Author: Support

Blogs

Blogs are are hard to do regularly. Sometimes I have plenty to say, but I am better off not saying it in public. Sometimes I have nothing to say that feels like it would benefit or interest anyone else. A blog implies that that you are either doing something interesting that others would like to know about, or that you have wisdom to share, or that you are funny and interesting. Many of the things that I do are mundane; often I doubt myself and seem unable to behave wisely myself and so there is not much point in sharing that, and often, when remarkable things happen, I am too busy to write about it. However, here is a summary of some noteworthy things that have affected me or that I have observed in the last few months:

  • A dear friend died in a fire. All I could do was mourn the loss of his life and his phenomenal creativity.
  • A boy that I care about a great deal was diagnosed with cancer. He is being treated and I feel for his suffering – both because of the invasive treatment and the enormous changes to his life and the lives of his family.
  • Two young men that I mentor both landed up in prison and although they are both doing well under the circumstances, all I could do was remain supportive and accept the complexity of their struggles.
  • I have moved house, finally sacrificing the empty promise of rural greenery for the complex joy of living at close quarters with a community who knows your name and occasionally invades your privacy, but also importantly witnesses and supports your life.
  • I am learning how to overcome extreme childhood wounds in order to risk sustaining an intimate relationship with a significant other, while some days holding the fear in my throat rather than re-enacting old defense mechanisms.
  • I have continued to teach the things I believe in day after day, and hopefully I am adapting my teaching to reflect my learning, and finding an optimum balance between fear,  realism  and hope in doing so.
  • And finally, by chance, I found an arum lily frog (surprisingly) in an arum lily. I had never seen one before.

Neurosis and creativity

Someone was talking to me yesterday about creative inspiration and how it can be blocked and this person paid me an important compliment. She said that the one thing she has noticed about me is that I never seem to struggle with blocked creativity. I had never noticed this about myself, but when I thought about it, I was delighted to realise that she was right. Of course, not everything that flows from my mouth or my keyboard (as a teacher and writer my creativity spills forth through those channels) has value for others, but it nevertheless seems to keep coming in an endless stream. For that I am extremely grateful.

However, I have been thinking about why that is. Why am I so fortunate? And some of the following thoughts came to mind. I have recently stumbled in my research across the work of a man named Otto Rank. He was a close associate of Freud until he developed a ground breaking theory that challenged Freud’s thought leadership. He suggested that the trauma of birth is as (if not more) important than the Oedipal complex. I am not enough of an expert to pursue the detail of that here, but I would like to focus on one of Otto Rank’s other ideas. He proposed that neurosis (or mental dis-ease) is caused by creativity that cannot be expressed.

Now, as most of my friends know, I have some profound neurotic tendencies. I suffer from massive anxiety about many things. I will spare you the details, but these days it is a source of much humour for my family. But, I have been privileged (and stubborn enough) to spend 15 years in therapy trying to figure out why I became so anxious. This process has meant that I have more answers than I started with and my anxiety is far more manageable than it used to be and that has been very useful. However, in some ways, a much more important consequence of all those years of self-analysis is that it resulted in the lifting of the flood gates of my creativity.  

I often have as many as five epic dreams a night, and new thoughts spill forth continuously. I cannot consciously make it happen, it just happens. And I think it is because the years of therapy allowed me to build the most important friendship of my life – the friendship with the part of me that houses and drives my unconscious mind. So, when that part speaks (as it does continuously through body symptoms, dreams, wayward thoughts, slips of the tongue, strange urges and impulses) all I have to do is listen.

The evolution of childrearing

I am doing research for my book on the unconscious and in considering the work of John Bowlby on attachment theory, I stumbled across a perspective that has horrified me.

The research about Bowlby indicated what a breakthrough his thinking provided. He emphasised the idea that children form an important bond or attachment to their mother or primary caregiver and that a disruption of this bond, in terms of sudden and/or prolonged separation, is detrimental to the child. He also talked about the idea that the effects of disruption in this important relationship transmit themselves over generations. These are ideas that I now take for granted. One of the personal facts about Bowlby is that he grew up in an upper class British home, where he only saw his mother for an hour a day. It was apparently felt that any more time with the mother could spoil the child. So Bowlby’s history explains his work. But, somehow it woke me up to the idea that my current perceptions and assumptions about children and childrearing are very different to those which have prevailed over the ages in many cultures.

The idea that children are precious and should be protected and nurtured is a fairly new one in many cultures. In many instances, what is now seen as child abuse was standard and accepted practice. I left Bowlby behind temporarily to investigate the history of childrearing. Google it. The information is terrifying. I will spare you the details. Suffice to say that it disturbed me greatly. But also, when seen in context, extremely hopeful.

Yes, we still neglect and abuse our fellow humans, particularly our children, in a multitude of ways all over the world today. However, gradually, over the ages, parents have tried to do less harm than their own parents, and have in many instances, succeeded. Many parents who suffered abuse and neglect at the hands of their own parents, have, like Bowlby, tried to and have done better, and even more, tried to teach the world about the destructive effects of the beliefs that prevailed at the time. As a result of Bowlby’s work, hospitals reconsidered their policies regarding the access of parents to their sick children. And as a result of all the other work done by parents and practitioners over the ages, my children and I live in a far more humane society than my ancestors did.  

The cobbler has a hole in her soul

I am good at helping other people solve their interpersonal problems. I am even quite good at solving my own problems as long as they are not in the realm of significant intimacy. I have spent years teaching others (and myself in the process) how to be more assertive, spend time more wisely, manage emotions, make presentations, facilitate, mentor, coach, counsel, manage teams and groups and do inner work, which means getting to know the contents of the unconscious part of the psyche. I think that along the way I have made a difference to some people and I am pleased about that.

Many of the people who have allowed me to work with them have asked me why I do this kind of work. Over the years my answer has become more honest, or rather more accurate, as I have become more conscious about the truth. In trying to help and heal others, there is of course a part of me that I am trying to heal, and my way of doing that has involved (amongst many other strategies) an intense and relentless research project aimed at understanding the psyche and its functioning. Somewhere inside me, driving me mercilessly, is a childlike belief that if I could just understand how the whole thing works, then maybe, just maybe, I can rewrite my personal history, and so prevent the unthinkable from having happened. Except of course it did happen, and even though to this day I am still not really sure what happened, I have all the symptoms of a survivor of the unthinkable and unbearable. I have painstakingly reconstructed most of my history out of many fragments discovered over the years, but a crucial hole remains, and so do the essential symptoms. Real intimacy remains a continual struggle. And so the research continues. I will keep us posted.

The importance of contact

I chatted to my son tonight who is now a weekly boarder at SACS and is therefore living away from home five days a week. Tonight I could hear homesickness in his voice for the first time in three weeks. I could feel the privilege and bittersweet sadness (or joy) of being able to tell him on the phone how important he is to me and to hear his voice soften with the felt connection.

Symbols and rituals in relationship transactions

Paradise Bay 171I was privileged enough to be sitting in a cafe near my home this morning drinking hot chocolate with a friend. The bill came in a tatty plastic folder. I did not consciously notice this, but my friend commented on the message that was being sent to us as customers in that important concluding moment of the relationship between us and the proprietors. I realised during the ensuing discussion how many of us are not consciously sensitive to the rituals between us. These rituals and the symbols we use in them result in the communication of the care or the lack of care we have towards others. I was reminded of how the unconscious or underlying positions we hold towards each other reveal themselves continuously, despite our best conscious efforts. And finally, I thought about how important it is to align the different parts of our psyche as much as we are able to, if we are to have relationships that support and enhance our mutual worth.

Thoughts on managing loss

Arctic selection 022We suffer loss everyday. We lose our youth, our health, inexorably and we lose the people and things that we become attached to. Conceivably, this is an unbearable part of being human, and in many instances, losses are indeed experienced as unbearable. However, surprisingly, we also recover from losses, even remarkably painful ones. I have been thinking about the things that help us recover from loss.

It seems that we as humans have an inherent capacity to grieve – in other words we have inbuilt mechanisms which help us metabolise the experience of loss. Elizabeth Kubler Ross did important work in this area and her books are well worth reading if one is struggling with loss. We have emotions that help move us through difficult experiences, if we are allowed to feel them and ideally express them. Sadness (and maybe first, anger) helps us to accept the eventual separation from the people and things that we are attached to. The experience and expression of grief allows us to come to terms with the loss. However, many of us have lost our capacity to grieve, or we never developed it in the first place.  Grief is messy, and in world that insists on the shiny one-sidedness of perfection as the ultimate goal, we increasingly shy away from the useful chaos and misery of grief. We have fewer and fewer rituals that evoke our deepest meaning-making capacities, and so we are losing touch with our archetypal predisposition to heal.

Another idea is that loss is never the final act of the drama. As an insightful friend recently commented, anything that had life once, eventually supports new life. In that way, we live forever. This idea is possibly not comforting in itself, but it does embed each of us firmly in the cycle of life, and this may deliver a sense of belonging that, although abstract, softens our felt isolation from a creative source.

Finally, loss keeps us humble. It forces us to re-evaluate our relationships, our lives, our choices. It reminds us of what we do value, and sometimes encourages us to newly appreciate people and things around us that had apparently lost their lustre. With the full experience of loss, we wash the dust from our eyes and our hearts, and we discover that, remarkably, they still work.