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April 25, 2022 by BHP Leave a Comment

“I’m interested in therapy but isn’t it a bit self-indulgent?”

Some of the people I see exploring whether to begin therapy, often express doubts as to whether their troubles are significant enough. I often hear the refrain – “nothing that bad has happened to me, maybe I’m just being self-indulgent, or isn’t this all a bit naval gazing?.” 

I think simplified, what the client is really saying is; “Am I justified in feeling this pain and am I worthy of this attention ? ” 

This blog will look at how therapy can help us incorporate our painful experiences as part of a fuller engagement with ourselves, the people in our lives (our relationships) and as a different approach to living

The Psychoanalyst Melanie Klein who was interested in early development, theorised that a key early and ongoing development task is the sad but necessary realisation that others are different and separate from us, with their own needs rather than as extensions of our own. This confronts us with the loss of what we hope and want the other person to be, but if we are able to face and mourn this loss, we can move onto to a more realistic and more liveable life. When the disappointments by the other are too great, or conversely, the other attempts to be everything for us, this task is all the harder. 

Voltaire, the French philosopher and writer, in his novel ‘Candide’, tells the story of a group of travellers who have suffered various trials and tribulations. On hearing of a murder at the Ottoman court they pass an old man peacefully tending his garden. They ask the old man about the trouble at the court and he replies that he doesn’t know anything about it, since he doesn’t keep up with the affairs there. Rather he tends calmly to his own small holding. Voltaire used this example to put forward the idea that in order to live a ‘good life’, we should not overly concern ourselves with worldly affairs, but find a task we can attend to, that leaves us satisfied but tired at the end of the day. 

In my therapy practice I relate to this, not in the sense that we should ignore politics or activism, I think these are important, but in the sense that I regularly experience how clients want to engage me in their ‘rages against the machine’, with different viewpoints and perspectives.  What I often find is that, smuggled into these arguments are parts of themselves they find difficult, or are unable, to face: the bad one is the other one over there – and if only they thought like me, the world would be fine. 

What often lies behind these projections, are painful feelings of despair, hopelessness, insecurities, personal failure, upset, grief, rejection and so on. 

I try to carefully and tactfully sense what is behind these things, and the defenses or shames against feeling them, and try to create a safe enough space where these grievances and pains can be heard, allowing air to the wounds. Allowing, over time, a sad but realistic acceptance of the wounds, limits and realities of ourselves and perhaps the human condition. Rather then than therapy being self indulgent, perhaps it is one the best things we can do for the world, by trying to understand ourselves so that we don’t project our own hurts and conflicts outwards. This is why in therapy I will always be thinking about, and trying to help you understand what is happening inside of yourself, using myself as an instrument to understand what is happening between us, utilising the self awareness I’ve gained through my own work on myself, to help you understand and accept yourself more fully. 

In his book, Voltaire argues that the melancholic position is the only one from which we – any of us who have suffered disappointments, broken hearts, loss, (all adults that I know) – can ever truly live. He contests that we cannot escape suffering, since to some degree, the world is a brutal and cruel place to live. Perhaps rather than getting lost in despair or raging about this, what we can do, is to cultivate our inner worlds, pulling up the weeds, planting, feeling, exploring. Not trying to rid ourselves of the pain or anxieties of life, or the world, but to learn – as sad as it is – to try and accept that these are part of the human condition. That after we have loved and lost, battled our own minds, tried to find the magical other, and failed, that perhaps the best way forward is to attend modestly and honestly to our own human natures, to its wild thorny ways, to our own sometimes unkind and cruel ways, and to do our best to be honest about these, rather than defend against them, driving them underground. To cultivate what we can, humility, acceptance, forgiveness and grace. Like tending a garden, the work is never complete.

 

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

Paul Salvage is a Psychodynamic Psychotherapist trained to work with adolescents from 16-25 and adults across a wide range of specialisms including depression, anxiety, family issues, self awareness and relationship difficulties. He currently works with individuals in our private practice in Hove.

 

Further reading by Paul Salvage –

Compassionate Curiosity and the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis

Why there’s nothing as infuriating as Anger Management

What makes Psychotherapy Different?

What’s wrong with good advice?

Psychiatry, Psychology and Psychodynamic Psychotherapy 

Filed Under: Mental Health, Psychotherapy, Relationships, Society Tagged With: Mental Health, Psychodynamic, Relationships, society

August 30, 2021 by BHP Leave a Comment

What makes Psychotherapy Different?

“The Patient who will not suffer pain fails to suffer pleasure.” Wilfred Bion 1970.

I’ve been a therapist for over ten years now and one of the things I love about the job is how demanding it is of me to stay awake and stay alive. The training never stops and development is always a work in progress.

After many years of various work and an enduring interest in self-development and study, encompassing Eastern thoughts and practices and various experiential group experiences, I started my formal Psychotherapy training in 2008 and finished in 2014. However, what I didn’t realise was that this was the beginning much more than the end of something.

What makes Psychotherapy so important to me is that it requires one to become a psychotherapist rather than to do psychotherapy. The non-behavioural psychotherapeutic interaction is not one where I teach someone strategies, but one where I seek to on a sustained, regular and meaningful way to contact another human being, always in service of them and focusing on them but using my own present being to help make sense and bring to awareness what is going for them. I do this with all that I have available my mind, my senses, my bodily feelings, my intuition, to try and get a felt sense of what things are like for them.

Jonathon Shedler, the American Psychotherapist and researcher, says “don’t ask what model your therapist practises but how much therapy they have had.”

For me this is what makes psychotherapy truly interesting, of course learning about different theories of the mind and the way it functions and disfunctions is hugely important but it is in our own therapy that we truly learn the ‘praxis’, (practice) of psychotherapy. This involves being challenged to reflect deeply on our own internal processes, our own avoidance and defence mechanisms all human difficulties are on a spectrum and that if we look deeply enough all of us can relate to our patients through our own reflecting selves.

 

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

 

Paul Salvage is Psychodynamic Psychotherapist trained to work with adolescents from 16-25 and adults across a wide range of specialisms including depression, anxiety, family issues, self awareness and relationship difficulties. He currently works with individuals in our private practice in Hove.

 

Further reading by Paul Salvage –

What’s wrong with good advice?

Psychiatry, Psychology and Psychodynamic Psychotherapy 

Analytic Therapy for Addictions

Loss

Post Natal Depression in Mothers & Fathers

Filed Under: Mental Health, Paul Salvage, Psychotherapy Tagged With: Psychodynamic, Psychotherapy, psychotherapy services

August 3, 2020 by Brighton and Hove Psychotherapy Leave a Comment

Psychiatry, Psychology and Psychodynamic Psychotherapy

I am aware that these terms often get confused, so will use this blog to offer some very brief definitions and distinctions. Full disclosure – I’m biased, the psychodynamic model is ‘my bag’, however it’s also really important to point out that, the research suggests a pretty equal efficacy between therapeutic approaches and that the working relationship with the therapist is more important than the particular model of therapy they practice. 

Psychiatry: – which isn’t a therapy but the branch of medicine that seeks to treat ‘mental disorders”. As its part of medicine, it seeks to take a scientific, biological view of the disorders and its main source of treatment is ‘medicine’ or psychiatric drugs, such as anti-depressants or anti-psychotics. These ‘disorders’ are seen primarily through the prism of chemical imbalances and this is what is known as biological Psychiatry.  However, within Psychiatry there are differences, for instance, – Social Psychiatry. Social psychiatry, challenges the traditional psychiatric view that mental illness is caused by abnormal thoughts and actions relating to biological imbalances and stresses the importance of social factors, such as relationships, and the wider contexts of a person’s life. 

Counselling Psychology:-A counselling psychologist will have first completed a degree in Psychology and then an additional counselling training. In theory their approach, or at least the ‘psychology part’,  will be based on theories resting on experiments and scientific deductions, for instance the British Psychological society states that “As a science psychology functions as both a thriving academic discipline and a vital professional practice, one dedicated to the study of human behaviour – and the thoughts, feelings, and motivations behind it – through observation, measurement, and testing, in order to form conclusions that are based on sound scientific methodology.”.

A critique of this would be around the critique of scientific methods, for instance A few years back, scientists at the biotechnology company Amgen set out to replicate 53 landmark studies that went on to be widely accepted as fact. They were able to replicate the findings of the original research only 11 percent of the time. This proves a general critique of science, which is that is inherently flawed as it is undertaken by humans and therefore always, although often subtly and perhaps unconsciously, driven by unconscious subjective and paradigmatic factors. 

 

Psychodynamic Psychotherapy

Johnathan Shedler, working in America, contrasts the psychiatric and psychodynamic approach, arguing that, “a psychiatric diagnosis alone is a poor and limiting way of understanding a person” as it, “fosters the fiction that we can treat emotional pain as encapsulated illness separate from the person having the pain.” 

In my experience many patients have adopted this split way of viewing themselves, it’s very seductive, the idea we are in control and can pick and choose between our emotions rather than having to surf whatever waves they may throw up,  this can appear comforting, however its isn’t because it’s a fallacy. A recent humorous Instagram, post suggests: – “1. Avoid emotional burnout by never experiencing emotions in the first place.” 

Shedler describes the difference between having therapy and having meaningful therapy; – If someone has had meaningful therapy, they will be able to describe the relationship with their therapist, what it was like and what they learnt about themselves, some patients can have had lots of therapy but not be able to describe these aspects as they and the therapist have seen therapy, as a “provider of techniques. “

A critique of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy is that it is often unfocused, that it has no clearly defined goals and no clear direction, which is a fair point but one that is an inherent part of a truly analytic approach. Barnaby Barratt, author of ‘Beyond Psychotherapy-Radical Psychoanalysis’,  defines Psychodynamics as relating to, “an understanding of the human condition that is non-manipulatively interested in the meaning of life’s events for the participant and one that is holistically interested in ‘mind, body and spirit’”, I.e. is interested in the dynamic interplay of these aspects of being human without taking sides, but simply in allowing the conflicts inherent in being human to be explored and brought to consciousness so that whatever uneasy peace may be possible, can be facilitated, and that folks in relation to being human in my opinion  is as good as it gets. 

 

Paul Salvage is Psychodynamic Psychotherapist trained to work with adolescents from 16-25 and adults across a wide range of specialisms including depression, anxiety, family issues, self awareness and relationship difficulties. He currently works with individuals in our private practice in Hove.

 

Further reading by Paul Salvage –

Analytic Therapy for Addictions

Loss

Post Natal Depression in Mothers & Fathers

The Therapeutic Relationship and the Unconscious

Face to Face and Online Therapy Help Available Now

Click Here to Enquire

Filed Under: Paul Salvage, Psychotherapy, Relationships, Society Tagged With: Counselling, Depression, Psychodynamic

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