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27 October 2019

Anger and rage

Some forms of anger are necessary for our survival

There are occasions when anger is perfectly justified. When it is contained, it is a reasonable and necessary response to certain situations. For most people, feeling angry is the exception to their norm.

When difficulties arise

Problems occur when conflict is a way of life and rage, the first line of defence. It is not always clear who or what is being defended against. All too often, sufferers are unable to think. They are either on the brink, or in the grip, of anger.

Anger as a hallmark of personality

Family circumstances can have a part to play in stoking our rage. On the other hand, a calm and loving background is no guarantee against a temperament shaped by an angry society. While on the streets, knife crime is soaring (1), we daily observe our politicians gnashing their teeth, goading us against each other and against any scapegoat imagined to threaten our identity or our livelihood (2).

If we feel bullied, powerless, oppressed, racially or sexually abused, we can become hostile in our very being. We not only direct our anger at those triggers that incite us, we become angry as a hallmark of personality.

“The only stability I feel, the only worth I feel, is when I’m angry – and that’s why I’m angry all the time.”

Such anger may be open and violent, or it may be expressed in various forms of passive aggression. Whatever form your anger takes, it is only in being angry and behaving angrily, that some people feel properly themselves.

In such cases, angry behaviour is rarely a free choice. When others are experienced as destabilising, it is only in being angry that sufferers are able to stand their ground, to feel they have potency (3), and a solid sense of who they are.

Giving up anger can be as frightening and as vulnerable as having to face its consequences.

How psychoanalytic psychotherapy can help

Psychoanalytic psychotherapy can provide a safe and containing space in which to understand why and how anger becomes a way of life. Psychotherapy is distinguished from other forms of therapy in that it facilitates a process of self-regulation through self-understanding, with the potential for fundamental change.

The therapeutic relationship provides the conditions for internal growth. It will help you to develop a more robust and integrated self, that no longer jumps to anger in order to assert itself.

(1)“London recorded the highest rate of 169 offences involving a knife per 100,000 population in 2018/19, an increase of 1 offence per 100,000 population from 2017/18”.

House of Commons Library Knife Crime Statistics, published Thursday, October 3^rd, 2019.

(2) Morgan, D, 2016, How Psychoanalysis can make sense of Brexit, in International Blog Archive, LSE.

(3)Menninger, Walter W., (2007), A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Violence in Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic: Vol. 71, (pp115-131)

27 October 2019

Loss and bereavement

giolpt Psychoanalytic Perspective

Healing requires us to grieve

Being able to move beyond our loss depends on the tools we have to contain it.

Healing requires us to grieve. The need to grieve not only applies to someone who has passed away. It applies equally to a loved (or not loved) person who is alive but no longer there. Grieving is a natural process that usually requires no interference or professional help. (1)

Resolving feelings and gaining closure

Despite the passing of time, some people find themselves unable to move on. They remain stuck in powerful and conflicting feelings from a relationship in which something has not been resolved.

The lost person cannot help us to heal, while without their gaze, or their acknowledgment, we feel that we can’t achieve closure on our own.

The link between loss and depression

So what have we been doing with these difficult feelings? Problems occur when our loss fuels an endless cycle of intrusive thoughts and emotional pain. When this happens, it is likely that depression, and not grieving, has taken root. Depression prevents us from grieving, either for the lost other or for ourselves.

How psychoanalytic psychotherapy can help

Psychoanalytic psychotherapy can help to resolve and relieve disturbing feelings that your loss may have triggered. The therapeutic process facilitates your ability to grieve, supporting you to heal from the pain and disorientation of loss.

You will be helped to grieve for the lost other, for the investment and time you spent. Or for that vulnerable part of you that is linked in some way to the person who is no longer there.

(1) Freud, S., 1917. Mourning and Melancholia. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, Vol XIV. Strachey, James ed. 2001. Vintage pp 243 – 258

27 October 2019

Anxiety

giolpt Psychoanalytic Perspective

Your anxiety is unique

The question of anxiety is central to the work of psychoanalysis. It is only in the context of who you are, where you come from and of the therapeutic relationship, that we can begin to understand what anxiety means for you personally.

Be that as it may, anxiety broadly falls within certain classifications. Here I focus on those that emerge in my clinical practice:

Realistic Anxiety

Realistic anxiety (1) is the healthy mechanism by which we avert a threat, or potential threat, that is real: (eg, avoiding an accident while driving; to redouble our efforts in order to meet a deadline). Realistic anxiety is necessary to spur us on to strive or survive.

Generalised Anxiety Disorder

Difficulties arise when anxiety has become a fact of our internal life and the backdrop to how we experience ourselves and external situations. It is a latent state of foreboding, a chorus of disapproval that throbs in the head and chest. Generalised anxiety sees danger where none exists and it takes offence where none is intended.

Panic Disorder

When unexpected and repeated episodes of intense fear are accompanied by physical symptoms.

Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

PTSD can develop after exposure to a terrifying event or ordeal in which grave physical harm has occurred or was threatened.

Social Anxiety

This is characterised by overwhelming fear and excessive self-consciousness in every-day social situations. Social anxiety is closely linked to shame and it perceives a latent or active threat in other people’s judgment.

The conflict is within ourselves

Those who suffer from anxiety are likely to be projecting their own internal state onto their surroundings. The world is experienced as a frightening place. Psychoanalysis seeks to explore the internal conflict, to understand its mechanisms and to dismantle old patterns of feeling and thinking that hold us in subjection.

Problems stored in the unconscious

Psychoanalysis looks for underlying causes. For example, what may have begun as a realistic anxiety in the past (in the case of a persecutory caregiver, or of having been bullied at school), may now have become a distorting prism through which the sufferer perceives themselves and the world around them.

Understanding and processing how and why your anxiety has evolved, (bringing what is unconscious into consciousness), is the first step to ultimately unburdening yourself of this powerful internal saboteur.

Ways psychoanalysis can help

Psychoanalytic psychotherapy is a process by which you will develop and improve the relationship you have with yourself. It nurtures internal growth, eventually dismantling as untenable what have evolved as inhibiting thoughts and feelings that dominate our internal and external lives.

Creating a new narrative

Psychoanalysis seeks to reset those distortions of perception that make us anxious as a way of being. Moreover you will discover over time that your development through the work in turn elicits new ways in which the world interacts with you.

(1) Freud, S., (1917) Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis in The Standard Edition of Complete Psychological Works, Vol XVI. Strachey, James ed. 2001. Vintage p392

27 October 2019

Depression

giolpt Psychoanalytic Perspective

If we could only be sad

For most, sadness, when it occurs, ebbs away. Depression on the other hand, is a constant.

If you suffer from depression you may be unable to take pleasure or make use of what is good. It can feel like a dull pain, a ‘manageable’ burden, that bleeds through all you say and do.

Depression can prevent you from leaving the house, to go out to work, or be able to love. Some people surrender to depression in despair, taking refuge in suicidal thoughts. Others seek escape through destructive behaviours.

Sufferers blame themselves

While not everyone can put their finger on why they are depressed, sufferers generally blame themselves.

Your depression may be linked to someone else

Through psychotherapy, you will be able to trace a route to the origins of your depression. At this buried depth, it often emerges that your depression is unconsciously linked to someone else.

You may already have a good idea of who it is. But how they impact on your internal life and to what extent, has yet to be understood.

How psychoanalysis can help

Psychoanalytic psychotherapy will help you to understand your unconscious mental processes. These determine your thoughts, actions and feelings. To know where your depression stems from, how it operates and to find the language to work it through. As a result of the internal changes that therapy supports, you can develop the selfhood, optimism and resilience to be free of depression.