losing. When we enter debate from the perspective of competing certainties, I believe that the conversations it is possible to have become immediately impoverished.

Modern Living

We may experience this dynamic of polarity most often in our intimate relationships. The pressures of work, of raising children, and of paying the bills, among other issues, often render us less than perfectly attentive versions of ourselves. The quality of our conversations with our loved ones often deteriorates under such duress. Managing and prioritising (triage style) the demands of modern life may leave intimate connection forced to the bottom of the pile. When we find ourselves enraged about whose turn it is to do the washing up or encounter one of the myriad incendiary touch points that can inflame separated parents, we know that we are between a rock and a hard place. We are (in part) caught in an inevitable existential bind, tethered between freedom and responsibility, yours and mine. We must find ways to catch ourselves and the conversation before it degrades into one of accusation and blame. If that happens, everyone is at once diminished and relegated to positions of victim-hood.

Opinion Versus Experience

While we may disagree with the opinion of another, we cannot disagree with their experience. When we get closer to understanding the experience of another, we enter a more relational dynamic. In this dynamic, we can be more open to complexity and more tolerant of difference. The quality of our listening changes. We become more generous, less defended and ultimately more compassionate.

Difference of opinion is something to celebrate and defend. After all, it is an expression of our human rights of free will and free speech. When we shut down, deny or disqualify the opinions of others, we enter dangerous totalitarian territory.

Back at the Kitchen Sink

When we find ourselves (as we all do) entrenched in our competing stories of reality, played out amid a greasy cast of pots and pans, perhaps this is a moment for a different kind of question. “What else might be going on for me/you right now?” “What am I /you not expressing/ hearing?” “What is the story we tell and believe about ourselves/ each other in this moment?” Generative questions are more likely to evoke answers in their image and serve to demonstrate our interest, curiosity and respect for each other.

Gerry Gilmartin is an accredited, registered and experienced psychotherapeutic counsellor who is available at our Hove practice.

What is Intimacy?

From ‘the family’ to ‘the couple’

There has been a historical shift from ‘the family’ to ‘the couple’ as the central organising unit in contemporary life, with an emphasis on intimate connection. The ‘ideal’ couple of today are both friends and lovers immersed in a disclosing intimacy of mind and body. For previous generations, the modern discourse on intimacy would be an anathema. Where once we may have ploughed the land together, bound by a common task to a shared end, today we talk. Rather than being a by-product of a long-term relationship, intimacy is now a prerequisite for one. Today, we expect much more of our intimate relationships, including personal happiness and sexual fulfilment, yet we lack the role models for the new intimacy we seek. No longer bound together simply by survival needs, and with sex separated from reproduction, our closest relationships become conduits for ‘higher’ intimacy ideals.

Our early experiences of intimacy

Our understanding of intimacy and intimate connection is grounded in our social, biological and psychological histories. In the evolutionary account, ‘attachment’ is a biological imperative rooted in an infant’s need to maintain physical proximity to its caregiver to ensure survival. Our early emotional attachments, though, are not simply about protection from present danger. They are also about the emotional and psychological human need for a secure base. Our physiological and mental development always takes place in a relational context. Our emotional responses are organised and regulated through our formative relational experiences of the presence and absence, sounds, smells, gaze and touch received from our caregivers. Herein our attachment styles are forged, informing our later capacities and appetites for intimacy.

We receive our initial cues about how the social world works in our families, and here too, we learn the rules of intimacy. We learn whether we are supposed to be strong, competitive, angry, sad or tender. We treat as truth the things we learn about love, trust and life. We make decisions about the world and ourselves on the basis of these truths. Many of these decisions (made out of conscious awareness) will have great bearing on our adult emotional lives. When our attachment experience is secure, we are less likely to struggle with psychological issues of self-worth. When it is not, for myriad reasons, such as traumatic experience, loss, separation and fundamental failures of attunement, we are more likely to develop core beliefs about ourselves as not being ‘lovable’, ‘enough’ or any number of injunctions against being important, being visible or belonging. These will inevitably play out in our intimate adult relationships. The developing infant is continuously learning about the boundaries between self and other at the same time being schooled in the power dynamics of intimacy. We all bring the legacy of intimate childhood relationships to our adult pairings, activating our original relational templates to confirm old and new beliefs about our value and worth. We navigate a perilous path between ‘too much’ and ‘not enough’ proximity and distance, me, you and we.

How couples therapy can help

Our need for meaningful connection remains throughout our lifespan. In its absence, symptoms from physical illness and depression to addiction may develop. Therapy can support couples in tracing the lineage and source of their beliefs and assumptions about intimacy and in an exploration of their disappointments and discontents, as they are experienced in the here and now context of their relationships. The couple willing to risk the emotional vulnerability of open-ended conversations about the tensions, conflicts and failures in their relationship be they sexual or domestic are indeed brave. True intimacy requires the recognition and will to balance the dual imperatives of individuality and interdependence, amongst other things.

Gerry Gilmartin is an accredited, registered and experienced psychotherapeutic counsellor who is available at our Hove practice.

Further reading on this and related subjects:

How does attachment influence parenting?

Aims and goals of couples’ therapy

Love, commitment and desire in the age of choice

Relational therapy – a view

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June 6, 2017 by Brighton & Hove Psychotherapy Leave a Comment

Love, commitment and desire in the age of choice

Throughout history, the institution of marriage and our understanding and expectations of committed relationships have shifted with the socio-political and economic tides. Where once marriage was primarily an economic arrangement to maintain patriarchy and secure lineage, by the end of the 19th century, new id

eas about romantic love were emerging. Whilst love was not yet understood as a precondition for marriage, it was now considered that marriage was a viable arrangement in which it might flourish.

The social and cultural revolution of the ’60s saw sex liberated from reproduction with the advent of the contraceptive pill. With the rise of feminism and the gay movement, sexuality was redefined as a property of the self and sexual expression as a fundamental human right.

The age of individualism has coincided with an erosion of the old structures and traditional institutions of extended family, community and religion. In the West today, the couple has become the central unit in our social organisation.

Disconnected from many traditional resources, the modern couple is thrown back upon itself to sustain the emotional connection and protections once provided by much larger social networks. A tall order, therapist and author Esther Perel suggests, to find all of this located in one person. We are freer then ever before and yet, paradoxically, also more alone.

Romantic love and desire is now the cornerstone of commitment in modern relationships. Definitions of commitment are largely organised around assumed notions of monogamy. As Perel reminds us, where once monogamy meant one sexual partner for life, it is now understood as one person at a time. In modern marriage, the new monogamy principle contains an implicit commitment to no longer pursue sex with others.*

The demands on the modern couple are immense and complex. How do we reconcile a need for safety with a need for adventure, and can we find them both in one person? Can we desire, Perel asks, what we already have?

Consumer ideals of personal satisfaction, happiness and fulfilment drive and perpetuate the myth of “the one” perfect partner with whom we might find completion. Seductive as the notion is, it perhaps does more to fuel dissatisfaction and disappointment, as the statistics on divorce might reflect. Indeed, the consumer principle depends upon dissatisfaction, and inevitably and conveniently, peddles the cure. In the digital age, we are drowning in an ocean of relentless choice and the tantalising promise that opportunity and fulfilment could be just one swipe away. Our anxiety is rising in proportion. What impact does this have on modern relationships?

It is so often the case that couples come to therapy as slightly diminished versions of their true selves. Indeed, relationships can feel so burdensome at times, so filled with worry and responsibility that there may be little space to connect to a sense of ones self at all. Loneliness in the presence of another abounds.

Couples therapy can offer a refuge for couples to pause and reflect, to consider and understand the cultural constraints, constructions and contexts of modern love. It can support people in an understanding of their personal emotional histories and how they inform and shape the people they have become. In our original family, we learn how to feel about our bodies, our gender and our sexuality. In couples therapy, we can explore the impact of then on now.

Whatever else love is, it is a story, and one we might be wiser for reminding ourselves that can be reviewed, re-visioned and retold. Perhaps it is time to cultivate new conversations about love and desire, to set them within an ecological narrative that acknowledges complexity and nuance. One in which we might learn more and fear less the natural tension that exists between the erotic and the domestic and the contradictory longings of modern relationships, such that we can remain alive to our partners, our selves, and our world.

* I speak here in very broad terms and acknowledge newly emerging paradigms in sexual identity and relating. To be explored in future blogs.

Gerry Gilmartin is an accredited, registered and experienced psychotherapeutic counsellor who is available at our Hove practice.

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November 21, 2016 by Brighton & Hove Psychotherapy 1 Comment

Relational Therapy – a view

There are a number of core concepts in the Transactional Analysis model, which provide a framework and map for
field understanding our internal emotional landscapes and structures. The concept of “script” suggests that people will often make decisions about themselves and draw conclusions about life from a very young age. Such decisions are made out of conscious awareness, and at the time, they constitute the best option for survival in a world that for myriad reasons, social and environmental, may be frightening, incomprehensible or even life-threatening. A Transactional Analysis approach will invite curiosity about the origin of our script decisions as well as exploration and recognition of how we may maintain and live these (outdated) decisions in our current lives.

No one is an expert on life, and no psychological theory or method holds the monopoly on insight, wisdom or cure. When I first meet a client(s), I am interested in engaging with a whole person and not just the problem they may bring. Each therapeutic encounter is different, since each of us has our unique experience of being a person in the world. Working from a relational perspective, I offer a willingness to engage in a process with my client(s) rather than a promise of certain knowledge. A relational approach is paced and reflective. It does not rush towards interpretation or refrain from appropriate challenge. It involves elements of risk, including that of knowing and not knowing. When we believe we know ourselves (and for that matter another) we perhaps take ourselves for granted, assume our identities as fixed and neglect or foreclose on our greater depths and potentials. Therapy can offer an opportunity for us to be curious about ourselves and to track, understand and challenge our assumptions both about others and ourselves.

I am always interested in the (often) impoverished stories that people tell themselves about the world and the enduring and sometimes debilitating impact that they may confer, physically, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually and relationally. In the speaking of and the listening to these stories it is possible that new stories may begin to be imagined. The therapeutic endeavour will be in part to hold a space in which we may tell, retell, de- and reconstruct and constitute the stories of our selves, such that we might understand more profoundly our appetite (or lack of it) for life.

Uncertainty is an inevitable part of being alive. Perhaps the only real certainty is that we will, one day, die. We are all subject to the urgencies and vulnerabilities of our bodies and our histories are written deep within its archaeology. Our bodies have much to tell us of our selves beyond logic, reason or words. A relational therapy is sensitive to the sometimes inarticulate speech of our more visceral selves, revealed at once in a movement or gesture, a tone of voice or rhythm of speech, a word, a silence. It is in the simple (and complex) practice of listening that I may begin to understand how experience has informed and shaped an individual’s sense of self. The relational practitioner is never a neutral observer but rather an active participant in the therapeutic process, always sensitive to news from within herself about what s/he is thinking and feeling and what this might mean for a client.

I believe that poetry, literature and art have much to tell us about the complexity of human existence and consistently seek to resource myself from these worlds. Sometimes we find ourselves moved to tears of joy or sorrow by the power of musical phrase or lyric, disarmed despite ourselves, absorbed in the experiencing of it, feeling at once known, understood, connected and transcendent. It is this capacity to experience, how we sustain and sabotage it, to enlivening or deadening effect that is of great interest to me and describes something of my own curiosity about the therapeutic endeavour. The language of therapy is at once pragmatic and practical, poetic and evocative, always unique to the individuals involved.

Gerry Gilmartin is is an accredited, registered and experienced psychotherapeutic counsellor who is available at our Hove practice.

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