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May 22, 2023 by BHP Leave a Comment

Does your Life Story make Sense?

Why are stories so important to us humans?

Human beings are the story species. From the earliest mythic hunts retold around tribal fires to the modern-day family evenings spent bingeing on the latest Netflix series, stories have captivated us. And yet, when it comes to our own life story, we are more liable to tell well-practised narratives that are unable to explain our struggling relationships, our lack of fulfilment or a life we feel adrift from.

As the human mind and its cognitive powers exponentially increased over millennia, humans found themselves increasingly at an evolutionary advantage. Like no other species, humans were able to learn from the past – through memories recalled and pored over – and imagine and shape future possibilities. This way of experiencing ourselves has placed us at the centre of our own story-world with us as the protagonist of a story moving from the past to the future in a continuous present. This uniquely human experience, where we can out-think our competitors, also tends to mean that we get pulled along by the mesmerising, dreamlike narrative.

Is what we experience and do in our awareness?

Though we believe we live in our own lives close-up and in technicolour, the truth is that much of what really happens is hidden from us. This can be a difficult thought to accept. We get a sense of this being true, however, when we try hard at our relationships, for example, but they keep breaking down in similar patterns, or when we achieve a life-long goal but it doesn’t make us happy. We can get a sense that our stories don’t match up with our experience.

The majority of the processes that the body and mind carry out – such as controlling our heart rate to deciding if we trust a person we’ve just met – are performed out of our awareness. This can be likened to an iceberg where only one tenth of its mass is visible above water. Nine tenths are out-of-sight below the surface.

How the past presents in the ‘now’

Another key factor is that many of our life decisions were made in childhood. This might sound strange, perhaps even outlandish, but think about it. Did you decide the family and culture you were born into? Or did you choose the personalities who surrounded you and their specific needs and struggles? Of course not. You – like all of us – did the only thing you could as a child: you adapted to your environment to try and get your needs met. While the impact of that process and what the cost was to you is often unseen.

Within early and intimate relationships, we do the best with what’s on offer to receive some level of acceptance and approval. These hidden life decisions, based on the logic of a young, immature mind, set us on a course for life as we try to make sense of experiences and create an unconscious working model of how we can be in relationships with others and who we are in those relationships. As a consequence, our self-stories have likely faced little challenge through their life journey to where we are at this very moment.

Through our life, we have been surrounded by other people’s stories – in our family, with friends, in the broader culture. These can have a positive, reinforcing impact on us. They can also overly influence us, make us maladapt and even make us lose touch with our own stories. Or trying to make our life fit someone else’s story.

How psychotherapy is about your story

People come to psychotherapy often due to problems encountered in their immediate lives, such as suffering from depression or a relationship breakdown. These issues however often point to deeper, underlying issues. Therapy offers the opportunity to look at what is going on underneath the one tenth of the iceberg. We do this together, therapist and client, in a collaborative process, using curiosity and compassion. It is through this unfolding process that a fresh and more connected story can emerge.

Through this therapeutic re-storying process, you engage with your personal narrative as the adult you are now, not the younger version of yourself who found themselves locked in rigid narrative episodes. As Jeremy Holmes, psychiatrist and writer on attachment theory and narrative, said, “Each story is there to be revised in the light of new experience, new facets of memory, new meaning” in a process of “narrative deconstruction and construction”. It is through this therapeutic work of review and rebirth that “narrative truth” and new meaning can surface and your story not only becomes understandable and real but it again becomes yours.

The mythologist and academic Joseph Campbell, who wrote about the ‘monomyth’ or common hero stories common across cultures, said, “I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.”

And perhaps this is a key aim of working with story in therapy: through opening up and meeting your self-story afresh, you can make sense of it, reclaim it and play an active part in its ongoing development. This offers the possibility of living a fuller and more engaged life, where you feel more here and more alive.

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 Brighton and Hove practice.

Filed Under: Brighton and Hove Psychotherapy, Psychotherapy, Society, Thad Hickman Tagged With: childhood, Mental Health, Relationships

April 3, 2023 by BHP Leave a Comment

Some existential musings on love, generosity, and the relation between self and other (part two)

(Adapted from a presentation given at the SEA conference November 2022) – (Part two)

Speaking of life itself as a movement of becoming. Have we forgotten the isness and replaced it with beingness, an allegedly unified subject of self-consciousness, contained and stuck within a name or a label? Must knowledge be part of it, must we always think our way in?

Does that remind you of anything? The masculine economy of desire tells us I think therefore I am (Descartes, 1998). It invites us to believe in the binary. But Nietzsche (1886/1978) tells us differently. He gifted us multiplicity, and music to dance to. He invited us to affirm life beyond the narrow confines of self-preservation: to play with all the dynamic forces and tensions.

Perhaps generosity is a type of life force? Bazzano (2019) says, in Nietzsche there is no individual will to power but “power understood as a generous expenditure” (p.95). But generosity is often suppressed in favour of rigid identities. In current culture it seems the human animal is seen as depending upon an idea of self, perhaps influenced by patriarchal forces. Discourses of subjectivity rely on notions of individuality, autonomy, and self-preservation. The different other often becomes a threat as does the potential for an unstable, non-unified experience of self.

And what about suffering? Are we allowed to suffer anymore? Is that not sometimes where the gift of transformation lives? Yes there is a paradox here, as Nietzsche (1974) writes, suffering is markedly personal because it is an aspect of self-expression, in time. In which the very process calls us forth to reshape and become; reinterpreting the past through healing and releasing what was and opening to the new. However, don’t we all rely on each other for that too?

Helene Cixous (1991) tells us “only when you are lost can love find itself in you without losing its way” (p. 39). This feels important to me. In Renshaw’s interpretation, Cixous seems to refer to “the very structure of desire that is made
possible in a non-possessive, feminine relation to difference. She goes on to say:

“Only when we are lost to ourselves, to the extent that being a self means being one and unified, are we opened to the possibility of a becoming that is expansive, abundant, and opened to the indeterminable difference of the other. Only then can love descend upon us the way it wants, in one of its bewitching, magical and divine forms” (p.183)

In her essay, The newly born woman, Cixous (1986) writes of the feminine economy of desire as a notion able to grasp the abundant and often incongruent aspects of desire, refusing to “exclude the contradictory, and the ability to
embrace a cycle of relations that are constituted in movement …never static …marked by movements, towards, away and elsewhere” (p.125).

There is much to consider here. In her book, ‘The Subject of love’ (2009, p.6), the academic Sal Renshaw offers us some questions to ask ourselves.

Perhaps we can explore them together.

“Can we love as a gift that does not return?
What would it take to love the other as other, neither to refuse nor to embrace the
other but to create a space in which the other is met, is brushed against, is
perhaps felt as well as seen”
Can we live our subjectivities in a way in which love emerges in the in-between,
not as something the ‘I’ does or has, but rather as something that happens to us,
that emerges, in the very space of meeting?
What kind of being or becoming, does it take to love the other in their otherness
and not to sacrifice oneself in doing so?
What kind of relations to and between subjectivities make possible a generous
meeting in difference?”

Part one of this blog can be found here.

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

Susanna Petitpierre, BACP Registered, is an experienced psychotherapeutic counsellor, providing long and short term counselling. Her approach is primarily grounded in existential therapy and she works with individuals.  Susanna is available at our Brighton and Hove Practice.

 

Further reading by Susanna Petitpierre –

Some Existential Musings on Love, Generosity, and the Relation Between Self and Other? (part one)

On living as becoming (part two)

On living as becoming (part one)

Some thoughts on becoming (part two)

Some thoughts on becoming (part one)

 

References – 
Bazzano, M. (2019). Nietzsche and Psychotherapy. Oxon: Routledge.
Carson, A. (1998). Eros: The Bittersweet. Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press.
Cixous, H. (1986 [1975]). ‘Sorties’. Trans. Betsy Wing. In Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement. The Newly Born
Woman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Descartes, R. (1998). Discourse on Method. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.
Merleau-Ponty, M., (2012) Phenomenology of Perception. Oxon: Routledge

Nietzsche, F. (1886/1978). Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. R.J. Hollingdale. London:
Penguin.
Nietzsche, F. (1974). The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House.
Renshaw, S., (2009). The subject of love. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Filed Under: Psychotherapy, Relationships, Susanna Petitpierre Tagged With: Love, Relationships, self-worth

March 27, 2023 by BHP Leave a Comment

Some Existential Musings on Love, Generosity, and the Relation Between Self and Other

(Adapted from a presentation given at the SEA conference November 2022) – (Part one)

Anne Carson (1998) wrote,

“‘Now’ is a gift from the gods and an access onto reality. To address yourself to the moment when Eros glances into your life and to grasp what is happening in your soul at that moment is to begin to understand how to live.” (p.153).

Was it Merleau-Ponty (2012) who showed us that, without you, I do not know who I am. I cannot see the back of my head. I need you, the other, to tell me so I can build a picture of it. Yes, it seems we are made in the social.  But that means there will be ruptures too. Losses and suffering will prevail without our control. Can we transform in them? Do I need your help for that too?

Sal Renshaw (2009) describes the relation between self and other as a continual movement intrinsic to our becoming. Not only does the relation between self and other reveal the movement of becoming. It also signifies the impossibility and impermanence of the unified subject or absolute being. Encountering self and other reveals difference, perceived “somewhere in the space between that which returns to us that which we recognize as the same, and that which escapes us” (Ibid, p. 2).

Sometimes difference is felt as a conflict, sometimes as a threat, sometimes as an interest and an opportunity. But difference can be, and is, an opening into our becoming.

It may entail a complex exploration: maintaining positive regard for the other without being implicated in a kind of sacrificial logic rooted in Christian morality and its derivatives and without being caught in the web of patriarchal narratives. As Renshaw states (2009) writers such as Helene Cixous inform us of the extent to which “women have traditionally borne the brunt of sacrificial logic in a patriarchal structure” (p. 7).

How can we hold a space for a version of selflessness that is generous, alive, affirmative and does not fall into self-abnegation? A difficult task, no doubt. But an important one: “loving the other as other, allowing them and oneself to be born into the present in love” (Renshaw, 2009, p. 176). Perhaps they have forgotten or never knew that difference is the astonishing source of their love.

Isn’t there always more to the story, yes, more to come, more to become?

Is not life itself a movement of becoming …

Part two of this blog can be found here.

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

Susanna Petitpierre, BACP Registered, is an experienced psychotherapeutic counsellor, providing long and short term counselling. Her approach is primarily grounded in existential therapy and she works with individuals.  Susanna is available at our Brighton and Hove Practice.

 

Further reading by Susanna Petitpierre –

On living as becoming (part two)

On living as becoming (part one)

Some thoughts on becoming (part two)

Some thoughts on becoming (part one)

What is the Menopause? (part one)

Filed Under: Mental Health, Psychotherapy, Susanna Petitpierre Tagged With: Love, Mental Health, Relationships

March 6, 2023 by BHP Leave a Comment

Online Therapy: Good for Some, but not Everyone

Therapy over the phone and in more recent years on video has been around for a long time, but since the recent pandemic it has become normalised with lots of online therapy platforms emerging and an abundance of “mental health” apps.

At Brighton and Hove Psychotherapy we offer both face-to-face and online therapy, and whilst many people can benefit from the latter, this option is certainly not advisable for everyone. I would like to share some of what I have observed about psychotherapy conducted online from my own clinical experience, from supervising clinicians who work with clients online and from many exchanges with colleagues in the field, especially since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. Here are some considerations:

Doing therapy from the comfort of your own home x travelling to see your therapist

The journey to a therapist’s office is a part of the work itself, as long as it isn’t so arduous and exhausting that it becomes unsustainable. The intention and commitment to make the journey each week, the space to reflect, the checking in with self before entering the therapist’s office, arriving at a physical room and being greeted in, or waiting for your appointment, all are rituals that are a part of the process itself. There is also the journey after the appointment, which hopefully is long enough to allow some space to be with yourself before engaging in any other activity. Time poor people will argue that they can fit therapy into their day more easily if it’s done online, however one of the goals of therapy for some individuals could be to look at difficulties in prioritising personal needs, including making time for therapy appointments.

Choosing from a larger pool of therapists x choosing someone locally

Depending on where you live it may be easy or difficult to choose someone to work with. However, the very process of choosing is an important one. I compare some online directories or platforms to fast food. We live in a consumer-led culture where convenience is highly sought after. We want quick results because many of us are time poor, but consider that this is probably on of the most important choices you will make. Therefore, it is worth spending some time and effort choosing a therapist as it might determine the future state of your mental health and even your life.

People who are socially anxious can access help at home

Unless someone has a debilitating condition that keeps them housebound, in which case psychiatric care would be advised, colluding with or perpetuating the existing issue might be counter productive. Encouraging someone with social anxiety to venture out and travel to see a clinician face to face is a small step towards creating a relationship that is safe and manageable for the client, before they risk other forms of social engagements that go beyond the therapy room.

“ The therapist’s office is intimidating ”

Here is another great reason to explore why it is more difficult or intimidating to talk about yourself when faced with a therapist – a real person in the real world. Psychotherapy should enable and encourage people to have better relationships that are real. If the ease of talking more about yourself when you’re meeting someone online could be linked to difficulties forming and sustaining real relationships. Just as we see brilliant poets and writers who can barely utter a word when faced with a social situation, someone who is seemingly confident and capable of relating on the screen, can be very different in person.

Having said all the above, I remain an advocate of virtual sessions depending on the person and type of work. For instance, more cognitive and solution-focused approaches can work well online. Whereas in-depth psychotherapy which draws on unconscious processes is undoubtedly much better done in person. I would not recommend online therapy to those who struggle to maintain clear boundaries, feel easily emotionally overwhelmed, or are dealing with a range of complex psychological issues. People leading chaotic lives usually find it more containing to have the predictability of their therapist’s office environment. I also would not advise anyone training to become a psychotherapist to have their therapy online, and couples work can be difficult virtually, especially if the couple is in the middle of a lot of conflict.

This is not to say that good work can’t take place virtually, but we have to accept that there will always be a missing component and that the therapy will probably not achieve it’s full potential.

 

On our website you can find more information about our counselling and psychotherapy services and how to contact our team.

Sam Jahara is a UKCP Registered Psychotherapist, Clinical Superviser and Executive Coach. She works with individuals, couples and groups in Hove and Lewes.

 

Further reading –

The Psychology of Mindful Eating

Defining Happiness

What are the benefits of counselling and psychotherapy?

Why is mental health important?

What makes us choose our career paths?

Filed Under: Brighton and Hove Psychotherapy, Mental Health, Psychotherapy, Sam Jahara Tagged With: Mental Health, Online Counselling, Therapist

February 6, 2023 by BHP Leave a Comment

On Living as Becoming (Part Two)

We seem to be in a world slipping deeper into seeking safety, transparency and the need for power and control to sanitise life. All as an apparent response and remedy to pain and suffering. A desire for continued uninterrupted happiness and security. We seemingly long for the place where happiness is and will remain,  but as Nietzsche states-  

“the hunt for happiness will never be greater than when it must be caught  between today and tomorrow; because the day after tomorrow all hunting time may have come to an end altogether”. (Walter a. Kaufmann, Nietzsche. Philosopher, Psychological, Anti-Christ. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950, p.140.

I interpret Nietzsche’s quote as an ironic statement, one that is not validating the search for happiness but understanding it as a fleeting endeavour. I believe he is asking us not be distracted by it. To go deeper and face and live life in the knowledge of our impermanence.

Both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard (great influences in existential thought) were concerned by how humans repressed and avoided self enquiry. They both strived to understand human existence and used their own existences as a case study for analysis. They recognised how they, and others, would seek to protect themselves from reality and consequently suffer extreme symptoms and tensions, such as depression, guilt, anger, anxiety, obsessive behaviours and disconnection. They had not even considered the effects of social media as an escape on human experience when writing this.

What might get lost in avoiding these affects in terms of our potential and freedom?  Soren Kierkegaard (1844) felt without anxiety there would be no possibility and growth as a human being. He suggested anxiety is the ‘dizziness of freedom’ and ‘freedoms possibility’. He famously wrote,

“Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way, has learned the ultimate…” (Kierkegaard S. The Concept of Anxiety. New York: Liverlight; 2014. p. 188.

They both emphasised the influence and importance of passions and the significance of commitment,  to take responsibility for their existence, to act, to create. They discussed in their own ways how our affects are significant for explorations (see more in a blog on Nietzsche’s magnificent monsters).  That attempts to avoid inner conflict and intensity and intellectualise and externalise struggles were in some way a defence against one’s own vitality. Anxiety was considered as a potent and necessary force for transformation. Potentially leading to an individual’s confrontation with their illusions and consequently a deeper awareness of how they are implicated via defences and rationalisations. As a dear friend and wise man recently said,

“without inner conflict, what chances do we have to give birth to ourselves. At the very least inner conflict is good for generating creative work”. 

Both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard died young (in the modern sense of the word). In that time they wrote prolifically and created great texts and thoughts, used to this day, that inform life and some types of psychotherapy in particular. In my mind both seemed to surrender generously their existences to creating and self enquiry (distanced from a need for notoriety or self preservation). They certainly left an enriched soil for those yet to come. There are many stirring and striking aspects to both of them and their writings.  However what moves me the most is their similarity to the eucalyptus tree’s surrendering of self-preservation as a dominant force: letting their passions, tensions, vulnerabilities, heartbreaks,  limitations and crises become a strength and force for creativity and transformation for those who are interested.

To end this piece, although more will come later about Nietzsche’s ideas about Will to Power’, I thought it might be fun to insert a quote kindly gifted from the aforementioned wise friend, where Nietzsche compares himself to a plant.

“It is absolutely unnecessary, and not even desirable, for you to argue in my favour; on the contrary, a dose of curiosity, as if you were looking at an alien plant with ironic distance, would strike me as an incomparably more intelligent attitude towards me”. (Nietzsche in a letter to Carl Fuchs, July 29, 1888)

 

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

 

Susanna Petitpierre, BACP Registered, is an experienced psychotherapeutic counsellor, providing long and short term counselling. Her approach is primarily grounded in existential therapy and she works with individuals.  Susanna is available at our Brighton and Hove Practice.

Further reading by Susanna Petitpierre –

On Living as Becoming (Part One)

Some thoughts on becoming (part two)

Some thoughts on becoming (part one)

What is the Menopause? (part one)

Some existential musings from the sea

 

Filed Under: Mental Health, Psychotherapy, Susanna Petitpierre Tagged With: anxiety, Depression, Self-esteem

January 30, 2023 by BHP 2 Comments

Client or Patient; Patient or Client – Does it Matter?

A topic of certain difference, and at times discussion in the field of psychotherapy, is whether we refer to those we treat as ‘clients’ or ‘patients’.

Why might this matter?

On the face of it, it should arguably matter little to someone attending psychotherapy, as to what the therapist calls them on paper; in the room they will be referred to by name and thus, to some extent, the nomenclature used is academic.

However, psychotherapy is about how the psychotherapist thinks about the person who engages their services and this thinking will inevitably influence how the psychotherapist refers to those who come to see them and vice versa.

Why such different terms?

Psychotherapy was born out of psycho-analysis. And in both classical and modern psychoanalysis, as well as in the language of many psychoanalytical psychotherapists, the term patient is commonly used.

Historically, this is derived from Freud’s use of the term, whereby he situated psycho-analysis firmly in the medical field.

There is an additional term that is used in analysis which is ‘analysand’ – the person who goes for analysis. Whilst it bridges the gap between client and patient, I find it somewhat clunky and it is not a valid term to use in psychotherapy.

Who is the expert?

Much progress has been made in the field of psychotherapy to shift from a ‘blank-screen’ model on the part of the psychotherapist, to a relational approach – meaning broadly that the psychotherapist plays an active role in co-constructing the relationship and works within the context of the relationship to bring about change.

Many in the more humanistic field argue that one of the goals should be to bring about as much equality between the therapists and ‘client’, so as to eliminate the power imbalance.

Whilst a noble endeavour, I think this is naïve, as firstly, we are are there in an expert capacity and those of us who are trained and work at depth, understand that we carry an enormous burden of responsibility to those who engage our services. We are therefore, not equals.

Secondly, depth psychotherapy, using a psychoanalytic model, works with what the client or patient ‘projects’ onto us – something we refer to as transference. In the transference, we inevitably represent one of the parents for the client and it is arguable that the treatment process in psychotherapy is one of re-parenting.

Parents and children are never equal

I believe that roles come with firm boundaries – many of which are frustrating. For example, it is a parent’s role to always be a parent to their child. This role will evolve and change over time and eventually there will be two adults in the relationship, however, this does not imply that there are two equals. Part of the frustration of being a parent (and the child of a parent) is in acknowledging the firm boundary, meaning that a parent should not become a friend to their child, no mater the age of that child. This does not mean that this does not happen in some families, however, I view this as unhelpful.

The therapeutic relationship between a psychotherapist and their client or patient is sacrosanct – as should be the relationship between parent and child. We are there in an important, and at times, critical capacity and co-create with those who come to see us a deep intimate relationship that must be alive, messy, creative, conflictual, loving and hateful – but always and forever boundaried.

Boundaries frustrate but facilitate grieving

Over the past decade of being a UKCP registered psychotherapist, I have seen a fair few people come and go from my practice. Most have stayed for years and, I believe, done some very good and important work.

As in life, the relationships we form with those whom we see week after week matter to us and I have grieved with the end of the work and having to say ‘good-bye’ when treatment ended.

The grieving is necessary as, irrespective of how much we have come to matter to each other, I shall always be in the role of psychotherapist for all of my former patients. Most will never cross my threshold again, however, it is vital that they can hold me in mind in the role they assigned me and that I don’t deviate from that position and ‘befriend’ them. Whilst this may feel seductive to both sides (as it does for a parent and child), the boundary enables the relationship to work and continue working in the capacity it must for the patient.

On why I use the term ‘patient’

I have shown my hand in the previous paragraphs in using the nomenclature of ‘patient’ and shall now explain why I have, over time, shifted in my way of thinking.

Patients come to me because they are in distress. I am there as an expert, not to tell them how to live their lives, but to help them understand how and why they live their lives they way they do and offer them a stable and secure relationship through which to bring about change.

Psychotherapy is about change – it is not about enabling existing behaviour and this needs to be agreed between therapist and patient.

I view the term ‘client’ as representing a grey area when it comes to boundaries – with clients we can ‘have a chat’ and maybe take the relationship outside of the context in which it began. It also seems to me to be very transactional. This is a personal view and not an accusation of anyone who has a preference for this term.

My work as a psychotherapist is to ‘treat’ my patients. I am accountable for understanding their minds and helping them find a way through their distress. If they knew how to do this, they would not need me.

Lastly, rather than being a distancing term, I view ‘patient’ in this context of one towards which I can show the upmost respect. It does not imply, to me, that I am better than them, but it does show that I am willing to take on the responsibility for my part in their treatment and that the boundary will always hold. For me it is ultimately a term of ‘love’, in the way Freud meant it.

 

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 to minimise Christmas stress if you are hosting

Can couples counselling fix a relationship?

How to get a mental health diagnosis

What is psychotherapy?

How to improve mental health

Filed Under: Mark Vahrmeyer, Mental Health, Psychotherapy Tagged With: Mental Health, Psychotherapy, Relationships

January 3, 2023 by BHP Leave a Comment

Is starting psychotherapy a good New Year’s Resolution?

Most of us make some sort of New Year’s resolution, whether overtly or covertly.  The new year can feel like an opportunity to put the past behind us and to start afresh.

Whether or not we actively name and own our New Year’s resolutions, most of us can also attest to the best held intentions for change slipping away. There are plenty of good reasons why New Year’s resolutions don’t work. We are often too unspecific in what would constitute change, and it can be hard to make change on our own.

Psychotherapy is about change.  However, the start of all change comes from inside. To make change, we need to understand ourselves and accept why we have made the decisions we have. Nothing is random.

Psychotherapy is first and foremost about learning to have a relationship with ourselves and to learn to hold ourselves in mind, often in ways others failed to do when we were growing up. When we hold ourselves in mind, we can objectively evaluate if something is helpful or in our best interests.

We learn to hold ourselves in mind through others holding us in mind. This is one of the main roles of a psychotherapist. Holding a client in mind is far broader and deeper than simply making notes and remembering what they told us. It is about having a relationship with them and helping them to understand their blind spots, their relational patterns to themselves and to others. Helping them work through this is the therapeutic encounter.

Psychotherapy is often hard. Keeping to a weekly day and time when we meet with our psychotherapist can feel like a slog. Unlike a New Year’s resolution, the process is held relationally. Your psychotherapist makes the time and space available to hold you in mind and expects you to show up for the weekly dialogue. Even if you do not attend, your therapist is there to hold you in mind.

Perhaps the question is not so much whether psychotherapy is a good New Year’s resolution. Rather, it may be whether you are committed to having a deeper and more meaningful relationship with yourself, and through this, learning to hold yourself better in mind. The latter will lead to long-lasting changes on a profound level which may or may not include more frequent trips to the gym!

Happy New Year from all of us at Brighton and Hove Psychotherapy.

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

New Year Reflections

How psychotherapy works

What is psychotherapy?

Face to Face and Online Therapy Help Available Now

Click Here to Enquire

Filed Under: Brighton and Hove Psychotherapy, Mark Vahrmeyer, Psychotherapy Tagged With: habit, Psychotherapy

December 26, 2022 by BHP Leave a Comment

On Living as Becoming (Part One)

Who would have known a recent visit to Alexandria Park in Hastings and a guided tree walk would inspire this work in progress. The Park happens to have a very diverse and nationally significant tree collection planted by Robert Manock in 1882, and subsequent others.

Much of what was conveyed was fascinating but left my memory swiftly. What struck a chord was information about the nature of the Eucalyptus tree: apparently they happen to be self-sacrificing so that their native youngsters can grow in well fertilised soil. In essence, they make themselves as flammable as possible so that when they inevitably burn, in the wild fires of their typical homelands, they burn bright and leave lots of fertilising ash. 

This in turn allows and nourishes the younger generations (not yet born) to flourish.

It reminded me once more of the ambiguity of life forces, and the significance of that which is greater than perhaps our own insistence and sense of volition. Something the sea often teaches me and touches in me: the understanding that we are both significantly connected yet open and vulnerable, we are in movement, incongruent and impermanent. Yet far from inconsequential.  We all have the potential to be far-reaching and changed in every encounter, even if we don’t see, feel or act on it. In fact, understanding our potential and capacity to act, even in the face of great limitations, could be the very thing that liberates and transforms suffering.

Understanding and identifying the vitality of often ambiguous intensities and affects within existence, when encountering both our freedom and limitations, may support us to act. Perhaps there is great importance in feeling into and investigating our suffering, anxiety and despair. To sometimes move beyond self preservation and safety into discomfort and uncertainty. To perhaps question the idea the self is an identity, an image or an object that needs to be fixed or made safe and certain and move into courage, generosity and open curiosity, with less need for any exchange. Perhaps, when we can face it, to surrender to life’s limitations, crises and drawbacks and let them move us. Transformation is perhaps in the very falling.

Returning, again and again, to the writings of Frederick Nietzsche and Soren Kierkegaard (the latter discussed in more depth in later blogs), and those subsequent great minds who have tackled their ideas, we find discussions and real experiences that highlight commitment to facing and investigating the passions, the intense (affects) forces within experience, and their commitment to act without the need for eminence and self preservation. Nietzsche said,

“Physiologists should think before postulating the drive of self-preservation as the cardinal drive in an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to vent its strength – life as such is will to power; self preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent consequences of it”. (Nietzsche, F. 1886/1978, Beyond Good and Evil. p. 26)

Within the quote we find Nietzsche referring to ‘strength – life as such is will to power’. The interpretation here is not that strength is the opposite of weakness but strength as potential, potency, vitality, a force/forces of energy.

Nietzsche inspires us to look again, across a multiplicity of forces. To widen our stance and help us see there is so much more to the forces of life than self preservation. More will be discussed in part two.

 

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

 

Susanna Petitpierre, BACP Registered, is an experienced psychotherapeutic counsellor, providing long and short term counselling. Her approach is primarily grounded in existential therapy and she works with individuals.  Susanna is available at our Brighton and Hove Practice.

 

Further reading by Susanna Petitpierre –

Some thoughts on becoming (part two)

Some thoughts on becoming (part one)

What is the Menopause? (part one)

Some existential musings from the sea

Nietzsche and the body

Filed Under: Brighton and Hove Psychotherapy, Psychotherapy, Susanna Petitpierre Tagged With: anxiety, nature, self-worth

December 5, 2022 by BHP Leave a Comment

As I Walked Out One Evening

Some years ago, I was given a card that quoted the second and third verse of Auden’s poem, ‘As I walked out one evening’. It was wonderful, the idea that someone could be loved until two continents met across the Pacific Ocean. What a romantic notion.

For many of us, when we fall in love we feel outside the ordinary world, a kind of intensity and madness that takes us beyond the limitations of everyday life. Auden illustrates this feeling at the beginning of the poem, The lover says that they will love the other until impossible things come to pass, ‘till the ocean is folded and hung up to dry’, that is they will love the beloved forever.

As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
‘Love has no ending.

I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
Till China and Africa meet
And the river jumps they over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street

I’ll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.

‘The years shall run like rabbits,
 For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
 And the first love of the world.’

(verses 1-5)

The idea of a never-ending romantic love is a seductive narrative and I believe a pernicious one. This is because it implies that the power of romantic love, i.e. being in love, is enough to overcome the vicissitudes and transitions of human life. But these are inevitable because we live in time and in space.

In order to fall in love we have to avert our eyes from the ordinariness of the other, to believe they’re special and by being loved by them we are too. Time passes and the ordinary person emerges; time passes and what first attracted us is now irritating; time passes and what matters to us has changed and we don’t share the same interests; time passes and our bodies have grown older and less attractive; time passes and we become forgetful, frail and fearful; time passes, perhaps we become ill and eventually we die.

What happens to being in love? Auden’s poem continues with a warning that love cannot overcome time. Time is watching us from the darkness, perhaps occasionally we are aware that our relationship has a time limit, but often ‘In headaches and in worry, Vaguely life leaks away,’. In the poem there are warnings about the lover’s relationship, the glacier knocking in the cupboard, the desert sighing in the bed and the cracks in the teacups.

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
“O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

‘In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.
‘In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.
‘Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver’s brilliant bow.
‘O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you’ve missed.
The glacier knocks on the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

(verses 6-12)

Couples come to therapy full of regret and resentment and tell me it’s been like this for years. They recognise there were signs that they needed to pay attention to their love and changes in their relationship and these opportunities were missed. I suggest that some of this is because people want what they had at the beginning, I want to it to go back to how it used to be. To recognise change in a relationship can mean mourning the loss of those early feelings of being in love, that intoxicating pinnacle of romance.

Part of the work of couple therapy is to be able to remember and respect those initial feelings and to find a more fluid and changing narrative about romantic love. One that recognises that time passes and we cannot, we just cannot, stay the same.

Where the beggars raffle the banknotes,
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.

O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress;
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.

It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.

(verses 13-16)

Apologies for any misinterpretations of Auden’s poem.

 

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

Angela Rogers is an Integrative Psychotherapeutic counsellor working with individuals and couples in Hove.

 

Further reading by Angela Rogers –

Thinking about the menopause in energetic terms

Poetry: A space to ponder

Relax: Watching people using their hands

What is Andropause and what happens to men when their testosterone levels decline?

Am I cracking up or is it my hormones? Pre-menstrual Dysphoric and the importance of tracking symptoms

Filed Under: Angela Rogers, Psychotherapy, Relationships Tagged With: couple counselling, couple therapy, Relationships

November 28, 2022 by BHP Leave a Comment

Online versus In-Person Therapy

When Covid struck we could no longer deliver therapy face-to-face and so this meant that many of us had to adjust to therapy online using a video web platform such as Microsoft Teams or Zoom. This was both challenging for the therapist and the client, however many people now prefer therapy online.

Research has shown that therapy using a video web platform is just as effective as in person therapy. Studies published in the Journal of Psychological Disorders and the Journal of Affective Disorders, Behaviour Research and Therapy have shown that online CBT and counselling are as effective as in person therapy in helping people address a wide range of issues including anxiety and depression.

There are some obvious benefits to online therapy such as therapy in the comfort of your own home, not having to leave your house so no travelling to appointments; the convenience of accessing appointments anywhere providing you have internet access and privacy. I have had some clients attend appointments in their car or sitting in their garden and even whilst on holiday. There is also the anonymity of not having to go to a therapy practise setting for appointments. There is also something about not having to meet your therapist in person which can allow some clients to open up more.

There is no doubt that some clients prefer the connection of in person therapy. They feel it allows for a more fulfilling relationship. In addition, some clients are already having to work online and don’t want to do anymore ‘on screen’. The issue of privacy and being interrupted by family members can be difficult as well. In person therapy allows for a neutral location, a safe space for the client to share private information away from everyday life.

In person therapy has always been considered as preferable and certainly this was the case before Covid, but now this is shifting and we are learning that online therapy is also a valid option.

 

Rebecca Mead is an accredited, registered and experienced Psychotherapist offering Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT) to individuals adults.  Rebecca is available at our Brighton and Hove Practice.

 

Further reading by Rebecca Mead –

Loneliness and CBT

Enhancing the Positive Self 

Is that a fact or an opinion? 

As we come out of lockdown, will a number of us be feeling socially anxious?

New Year’s Resolutions

Filed Under: Mental Health, Psychotherapy, Rebecca Mead Tagged With: CBT Therapy, Online Counselling, Onlinetherapy

November 14, 2022 by BHP Leave a Comment

What does Couple Counselling do?

At a fundamental level, couple counselling provides an opportunity for a couple to explore their relationship with a therapist who facilitates the exploration. Couples have said to me that they really value the dedicated time, space and support to talk about feelings and difficulties that don’t feel safe to share with each other elsewhere. What else couple counselling does is more provisional and it’s perhaps helpful to think about what couple counselling can do?

First of all, I’d like to make it clear what, in my opinion, couple counselling doesn’t do. Couple counselling is not about the counsellor determining whether a couple should split up or stay together. Nor is it about the counsellor telling either individual how to behave or taking sides. (There are exceptions to this if one of the partners is coercive or violent.) The more behavioural approaches to couple counselling often provide communication exercises and homework between sessions, humanistic and psychodynamic approaches tend not to do this.

I think a key element of what couple counselling can do, is to give a couple the opportunity to see their relationship from a more objective position, to help a couple step away and see themselves as if looking in from the outside. People are often familiar with repeating patterns in the interactions with their partners. They know which situations end in a row or sulking or tears – “you always …,” “you never …” but they can’t necessarily recognise the dynamic that underpins the patterns. How they both act in a way that means these situations keep playing out in the same way again and again. They know that over time painful feelings have built up, such as hurt and resentment, frustration and fear, disdain and humiliation. These feelings can reach a point where one or both partners question whether they can carry on living like this or would it be better to break up. Then they come to couple counselling.

A couple counsellor can notice and comment on what they see being enacted between the partners in the session. They and the couple can think about how this dynamic can play out in the relationship and the way it impacts how they feel about each other. This close attention from the therapist can make couple counselling challenging, each partner becomes aware that their behaviour is coming under scrutiny. They may be fearful of owning their own behaviour and ashamed about revealing aspects of themselves, aspects that may be protecting them and hiding feelings of weakness, vulnerability or lack of self-worth that probably originate from their past.

A therapist can encourage both partners to be more compassionate with themselves and each other, to let go of the feeling that their partner is a potential threat and they need to defend themselves. A couple can then begin to see their partner as someone who is on their side, who is on the same team but perhaps brings a different perspective.

Hopefully a couple can recognise the dance between them and acknowledge the relationship they have created together is a shared responsibility, both the positive and negative parts. This means that the project of creating a more satisfying relationship, or a constructive separation, can also be shared and is perhaps more possible than they imagined at their first counselling session.

 

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

Angela Rogers is an Integrative Psychotherapeutic counsellor working with individuals and couples in Hove.

 

Further reading by Angela Rogers –

Thinking about the menopause in energetic terms

Poetry: A space to ponder

Relax: Watching people using their hands

What is Andropause and what happens to men when their testosterone levels decline?

Am I cracking up or is it my hormones? Pre-menstrual Dysphoric and the importance of tracking symptoms

Filed Under: Angela Rogers, Psychotherapy, Relationships Tagged With: couple counselling, couple therapy, couples

October 3, 2022 by BHP Leave a Comment

What Can Relationship Counselling Help With?

For most of us, the start of a relationship is an extremely exciting time. Not only is the relationship itself hugely enjoyable – fun and life-enhancing – but it can also seem to transform our world. Put simply, it makes the world seem a better place.

It seems odd to think that something that develops from a place of such unbridled joy, can be connected to the development of so much unhappiness for many couples. The intimacy the couple once shared freely and with delight, now feels like a chore and is doled out with resentment; the home they once thought of as their refuge has become their prison; the person who was once lover and confidante is now an enemy. And so on.

Of course, not all relationships that run into difficulties have a narrative that can be summed up in as binary as fashion as that above – but they do all have a narrative. The exploration of this narrative is the generic purpose of couples counselling. As the couple talk through the journey of their relationship, it will help them to understand the reasons – often unconscious forces – behind their behaviours and feelings. They can then make choices based on understanding rather than unconscious drives.

Communication and the presence of the past

It is difficult to avoid the presence of the past in almost anything we say or do. We learned our communication skills when we were very young from the family and environment in which we were raised. It is no surprise that those skills will play out strongly in our relationships as adults. If our communication skills are poor, we may feel misunderstood. If we feel misunderstood, we may become defensive, which might well be experienced by our partner as hostility. Over time the behaviours driven by such communication may leave both partners feeling isolated, which in turn will drive further alienating behaviours.

One of the most important aspects of relationship work will be to explore how the couple communicate and, importantly, what is driving those communication methods. If there is will, whatever has been learned can be unlearned and replaced. It just takes a little bit of work!

Intimacy

Intimacy is not necessarily the most important area in a relationship, but it is often a touchstone for other matters and its lack can be felt intensely by either or both partners. It can be difficult for couples to understand how something that once seemed so colourful and vital now appears so pale and lifeless. The prospect of intimacy can be threatening. It touches on areas of desire, shame, self-worth, driving fear – again often making us aware of
the presence of the past. Through an exploration of this aspect of the relationship, the couple will have a better understanding of what is behind their behaviours in the area of intimacy and can begin to move towards a re-connection in this most vital part of how they relate to each other.

Surviving conflict

Couples counselling will help us to understand what is happening with us when we are in conflict. Many couples will want to avoid conflict, and it can be difficult to understand that dealing with it can be good for us. It can help us learn that we can be in dispute – with all the anxiety associated with it – and then return to a place where we feel safe again. Conflict does not have to mean catastrophe. However, this is another aspect of communication, and
we need to develop our resilience in the area to avoid becoming (once again!) prisoners of our past.

Knowing me, knowing you

The ‘unexamined life is not worth living’ might seem a little reductive. Perhaps Aristotle should have put it more positively – more like, ‘understanding oneself has great benefits.’

However, within a relationship, understanding yourself and your partner does indeed have great benefits. I would argue it is one of the significant rewards of attending therapy as a couple. Being valued, being understood are the building blocks of love.

Talking and listening

It is not unusual for couples to find it difficult to talk to each other. Over time, the pair may begin to avoid difficult topics, often through fear of conflict, or maybe through fear of potential outcome more generally. Couples counselling will help the couple discover and explore these areas of difficulty and, importantly, help to build a model which can be used outside and beyond the sessions to make sure that couples have the skills to talk and listen
effectively.

A good ending

A cursory look at divorce rates would demonstrate, starkly, that many relationships do, and will, end. Sometimes, the issues couples bring to their therapy, either as individuals or as a pair, lead them to decide that what is between them is overwhelming and that their best option is to separate. Couples counselling can help to navigate these challenging decisions and the very difficult feelings associated with them. All of us must deal with endings in our lives, and all endings involve loss of one sort or another. Although dealing with endings is often the one of most painful processes of couples counselling, it does not have to be catastrophic. If the decision is to end the relationship, counselling will help the couple to find a way to keep intact as much of the positive connection between the couple as possible.

 

Kevin Collins is a UKCP registered Psychotherapeutic Counsellor with an academic background in the field of literature and linguistics. He worked for many years in education – in schools and university. Kevin is available at our Lewes Practice.

 

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

 

Further reading by Kevin Collins –

I never thought my son would watch pornography

Care for a dance?

Name that tune

Why is it hard to make decisions?

Communication, communication, communication

Filed Under: Kevin Collins, Psychotherapy, Relationships Tagged With: couple counselling, couples, couples therapy

September 27, 2022 by BHP Leave a Comment

Will counselling save my marriage?

One of the most common questions asked by individuals enquiring about couple’s counselling is whether the process will save their marriage? This is an understandable question and is driven by anxiety in relation to thoughts of a break-up.

The answer to this question is not simple and the variables lie with the two individuals in the couple, rather than with the therapist. Allow me to explain:

If a couple enter into couple therapy with clarity about wanting to work through some difficulties with the goal of continuing with their relationship AND this is reflected in the work then it is likely that the outcome will be a stronger relationship between the two individuals in the couple resulting from improved dialogue and intimacy.

However, this is often simply not the case. At best one partly frequently has ambivalent feelings about staying in the relationship or simply cannot get in touch with whether this is something they want due to the strength of feeling around unresolved issues.

Let us take the example of an affair. This is a fairly common presenting issue with couples who seek out couple counselling. In a typical scenario where one party in the relationship has been unfaithful, the other is likely to be feeling betrayed, hurt, angry and mistrustful.

Until these emotions can be worked through in session (if they can) and the hurt party can both come to terms with the affair, as well as with how both parties in the couple contributed to a loss (or avoidance) of intimacy, the question of whether the marriage can be saved remains a moot point.

Working with a skilled counsellor or psychotherapist can only benefit your relationship in terms of providing you both with a therapeutic relationship and environment in which difficult feelings can be worked through and better dialogue and understanding reached between to two members of the couple.

As painful as it is, sometimes the best outcome for a couple can be that both amicably go their separate ways.

 

Brighton and Hove Psychotherapy is a collective of experienced psychotherapists, psychologists and counsellors working with a range of client groups, including fellow therapists and health professionals. If you would like more information, or an informal discussion please get in touch. Online therapy is available.

Filed Under: Mental Health, Psychotherapy, Relationships Tagged With: couples, couples_therapy, Relationship Counselling

September 26, 2022 by BHP Leave a Comment

What are the Benefits of Counselling and Psychotherapy?

Counselling and Psychotherapy can help with a range of issues that we may find difficult overcoming by talking to friends and family. There is a significant difference in talking to a skilled professional outside of your social and family circle, someone who is formally trained and experienced in what they do and understands how to work with psychological issues. I won’t go into the differences between counselling and psychotherapy, as this has been addressed in a separate blog. Rather I will focus on what makes talking therapies so beneficial.

Providing a safe environment

Anyone going through a crisis or wanting to discuss sensitive issues needs to feel heard, validated and understood. The therapy space is one which is designed to create containment, consistency, and safety. Weekly sessions usually at the same day and time, a calm and relaxing setting without distractions, an hour dedicated to you, and a professional who creates an environment conducive of trust and safety are all important aspects of the “talking cure”. These elements comprise what we call the “therapeutic frame”, which underpins and supports the work we do as therapists.

Someone who listens but not just listens

In my opinion, listening skills are highly underestimated. Listening isn’t just about listening, but also about making sure that the other feels heard and understood. Although this is considered a basic and essential skill in any talking therapy, listening takes presence of mind, body, and spirit. It is not as easy as it seems. The last thing anyone wants is a distracted therapist or one who seems they don’t listen or understand what you are telling them. For some it can bring up painful past and present experiences of lack of care, it can also convey a lack of interest and touch on previous abandoning and rejecting experiences. So, to get the basics right is very important!

Getting stuck in

Once you have a place to come where you feel comfortable, at a set time each week, with a person you feel you can trust and speak to without being judged, then the work can begin.

“The work” can be compared to an exploration, excavation, unpicking and un-knotting of the different strands of the issue or issues that you came to talk about and get help with.

This can be sophisticated work of great skill, but also messy and clunky at times. There is much uncertainty about what will be revealed and the paths that you will walk together.

The therapist’s job is to help you keep on track, but also allow for new pathways to be discovered. This is what makes the work interesting, fascinating, and rewarding for both parties. This relationship can be one of collaboration, creation, and deconstruction. None of this is necessarily smooth or easy but knowing ourselves is always ultimately rewarding.

The benefits

All the above is designed to support trust building, lessening isolation, creating space and safety amongst turbulent and uncertain situations, helping individuals regain control over their lives, feel and process difficult feelings, make sense of confusing situations and build or rebuild better relationships with self and others. Other benefits include: increased self-awareness, self-development, psychological and emotional strength and resilience, finding more meaning and purpose in life, making positive changes, and better communication amongst many other things.

On our website you can find more information about our counselling and psychotherapy services and how to contact our team.

Sam Jahara is a UKCP Registered Psychotherapist and Clinical Superviser and Executive Coach. She works with individuals and couples in Hove and  Lewes.

 

Further reading by Sam Jahara

What makes us choose our career paths?

Antidotes to coercive, controlling and narcissistic behaviour

An in-depth approach to leadership coaching

Demystifying mental health

Women and Anger

Filed Under: Psychotherapy, Relationships, Sam Jahara Tagged With: Counselling, Psychotherapy, Relationships

September 21, 2022 by BHP Leave a Comment

How to prepare for couples counselling

So you have taken the difficult step to go to couple counselling – what do you do now?

Obviously there are a lot of variables when it comes to couples’ attending counselling together. Some couples are both on the same page and have a common goal, albeit they are struggling to reach that goal, whereas others may have very different wants and needs to each other. Your particular circumstances will dictate whether you prepare for your first session as a couple or you take a more individualistic approach.

If you are new to counselling in general and couple counselling specifically, the days and hours leading up to your first session may feel daunting and anxiety provoking. You are likely to worry about both how the session will go and whether or not your counsellor or psychotherapist will be someone you can work with.

On of the most common fears that individuals in a couple have is that the counsellor will ‘side’ with one party in the couple against the other. Indeed, one can go a step further and suggest that secretly this is often a wish that individuals in a couple may have: that the clinician will see things from their point of view and help explain to their partner where they are going wrong. Well, whether a wish or a fear, any couple counsellor who is well trained
is not going to take this position and will work instead to facilitate a dialogue between the couple and to establish the goals of the work.

Unlike open-ended psychotherapy which can go on for many months or years (indeed, it should), couple therapy is very different, in that it is far more goal orientated. The goal(s), however, are to be defined by the couple themselves and if this is unclear then this can often be the first piece of work that is done together.

A couple counsellor is not invested in whether a couple stay together or not. This may sound counter-intuitive, but they will work with the wants and needs of the couple and in couple counselling, whilst break-ups are invariably painful, a ‘good’ break-up can be an as successful a piece of work as where the couple decide to remain in the relationship.

Returning to the question of how best you can prepare for couple counselling, if you are working towards a common goal as a couple then it can be wise and productive to spend some time in advance of the session talking about what you each wish to get from the session(s) as well as what you as a couple wish to get. You will both have individual
needs and the couple as an entity also has needs.

If you are unable to communicate together, or are clearly on very different pages in terms of what you want, then I would suggest you spend some time on your own thinking about what you want to achieve from the work.

Lastly, it is important that you are both comfortable enough working with your couple counsellor. Inviting a third party into your relationship is an intimate act and you need to be sure that the person you are seeing is both qualified to help you as well as someone you both feel you can be honest with. If one of you is too uncomfortable to work with a particular clinician, then there is no point in proceeding with any further appointments.

 

Brighton and Hove Psychotherapy is a collective of experienced psychotherapists, psychologists and counsellors working with a range of client groups, including fellow therapists and health professionals. If you would like more information, or an informal discussion please get in touch. Online therapy is available.

Filed Under: Mental Health, Psychotherapy, Relationships Tagged With: couples, couples therapy, Relationships

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