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Making Sense of our Multiple Selves

How many people are you? Personally, I know I’m quite a few and always will be.

Some years ago at a conference on ways of treating trauma a speaker was challenged from the audience to define what ‘mental health’ was. She paused for a moment and then replied that a mentally healthy person was ‘comfortable with self, comfortable with others’.

I admired the way she met this challenging question with a clear definition that describes a state of true wellbeing. At the same time I wondered, which ‘self’ are we referring to here?

Being in Relationship

Underlying that speaker’s definition of mental health is the notion of relationship and the recognition that to be a person is to always be in relationship with others and, most especially, with ourselves. In fact this learning how to be with ourselves is a process intricately linked to how we come to be ‘our selves’ in early development through relationships with our primary caregivers and other family members.

This notion that each of us appears to have multiple selves – or at least multiple parts of our ‘self’ – chimes with the reported experience of most people. This sense can be most acute when we face a life situation where we cannot decide on something, as though different parts of us are conflicting with each other to determine what is best for us as a ‘whole’ self.

The Parent, Adult & Child Model of the Self

A radical and deceptively simple idea for accounting for our different selves first emerged in the 1960s in the modality of Transactional Analysis (TA) (1) . This proposed that we naturally relate to ourselves and to others through a constant interplay between three different ways of thinking, feeling and behaving.

We first learn how to be from our close observation of the all-powerful others we meet in infancy.

We borrow aspects of how they behave towards us and incorporate these into our own way of being. This has been termed our ‘Parent’ ego state, of which we can have many different ‘borrowings’ from the authoritative figures of our early years. Borrowing these parental ways of being is useful when it allows us to provide ourselves with parental comfort and structure to safely navigate the world, such as soothing ourselves by rubbing a bruised knee or remembering to stop and hold hands at the kerb. This becomes unhelpful when any borrowed forms of the parenting we received prevent us fully accepting and loving ourselves.

We also learn by actively storing as separate ‘Child’ ego states within us our earliest intense aspects of previous emotional experiences and imaginings about the world. By replaying these old experiences in different situations, they give us guiding models for expressing our innermost impulses or adapting in order to successfully maintain relationships with others. This is less helpful to us when previous fears overwhelm us in the present or we over adapt to the demands of others at the expense of our own needs.

Our third and probably most common way of being is to operate in the here and now – or our ‘Adult’ ego state – where we use our accumulated knowledge of the world to solve daily challenges and get our needs met. Problems can arise when our ability to function in the moment is compromised by us bringing our more unhelpful Parent or Child ways of being into our present.

Making sense of our multiple selves

So when we face times in our lives when we do become ‘uncomfortable’ or worse, it can be instructive to use this powerfully simplified model to explore how aspects of our Parent, Adult or Child ego states might now be limiting our capacity to live well.

TA Psychotherapy

Part of the process of TA Psychotherapy is to focus with compassion on how our borrowed and previous selves continue to serve us and to explore with care and curiosity those aspects of ourselves that are now no longer helping us to change or grow. For example, we might identify the origins of self-critical voices and practise liberating new nurturing parts of ourselves. Or we might explore those moments in our lives when we seem to be suddenly incapacitated by childhood vulnerabilities and work to resolve why this is so.

To return to our speaker, if the definition of mental health is indeed to be ‘comfortable with self, comfortable with others’, then I would like to suggest that the vitally important process towards this healthy state is of one of ‘compassion for self, compassion for others’, a process that TA and many other forms of psychotherapy can very effectively support.

 

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 –

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

How are you?

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

 

Resources – 

(1) Berne, E. (1961). Transactional analysis in psychotherapy: A systematic individual and social psychiatry. New
York: Grove Press. 

 

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Out of sight, out of mind

Available entertainment over the recent end of year break included the chance to laugh at the prospect of us all being killed. The climate crisis satire, ‘Don’t Look Up’ presented a mirror of our times, with scientists struggling to communicate imminent planetary annihilation by comet to a disbelieving public.

This new year sees the 60th anniversary of Rachel Carson’s landmark environmental work, Silent Spring. Her ‘fable for tomorrow’ begins with a stark picture of a rural American town that has died, its people taken ill, its farm animals barren, its insect life no more and all birdsong silenced. Recognizing the widespread harm caused by indiscriminate use of highly toxic insecticides, her book inspired an emerging environmental protest movement, leading to stricter regulation and a new awareness of how human activity was damaging the natural world.

Separated by sixty years of change, what strikes me most about both these works of warning is they seek to call attention to signals in the environment others have missed – or simply cannot see – and each insists these signals have meanings, with implications for the need to take action for purposeful change.

Not seeing the bigger things

In the same decade that Carson was warning of environmental collapse, a pioneering psychiatrist turned her attention to another neglected area of human experience. Conducting over two hundred interviews with dying hospital patients, Elizabeth Kübler-Ross gave moving shape to their stories with a new theory of how we cope with loss.

In her equally ground breaking publication, On Death And Dying, she proposed five separate stages of coping: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Although later critiqued for proposing a linear ‘stage’ process to change, her assertion that our primary response to loss is ‘denial’ holds truest for me.

Although now commonplace to hear talk of someone being ‘in denial’, this can often sound critical, as though there were something dysfunctional about this deeply human response.

For Kübler-Ross the denial she encountered in her patient interviews struck her as a ‘healthy way of dealing with the uncomfortable and painful’.

I think our human propensity for denial is testament to our powerful capacity to use our brilliant imaginations for self-protection. When faced with the intolerable, we unconsciously block out what threatens our fundamental sense of security.

Not seeing the smaller things

Because denial has acquired this shade of critical meaning, I find a more psychotherapeutic term, the process of ‘discounting’, much more helpful to use.

This theory emerged from a school of thinking in Transactional Analysis in the 1970s, when it was recognised that patients struggling to manage their lives and relationships had one big thing in common: they each engaged in ‘discounting’, whereby their thoughts and behaviours were often based on being plainly unaware of significant aspects of themselves, other people or wider reality.

Just as we can deny our larger reality in a life crisis I believe that an unconscious unawareness of smaller things is part of our day to day human experience. We all regularly discount some aspect of ourselves, of others and the world, simply in order to live in the best way we can. And as our denial must eventually give way to our awareness for change and growth to happen, so must our discounting.

The uses of psychotherapy

Psychotherapy often involves the paradoxical question, ‘What is it, that at some level, I am unconsciously choosing not to notice, and why?’ I see the process of psychotherapy as a sustained collaborative inquiry between therapist and client, so that clients can move at their own pace from self-protective discounting to self-expanding awareness.

In Carson’s fictional doomed American town, her explanation for the crisis is, ‘The people had done it themselves’. And just as her work helped many people to become aware of what they were not seeing and begin to account for healthier ways of relating to nature, so the business of psychotherapy can liberate individuals.

It can do this through carefully exploring their beliefs, feelings and behaviours in order to increase awareness of other ways of being and discover new options for change. In this way, psychotherapy at its most effective helps people, in the only way possible, to do it for themselves.

 

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.

 

Other reading:
Carson, R. (1962) Silent Spring Houghton Mifflin Co. Inc
Kübler-Ross E. (1969) On Death and Dying Routledge

 

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What is Transactional Analysis?

Transactional Analysis (TA) is a widely recognised form of modern counselling and psychotherapy, originally conceived by Eric Berne in the 1950’s and which is now used not only in therapy but also in education and organisational training and consultancy.

It is a theory of personality, behaviour and communication, and draws on tools and methodology from a wide range of psychological disciplines, including humanistic, psychodynamic, person centered and relational therapies.

It is therefore a flexible form of therapy that can be tailored to an individual’s needs to facilitate personal growth and change.

How is Transactional Analysis used in counselling and psychotherapy?

A Transactional Analysis counsellor or psychotherapist has a wide variety of theory to hand including the theory of personality, communication and child development.

Transactional Analysis theory has an emphasis on the therapy being contractual, with a negotiated agreement between the therapist and client on what will be explored in the therapy sessions with a view to an end goal or change. The agreement is not fixed but rather is a dynamic and fluid process where the agreement can be re-negotiated at any time. This enables an active participation, both by the client and the therapist, and an equal partnership which is built on the core values of clear communication, respect, and openness.

Transactional Analysis counselling and psychotherapy can be used for individuals, couples, and groups and for a wide range of issues, including anxiety, depression, bereavement, and other life changing issues.

Some key concepts of Transactional Analysis theory

Transactions– this looks at both the verbal and non-verbal messages we use to communicate with ourselves and others, which can give us an insight to how we think, feel and behave and how we view the world around us.
Unconscious Scripts – this is our life story or ‘script’ that we unconsciously write for ourselves when we are young, uniquely interpreting both internal and external events which influence our thoughts, feelings and behaviour. Transactional Analysis can help facilitate exploration of which of our thoughts, feelings or behavior is archaic and no longer serves us, and is therefore having an impact on how we want to live our lives in the ‘here and now’.
Ego States – Ego states theory relates to personality and is linked to which of our thoughts, feelings or behaviour has either been learnt from our caregivers and other significant people in our formative years (Parent ego state), from past experiences in our childhood (Child ego state) and which are direct responses to the ‘here and now’ (Adult ego state). It may be familiar to you that you play different ‘roles’ depending on the situation you are in, such as at work, or with friends or family and switch between these ‘roles’ many times during the day. In Transactional Analysis we see this as switching between ego states.

Transactional Analysis Counselling and Psychotherapy helps facilitate awareness of your life ‘script’ and its link to archaic perceptions and beliefs with exploration of how you would like to live in the ‘here and now’ to have a more fulfilling, enjoyable, and happier life.

 

Louise Herbert is a psychotherapeutic counsellor who is in the final year of specialist training in Transactional Analysis Psychotherapy. To get in touch with Louise, please contact us.

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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 supervisor, working in Hove and Lewes. Sam is also one of the founding partners of Brighton and Hove Psychotherapy.

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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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Relational Therapy – a view

There are a number of core concepts in the Transactional Analysis model, which provide a framework and map for understanding our internal emotional landscapes and structures. The concept of “script” suggests that people will often make decisions about themselves and draw conclusions about life from a very young age. Such decisions are made out of conscious awareness, and at the time, they constitute the best option for survival in a world that for myriad reasons, social and environmental, may be frightening, incomprehensible or even life-threatening. A Transactional Analysis approach will invite curiosity about the origin of our script decisions as well as exploration and recognition of how we may maintain and live these (outdated) decisions in our current lives.

No one is an expert on life, and no psychological theory or method holds the monopoly on insight, wisdom or cure. When I first meet a client(s), I am interested in engaging with a whole person and not just the problem they may bring. Each therapeutic encounter is different, since each of us has our unique experience of being a person in the world. Working from a relational perspective, I offer a willingness to engage in a process with my client(s) rather than a promise of certain knowledge. A relational approach is paced and reflective. It does not rush towards interpretation or refrain from appropriate challenge. It involves elements of risk, including that of knowing and not knowing. When we believe we know ourselves (and for that matter another) we perhaps take ourselves for granted, assume our identities as fixed and neglect or foreclose on our greater depths and potentials. Therapy can offer an opportunity for us to be curious about ourselves and to track, understand and challenge our assumptions both about others and ourselves.

I am always interested in the (often) impoverished stories that people tell themselves about the world and the enduring and sometimes debilitating impact that they may confer, physically, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually and relationally. In the speaking of and the listening to these stories it is possible that new stories may begin to be imagined. The therapeutic endeavour will be in part to hold a space in which we may tell, retell, de- and reconstruct and constitute the stories of our selves, such that we might understand more profoundly our appetite (or lack of it) for life.

Uncertainty is an inevitable part of being alive. Perhaps the only real certainty is that we will, one day, die. We are all subject to the urgencies and vulnerabilities of our bodies and our histories are written deep within its archaeology. Our bodies have much to tell us of our selves beyond logic, reason or words. A relational therapy is sensitive to the sometimes inarticulate speech of our more visceral selves, revealed at once in a movement or gesture, a tone of voice or rhythm of speech, a word, a silence. It is in the simple (and complex) practice of listening that I may begin to understand how experience has informed and shaped an individual’s sense of self. The relational practitioner is never a neutral observer but rather an active participant in the therapeutic process, always sensitive to news from within herself about what s/he is thinking and feeling and what this might mean for a client.

I believe that poetry, literature and art have much to tell us about the complexity of human existence and consistently seek to resource myself from these worlds. Sometimes we find ourselves moved to tears of joy or sorrow by the power of musical phrase or lyric, disarmed despite ourselves, absorbed in the experiencing of it, feeling at once known, understood, connected and transcendent. It is this capacity to experience, how we sustain and sabotage it, to enlivening or deadening effect that is of great interest to me and describes something of my own curiosity about the therapeutic endeavour. The language of therapy is at once pragmatic and practical, poetic and evocative, always unique to the individuals involved.

Gerry Gilmartin is is an accredited, registered and experienced psychotherapeutic counsellor who is available at our Hove practice.

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Transactional Analysis Psychotherapy

Eric Berne, the founder of Transactional Analysis (TA) described it as ‘a theory of personality and a

systematic psychotherapy for personal growth and change’.

In Transactional Analysis Psychotherapy, we adopt the philosophical principles that:

– People are fundamentally OK, even if they sometimes behave in not-OK ways;

– Everyone (with rare exceptions) has the capacity to think, and can decide what they want from life;

– We make decisions early in life as a result of our experiences, and these decisions can be changed.

In TA, both client and therapist take joint responsibility for achieving the changes that you want to make in therapy.

Central to TA are equality, transparency and open communication, and these underpin our therapeutic work throughout.

The ultimate therapeutic aim of TA Psychotherapy is to achieve autonomy. The definition of autonomy being: awareness, spontaneity and the capacity for intimacy.

In addition to the above, some of the main advantages of TA as a therapeutic method are:

– It helps us easily understand the psychological dynamics within people and between people.

– It embraces cultural diversity and is known world-wide

– It can be used both in short- and long-term psychotherapy

– It’s flexible and applicable with individuals, couples, groups, families and organisations. And finally,

– TA brings together both the depth of psychoanalysis and the warmth of a relational approach.

Sam Jahara and Gerry Gilmartin offer Transactional Analysis Psychotherapy to individuals and couples. Sam Jahara also runs a long-term Psychotherapy Group based on TA principles.

Sam Black and whiteGerry-Gilmartin-image

 

 

 

 

 

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