Tim's blog
I was recently asked by a friend to comment on a quote from a TV show;
"Hi Tim, I am curious for your comments on this quote..."Not everybody has to be happy all the time. That's not mental health. That's crap." ... I don't know the TV show though so not interested in the context."
I have recently been re-watching the HBO mini-series ‘Band of Brothers’ (and concurrently reading the original account written by Stephen Ambrose). It is a true story, and follows a group of American paratroopers through their training and some of the most significant battles of 1944 and 1945. I have been quite struck how the account of their experiences seem to reinforce some of today’s key contemporary psychological understandings.
Watching the U.S. Masters golf on TV on Monday, I was struck by a couple of things.
We all have secrets. At our core, there are things that we just don’t want other people to know and we hold onto these secrets for all we are worth. Along with this there is a popular perception that we should be telling our secrets, and that a life without secrets is what we should be aspiring to. I don’t agree.
Updated: Sometimes in a couple – let’s call them Sam and Lee – you might find one of them seems quite calm and the other might seem quite anxious. It would be natural to think that the calm one – let’s say Sam – would eventually, over the course of the relationship, help Lee become less anxious. However, there’s a lot more to it than that.
This can be such a difficult time of year. Not only are there expectations about buying gifts for people, but it is very common to feel a requirement to see other people that we don’t much enjoy, or to spend time in activities that aren’t pleasurable to us. In this sense, Christmas can seem like the season of obligation, not celebration.
We all understand that we have a conscious and an unconscious part of our mind. This distinction goes back to the earliest days of psychoanalysis. Similarly, we all know that we have access to the conscious part but not to the unconscious part, yet both contribute to the complete picture of who we are. However, fascinating research suggests is that we all have more than one unconsciousness.
Many of us know the feeling – the pull to do what another person wants and to let our own needs take a back seat. Whilst to put another person first can be a generous and courteous thing, when it becomes compulsive and our own needs become impossible to assert, we may well be in the grip of what can be termed ‘pathological accommodation’.
So many people have independence, particularly psychological independence, as their goal; it is seen as the logical and inevitable end-point for the maturation of an adult. However, this ideal – and what ‘independence’ might actually mean - is worthy of some critical examination before we pursue it.
A question that often comes up for parents is the notion of spoiling. ‘How can I give my child all that I want to give them, to ease their path through life and to make them happy without spoiling them?’ It seems like a real dilemma, as we hope to simultaneously help them, but we also want to instil respect for their own abilities to achieve things. It’s a tricky road to navigate, and we can be concerned about the effect that our actions will have on them when they are adults.
We all know what it is like to have strong feelings and the way that they can take us over. When these feelings are those such as anger, pain, shame or outrage, they can seem like a private hell that no-one else can penetrate. However, all might not be as it seems.
If you have an addiction, you have many good reasons to want to quickly have it dealt with and behind you so you can get on with life. This is understandable, as addictions exact a high – and ever increasing – cost from those that are addicted. However, this might not always be the best way.
One of the things that bring people to psychotherapy are their addictions. Whether the addiction is to a substance or to a form of behaviour, we want to loosen the hold that these addictions have on us. We hope that we can get to a place where we have no addictions and be free. However, along the way it is often necessary to understand what we get from the things we are addicted to and to face the uncomfortable truth that the addictions sometimes ‘work’ for us.
If you are in the middle of dealing with your own difficulties, then it can be harder to focus on the difficulties of others. It seems that you need all of your resources just to deal with what is happening to you. Even if another person close to us is experiencing real need, our perception of the importance of those needs can get blunted. I feel there are important reasons to fight this – and good ways to fight it too.
A good way to start the year might be to consider the purpose of counselling / psychotherapy. For many people who seek help, the answer is pretty straightforward – they are in distress, they don’t know what to do and they want someone to give them immediate help with what they are going through. Knowing this, we counsellors and psychotherapists respond as best we can.
Ask anyone what would make them happy and you’re likely to get an answer in terms of how much money it would take to make them happier; “If I had fifty thousand / five hundred thousand / five million dollars, then I’d be happy” and then you’re likely to get told about what they would do with that money – paying off debts, bigger houses, overseas trips. However, it might be that some level of happiness is nearer to hand than this.
Mention climate change, immigration or the Occupy movement and you’ll hear a lot of strong opinions both for and against. People take up passionate positions on these and many other issues, and it isn’t often that you hear of people changing their minds – yet we sometimes come to our opinions in surprising ways. When we look more closely at this phenomenon it can give us a real insight into the way we are in a whole range of areas.
We all know the popular theory; being left brained means being more logical and structured, being right brained means being more creative and emotional. However, these theories of brain function have been debunked since they first caught the public’s imagination. There is now a different yet equally fascinating picture of how brain function is split between the different hemispheres.
You can frequently hear people in our social circles or in the media talk about being bored. They can be bored by other people’s opinions, bored with their lives, bored with politics, music, other people, being lonely, the weather, being at home, being out and so forth. It’s quite a common thing to say, so much so that it seems you can be bored with anything. However, in many cases it is possible the person is actually not bored at all.
