Tim Hill

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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’.

In a recent book, Bernard Brandchaft explores this issue in depth. He builds a compelling picture of what it is, how it arises and how therapists can work to help their clients that suffer from it. Pathological accommodation is often a very deep pattern and can impact our home and working life. You see it all the time.

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.

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.

We would certainly like to be our own people. We want to be accountable to ourselves and to be able to have our own thoughts and feelings without the fear that will be judged for them or criticised or forced to act in ways which we don't want to act. Moreover, for those of us that have been dominated in the past by other people, the need to establish independence is a primary goal. We believe that is only when we had this independence to think, feel and act that we start to live our lives for ourselves.

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.

When we consider a definition of what boredom is, the words that come closest to describe it are ‘disinterest’ and ‘under-stimulation’. Both of these are low-energy types of feelings, and you can imagine someone who is bored wanting to shift their attention to something that is more interesting for them.

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.

Implicit in this is the concern that giving your children too much will make them irresponsible, ungrateful and demanding of more. We are afraid that our help – given with the best of intentions – will make things worse for them rather than better.

In a previous post, I have discussed affects in general. Today, in the fifth of an occasional series, I look at ‘Anger-Rage’.

If you are just joining me here, a quick recap is in order. We all have affects; they are the normal responses of our body connected to our feelings. Our feelings are an internal sign that an affect has been triggered. Let’s take fear as an example; when we ‘feel’ fear in our bodies – a dropping of our stomach, waves of nausea – that’s an internal indication that the affect of ‘Fear-Terror’ has been activated. We have no control over our affects at all; if strong enough, they can almost take us over. If a particular pattern of brain activity is experienced, then the affect will be triggered automatically.

In a recent blog post I talked about the value of keeping your defences. This time, let’s reflect on what might be possible from a series of counselling or psychotherapy sessions. Many people come to counselling or psychotherapy with the hope of making some changes that will help with their immediate problems, so it is sometimes surprising to them that it can offer more.

Counselling and psychotherapy certainly has the potential to help you with what’s on your plate right now. Whether it is a problem with a relationship, with work or dealing with some aspect of your personality that’s troubling you, there are some times in your life when it can help to talk to someone to get things back on track.

In popular culture we sometimes told that couples should solve their problems through making a deal. I’ll agree to do this, if you agree to do that. It’s seen as a compromise and a win–win solution; however the results can be unexpected. Perhaps there is a better way.

Take Sam and Lee. In this picture, you have a couple who are both a little – or perhaps very – unhappy with the other person, and want something about this person to change. The content is the stuff of everyday life; Sam wants Lee to stop smoking -

It’s very common for us to want to change our thought patterns or behaviours. We can be uncomfortable with these aspects of ourselves, and find that other people criticise us for these thoughts and behaviours too. Change seems like the solution - however, it might be that another approach might be more useful.

Typically the things that we would like to change are the things that we do to defend ourselves. These defensive behaviours might include withdrawing from arguments,

When we sit down and really think about how different our lives are from how we would like them to be, the task of change starts to seem enormous. Relationships, family, work all seem to have their shortcomings. What hope is there if there are so many problems?

Self Psychology theory offers us hope by asking us to concentrate on one thing at a time.

Advances in neuroscience have given us a lot of fascinating information about the brain that we didn’t previously know and this knowledge has the potential to profoundly change the way that we think about ourselves. It also has interesting implications for psychotherapy.

Some of these advances cover the way the brain develops and is influenced by our life experiences. Previously, we did not have a lot of detailed understanding about how the brain functioned, but we made a lot of advances in the later years of the 20th century.

A common controversy regarding human development centres around two opposing ideas about what makes people who they are – are we the people that we are due to our inbuilt nature, or is it because of the nurturing we have received? Or some mixture of the two? I think it’s more than just that.

This question has been in people’s minds for a long time. Historically, it was commonly thought that people were largely the product of their unvarying, inbuilt nature, with our personalities given to us by our genes.

The topic of ‘how do you best raise a child?’ is one that highly interests new parents, and one where different opinions about what to do and how to do it abound. After all, we have all had the experience of being a child and many have had the experience of being a parent. Questions such as when and how often do you comfort a child, the role of discipline, the giving of support and many others are hotly debated and widely divergent opinions are held. No wonder it is an area of confusion for new parents.