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January 16, 2023 by BHP Leave a Comment

I’m the Problem – It’s Me!

Are you curious to know the most popular song in the world right now? Of course, you might not have been able to miss it.

This autumn, a musical milestone was achieved by Taylor Swift, who has become the first musician to claim all ten top slots of the US Billboard Top 100. Of her ten conquering songs the one that’s found most popularity with streamers is Anti-Hero, with its choral refrain, ‘I’m the problem, it’s me’.

And this phrase has been reported as being rapidly taken up in social media trends almost as an anthem for our times. The promotional video accompanying the song depicts multiple versions of Swift portraying a character riven by internal conflict, struggling to relate to others and self-medicating with alcohol to cope.

Clearly, apart from its evident musical catchiness, something in the central message of this song is resonating with fans of an artist whose online followers number more than 100 million, mostly young, people. Is it that the singer’s conflation of her very identity with her problem seems to fit their own experience?

So what’s ‘the problem’?

The word ‘problem’ has been defined as ‘a situation, person, or thing that needs attention and needs to be dealt with or solved’. Just to speak the word involves compressing the lips twice to form the first syllable with its explosive ‘p’ and ‘b’ in a verbal stumble, almost expressive of something being expelled. It’s derived from the Greek ‘proballein’, a combination of ‘pro’ meaning ‘before’ and ‘ballein’ meaning ‘to throw’. And perhaps there is an ancient wisdom in the root of this word in its suggestion that we experience the need to ‘throw’ a perceived problem out of us.

Working with ‘the problem’ in therapy

This has recalled me to thinking about the uses of therapy as a means for practitioner and client to work purposefully together in addressing the recurrent phenomena of ‘the problem’.

Narrative therapy offers a framework for supporting families and individuals who present accounts of their life experience as ‘problem saturated’. Where someone has concluded they are the problem, in locating the problem inwardly in this way, they have formed what is called a ‘dominant story’ about themselves, one that could become powerfully restricting in narrowing possibilities for them to uncover other meanings or perspectives on their lives. It’s argued that this way of seeing only supports and sustains the presenting problem.

Linked with the original meaning of the word as ‘throwing’ something away from us, narrative therapy invites us to separate the person from the problem. Therapist and client engage in a collaborative search for an ‘alternative story’ that will challenge a person’s dominant story through techniques of ‘problem externalisation’. This starts with the contention that ‘the problem is the problem’ and focuses instead on the relationship between the person and the problem.

In therapeutic practice, fruitful ways of externalising any problem often involve using language creatively in naming it and even placing the problem where it may be visualised in the room and personified in its own right as an entity with its own curious qualities. So depending on the nature of the difficulty, practitioner and client might be working together to discover more about what the client them self names as, for example, the ‘Anxiety Wave’, the ‘Constant Conflict’ or even, in the case of Taylor Swift’s Anti-Hero, the ‘Monster On The Hill’.

This is an approach that honours the deep distress experienced by many individuals for whom a problem has become an inextricable and debilitating part of themselves. Through supporting them to separate from their problem, alternative stories can emerge that surface previously unacknowledged – or discounted – personal skills and competencies, revealing new capacities for agency.

Arguably Taylor’s song has done a service for those who most identify with her protagonist’s dominant story of problem internalisation. I hope it leads them to ways in which they might find their own alternative stories to effect preferred positive change in their own lives.

 

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

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. He works with individuals (young people/adults) in private practice.  He is available at our Lewes and Brighton & Hove Practice.

 

Further reading by Chris Horton – 

Making sense of our multiple selves

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

How are you?

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

Filed Under: Chris Horton, Mental Health, Society Tagged With: Mindfulness, Relationships, self-care

April 4, 2022 by BHP 2 Comments

How are you?

How are you at just sitting down quietly by yourself? 

Some years ago I completed a mindfulness meditation course and first encountered the philosopher Pascal‘s assertion that, ‘all the misfortunes of men derive from one single thing, which is their inability to be at ease in a room’. Our teacher suggested Pascal referred to the harm caused due to our periodic inability to tolerate the sheer intensity of thoughts and feelings that can rise within us, when no distractions are available. 

Having worked through meditation guidance books at earlier times in my life, I found attending this formal course was an enriching way to discover that engaging in mindful meditation could be a useful aspect of my own wellbeing.

The paradox of mindfulness – ostensibly sitting alone not ‘doing’ anything – is that it’s an active practice, requiring our presence in the moment and making it a regular habit in order to be effective. The health benefits of mindful meditation have been increasingly suggested in numerous research studies. 

Pioneers such as Jon Kabat-Zinn have taught how cultivating a focused awareness of our thoughts, feelings and physical sensations increases our capacity to tolerate their extremes. 

More recently the psychiatrist Dan Siegel has developed his ‘Wheel of Awareness’ practice: a structured meditation session inviting us to develop both awareness and compassion for ourselves that we then extend to our personal relationships, wider humanity and all life in our natural world.

Just as many have found meditation a valuable resource at particular times of stress or crisis in their lives, so psychotherapy has taken its place as an important activity that addresses the challenges we face in seeking to be at ease with ourselves. 

And for this activity we might turn to the insight of another giant of French thought, Montaigne, who wrote, ‘The greatest thing in the world is to know how to be oneself.’

In the therapeutic process we move beyond sitting with ourselves into a particular kind of beneficial relationship. The therapy room offers us a space where we can enlist the full attention of another person – a trained therapist – who is professionally committed to helping us explore those aspects of ourselves that can be hardest to uncover and often too painful to encounter by ourselves. 

And just as meditation is called a ‘practice’, so psychotherapy is often referred to as ‘the work’ in an acknowledgement of the purposeful regularity of this process of deeply supported self-examination.  

If the goal of mindfulness is to achieve a greater sense of wellbeing though cultivated awareness, it seems to me the aim of psychotherapy is to help us truly know not who, but as Montaigne suggests, how we are in the world. Only by understanding much more about how we have come to think, feel and act in the way we do can we begin to understand how we might choose to be different.

 

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

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. He works with individuals (young people/adults) in private practice.  He is available at our Lewes and Brighton & Hove Practice.

 

Further reading by Chris Horton

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

Filed Under: Chris Horton, Mental Health, Relationships Tagged With: meditation, Mindfulness, wellbeing

August 2, 2021 by BHP Leave a Comment

Poetry: A space to ponder

How many of us feel we don’t want to be known beyond what we present to the world and are relieved when our presentations are not tested? When we’re not found out.

The poem below by the American poet Jane Hirschfield, is an uncomfortable look at our response when we read about the shameful acts of others. Is it relief? Is it pleasure? Is it confirmation that we have maintained a reassuring surface?

For Horses, For Horseflies

We know nothing of the lives of others.
Under the surface, what strange desires,
what rages, weaknesses, fears.

Sometimes it breaks into the daily paper
and we shake our heads in wonder –
‘Who would behave in such a way?’ we ask.

Unspoken the thought: ‘Let me not be tested’.
Unspoken the thought: ‘Let me not be known’.

Under the surface, something that whispers.
‘Anything can be done’.

For horses, horseflies. For humans, shame.

The last line is curious and makes a comparison between horses and their experience of horseflies and human beings and our experience of shame. Perhaps it asks a question about an ever-present sense of shame that we might share. An irritation that occupies the space between human fallibility and the drive to be civilised. Rosanna Warren says Hirschfield’s poetry invites us to pause ‘our fast-forward habits of mind’ and ‘clear a space for reflection and change’.

Quotes from Warren’s award citation for Hirshfield’s 2004 Academy of American Poets’ Fellowship.

 

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 –

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 symptons

Viagra for women? Medical treatment for women’s sexual problems focuses on the brain rather than the genitals

New Year’s Resolutions – Why change might be so difficult?

Filed Under: Angela Rogers, Society Tagged With: Mindfulness, reflection, shame

May 10, 2021 by BHP Leave a Comment

The Unconscious Mind

How do we bring to mind what is unconscious? Is it important to make this journey? These two questions are central to the therapeutic process of psychological therapy. When we are young we depend on our primary carer’s usually our parents, to hold and contain our emotional needs.

In childhood, none of us have a mature mind to guide us we rely on adults, siblings or our extended social network to help us grow into mature people. Siblings play an important role in our social development our place in the pecking order can determine how we deal later on with competition, rivalry our reaction to authority, etc. This effect can impact on us throughout our lives. Bringing to the conscious mind these experiences can help with regulation of our emotional responses as adults.

Our unconscious can exercise its influence on us leading to destructive patterns in our relationships with family, friends and work colleagues. This is often the primary motivation for people to seek out psychotherapy.

When we are grown up the experiences of childhood can exhort their influence on us leaving us bewildered at our difficulty in managing our emotional responses in everyday situations. It is as if a shadow is caste over us, we are driven by something beyond our control to act out.

Feelings, emotions and experiences from childhood or the accumulation of a long period of small daily undermining by family dynamics or bullying at school can lead to trauma. When we are traumatised, either by an event or the cumulative effect of oppression, our only escape is to detach. This may result in retreating into a fantasy world or addiction, compulsive behaviour or other psychological defenses in order to survive.

The work with the therapist or group on the unconscious allows us to revisit this hidden material. To experience in a safe environment the painful and disturbing events that triggered a defensive psychological response.

This blog to asks more questions than gives you answers. Its aim is to offer you whatever your age, ethnicity or orientation to consider looking at your own journey with greater understanding. You can follow-up this blog by watching a utube webinar “Three Ways of Connecting With Our Unconscious Mind” by Kirsten Heynisch’s, Clinical Psychologist’s description of accessing the unconscious and working with it. This can inform your work with the process of change in Individual or Group Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy.

 

To enquire about group sessions with Thea Beach, 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

Groups for Mental Health

Group Psychotherapy in a post ‘Pandemic World’

Termination and endings in Psychotherapy

What is Social Unconsciousness?

Filed Under: Parenting, Psychotherapy, Relationships, Thea Beech Tagged With: Emotions, mind and body, Mindfulness

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