behaviour Archives - Brighton and Hove Psychotherapy

Stop the Boats! You may be familiar with this recent government slogan referring to the persistent behaviour of vulnerable people, risking their very lives in setting out to sea in search of a better future. For me, regardless of how any of us might respond to this slogan in terms of our values or politics, the most deadening aspect of its expression is the injunction to stop doing something.

It is difficult to say the word ‘stop’ without frowning. Say the word ‘start’ and your face opens up. In the inherent wisdom of language, one word feels energy sapping to say, the other enlivening.

Stop the Boats! You may be familiar with this recent government slogan referring to the persistent behaviour of vulnerable people, risking their very lives in setting out to sea in search of a better future. For me, regardless of how any of us might respond to this slogan in terms of our values or politics, the most deadening aspect of its expression is the injunction to stop doing something.

Much of what appears in the media around the issue of migration is interwoven with metaphors of conflict and talk of enforcement, deterrents and exclusion. As a public response to behaviour that has become recognisably problematic, it has reminded me of personal behaviours at the individual level and how we as practitioners, alongside our clients, seek to make sense of those that have become challenging points of focus for them.

Thinking about unwanted behaviours of our own:

Oftentimes people seek therapy in response to a ‘stuckness’ they feel in some repeated behaviour or fixed way of relating. When I ask about their presenting issue, it’s understandable to hear many say, ‘I just want to stop doing X’. And as with the government’s ‘stop’ campaign, there can be a rush towards their need for relief, alongside a belief that ‘just’ stopping the behaviour will be the most effective route to change.

In the modality of Transactional Analysis (TA), we work with a model of the personality which suggests that our unhelpful ways of being are often related to aspects of ourselves that repeat parentally influenced or child-like processes, which we take on developmentally as part of equipping ourselves to deal with life. We call these processes Parent and Child ‘ego states’, or consistent patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving as our parents once did or as we once did as children.

While many of these processes may have worked for us before, some of them may now be causing us to feel stuck.

In terms of parental processes, part of an unwanted behaviour might be a debilitating voice of harsh self-criticism. Other behaviours might be related to a child-like over-adaptation to the wants of others in our lives. Both processes can lead to anxiety for us and contribute to conflict in our key relationships. And they can be such second nature for us to experience, that only a therapeutic relationship can help us fully identify how we might be limiting ourselves.

Exploring unwanted behaviours in therapy:

Working with these examples in therapy, we might feel a strong pull to concentrate the work on stopping the self-criticism or the automatic need to please others. But one way of conceptualising personal change is to think about our behaviours, however maladaptive we feel them to be, as simply forms of energy. And instead of an urgent focus on ‘stopping’ them, we might allow ourselves to become curious about them, how they recur, how they might have served us well in the past and how much of our energy they consume now.

And thereby we create a collaborative space to explore how we might ‘start’ to expend our energy in different ways, such as finding a more parentally nurturing voice for ourselves or experimenting with ways of asking others in our significant relationships to recognise our needs. By this means we might be said to pour our energy from one place to another in a way that diverts energy previously always available for the problematic behaviour.

Back to the boats slogan, I don’t think I’d be alone in suggesting that solving a complex problem of international migration with energy directed at enforcement and confinement might be better approached through energy channelled into inquiry about the complex reasons for the crossings and asking, ‘What could we start doing instead?’

It’s natural that when faced with a behavioural crisis we feel an urge to act in stopping ways that seek to suppress the symptoms of our difficulties. But if we bring our attention to the deeper meaning of our behaviours, we start to direct energy into new behaviours that can free us from feeling stuck.

Chris Horton is a registered member of the British Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy (BACP) and a psychotherapeutic counsellor with experience in a diverse range of occupational settings.

Further reading by Chris Horton

The end

You’re not watching me, Mummy!

I’m the problem – It’s me!

Making sense of our multiple selves

Let’s not go round again – how we repeat ourselves!

Freud is an extraordinary and greatly misunderstood individual (and mental health practitioner). Many believe we have ‘evolved’ beyond his ‘outdated’ theories and indeed, there are views and theories of his that are no longer literally relevant. However, to dismiss him on this basis is myopic and superficial in that Freud’s writing has taken us to where we are today in the world of psychotherapy; and so many of his theories are increasingly becoming ‘evidenced’ through technology and our understanding of brain plasticity and the need for relationship to grow a mind. So, with this in mind, I shall now start my piece with a Freud quote:

‘Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love’ Freud, S. (1906) correspondence with Jung.

What is love?

The first question that must be considered in Freud’s statement is the question of what love is?

Clearly Freud is not talking about Eros, or erotic love; he is referring to Agape, love towards fellow human beings. However, I believe Freud is saying something significantly more profound and more important: By using the terminology ‘love’ Freud is drawing a comparison to the role of the analyst (or psychotherapist) in the transference – the role of the parent who has let the child in the client down.

Parents should love their children and most do. However, loving a child is complex as it means to allow and encourage that child to have their own experience – emotional and psychological – separate to the parent. It is about being able to encourage and tolerate difference and then celebrate it in own’s child.

Children who have been let down – neglected, abused or abandoned – have learnt that their survival depends on ‘keeping their parent happy’ – they sacrifice their own separateness and own experience in order to hold on to a parent. This is not a child who is ‘loved’. But a child who is owned.

Love therefore in Freud’s sense of the word is about true empathy – to be able to understand and accept another’s experience without becoming threatened by it, without collapsing and without colluding with it. And without sacrificing our own experience.

Does loving a client mean accepting their behaviour?

Behaviour, when driven unconsciously by effect (emotion) is termed ‘acting out’ and ‘acting out’ is mindless. Furthermore it is an attack on the therapy and an attack on the therapist.

Much like a good parent will have empathy for a child’s fear of the dentist, or a child’s desire for sweets placed next to the till, this does not mean that the child gets what they want – the avoidance of the dental appointment or the indulgence of sweets. A ‘good enough’ parent is able to empathise with the child’s feelings but withstand their demands. In short, a parent’s job is to hold their child in mind and advocate for their best interests rather than the child’s self interests (or their own self interests).

Is Psychoanalysis in essence the same as a Person-Centred Approach?

Now we have established what Freud probably means by love, we can consider whether the analytical approach is in essence the same as a person-centred approach – one of unconditional positive regard. Is this not love?

To a point it is, however, in my view (and that of analytically minded clinicians) the person-centred approach leaves the whole idea of ‘the unconscious’ just there – in the unconscious: in other words it does not exist. What you see is what you get.

Without working with the unconscious and in the transference, a clinician cannot really ‘love’ their client as they are oblivious to the drives and projections that are paying out in the room – the meaning behind the strength of emotion from the client. And they remain oblivious to whom they represent for the client and thus where the loss or trauma resides relationally.

An analytical clinician will work to understand whom the client is projecting onto them – the transference – and will work within the context of that to provide the client with a different experience of relationship

Evicting the bad parent

We all ‘internalise’ our parents – working models of how we experienced them. If this process of internalisation goes ‘well enough’ then we can draw on a solid sense of sense that is supportive of us taking up space in the world and in other relationships: we can bear our inner world However, if it goes awry somehow, then that working model can be punitive, critical and unsupportive and we avoid contact with our inner world at all costs. The process of analytical therapy is to ‘evict’ the bad parent and offer the client an alternative object (person) to introject through the consistent therapeutic relationship.

How to ‘love’ our clients

Loving our clients is a hard thing to do not because they are unlikable or unlovable, but because it means consistently offering the client a different experience of relationship that they will be unconsciously trying to sabotage in subtle ways. Freud also spoke of our fear of change and suggested that in order to mitigate against change, going forward we always seek to replicate the past. Abused and neglected children feel unconsciously ‘safe’ in abusive and neglectful relationships as then the ‘world makes sense’ and they can simply use their old defensive mechanisms to carry on surviving. They also don’t need to feel vulnerable.

Loving a client means holding appropriate boundaries, offering them support and understanding whilst resisting either being seduced or offended by attacks. And as with real life evictions, the internal parents will protest and fight back to stay put.

Ultimately loving our clients means to hold them in mind in ways they never were – their best interest rather than self interests.

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

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 –

What is the purpose of intimate relationships?

Why ‘Cancel Culture’ is about the inability to tolerate difference

The Phenomenon of ‘Manifesting – The Law of Attraction’ and the inability to tolerate reality

Why does the difference between counselling and psychotherapy matter?

Love in the time of Covid