Category / Counselling and psychotherapy

by Therapy place uk

Suffering from creative constipation …?

Blog awaiting imageI’m not quite certain if I first heard, read or spontaneously thought of the phrase ‘creative constipation’, but over the years I’ve made it my own. Often, when I first use it as a possible explanation for a feeling people are trying to express, it is greeted with a smile or chuckle before, on reflection, it begins to reveal its more serious nature in the therapy space.

The UK government reports that the creative industries are worth £84.1 billion a year to the UK economy, generating nearly £9.6 million an hour. Indeed, these have been a growth area of the UK economy as a whole: in 2014, they grew at almost double the rate of the rest of the economy.

While creative activity can be profitable, most people, at some point in time, decide they aren’t actually creative. Sometimes that moment of ‘discovery’ is quite clearly remembered. ‘My music teacher communicated to me that I was welcome to sing in the choir, just not on performance night’; ‘Our art teacher was a sarcastic man; he suggested to me that while the naive style was practised by many artists, first they had to learn to make it look like the thing they were drawing and then unlearn the rules. I never tried to draw again.’

While being creative is rightly connected with the arts, I tend to see it as a much wider human activity. Indeed, I’d boldly state that to be human is to be creative. While artists, musicians and actors are the creatives we think of most readily, teachers, builders and engineers, for example, can be hugely creative in all their various forms.

Creativity is an experimental activity. Small children do it naturally, acting out roles and bringing life to inanimate objects. But the socialisation processes of modern society, in the home, in educational settings, rarely stop to focus on the development and enhancement of the creative process. (I’m reminded of the lyrics of Harry Chapin’s ‘Flowers are Red‘.) And there begins the long constipating process. Life, vitality, energy, spontaneity can all begin to sludge up in our system when we abandon or refuse to see the creative spirit in human activity. When it gets really bad, even sex itself, the ultimate creative expression of human beings, can suffer.

Rather than a neat conclusion to this blog I thought I’d end this post with a challenge. How have you been creative this week?

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Why not visit my therapy website – therapy-place – where you can contact me or find further information about the therapies I provide for women, men and couples.

by Therapy place uk

Just call me …

Blogfind200

“Yes you’re right,” says Jessica, as we begin to talk for the first time about the process of therapy. “The only clues I’ve got,” she says, “are from TV sit coms and films.” We laugh together for a moment and then I begin a fairly routine explanation of what my work role as a therapist is.

First, what I am not. I’m not a psychiatrist. The Royal College of Psychiatrists* describes Psychiatry as a “medical speciality, like general practice, surgery, general medicine or paediatrics. You have to train for 5 years as a doctor and in the UK – like every other medical specialty – do 2 further years of ‘Foundation’ jobs in hospitals before you can start to specialise in psychiatry. It usually takes another 4 years to pass the two professional exams of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, after which you can specialise further.”

Although I studied some developmental psychology during my initial degree, I am also not a psychologist. A Clinical Psychologist (the type of psychologist you are most likely to encounter within an NHS setting) will have gained an undergraduate degree in psychology. Again, according to the Royal College of Psychiatrists, psychologists will have gained “further experience working in relevant healthcare settings[;] clinical psychologists then do 3 years Doctorate clinical training in an approved training scheme at university. During this time they work with patients under supervision from experienced psychologists and study for an academic doctorate as well as their first degree. They complete training placements with adults, children, older adults and people with learning difficulties.”

Historically, psychology has applied experimental approaches to exploring sates of the human mind. My shorthand for people is that psychiatrists are doctors of the mind and psychologists are scientists of the mind.

So back to what a psychotherapist is and isn’t …

“I’m not an analyst.”

“So I’m not going to be lying on a couch answering your questions,” says Jessica. “It’s not a Woody Allen film, then?“

Indeed, in my own twice-weekly analysis that lasted nearly 6 years I never laid down on a couch because even analysts don’t all do that.

“I am a therapist who deals with people’s internal mental and emotional issues and difficulties,” I continue. “Sometimes people are comfortable with me as their counsellor – a word that is derived from one who walks alongside. Other people I work with refer to me as their psychotherapist, from the Greek for ‘soul and healer’. Some think of me as their coach, and others come to me for hypnotherapy.**

“What I will actually do is sit in a chair opposite you and listen, talk and engage with you in a relational manner. In short we will have conversations about you, what course of action you might need to take, often what you have done or experienced in the past, how you see the world and your interactions with it, and where it is you are trying to get to. I work with all the issues a human can have problems with – including things that are really difficult to talk about such as sex, addiction, relationships, anxiety and bereavement. But I’m not a doctor of the mind and I’m not a scientist of the mind. I’m more an interpreter or an artist, helping you to construct your own canvas by pulling things from one place and sitting them somewhere else.”

“I call myself a therapist, but my professional registration*** says I am a counsellor/psychotherapist. You can just call me Duncan.”

* http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/

** I am fully qualified hypnotherapist and is registered with the General Hypnotherapy Register.

*** I am a fully qualified, registered and accredited BACP (British Association for Counselling and psychotherapy) counsellor/psychotherapist.

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Why not visit my therapy website – therapy-place – where you can contact me or find further information about the therapies I provide for women, men and couples.

by Therapy place uk

The transient existence of meaning and belonging

Connection200

The transient existence of meaning and belonging

29 June 2016

The midsummer light has finally faded around the edges of the blinds and I am sat within 3 metres of two of the most beautiful voices imaginable. As the climax of the final piece fades and the last statement of the main theme rolls from the trumpet bell, it is possible to anticipate what is about to happen within the venue. Almost in slow motion an eruption of connectedness pushes forth as cheers, shouts and bellows for an encore assault the very oxygen of St George’s concert hall, Bristol. The Unthank sisters, singers of extraordinary presence and warmth, are clearly moved by the reception, and for a few minutes I know I am truly alive – in the moment with every one of the 500 humans emoting in the space.

It is several hours before I can settle, but as I drift off to sleep I am already beginning to think about The Unthanks experience in terms of the wider psychology of human beings. I realise that the gig, and my weekend visit to my home city of Bristol, was about meaning and belonging. Viktor Frankl, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, put forward the idea that humans are driven to find meaning in life.

While many men and women naturally discover meaning, our perception of how much of it we have and/or need appears rather variable and subjective. From the therapist’s chair I witness that believing one’s life lacks meaning is correlated tightly with a number of negative mental health issues including stress, anxiety, depression and thoughts of suicide. Conversely, through therapy I see that people often find their pathway to meaning, which brings with it positive inner feelings and good mental health.

Research frequently focuses on meaning and belonging in connected ways. Social bonds and attachments are clearly tied to this research and are undoubtedly important for humans – so much so that, at certain points, our very survival is predicated upon it. Men and women commonly associate their social relationships as something that creates meaningfulness in their lives, and this is reported in several pieces of research. However, this view of meaning and belonging invariably leads us too often to understanding these issues in relational terms only.

It seems to me that there are other important ways of finding and internally holding our connections of meaning and belonging as a human being. It might be no surprise that I put forward the idea that the arts are one way in which we might build such a sense of belonging and meaning in life; that said, there is also the need for being part of ‘tribes’ whether they are found in sport through supporting a team or the simple acknowledgement of where one comes from … And here I am back with the Unthanks’ songs, deeply rooted and evocative of a culture and geography.

Fast forward to a wet Monday morning. The weekend has ebbed but the music, art and culture of my home city has filled me with a sense of meaning and belonging. Although I must return to Cambridge, it is my connection with my tribe in the West that helps me fully to understand exactly who I am. Beyond the more normal way of viewing meaning and belonging within relationships, I recognise that I have both these things dynamically alive within an internal map of connections built across time, culture and geography, and however present but transient artistic and cultural experiences of meaning and belonging might be, I realise the richness, depth and importance of its touch on people’s lives.

Why not read: Crying has an upside – for men and women alike

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Why not visit my therapy website – therapy-space – where you can contact me or find further information about the therapies I provide for women, men and couples.

 

by Therapy place uk

What are you living for now

JamWhat are you living for now

5 April 2016

It is a gloriously sunny spring afternoon and all I can see, as I walk away from the city centre of Cambridge, is an unending line of traffic queuing to make its way to an impossibly small number of parking spaces. I am aware that I feel very free, liberated, uplifted by the sunlight. But as my passage contraflows the stationary victims – would-be shoppers – I can’t help picking up on the silent messages of those stranded in their overheating metal boxes. Hands flex and contract as they grasp and ungrasp leather clad steering wheels. Passenger seats wriggle with adults and children, each stretched to breaking point by the seemingly endless wait to reach the junction of this road in order to join the main queue on the next one. Further along, the frustration has already erupted in road rage as a woman in a 4×4 mounts the pavement in a very unwise manoeuver. For a while my joyful mood is attenuated. I have stopped enjoying my journey (on foot) and begun to focus on getting to my goal, far away from this line of traffic. Without conscious passage, my head is cluttered with thoughts about the anxiety of modern life – something I’ve been meaning to write about for some while – and then my working mindset is to the fore.

From the communication style they’ve adopted, the male/female pair in the silver Merc look ready for a couples session. Come on! Shouting rarely gets listened to. The family in the people carrier could do with an anger management workshop. And will someone please hand the sports car driver a paper bag to breath into before he passes out!

For a few more metres I’m left wondering what this line of suffering stretching out in front of me is all about before the words of British philosopher and Zen exponent Alan Watts come to mind. In one of his engaging talks* he states: “You can’t live at all unless you can live fully now.” The point he is making is that it’s not the end goal that forms the major reward and provides the greatest pleasure, but the journey itself. And having engaged with this thought, I felt once more liberated, uplifted and grateful that I wasn’t sat in the traffic looking for anticipated reward in my shopping basket.

*If you can spare 2 minutes 22 seconds, you can listen to the rather inspirational way Alan Watts talks about life fully in the now.

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Why not visit my therapy website – therapy-space – where you can contact me or find further information about the therapies I provide for women, men and couples.

by Therapy place uk

When someone strays

Blog200Couple29 February 2016

Most people – whether through experience or empathy – can understand the range of feelings that go through someone’s mind and body when they discover their partner has, or is currently having, an affair. The event more often than not is experienced as a catastrophe by at least the wronged partner and it is common for all blame for the situation to be heaped on the straying partner.

From the therapist’s chair, affairs often look rather different. An affair, almost without exception, is actually a specific form of communication. In supposed monogamous relationships the fact that an affair has arisen suggests there might be evidence to support the idea that this is a relationship that has issues – and the underlying issues have probably developed over time. While it is very difficult to look beyond the pain of the immediate situation, couples who find their way to the consulting room tend to be providing themselves with an opportunity to really deal with their immediate and more longstanding problems.

One of the difficulties couples have to overcome when starting work, if an affair is the presenting issue, is avoidance. Avoidance is a strategy that rarely works in relationships and, while I don’t have space to go into any detail about it in this blog, it might be obvious to most people that avoiding an issue doesn’t mean it goes away. Indeed, a wide range of strategies of avoidance gets used between couples. One thing to bear in mind is that avoidance restricts resolution.

If you have discovered that your partner is having an affair, then I suggest you move more slowly with things than you might immediately feel driven to do. If you leave the relationship straight away you limit your opportunity for understanding what has happened and ultimately for your own repair.

Find yourself space. You are unlikely to want to go on sleeping in the same space as your partner for a while, but if you move too far away this is likely to fuel your anger and indignation. Try to reach a civil agreement that can work for a short time about how to use the space in your home.

Seek out some help, but be careful of other people’s moral judgements or advice. Therapists can be useful at a time like this because we don’t have to take sides. We tend to try to open up the picture so that understanding of the situation can be brought to bear, and the non-judgemental position can help make sense of the anger and rage that is commonplace at a time like this.

The process of working things through is actually just as likely to make you a stronger and closer couple than it is to split you up, providing you both want to work on the issues and are happy to look at not just your partner’s actions but also your own. Sadly, not every relationship can be brought back from the brink, but in thinking and talking together it is likely that even the decision to split will bring some positive benefits.

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Why not visit my therapy website – therapy-space – where you can contact me or find further information about the therapies I provide for women, men and couples.

by Therapy place uk

On being ignored, forgotten or abandoned

AttachmentblogOn being ignored, forgotten or abandoned

1 December 2015

From my window seat, I was enjoying watching the early Saturday coffee addicts flock into the café for their various flat whites, cappuccinos and espressos – or at least I was for the first ten minutes. But, during the next five, it was becoming increasingly clear to me that my friend had forgotten we were supposed to be meeting for a long overdue catch-up. At times like this, there is often a choice of internal conversations to follow, and by the time I’d sat for twenty minutes on my own I began to indulge a few childhood voices. Some remembered being ignored, others the embarrassment of being forgotten; and then came the memory most often worked on in my own twice-weekly analysis: the sorrow of abandonment. So, what are these often strong feelings based on?

In the very early months and years of our lives we build up particular ways of relating to people. This is referred to in the therapeutic world as our attachment pattern. The research into attachment patterns was originally conducted in relation to children and their parents.* These early attachment patterns are referred to as Secure, Avoidant, Ambivalent/Anxious and Disorganised. Later research has suggested equivalent patterns of attachment in adults to their significant intimate partners.** In other words, once attachment patterns are established it then becomes the way we relate in our intimate relationships.

People who had the opportunity to form Secure attachments as children also tend to form Secure attachments as adults. The Secure person has a desire for close connections with others and has a sense of a positive view of her or himself. Not surprisingly the Secure personality holds positive views about partners and their relationships.

The adult Dismissive personality is associated with those who had avoidant attachments as children. People with Dismissive personalities are largely characterised by being more separate, inward and isolated. Relationships and emotional life tend to be viewed as relatively unimportant. The cerebral takes precedence and feelings are suppressed – including distancing themselves from others.

Ambivalent/Anxious children often become Preoccupied personalities in adulthood. Self-critical and insecure, the Preoccupied adult seeks approval and reassurance from those around him/her even though this never provides the sought relief from self-doubt. In relationships, this type of personality imagines they will be further rejected which, in turn, creates more anxiety, over-dependence, lack of trust and emotional desperation.

The Fearful-Avoidant personality has its connections with the childhood Disorganised pattern of attachment: i.e. in childhood there was a detaching of feelings at times of trauma, and this persists into adulthood. There is a desire to be involved in relationships until the point at which the relationship develops emotional closeness. This becomes the trigger for the repressed feelings from early life to become live triggers in the here-and-now, which are then experienced as if they are happening in the present moment. This makes it very difficult to have a coherent sense of (your)self with the corollary that it makes intimate connections with others equally challenging.

By the time I left the café, it transpired I’d had quite a mental workout. Assured that I can still rely on my own Secure attachment, I wandered through the already stressed shoppers pondering whether my friend’s lie-in had been as interesting as my own solo coffee encounter. Perhaps, I thought, I should enjoy my own company more – but that might just have been the edge of some Dismissive personality traits talking.

* See Mary Ainsworth
** See Hazan and Shaver

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Why not visit my therapy website – therapy-space – where you can contact me or find further information about the therapies I provide for women, men and couples.

by Therapy place uk

Crying has an upside – for men and women alike

Cryblogsmall9 November 2015

It’s 8am on a cold early November morning and I’m not expecting to cry any time soon. In fact, I’m sat inside an incredible structure made from discarded and dormant materials, which itself sits inside the bombed-out remains of the 14th century Temple church in Bristol. Among a small group of people – some clearly on their way to work – my wife and I are listening to a band, toyface, who are part of Sanctum, a 24 hour-a-day, 24-day-long performance.

Visiting the city I was born and raised in – and still feel deeply tribal towards – there are always emotional triggers from my past to be found; the song being beautifully performed by the band suddenly triggers a deep emotion in me. And I want to cry. Despite the distractions of the fluxing audience, the music and lyrics of the powerful quartet of musicians speak deeply to something at my core. And yet, I’m still coded to my childhood upbringing half a century ago: ‘big boys don’t cry’.

I know the ‘big boy’s don’t…’ myth well, as men commonly apologise when their emotions release and they cry in my consulting room.

Although little is in fact known about the function of crying for humans, it appears that, according to Professor Ad Vingerhoets, a world leading expert on crying, on average women cry 30 to 64 times a year in comparison with 6 to 17 times a year for men.*

While I cry at the lowest end of the parameters of the quoted figures, I have rarely cried as an adult in a public setting and yet everything tells me this morning that toyface could do me a favour and offer a very therapeutic tear to slip out and relieve me of a few thoughts that the weekend has imposed on me.

A recent study by Asmir Gračanin** suggests that crying might indeed go a long way to making us feel better. The research team examined both the immediate and the delayed effect of crying on mood within a controlled laboratory setting. Immediately after watching two tear-jerking films, 28 participants who had cried and 32 who hadn’t were asked how they felt. They also had to rate their moods 20 and 90 minutes later.

The mood of the non-criers was unchanged and unaffected immediately after seeing the films. However, the mood of the group that cried was distinctively low. After 20 minutes, it was reported that their mood had returned to the level experienced before the screening. When asked again, after 90 minutes, the group that had cried reported a better mood than was the case before the films started.

My own call to personal emotional catharsis, while sitting in the Sanctum space, finally caused my eyes to fill but not to spill. For that to happen, I needed to be a man alone in the company of the downloaded track and my own safe space. I’m adding the track Motherlover to my iPod emotional triggers list. I encourage anyone to experience the purgation of a personal cry list. Think how good you might feel in 90 minutes’ time.

*Professor Vingerhoets also claims that women cry for an average of 6 minutes, while men cry for only 2 to 3 minutes.

**Gračanin, A. et al (2015). Why crying does and sometimes does not seem to alleviate mood: A quasiexperimental study, Motivation and Emotion.

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Why not visit my therapy website – therapy place – where you can contact me or find further information about the therapies I provide for women, men and couples.

by Therapy place uk

When to dwell on things

Dreamblogsmall20 August 2015

Rumination (the process of repetitive thoughts often but not always about a negative situation) is a common, if not universal human process. Most of us will have had the experience of finding it difficult to let go of certain types of thoughts at some point in our lives – perhaps things that are known unknowns like an upcoming business presentation or perhaps something in the recent past such as when one partner said something in the heat of an argument that really hurt the other, but was based on a level of truth both recognized.

What we know is that during the day, as we learn new things, a new connection forms in our brains between one nerve cell and another. As we sleep, this connection is strengthened forming a memory of the thing we learned while we were awake. This is very useful to know if, for example, you are studying and choose to do some trial answers in your head as you begin to drift off to sleep. However, what might be even more useful is to know that if you have traumatic memories or events it is a really good idea not to dwell on these issues before going to sleep because, if you do, this will tend to enforce the memory and strengthen the emotional fear response attached to it. Turning the results of this research on its head we can see that by attending to, and dwelling on, some of the positive memories and events of the day we can, for ourselves, cement and bolster positive experiences instead.1

So, just before you go to bed why not select a number of positive things you experienced during the day. Even simple things – e.g. reminding yourself how great the walk back from work was in the sun – will do and let your brain consolidate the positive memory and affect while you sleep. Sweet dreams!

1 Dr Hannah Critchlow, BBC Radio 4 ‘How to Have a Better Brain’ Sleep Ep4

by Therapy place uk

When the sex goes bad, make the talking good

Blog200Couple1 July 2015

Sadly, lots of people don’t feel very satisfied with what happens in their sex lives, and there are many reasons why it can go wrong. Sexual difficulties for men such as premature or delayed ejaculation (when they orgasm too quickly or, conversely, take too long to get there for the couple’s satisfaction) or issues for women like vaginismus (where they might not be able to let their partner enter, or find penetration painful) are common experiences for couples. When a couple suffers the issues rather than talking about them to try to work out the root of the difficulty, things can tend to get worse. Many common sexual issues can have organic, health-based origins or can be related to the use of some types of prescription drugs. Other difficulties can be psychological at their roots. Age and general health also often contribute to an individual or couple experiencing difficulties.

Additionally, sex can break down because relationships become stale or are challenged by life events. Over time, negative issues in sex lives build up because talking about your sex life often seems too difficult and challenging. Talking about your own intimate and personal experience, especially with the partner you share your life with, is a different type of talk for most people. No one really teaches us how to discuss a part of our lives that can make us, and our partner, feel unusually vulnerable. Add to this difficulties around intimacy for one partner due to, for example, a loss of trust based on infidelity, cheating, flirting or perhaps use or overuse of pornography, and you might begin to see why sexual activities fall into a rut or ‘just cool off’; rejection and blame are often quick to follow, and the sex cools further. No one dares to talk about the root issues – be they physical, emotional, psychological, cultural or even spiritual – that can affect what is or isn’t going on in the bedroom. And yet, that is where therapy can begin.

While you might perceive that talking to a therapist (a total stranger) about your sexual issues will be anxiety provoking (quite normal), or could be even worse than suffering in silence or living with the proverbial elephant in the room, the majority of people who talk to me as a couple or as individuals generally find it easier than they thought. I’ll always do my best to make clients feel comfortable: there are no ‘off-limits’ topics of discussion; you’ll always be treated with professional respect; and I’ll do my very best to facilitate the least stressful way of working with you. Therapy really can become ‘good talk’.

by Therapy place uk

Finding a good therapist

Blogfind2002 June 2015

I remember reading Canadian educationalist Allen Tough’s pioneering thoughts in the area of self-directed growth in adults and being inspired at the way most adult learning occurred in informal settings and ways. You could say that adults learn on a need-to-know basis. When you need to get a new car you read magazines, check the Internet, ask around your friends and family for their views, and if you are lucky enough to know a professional in the area you are ‘researching’ then you tend to ask them.

I’m tempted to say that the above pretty much all holds true for finding a therapist as well. But if I think back 20 years or so when I needed therapeutic help myself, I can all too easily remember how difficult it was to talk to people about such issues. Back in the early 90s society was still too wary of therapeutic help. It was also the pre-Internet world when counsellors and psychotherapists were more difficult to find. So, should you just rely on the Internet? Is it good enough to simply look someone up on a website and then hand over your emotional wellbeing to them?

If I were looking for a therapist today here’s what would be on my checklist before I started any sessions with them:
Are they registered and accredited by a respected professional organisation such as the BACP, UKCP or BPS?
Will they talk to you on the phone, by Skype or email before you book a session?
Are they experienced in working with the issues you want to work with? (This is particularly important in areas like sexual difficulties, as few general trainings offer enough input in this area.)
Is the therapist used to working with people in short-, medium- and/or long-term encounters? This might be very helpful in matching your needs with the therapist’s skill set.
Has your prospective therapist had their own therapy? (It might seem odd but not all models of therapy require therapists to undertake their own therapy, while some will simply have done the minimum required by a training course. I’d find it odd to have therapy with someone who hadn’t been in the chair themselves.)

Above all, don’t be persuaded that someone is a good therapist because they have a lot of letters after their name. Studies show that once core requirements of education and training have been met, the effectiveness of the therapist is not dictated by their qualifications.

To my mind, all therapists should be looking to make a good match to the people they are going to work with. Again, studies support the view that it is the quality of the relationship that really helps therapy work. So, it follows that I always offer a no-obligation initial session.

Finally, go with your gut feeling and, if it doesn’t feel right in the room, shop around.