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Psychotherapy and the Climate Crisis

In times such as this, I question my role as a psychotherapist wishing that I had studied something that could truly and directly help the climate and environmental crisis that we face. I feel so connected to the natural world that to see it being destroyed, disregarded and exploited to this scale, to see us humans destroying what sustains us is truly horrifying and evoques in me a profound sense of helplessness.

I love my work because it entails looking at human psychology. In essence, understanding why we feel and behave they way we do.  This is much easier to do with an individual sitting in front of me than to speculate what drives us to collectively cause harm or do nothing.

Biologically we are wired towards survival. Capitalism and consumerism, paired with technology has made us more and more disconnected from our bodies, our food and our environment.

In psychotherapy we try to help people tolerate their feelings, be in their bodies, understand what drives them to make certain choices in life, etc. I believe that as a profession we can help to heal the wounds and traumas of the past so that we don’t have to continue repeating painful experiences. Psychotherapists can help individuals and groups to think the unthinkable and feel our most painful feelings. This is both a delicate and yet powerful process, which happens over time in order to not overwhelm the system.

Too much information, and we either react or disconnect.

A similar process is taking place collectively. The issues we are dealing with are huge and require serious attention. But how we pay attention is key. Reactivity and disconnection are inevitable responses to such overwhelmingly big issues. Therefore we need to learn to face things and not run away from them. We need to talk about and help one another grieve not just our personal losses but also the loss of nature and life, as we know it.

I deeply admire climate activists, environmentalists and all the scientists that dedicate their lives to bringing all this information to our attention and who are desperately trying to raise awareness to protect our natural world. But this depends on all of us waking up to what is happening and to begin treating ourselves and other humans/beings/the planet with care and respect.

We can only wake up and take action from a place of consciousness. So, it’s time we stop burying our heads in the sand and take a serious look at how we live, the choices we make and how we treat the planet every single day.

As a profession, a society and a nation, we need to face our areas of contradiction, our “splits”.  After all, the personal is the political.

In the words of Great Thunberg:

“If the walls of your house truly came tumbling down, surely you would set your differences aside and start cooperating.

Well, our house is falling apart. And we are rapidly running out of time. And yet basically nothing is happening.

Everyone and everything needs to change. So why waste precious time arguing about what and who needs to change first?

Everyone and everything needs to change.”

Global Climate Strike 20 and 27 September 2019

https://globalclimatestrike.net/

Further reading by Sam Jahara –

Psychotherapy can change your life – but you may not want it to

On rushing towards answers

How do Psychotherapists work with anxiety? Trio of Blogs – Part 3

 

Sam Jahara is UKCP Registered, CTA, PTSTA and is one of the Brighton & Hove Psychotherapy Co-founders.  She is an experienced Transactional Analysis Psychotherapist. Her special interests include culture, identity, belonging, sustainability and environmental issues. Sam is available at our Lewes and Brighton & Hove Practices.

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Psychotherapy can change your life – but you may not want it to

Anyone who is or has been in “psychotherapy proper” will tell you that it can be really hard work.

First, you begin by telling a total stranger about the most intimate things in your life. Things you never even said out loud because it was all too difficult to admit to yourself, let alone to another human being.

Then, you find out that most things you were taught about yourself growing up turn out to not be true. Well, that’s a relief in most cases, especially since many of us are taught to believe pretty horrible and untrue things about ourselves like: “you’re stupid”, or “you’ll amount to nothing”, or something a bit subtler like “your sister is the good one”.

Next, you are encouraged to feel things you haven’t or couldn’t feel before because no one cared or knew how to deal with it. So, once you start learning that the stuff you swallowed in your childhood was more about your parent’s inadequacy rather than anything to do with you, you begin to feel pretty angry about this, or sad, or disappointed, etc

All of this inevitably leads to the painful realisation that your early life wasn’t as rosy as you thought it was, and therefore you are now feeling very anxious or depressed about seemingly unrelated things like work or your relationship.  This then leads to more mourning of the loss of good experiences that you never had. And because you can’t go back in time and no one else can make up for these experiences, you then have to gradually come to terms with it.

Of course, this is all very uncomfortable and plus it turns your world completely upside down, which you weren’t expecting at all cause you just came here to talk to a lady (or man) with a nice face and (hopefully) a soothing voice.

But then, because you are feeling all this sad and angry stuff that you never felt before, you realize that you are also feeling other things, like relieved and happy. And that over time, you feel more and more alive and happy than sad and miserable.

This leads to you being more attractive to other people and them wanting to spend more time with you because you are a nicer and more interesting person.

You also get more secure in yourself and find better work, which in turn leads you to feeling even better about things and, oh gosh – a positive loop begins!

But of course, being sad and miserable has its advantages. People feel sorry for you and they try to rescue you. Plus, you don’t have to make any fundamental changes or feel very uncomfortable feelings and make some difficult realizations. It’s the devil you know, right?

Well, being in psychotherapy might change your life for good – it’s up to you whether you want to.

(P.S. The process of psychotherapy can take many different avenues, depending on what you are bringing and where you want to go. The above is only one general example).

Sam Jahara is UKCP Registered, CTA, PTSTA and is one of the Brighton & Hove Psychotherapy Co-founders.  She is a Transactional Analysis Psychotherapist with experience of working with individuals and couples in short and long-term therapy. Sam is available at our Lewes and Brighton & Hove Practices.

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On rushing towards answers

Take the following situation: a client seeks psychotherapy to deal with anxiety and other related physical symptoms such as heart palpitations, ABS, stomach pains, etc.

They are used to a solution-focused approach and can want quick answers from me.

I feel rushed and pulled to meet them in their anxious place – to offer solutions, set goals, etc. I can easily see the how therapy session could quickly turn into a business meeting.

I take a breath, check in with myself and see how I am feeling (pushed, rushed, slightly anxious to give solutions).

I pause and offer the following:

“It seems you want me to give you more work in addition to what you already have. This seems to be exactly what is stressing you out. What would it be like for us to slow down and focus on your experience right now?”

We both look at one another for a moment and there is a sense of confusion: “I’m not sure what I’m supposed to DO.”

The DO bit is of importance here. Everything seems to be about doing in this person’s life. I imagine most of us can relate to this way of being.

This is because many of us have not learnt to pay attention to our experience. As children we are taught to do well, achieve, win, etc. in order to be loved and recognized. However, real recognition comes from validation of experience. This means paying attention to feelings, thoughts and responses,

Through a focus on doing and achieving, we loose connection to our bodies and our feelings. This means we end up a little bit like performance machines, ticking lists and meeting deadlines. In this process we tend to forget who we are, why we do what we do and how we feel about it.

One of the goals of therapy is to facilitate this process of coming back to oneself and understanding what drives us for good or bad. We then look at what behaviours and ways of being serve you and which really don’t.

Sam Jahara is a Relational Transactional Analysis psychotherapist and superviser, working in Hove and Lewes. Sam is also one of the founding partners of Brighton and Hove Psychotherapy.Facebooktwitter

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How do Transactional Analysts work with Anxiety?

In this blog I share my view on how to work with a fictitious client. The “client” James, is a high achieving barrister in his mid-thirties presents with severe anxiety. He has recently started a new relationship and they are thinking of moving in together.

Client background

The “client” James, is a high achieving barrister in his mid-thirties presents with severe anxiety. He has recently started a new relationship and they are thinking of moving in together.

He comes from an upper-middle class background where there was a family culture of not talking about feelings and difficulties. He was sent to boarding school ages 6 – 13. He is eldest of 3 children and his parents divorced when he was 13. There’s has been other traumatic childhood incidents that he is yet to disclose.

He presents well dressed, competent, practical and wants quick solutions. He is very busy and wants to know what therapy can do for him and how long it will take

A transactional analysis / psychodynamic approach

I’m interested in James’s past, present and hopes for the future. Also relevant here is James’s attitude towards emotions. What has he learnt from his parents or caregivers about the role of feelings and emotions? Here, clearly there is a culture of not talking about feelings. I would imagine there was little encouragement for James to develop a relationship with his inner-world, given academic achievement was the main focus and what James would have been rewarded for.

In boarding school there is usually a culture of suppression of emotions, including suppressing the distress of leaving home at such an early age. The developmental stage of 6-13 years is also relevant. It is a transitional period for both girls and boys linked with identity development and moving from dependence to independence. Without a ‘secure base’ (parental presence, support and encouragement), this is likely to be compromised.

Why now?

Starting a new relationship can trigger feelings around early bonding and attachment. Inner conflicts to do with dependence versus independence will likely resurface, causing anxiety about the future of their relationship.

The divorce of his parents at age 13, followed by years in boarding school would have invariably shaken his world. Early separation from parents is traumatic for children, and so is divorce. We don’t know yet about the other traumatic events of his childhood, which will no doubt emerge as the therapy progresses.

I would be led by the person’s telling of their story. The process of telling one’s story and being heard by a present and supportive other can be transformative in itself. This might be an alien concept to James and something that he may find both pleasant and strange.

Wanting quick solutions is part of the driven environment of his family, profession and background. A therapist who is willing to be both understand and challenge his worldview, whilst exploring healthier ways to relate to himself is needed here.

Working relationally in the ‘here-and-now’

I would encourage James to begin paying attention to his experience, rather than on the demands he is likely to impose on himself and others. I imagine that James has never been allowed to experience his feelings and receive comfort and support when distressed, sad, angry, etc.

Unprocessed feelings usually manifest in anxiety and or depression. These will also resurface at key moments in life, such as new relationships, crisis, having children, etc.

The above are just initial thoughts based on a limited amount of information given about a fictitious client. Although the information presented here will be familiar to quite a few readers.

In therapy, client and therapist will work together in defining their therapeutic work. This usually happens in a spirit of collaboration and mutuality which, albeit challenging, can also be an enjoyable and incredibly rewarding experience.

Sam Jahara is a UKCP Registered Psychotherapist and Certified Transactional Analyst with a special interest in cross-cultural and intergenerational influences.  She works from our Lewes and Hove practices and sees individuals and couples as well as offering clinical supervision.

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Lady Bird: a Psychotherapist’s Perspective on Key Themes

Ladybird

Warning – This article contains spoilers for anyone who has not seen the movie Lady Bird.

A critical success, this film about a mother and daughter relationship falls into the ‘coming of age’ genre, however it is also so much more than this in considering the systemic and unconscious processes at work that make this film both poignant and painful to watch.

There are many key themes present relating to those clients bring to psychotherapy, however I would like to pick out a couple that stood out for me which are perhaps better posed as questions we can imagine that Lady Bird (Christine), the protagonist, is grappling with unconsciously:

What is my desire?

How do I leave my family?

These two questions are in reality interconnected, as it is through desire that we leave the family.  However, in a family where the roles are blurred, and for a young woman whose desire has always had to be curtailed to cope with her mother’s envy, the two questions are complex and the unconscious conflict immense.

From the opening scenes, we see a mother who struggles to see her daughter as separate to her.  She clearly loves her, but also invests her own unfulfilled desires in her daughter.  This is suffocating for Lady Bird, to the extent that in an early scene, she flings herself from the car to escape the literal confines of being with her mother: existence is impossible with her mother and hurling herself from a moving vehicle is less a thought-out action of leaving, than a murderous gesture – self destructive to her and to her mother.

As the film unfolds, the usual twists and turns of teenage experience are interspaced and amplified by the complexities of Lady Bird’s family.  Her father is impotent – he loses his job and cannot separate mother and daughter.  However, what he does know is that Lady Bird must leave, and he facilitates this through making financial arrangements for her university education, without involving his wife to whom he seems to be unable to stand up against (or to come alongside).  This arrangement is pragmatically what Lady Bird needs, however, psychically it further undermines her autonomy and blurs any clarity of who she is in the family and who she is in relation to her mother.

An Envious Mother

Lady Bird understands, like so many of us who have had envious mothers, that she needs to ‘split off’ (disavow) her desire and get it met secretly, if at all.  Or she can turn it into something destructive.  Both choices aim to protect her relationship with her mother.

She gets in with the exciting, but bad crowd and swaps her boyfriend (who it turns out is gay) for an aloof boy who, like his friends, is nihilistic in his outlook on life.  Neither her gay boyfriend nor her disinterested one will help her leave her family, as neither contain her true desire.  Here Lady Bird seems to be asking herself less about her own desire and more about that of others: who am I for others and what do they want from me?  A question she asks herself repeatedly in the relationship to her mother.

Owning her Desire

There are two scenes in the film which fill us with hope for Lady Bird: the first when she owns her wish to go to the school prom and be with her old friends, thereby stepping away from her less nihilistic friends who are ‘too cool’ for school, but who in reality actually have no idea about what they want, other than to rebel.

The second scene of hope is at the end of the film where Lady Bird is at an unnamed university in New York.  Lady Bird’s father has slipped a pile of discarded attempts at a letter her mother tried to write to her into her suitcase which she finds.  This is significant as Lady Bird’s father is finally able to help mother and daughter separate: he encourages his daughter to leave but provides her with the evidence her mother loves her; he assumes his rightful position as his wife’s husband by consoling her at the airport when she, as a result of her struggle to let her daughter have her own desire and individuate, misses her daughter’s departure.

To Individuate or Rebel?

Towards the finale, there is a perfectly ordinary scene with Lady Bird, at what me must assume is her first party in New York, she drinks, meets a guy and they end up at his or hers.  She then becomes ill and the next scene is at a hospital where we learn she has drunk far too much.  This scene is a reminder of the powerful unconscious forces at play in Lady Bird – whether she can find a way to individuate and own her desire or create distance from her internalised mother through self-destructive acts (think back to the hurling herself from the car).

Ultimately the viewer is left with hope as she seems to have enough psychic distance to claim her birth name – Christine – and to find ways to be like her parents (visiting a local church), without having to be defined by being them, or not being them.

Christine  makes a call home to speak to her mother but she gets the answerphone.  The message here?  That her mother and family can survive her going and that they can too move on with their lives.  She is free.

Sam Jahara is a UKCP registered psychotherapist, certified transactional analyst and clinical supervisor. She works with clients and supervisees in Hove and Lewes.

 

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