Tag: Therapy

Reaching Across The Divide

Here is a sort of précis / romp through this piece I wrote a year ago for Thresholds – a BACP quarterly that addresses spiritual issues in counselling and psychotherapy. The article sprang from our efforts, early in the Coronavirus pandemic, to manage therapeutic contact across video-conferencing platforms. I was struck by my and others’ experience of finding the process particularly effortful and was led to reflect on the difference between this medium and the “real life” analogue situation, and to explore how it might shed light on what goes on in the latter (hitherto much commoner) setting.

I contend that the digital medium favours content over process whilst psychotherapy relies on content in the process which may therefore be lost, or at least harder to apprehend. The issue of timing, in particular, is important in communication; minute hesitations can say so much in the real world, but may be put down to latency when on-line. The platform algorithm, selecting which video of moving mouth parts to patch onto which bit of compressed speech, and often arbitrarily promoting one speaker over another, I liken to an enthusiastic and naïve co-worker in the therapy room.

This technological solution to the problem of being together during a pandemic brings obstacles to communication which I liken to the concrete obstacles that had to be overcome by adherents of non-conformist churches meeting together in Britain in the 17th century. This comparison, in turn, leads me to reflect on the common ground between psychotherapy and religion; a conviction of reality and benefit on the inside, struggling with an external demand for sufficient “evidence” to satisfy a sceptical audience.

I conclude (via yet another analogy drawn this time from marine biology) that when humans communicate, factual content has to be accompanied by some animating essence that I decide to call animus.

Bit of a stretch? Nah! But sorry; if this has whetted your appetite, you will have to get through the paywall.

Return to AFW in print

The Pain of the Wronged World

The Pain of the Wronged World

Here are two fragments of text. Each is there to comfort you if you are put off by the language of the other.

Elio Vittorini

Elio Vittorini was an Italian Communist, born in Sicily in 1908. The translator Alane Salierno Mason points to Vittorini’s conception of the novel as an art form akin to music – specifically opera. Music is a medium capable of taking us past words and into a non-partisan realm. In his posthumously published novel Conversations in Sicily his protagonist starts,

“…in the grip of abstract furies….not heroic, not living…furies for all doomed humanity.”

On the spur of the moment he sets out for his home village to see his mother, whose birthday it is. This proves to be something of an Odyssey during which he is welcomed by a group of men who bemoan the fact that,

“The world is big and it is beautiful, but it has been badly wronged. Everyone suffers each for himself, but not for the world that has been wronged and so it continues to be wronged.”

These men applaud our protagonist’s suffering with a phrase that becomes a sort of chorus:

“He suffers the pain of the wronged world.”

Lighting a cigarette as he leaves his mother’s house, he remembers, and starts to weep. He walks through the village weeping and, gradually, the villagers follow him:

‘Why are you crying?’ They asked. But I had no response to give them. I wasn’t crying for any reason. Deep down I wasn’t even crying; I was remembering.  

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L. Violet Holdsworth

L. Violet Holdsworth, née Hodgkin, (1869-1954) was an English Quaker. Amongst her many writings is the following passage from Seas of the Moon (1940) quoted in the 1960 “Blue” version of Quaker Faith and Practice (©1969 London Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends):

Perhaps [in ageing] our other powers are being taken away from us to teach us to trust more to our prayer-wings, and to pray, pray for the needs of the whole world with an urgency unknown in earlier days, when our longings were more circumscribed by our immediate horizon. We can pray now, or rather we can try to let prayer stream through us, knowing that our prayer is not ours alone…”

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In Being With and Saying Goodbye I describe myself as a “moderately aggressive agnostic”. I am not someone who uses the word “prayer” – one has to somehow avoid alienating either side of the religious coin – but I am taken by the ground shared by these texts, and by the hope of a redemptive power in collective grief, compassion, expression, and the virtue of being open to the pain of the wronged world.

Here I am, then, with youthful powers gradually reducing, hoping that in some way I can contribute to a healing so much vaster than myself. I wonder if this is what Therapeutic Attitude might look like, applied beyond the individual, to a collective suffering.

Therapeutic Chess… or… When the engineering analogy breaks down

Therapeutic Chess… or… When the engineering analogy breaks down

This Christmas a three-player chess-set was given as a present and we had a game. It was a fascinating experience. I am not a great chess-player. As someone said to me recently, I always have the sense that my opponent has some far-reaching grand scheme that I unequivocally lack. This hexagonal chess board reduced the three of us to very similar levels of ineptitude as we reminded and re-reminded ourselves and each other which squares the pawn could take, how many bent diagonals were currently open to the queen, and the oddly straight knight’s move.

But that was not all. We found how hard it was to build any strategy when the person you took to be your opponent for the last two moves turns out to be an ally. The rules (one version, at least) spell out that, if you fail to take available steps to prevent a checkmate, you lose. And yet no checkmate that we encountered in two days of playing was achieved without the effective, if inadvertent, collusion of the other player.

We have been raised with a firm understanding that the triangle is the most stable structure. And yet, with this game, we found ourselves unseated from a stable, albeit viciously confrontational, dyadic structure into a disorienting dream world in which familiar shapes abounded but relationships flickered constantly and with bewildering rapidity. Chess had changed.

It seems that however important the triangle may be in the creation of stability and rigidity in the physical world in the world of interpersonal dynamics they represent a massive step into instability.

Our first relationships are with one Other (even if based on a misunderstanding about the identity and composition of that other) and I suggest that we would happily have it stay that way provided the Other remains committed and continues to come up with what we need. We often use a metaphorical third party to stabilize the dyad (you and me against the world) but the truth of the matter is that the world inexorably introduces genuine third parties with agency and their own urges to combine forces. What is more, the Other we have got used to fails, from time to time, to come up with the goods, we develop our own roving eye and the world, for evermore, is a place of unstable triads.

Or, if you prefer, the world is for evermore a stable-ish scenario of constant flickering transitions as triads configure and reconfigure. This is the world we found ourselves in with three-sided chess. It was initially disconcerting but, once the unfamiliarity was overcome, a new relief settled in. We found that the bitter paranoia of being in the lonely position was always momentary and was replaced by a higher-level sense of everyone being equally and temporarily both in a dyad, and in relationship with a dyad. Rigidity had actually been the problem; This idea that I am rubbish at chess, for example, or the constant search for a chess partner exactly like me.

This set could be sold as Therapeutic Chess …. and triangles rock.

Reaching Across and Introducing Animus

Reaching Across and Introducing Animus

The last nine Covid months have been weird. They have felt relatively unproductive, and yet I think something intangible or indefinite has happened. I think a great deal has been processing in the background. In the foreground, so to speak, one of the things I did was to write a piece for the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy in which I try, rather ambitiously, to set out what remote working has taught me about therapeutic process – or “being with”.

I attach a link to the pdf below and invite you to read it whilst respecting copyright. Here, though, are two essential points:

  1. I talk about content and process and assert that video conferencing platforms favour content at the expense of process. I give examples of how timing is messed with and non verbal material is sacrificed so that verbal content can be transmitted as intact as possible. But I acknowledge that the distinction between the two is not absolute or clear. “Which is the content and which the process, for example, when a mother and a baby look at one another?” The therapist looks for the content in the process. I believe this is one important reason for the increased effort needed to carry out certain categories of conversation when the participants are “remote”: How to be with someone when you can’t actually be with them.
  2. I invite the reader to an exploratory use of the idea of animus. I use this word, not in the gendered sense that Jung used it, nor in the sense of aggressive urge, but to denote that which gives life to or animates our utterance. If what I have to say to you is to reach you, and if you are to appreciate it in a holistic sense – ie not simply the overt content but also the content embedded in process – then it must reach you with its animus intact. Human contact is a living process. This, I believe, is something that the video conferencing platform with its binary coding, simplistic algorithms, and bias in favour of verbal content, cannot yet achieve.

Click to access reaching-across-the-divide-copyright-bacp.pdf

The article provided here in pdf form appears in the October 2020 issue of Thresholds, published by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. www.bacp.co.uk/bacp-journals/thresholds/ BACP 2020©.