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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

August 16, 2021 by BHP Leave a Comment

Using empathy to re-build connection with children and young people

This last year of global pandemic has been a time of massive disruption to almost everyone. With it has come disconnection in various forms and the challenge of reconnecting at points when restrictions have lifted. Children and young people have faced their own particular challenges with school closures preventing contact with peers and friends, in addition to the stress of uncertainty about exams and other limitations related to online learning. At a time when many teens would normally be exploring social freedoms to the full, those who have kept to the rules have made do with scraps of interaction and often relied heavily on digital forums. Sadly, a considerable number have struggled to hold onto what fragile self-esteem and social confidence they formally knew. Even some of those used to thriving have found their resilience quashed and required additional support to pull through.

We are still in the early days of reconnecting with the world and all the structures of human engagement that we once took for granted and, with time, we will no doubt start to see the fuller picture of how people’s lives have been impacted by COVID and all that has come in its wake. For some, reconnecting is proving to be a battle. There are those for whom the protection of a smaller, quieter world felt safer and some are simply feeling rusty about conversing and interfacing with real live people.

Hardships faced by those whose lives COVID has touched in very tangible ways, have brought forth numerous stories of lived empathy in response to people encountering terrible pain and the loss of health and loved ones, empathy perhaps evoked by the realisation that these losses could become reality for any of us. Likewise, there has been widespread, heartfelt support for the thousands of frontline workers who have sacrificed their own safety for the wellbeing of others and for those who have lost jobs, income and businesses. Many have felt for children deprived of opportunities to learn and play as they usually would and this continues to be a time when the younger generation needs us to recognise and engage with what they are going through.

Children and young people with social and emotional difficulties always require our empathy as part of recovery and perhaps even more so in these times. Empathy is what helps them feel understood, paving the way for self-acceptance, which in turn makes it more possible to seek support from others. Daniel A. Hughes (pioneer of Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy) places Empathy at the core of the PACE approach, along with Acceptance and Curiosity (see my other blogs on these two subjects). In his book, co-written with John Baylin (The Neurobiology of Attachment-Focused Therapy: Enhancing Connection and Trust) he talks about embracing “the child’s defensiveness, putting connection before correction” and offering “radical acceptance” of the child’s mistrust.

In this context, Hughes and Baylin were referring to the particular struggles faced by traumatised children with attachment difficulties but we could apply the same principle to supporting children and young people who are emotionally and socially adjusting to each “new normal” they are faced with, whether or not they have experienced additional childhood trauma pre-COVID.

Hughes and Baylin recognise that this is no easy task, likening it to “hugging a porcupine”. Social and emotional defences, by their nature, are often difficult to permeate and can repel. A child or young person who repeatedly gives off a vibe of wanting to be left alone can leave the person reaching out feeling confused, rejected, useless and resentful and can lead, understandably, to withdrawal. This makes it even harder for the child or young person to reconnect, risking further disconnection, isolation and all the ill-effects that these states can bring.

If we can catch ourselves withdrawing and find empathy within ourselves for how the child or young person may be feeling in that very moment when they are unable to allow us in, we provide a bridge back into connection. This is so powerful as it communicates that we have not given up and that we see the child or young person as worth sticking with – we still see that part of them which has the potential to be in relationship with others and the world.
Brene Brown, in a Youtube clip based on part of her Tedtalk on Empathy, beautifully describes how “empathy fuels connection”. She refers to Teresa Wiseman’s 4 qualities of empathy: recognising another person’s perspective is their truth, staying out of judgement, recognising emotion in others and then communicating this. This is about “feeling with people” she says. Being with others is so much more effective than trying to fix the situation by saying the right thing: “Rarely can a response make something better, what makes something better is connection.”

In taking an empathic stance, we make an active choice to suspend our own anxiety and impatience about the pace at which a child or young person is re-engaging with life post-lockdown. We accept where things are at and we take time to understand as best we can. We then make what Brene Brown calls a “vulnerable choice”, that is choosing to connect with something in ourselves which knows the feeling we have encountered in another. This vulnerable choice is a risk well worth taking if we are serious about wanting to mitigate against the secondary effects of COVID on the mental health and wellbeing of children and young people today.

 

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 with us. Online therapy is available.

 

References – 

See more from Brene Brown at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jz1g1SpD9Zo

Read more from Baylin and Hughes.

Filed Under: Child Development, Families, Parenting Tagged With: child therapy, childhood, childhood developmental trauma

June 21, 2021 by BHP Leave a Comment

Are our emotions shaped by our relationships?

This particularly influences us during infancy, childhood and adolescence.  These early experiences can be activated if they have led to the development of unhelpful defenses.  The lack of attunement in parental relationships can result in an infant developing an unhealthy attachment style, divorced from reality in the form of fantasy or withdrawal and detachment.  This initially protects the infant from the pain, emotion and feelings.  Later due to the blocking of the ability to connect emotionally the protector becomes the persecutor.

A chaotic attachment experience can impact on vital neurological developmental pathways leading to permanent damage to later functional performance. Hence the recent research on childhood services from pregnancy to five years of age. 

If a “good enough” environment is NOT available for one reason or another during a person’s childhood there will be aspects of this early experience that appear to act at an unconscious level, a shadow of the early object relationship. This can be brought into consciousness and worked with in the therapeutic process.   Forming a trusting relationship with a therapist or a stable relationship within a group to hold and contain feelings and emotions to be internalized, made sense of in order to be restored. However, we must not conflate this process by apportioning blame on the parent but as a means of unfolding the neurological pathways that block the capacity for integration.  This is re-experienced in the therapeutic alliance as an imago of the infant / child with an immature mind as the “unthought known”     

Our brain and therefore our mind can remain adaptable throughout our lives and given the right support can  make a conscious decision with a mature mind not that of the infant /child.  A similar process occurs in trauma.  It can respond making the shifts necessary to live a valued and happy life.

 

To enquire about group sessions with Thea Beech, please contact her here, or to view our full clinical team, please click here.

 

Dorothea Beech is a Group Analyst with many years experience working in the UK and overseas.  She worked as A Group Analyst in South Africa as a Lecturer at Cape Town UCT and at Kwa Zulu Natal University in Durban, lecturing on a Masters Program in Group Work.  Her MA in Applied research was on Eating disorders. Her interests are in cultural diversity and trans-generational influences on the individual.  Thea is available at our Brighton and Hove Practice.

 

Further reading by Thea Beech

Group Analytic Psychotherapy – the slow open group

It is never too late!

The Unconscious Mind

Groups for Mental Health

Group Psychotherapy in a post ‘Pandemic World’

 

Filed Under: Attachment, Brighton and Hove Psychotherapy, Families, Relationships, Thea Beech Tagged With: childhood, Emotions, relationship

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