The air seems thick with argument post-referendum. We are told we are a divided nation. Listened to Labour's John McDonnell this morning on radio telling us that we need to come together, and that Labour will lead the way. He is not the first and won't be the last. As someone remarked, the sentiment can begin to sound downright threatening! You will do as you're told and come together, or else . . .
First of all, I notice that we remain standing despite it all. Yes, a few individuals have resorted to violence, and some to inflammatory racist dialogue, but it was ever thus. Some people cannot settle an argument without shouting or fisticuffs. I sympathise with the shouting (though don't advocate it) but haven't much time for the fisticuffs. We have laws, rightly, to deal with that sort of approach to public discourse, and I just hope it is being taken seriously by those whose task it is to enforce them. Mainly, however, we are arguing heatedly, at times furiously, but within the bounds of civilised behaviour. The nation has not fallen apart, my neighbours are still talking to me, and politics has become interesting again, if somewhat hectic.
Underneath the debate about whether we remain in the single market, whether we jettison the free movement of labour, what our prospects are in a World Trade context, is perhaps a deeper debate, to which many analysts are struggling to give a name. What I am hearing is a strange mixture of anxiety, sometimes paranoid, shed-loads of mistrust, a lot of anger, plus a certain kind of exhilaration about being let off the leash at last!
The latter element is interesting me quite a lot. Could it be that the British, whose culture has been buttoned up for a century in the eyes of the rest of the world, have finally shrugged off the inhibitions that have told us, time and time again, to say nothing - to be polite at all costs - and never to talk about controversial things? I declare an interest - it's the part of being British that I have always disliked the most. Not being able to say what you are feeling or thinking in a genuine, honest way, has not played well with the health of our society in my opinion. Ultimately, remaining buttoned up has made it hard for us to achieve real intimacy in our relationships. To be close involves us, of necessity, in being frank. I am not talking about sex, as some people seem to think as soon as the word 'intimacy' is uttered, though, of course, our sexual relationships are very much involved in our ability to be intimate. I'm speaking about the business of being emotionally open - being able to say, "I'm sad, I'm angry, I'm depressed, I'm furious" et al. In a word, just to say, "This is how I feel." That we don't do this easily in this country has led to the cinderella status of the mental health services, to the lack of firm public support for psychotherapy and counselling services, and, worse, to the time it has taken for abused and mistreated people to feel able to complain about what they have suffered. The sight of other people saying just how they feel can evoke an astonishing amount of feeling. Years of being buttoned up can quickly lead to a splurge of ventilated feelings. For some, the feeling it evokes is rage. Feelings are coruscated as 'mushy', 'sentimental', 'inappropriate in a public place' and so on. It is quite intolerable, isn't it?
Well, not really. It is misguided sometimes, and misplaced in others. But just as we can get it wrong in regard to a whole hosts of behaviours from time to time, it is only a mistake, after all - not a hanging offence. Perhaps you opened your mouth too hastily when moved by a sense of fury about what someone said in a meeting. And afterwards regretted it. Or possibly you told your spouse a couple of home truths that you had been harbouring for too long. And wish you hadn't said it. I think we all need to get over this kind of guilt and sometimes shame. These are toxic responses, and far worse for us than what we actually said in the end. It can be sufficiently hard to get over it to warrant some professional help. But that's fine too. Nothing to hang your head in abject horror about! Do what you need to do for you, is my best advice. And worry not to so much about what other people may think!
The Americans have unfortunately given us a dubious example of emotional openness for years. Many of them take the opposite view to us, it seems - the more you lay your feelings on the line, the more popular you are. The backlash from a British audience to this kind of public display can reinforce our conviction that it is better and safer to stay buttoned up. But both of us are in the wrong, it seems to me. We are far too buttoned up for our mental good, and the Americans are too all hung out about everything for theirs. There is no particular virtue in failing to be able to express an honest feeling. And equally, there is no cosmic brownie point to be awarded for transparently wallowing in insincere feelings - what a friend of mine calls 'cosmic wanking.' What really matters is the genuineness of the feeling. Feeling something in itself is neither virtue nor vice. It's normal and human, like eating and sleeping. It's what we do as members of the race. The hard part is being able to distinguish the phoney from the true, in what we hear and what we speak. Artists have helped us, I think, in being able to spot the phoney, and the better the artist the more helpful they have been. But wherever the help comes from, we need all the help we can get in this area.
I have noticed that men who often find it particularly hard to express feeling can be emotionally galvanised by football. It seems there is something about eleven men kicking a ball around that arouses passion - and passion is not my word, but the word frequently chosen by football supporters and commentators when they want to confer the highest admiration they can imagine. Equally, the worst criticism you can make of a footballer is that s/he lacks passion. In sport, generally, I suspect, we of the buttoned up culture have found an outlet for our suppressed and often repressed feelings. It cannot be accidental that the national game, football, has struggled hardest with the kind of behaviour that is pretty much outlawed elsewhere in society.
So has the EU exit changed the national culture is my question? I think we need to calm down a bit and remember that change is a process, not an event! I think something has begun, indeed. For many people, feelings have spilled over their usual confined spaces deep within psyches, and come out yelling and furious, sad, depressed, triumphant, excited, badly shaken. When this happens, a process begins but is not concluded. Not yet, by a long chalk. The important thing about having said whatever you said, is that you don't then retreat into a sulk or walk away to tend to the cabbages and refuse to open the topic ever again! This is really tantalising behaviour, sometimes downright tyrannical. It seems to say, "I have said what's important, and I have no intention of listening to your reply!" If you want to say something difficult and possibly destabilising to a relationship (and 'I'm for leaving' qualifies, believe me!) then you had better say it. But equally, do not expect to the person thus told to say, "Ok, then," and walk away likewise and never refer to it again! Some of those who desperately want to exit the EU seem to regard what they said when they voted as the final word of God on all things. Sorry, but there is no such thing. Once you open a dialogue ('dialogue = a conversation between two or more people'), you have some responsibility to expect that dialogue to continue. To facilitate a space, indeed, where that dialogue can continue. And have the patience to listen, as you are being listened to.
Refusal to take part in an ongoing dialogue often has a lot to do with sheer fear. Fear that one may still lose the argument. That somehow the other party will get the better of you. That you may not be articulate enough to find the words you need to defend your case. That the power balance will turn out to be as unequal as you always imagined. Well, these are all risks of dialogue, all right. The same risks that any kind of relationship poses. But they have a chance, at least, of leading to some kind of resolution of conflict. At worst, they offer relief from living a buttoned-up kind of existence, which is painful. And a not unimportant consideration is that if you want to get better at expressing yourself, you need practice! Which means accepting that part of your learning will sometimes be getting it wrong, going over the top or even on occasion making a fool of yourself. Why is it that we would expect to be told to practice if we wanted to learn golf, but never seem to imagine that we need to practice talking to others? That we might need practice in expressing feelings, especially difficult ones. That choosing the right words is not a gift divinely conferred, but one that comes out of years of making an effort?
Being able to listen is often the heart of a psychotherapy exchange. Among other things, it helps us to orient ourselves towards the task of simply talking about ourselves, that hasn't had much chance to flourish earlier in life. If you had buttoned up parents, you are very likely to grow up a buttoned up kid. A lot of earlier behaviour and thinking needs unlearning. But also we need experience of actually listening to ourselves talking. Hearing my own voice at work is powerful - it can make me feel different, like a person of some importance with a mind of her own. It helps me to feel that what I mind about is worth saying.
So it seems that one part of the country has a lot to say to the other part. And we haven't really been listening well to each other, perhaps for a long time. So if the time is now, then let the dialogue continue, by all means, and let's not get too worked up about it. I suggest a moratorium on the demand that we come together. This seems to me to be like the voice of the teacher in the playground, demanding that this battle cease at once! I don't think we need to tell anybody what to do, really. Perhaps just allow a period of unusually heated discussion! From such dialogues something emerges, in my experience, eventually. Which will probably turn out to be surprising.
Sunday 11 December 2016
Monday 21 November 2016
Sacred truth
The word 'truth' is unusually around in our cyber- and other spaces. The word 'post-truth' has been declared word of the year by those who write dictionaries. A Times correspondent described 'post-truth' as lying - it's that simple. My generation can call a spade a spade, he declares. There is much generalised anxiety around about the idea that perhaps we are increasingly being fooled into misperceptions, to the extent that we are no longer in touch with reality. Do we all live in a Matrix, or a Truman Show kind of world in which we are 'normalised' into believing that what is real is not in fact real at all?
This idea is not new - what is? I recall a great sci-fi writer of another generation (E F Russell) who wrote about our planet as in fact a scientific experimental laboratory, run by aliens of far greater advancement than us in knowledge. Little did we know that they might call a halt to the experiment at any time . . . .
All such perspectives seem to be grounded in huge anxieties, which we don't care to admit to often, that we are in fact unimportant little creatures, dots upon dots upon dots, frequently way off beam, who take ourselves fantastically seriously without just cause. Are we Hamlet's 'the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals,' or are we 'this quintessence of dust?'
We could engage with this argument at great length - possibly arriving at very little useful conclusion. It's narcissistic in its essence - born of the need to feel like 'the Great I Am' and the fear of not being. Equally, we could say, 'why does it matter?' The why question is what often comes up in psychotherapy. I find that people want to know whether they are important or not - whether they are valuable, whether they are valued. And the reason they want to know is because nobody has given them much to go on in the past. The parental job, among other things, is to help your children find their own worth and feel confident in it. But often parents have too little sense of self-worth themselves, and cannot transmit to their children what they never had themselves. They themselves are confused and uncertain in this difficult world. Do they matter? Do their children matter?
The ultimate cop-out is to say, 'What is truth anyway?' as Pilate did. I can't really blame him, in the difficult world of Judean and Roman politics of the first century. But it is a cop-out in the sense that shoving aside the existence of truth is meant to relieve you of responsibility. I didn't actually lie to you - I just told you the version that suited us both at the time! It's an attempt to escape from that responsibility by shelling the very idea of truth. Deny truth and you are free to say whatever you like.
The fact is, though, that we have always been free to say whatever we like. Haven't we? What curtails our freedom, or appears to, is the world of consequences. Patients who struggle with a powerful sense of being in chains - being denied the right to their point of view, being controlled, being shut in, shut down, shut up - are sometimes demanding the impossible, namely the right to say and be whatever they want without any consequences. Yet, provided you are prepared to accept the consequences you can do and be and say anything you like. But consequences there will often be! It takes courage to accept the consequences of your behaviour, because you feel that what you have to do or say is that important. It is the essence of the struggle to be a self in a world that is over-peopled with other selves also struggling in the same way. If you want to be free to commit crimes, don't expect them not to put you in jail! If you want to stay in bed mornings, don't expect them to forgive you for being late for school! What these struggles are about, it seems to me, is the immensely difficult task of finding your place in the world, where you are not a lone wolf but one of a community. You can have your share, but you cannot have it all. Not without consequences.
But are there always consequences you may wonder? It can be a desperately unfair world where some people seem to get away with no consequences at all for their behaviour. I think the word 'seem' is important here. You may lie and cheat and not get found out, it is true - but you yourself will find you out. The idea that life is a breeze if you play by no rules and collar all the bonuses is wrong, or at least a partial truth. There is always the overhanging fear that one day . . . . someone will find you out. Justice has a long arm in a world where records are always left somewhere of everything we do. Abused children grow up and get courage to spill the beans. Investigative journalists expose fraudulent behaviour that goes back decades. You are always having to cover your tracks. Always having to make excuses, think up fresh lies and deceptions. The quality of relationships is tarnished by lying and deception. You imagine that nobody knows - that it is your dark secret. And then you find out that everybody knows! Has been treating you differently from way back as a person who cannot be trusted. All hope of real closeness, of intimacy, goes out of the window. You inhabit a phoney world where nobody is expected to be real, to be in the now. You have put yourself in the Matrix, in the Truman Show, willingly! And this is a fate worse than death.
A particular issue for a lot of people, I find, is struggling for the right to say things - find a voice and use it in people-to-people situations. If they could do that, they probably wouldn't need psychotherapy! But their fear is too great. Won't people be angry with them for disagreeing? Won't they lose their closest relationships and be abandoned? Won't they be unpopular? (This is a particularly powerful fear in teenagers - a fate they can only gasp with horror at!) I don't dismiss such fears as trivial. Not at all. But you tend to find with experience that being disliked in one quarter gets you rather liked better in another. Also, being abandoned is actually not the worst thing that can happen to you (I exclude childhood of course in this). It may be that, having got rid of some deadwood in your life, you may have cleared the first space in your life to do something for yourself alone. Imagined consequences may turn out quite differently from what you thought. Imagination plays tricks, enables our internal worlds to speak many varieties of untruth to us - to whisper in our ears all sorts of negative stuff.
So I want to speak up on the side of truth as being psychologically healthy, if nothing else. However, there are caveats worth thinking about also. It pays to be thoughtful about what truth actually is. Very few truths are sacred and inviolable. Truth is not perception. We are creatures of perception - we tend to think that what we perceive to be happening is the only truth there is. Keep an open mind to the possibility that your perception may differ from that of other people - and that neither may be wholly wrong. Check out the facts. Do the work of a good journalist and make sure you know the event history. Social media don't seem to mind whether you have checked anything or not. Everything that is said is presumed to be the case. And a lot of people seem to be be extremely gullible. "It was in the papers" was once a common self-defense against being challenged. Not now. But 'it was on Twitter' has become an easy substitute. Time we became harder to fool. Time we came to value truth more highly. The alternative is to join the world of The Truman Show and not even know you're doing it.
This idea is not new - what is? I recall a great sci-fi writer of another generation (E F Russell) who wrote about our planet as in fact a scientific experimental laboratory, run by aliens of far greater advancement than us in knowledge. Little did we know that they might call a halt to the experiment at any time . . . .
All such perspectives seem to be grounded in huge anxieties, which we don't care to admit to often, that we are in fact unimportant little creatures, dots upon dots upon dots, frequently way off beam, who take ourselves fantastically seriously without just cause. Are we Hamlet's 'the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals,' or are we 'this quintessence of dust?'
We could engage with this argument at great length - possibly arriving at very little useful conclusion. It's narcissistic in its essence - born of the need to feel like 'the Great I Am' and the fear of not being. Equally, we could say, 'why does it matter?' The why question is what often comes up in psychotherapy. I find that people want to know whether they are important or not - whether they are valuable, whether they are valued. And the reason they want to know is because nobody has given them much to go on in the past. The parental job, among other things, is to help your children find their own worth and feel confident in it. But often parents have too little sense of self-worth themselves, and cannot transmit to their children what they never had themselves. They themselves are confused and uncertain in this difficult world. Do they matter? Do their children matter?
The ultimate cop-out is to say, 'What is truth anyway?' as Pilate did. I can't really blame him, in the difficult world of Judean and Roman politics of the first century. But it is a cop-out in the sense that shoving aside the existence of truth is meant to relieve you of responsibility. I didn't actually lie to you - I just told you the version that suited us both at the time! It's an attempt to escape from that responsibility by shelling the very idea of truth. Deny truth and you are free to say whatever you like.
The fact is, though, that we have always been free to say whatever we like. Haven't we? What curtails our freedom, or appears to, is the world of consequences. Patients who struggle with a powerful sense of being in chains - being denied the right to their point of view, being controlled, being shut in, shut down, shut up - are sometimes demanding the impossible, namely the right to say and be whatever they want without any consequences. Yet, provided you are prepared to accept the consequences you can do and be and say anything you like. But consequences there will often be! It takes courage to accept the consequences of your behaviour, because you feel that what you have to do or say is that important. It is the essence of the struggle to be a self in a world that is over-peopled with other selves also struggling in the same way. If you want to be free to commit crimes, don't expect them not to put you in jail! If you want to stay in bed mornings, don't expect them to forgive you for being late for school! What these struggles are about, it seems to me, is the immensely difficult task of finding your place in the world, where you are not a lone wolf but one of a community. You can have your share, but you cannot have it all. Not without consequences.
But are there always consequences you may wonder? It can be a desperately unfair world where some people seem to get away with no consequences at all for their behaviour. I think the word 'seem' is important here. You may lie and cheat and not get found out, it is true - but you yourself will find you out. The idea that life is a breeze if you play by no rules and collar all the bonuses is wrong, or at least a partial truth. There is always the overhanging fear that one day . . . . someone will find you out. Justice has a long arm in a world where records are always left somewhere of everything we do. Abused children grow up and get courage to spill the beans. Investigative journalists expose fraudulent behaviour that goes back decades. You are always having to cover your tracks. Always having to make excuses, think up fresh lies and deceptions. The quality of relationships is tarnished by lying and deception. You imagine that nobody knows - that it is your dark secret. And then you find out that everybody knows! Has been treating you differently from way back as a person who cannot be trusted. All hope of real closeness, of intimacy, goes out of the window. You inhabit a phoney world where nobody is expected to be real, to be in the now. You have put yourself in the Matrix, in the Truman Show, willingly! And this is a fate worse than death.
A particular issue for a lot of people, I find, is struggling for the right to say things - find a voice and use it in people-to-people situations. If they could do that, they probably wouldn't need psychotherapy! But their fear is too great. Won't people be angry with them for disagreeing? Won't they lose their closest relationships and be abandoned? Won't they be unpopular? (This is a particularly powerful fear in teenagers - a fate they can only gasp with horror at!) I don't dismiss such fears as trivial. Not at all. But you tend to find with experience that being disliked in one quarter gets you rather liked better in another. Also, being abandoned is actually not the worst thing that can happen to you (I exclude childhood of course in this). It may be that, having got rid of some deadwood in your life, you may have cleared the first space in your life to do something for yourself alone. Imagined consequences may turn out quite differently from what you thought. Imagination plays tricks, enables our internal worlds to speak many varieties of untruth to us - to whisper in our ears all sorts of negative stuff.
So I want to speak up on the side of truth as being psychologically healthy, if nothing else. However, there are caveats worth thinking about also. It pays to be thoughtful about what truth actually is. Very few truths are sacred and inviolable. Truth is not perception. We are creatures of perception - we tend to think that what we perceive to be happening is the only truth there is. Keep an open mind to the possibility that your perception may differ from that of other people - and that neither may be wholly wrong. Check out the facts. Do the work of a good journalist and make sure you know the event history. Social media don't seem to mind whether you have checked anything or not. Everything that is said is presumed to be the case. And a lot of people seem to be be extremely gullible. "It was in the papers" was once a common self-defense against being challenged. Not now. But 'it was on Twitter' has become an easy substitute. Time we became harder to fool. Time we came to value truth more highly. The alternative is to join the world of The Truman Show and not even know you're doing it.
Friday 11 November 2016
Post-election reflections
Well, it's all over, and we can breath a collective sigh of relief.
The outcome of the Presidential election has obviously been a major shock and to some people has been a source of dismay and indeed profound despair. It feels all too much like what prevailed on the morning after the EU Referendum was declared. A nasty chasm opens up, in which we find that we are capable of thinking about each other quite differently from what we ever imagined. When I was a school kid, we were taught that the great virtue of the United Kingdom was its homogeneity! From one end of the islands to the other, we were all pretty much the same! Yes, honestly! We've come a long way since then, but even so we did not quite understand how utterly different we were from each other until the ground began to quiver beneath us. Difference, and how we come to terms with it, seems to me to be the great issue of our time.
I'm left with a myriad of impressions of the whole vast stretch of the election, which is so long and laborious for the Americans that I have always wondered how they can bear it. And even now, the handover process will take up unconscionable quantities of press and TV and social media discussion and analysis, and it won't be until a cold January day in Washington that the lid is finally sealed on the whole episode. American friends say, "You don't understand. It works for us." Ok, I believe them, but I also think we understand only too well! Actually the people of these islands are in many cases better informed about American politics than the Americans are. I was astounded to hear one highly acclaimed US pollster remarking in an interview that the polls got it wrong because they had not really drilled down to the backyards of the rust belt and deepest south properly, to the ordinary folk going about their lives. Frankly, I have seen dozens, if not hundreds, of such interviews over the period of the campaign. Maybe they didn't, but we certainly did!
One response from such ordinary folk that stays in my mind is the frequent remark, "He (meaning Trump) knows how to get things done." Competence, it seems, is part of what Sir Harold Evans strikingly called 'the deep ache' in the American psyche - a longing for change that is real and not just cosmetic, and a conviction that nobody in their system knows how to achieve competence in political terms. This is a particularly startling perspective, coming from the nation we have always thought of as the 'can-do's' of the world. Aren't Americans famous for their competence? They get on with solving problems, with dealing with things, not vacillating in the backwoods of denial and polite indifference. If an earthquake tears down their bridges, they build them again practically overnight - don't they? The highly educated, thoughtful, rational US liberal intelligentsia, on the other hand - people whose minds we can only admire for their ability to scope, evaluate and analyse - seemed relatively unconcerned about this same question. There was an assumption that nothing was really broken in the system - yes, it might be unwieldy and gridlocked at times, but essentially the vision of the founding fathers had got it right, and success, justice and truth would be delivered down the line somewhere.
It is obvious that US society is working for some people and not others. Like our own society, it appears that if it seems a bit wacky but basically competent and sound to you, you belong to a different class from those to whom it appears to be messed up big-time. I was rather struck by Mr Trump's acceptance speech at the end of a long night of results pouring in, in which he spoke about the immediate need to 'rebuild the infrastructure' of the nation - roads, bridges, hospitals, airports, and so forth. 'Infrastructure' chimed with me psychologically - raising, as it does, images of the deep psychological underpinnings of the human mind. We sometimes speak of analysis as the means by which we 'restructure the personality.' It implies that a few cosmetic behavioural changes will not do it - there is more wrong than this, which will need more than the cosmetic to put right. Things inside us have got into the wrong places or are too powerful for our good, or are too weak to sustain us and need to be rebuilt. Patients often dream about infrastructure, I notice - about buildings, houses, rooms, old homes, new homes, missing furniture, roads they are travelling on or parked on or lost on - or of being 'off the beaten track', in a dark wood or on a foggy hillside, out in the wild, travelling down a winding river. The possibilities are endless, but these images seem to be deeply ingrained in the human psyche, representing very different archetypal worlds. The Paleolithic - the Stone Age - was characterised by being always 'off track.' Infrastructure was not unknown, that would be wrong to suggest, but it was limited by our standards. Our current world is mostly infrastructure, on the other hand, even if you happen to live out in the wilds of Montana or the far north of Scotland. You will still take a road to get there, and more probably an aeroplane, and you will not be cut off in any important sense from the rest of the world around you - linked by a thousand overhead wires and invisible underground pipelines, or by cyberspace itself, that strange no-land which so many of us now seem to inhabit a lot of the time. These three different worlds - 'off track', 'on track' and 'nowhere land' seem to represent levels of human psychological development, which it is apparent do not go away. New experience does not override old experience, so far as we can tell - it is simply added to the sum total of humanity's extraordinary experience of marching through the planet and carving a route through it as it goes, until 'the world' as we know it is unrecognisable as the world we started out from, in some deep valley in Africa. And each of us can still access those worlds through our own internal experience, through dreams and art and culture and the many varieties of imagining that we espouse.
So the urge to rebuild the infrastructure, which is talked about well beyond America, resonates with me symbolically - it brings with it the flavour of 'putting ourselves right' - reframing ourselves in a cleaner, clearer, less cluttered place, so that we can think to some greater purpose where we have got to as humanity, and where we would like to go from here. I found this hopeful to a degree. When you are coming out of depression, some of the first things you want to do is to tidy the front room, repaint the kitchen ceiling, put the broken catches back on the cupboards. It's often a declaration, that you now see yourself as having a future living here! Not just existing, and putting up with whatever you find around you, but actually 'doing it up' a bit. It also involves some investment in ourselves, however little we may have to begin the process. It doesn't matter that the new rug came from a garage sale, or the colourful vase from a charity shop. What matters is that you have invested a small portion of your energy and resource in it. It matters to you.
And there is a community and a commonality about this process, I think, which might be better at helping us to deal with difference than we think. I doubt, myself, whether difference can be argued away, protested over, or otherwise somehow neatly erased. I don't believe in the wall. 'Something there is that doesn't love a wall,' said Robert Frost, one of America's greatest poets. Perhaps so. The question is not whether the wall can be built - walls have been built around the entire planet, remarkable feats of engineering, from the Great Wall of China to the Iron Curtain, and we can build them for sure. The question is: do walls do what they are expected to do?
'Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out
And to whom I was like to give offence.'
The wall sneakily manages to undermine and get undermined, Frost points out. There is an interminable process of rebuilding this particular infrastructure that goes on forever. It is never final, never completed, always needing attention. And do he and his neighbour really need a wall? His neighbour replies,
'Good fences make good neighbours.'
But Frost thinks this mantra is one that his neighbour learned from his father, and might do well to question.
The outcome of the Presidential election has obviously been a major shock and to some people has been a source of dismay and indeed profound despair. It feels all too much like what prevailed on the morning after the EU Referendum was declared. A nasty chasm opens up, in which we find that we are capable of thinking about each other quite differently from what we ever imagined. When I was a school kid, we were taught that the great virtue of the United Kingdom was its homogeneity! From one end of the islands to the other, we were all pretty much the same! Yes, honestly! We've come a long way since then, but even so we did not quite understand how utterly different we were from each other until the ground began to quiver beneath us. Difference, and how we come to terms with it, seems to me to be the great issue of our time.
I'm left with a myriad of impressions of the whole vast stretch of the election, which is so long and laborious for the Americans that I have always wondered how they can bear it. And even now, the handover process will take up unconscionable quantities of press and TV and social media discussion and analysis, and it won't be until a cold January day in Washington that the lid is finally sealed on the whole episode. American friends say, "You don't understand. It works for us." Ok, I believe them, but I also think we understand only too well! Actually the people of these islands are in many cases better informed about American politics than the Americans are. I was astounded to hear one highly acclaimed US pollster remarking in an interview that the polls got it wrong because they had not really drilled down to the backyards of the rust belt and deepest south properly, to the ordinary folk going about their lives. Frankly, I have seen dozens, if not hundreds, of such interviews over the period of the campaign. Maybe they didn't, but we certainly did!
One response from such ordinary folk that stays in my mind is the frequent remark, "He (meaning Trump) knows how to get things done." Competence, it seems, is part of what Sir Harold Evans strikingly called 'the deep ache' in the American psyche - a longing for change that is real and not just cosmetic, and a conviction that nobody in their system knows how to achieve competence in political terms. This is a particularly startling perspective, coming from the nation we have always thought of as the 'can-do's' of the world. Aren't Americans famous for their competence? They get on with solving problems, with dealing with things, not vacillating in the backwoods of denial and polite indifference. If an earthquake tears down their bridges, they build them again practically overnight - don't they? The highly educated, thoughtful, rational US liberal intelligentsia, on the other hand - people whose minds we can only admire for their ability to scope, evaluate and analyse - seemed relatively unconcerned about this same question. There was an assumption that nothing was really broken in the system - yes, it might be unwieldy and gridlocked at times, but essentially the vision of the founding fathers had got it right, and success, justice and truth would be delivered down the line somewhere.
It is obvious that US society is working for some people and not others. Like our own society, it appears that if it seems a bit wacky but basically competent and sound to you, you belong to a different class from those to whom it appears to be messed up big-time. I was rather struck by Mr Trump's acceptance speech at the end of a long night of results pouring in, in which he spoke about the immediate need to 'rebuild the infrastructure' of the nation - roads, bridges, hospitals, airports, and so forth. 'Infrastructure' chimed with me psychologically - raising, as it does, images of the deep psychological underpinnings of the human mind. We sometimes speak of analysis as the means by which we 'restructure the personality.' It implies that a few cosmetic behavioural changes will not do it - there is more wrong than this, which will need more than the cosmetic to put right. Things inside us have got into the wrong places or are too powerful for our good, or are too weak to sustain us and need to be rebuilt. Patients often dream about infrastructure, I notice - about buildings, houses, rooms, old homes, new homes, missing furniture, roads they are travelling on or parked on or lost on - or of being 'off the beaten track', in a dark wood or on a foggy hillside, out in the wild, travelling down a winding river. The possibilities are endless, but these images seem to be deeply ingrained in the human psyche, representing very different archetypal worlds. The Paleolithic - the Stone Age - was characterised by being always 'off track.' Infrastructure was not unknown, that would be wrong to suggest, but it was limited by our standards. Our current world is mostly infrastructure, on the other hand, even if you happen to live out in the wilds of Montana or the far north of Scotland. You will still take a road to get there, and more probably an aeroplane, and you will not be cut off in any important sense from the rest of the world around you - linked by a thousand overhead wires and invisible underground pipelines, or by cyberspace itself, that strange no-land which so many of us now seem to inhabit a lot of the time. These three different worlds - 'off track', 'on track' and 'nowhere land' seem to represent levels of human psychological development, which it is apparent do not go away. New experience does not override old experience, so far as we can tell - it is simply added to the sum total of humanity's extraordinary experience of marching through the planet and carving a route through it as it goes, until 'the world' as we know it is unrecognisable as the world we started out from, in some deep valley in Africa. And each of us can still access those worlds through our own internal experience, through dreams and art and culture and the many varieties of imagining that we espouse.
So the urge to rebuild the infrastructure, which is talked about well beyond America, resonates with me symbolically - it brings with it the flavour of 'putting ourselves right' - reframing ourselves in a cleaner, clearer, less cluttered place, so that we can think to some greater purpose where we have got to as humanity, and where we would like to go from here. I found this hopeful to a degree. When you are coming out of depression, some of the first things you want to do is to tidy the front room, repaint the kitchen ceiling, put the broken catches back on the cupboards. It's often a declaration, that you now see yourself as having a future living here! Not just existing, and putting up with whatever you find around you, but actually 'doing it up' a bit. It also involves some investment in ourselves, however little we may have to begin the process. It doesn't matter that the new rug came from a garage sale, or the colourful vase from a charity shop. What matters is that you have invested a small portion of your energy and resource in it. It matters to you.
And there is a community and a commonality about this process, I think, which might be better at helping us to deal with difference than we think. I doubt, myself, whether difference can be argued away, protested over, or otherwise somehow neatly erased. I don't believe in the wall. 'Something there is that doesn't love a wall,' said Robert Frost, one of America's greatest poets. Perhaps so. The question is not whether the wall can be built - walls have been built around the entire planet, remarkable feats of engineering, from the Great Wall of China to the Iron Curtain, and we can build them for sure. The question is: do walls do what they are expected to do?
'Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out
And to whom I was like to give offence.'
The wall sneakily manages to undermine and get undermined, Frost points out. There is an interminable process of rebuilding this particular infrastructure that goes on forever. It is never final, never completed, always needing attention. And do he and his neighbour really need a wall? His neighbour replies,
'Good fences make good neighbours.'
But Frost thinks this mantra is one that his neighbour learned from his father, and might do well to question.
Tuesday 8 November 2016
Reading the American election runes: reflections of a psychotherapist
The American election has probably overwhelmed you as well as me. The sheer amount of coverage is wearing, and I imagine we're all relieved it's over, as well as the Americans who have had to make the hard choice today. I don't envy them. I found the insistent voice of Donald Trump particularly wearing - though Hillary can be pretty hard on the ear too. Partly, I know, it's the difference of accent and tone, and nobody is to blame for that, but it feels sometimes as though they are drilling into my ears with a corkscrew. Sometimes I would like to say, 'Please speak to me a little more softly, a little more kindly. Speak to me a little more reflectively, instead of repeating the same old slogans as though they had any real nourishment left in them!' It's as though politicians - and ours are as mistaken as theirs - have forgotten that if you want people to listen, you need to lower your voice a bit, rather than wind it up into a hysterical shriek. And the drilling of their monotones teaches the crowd how to respond, with wild shrieks and hysteria and flag and slogan waving. "This is how Americans do their elections, " say the sage correspondents. But is it a tradition that is rapidly wearing thin, I wonder? Does it have an emptiness at the core of it, which all that noise and yelling is trying so desperately hard to suppress?
The election has raised so many important issues for democracy that now, of all times, we need a lot less yelling, stridency, posturing and sloganising, and a lot more calm and thoughtful reflection, it seems to me. The fact is, we have lost a lot of faith in our institutions and ways of doing things, which seemed to work at one time but seem to be losing their savour a bit more every day. I don't want to repeat what has already been said in thousands of words on this theme, but to add this: we need to worry the most about our lack of trust in institutions, in other people, in the intentions of the world towards us. The dominant anxiety in our western cultures seems to be paranoia. Nobody can be trusted any longer. Everyone is out for him or herself. They have all got their snouts in the trough (notice the animal level of the imagery - other people are less human than us!) Everybody lies - it's foolish not to know that. They will get you if you let them. And so on . . . . It's not that presidential elections have not been bitter and personal before - they have. But this time, there has been an open refusal to grant the most basic honour and decency to the other side. Things have been said, as commentators remark, which may be hard to make good, whoever wins.
Well, for sure, some people are dishonest. Some politicians are not to be trusted. Some people lie routinely. Most of us do this on occasion, for all kinds of reasons, not necessarily bad ones. Parents, in my experience, routinely lie to their children, with the fixed belief that it is better for them not to know the truth. As though we could protect them from the genuine pain and suffering of the business of being a live human being. My attitude is that it's not what you say, but the way you say it, that makes all the difference. If the motive behind the words is the desire to punish, to hurt, to control, to repress, they will be damaging, because though you may deny it later, the truth of what you really meant will be heard and felt at a deep level. The denial simply adds to the pain of it.
So we all get it wrong pretty regularly. But now we seem to live in an age where mistrust, suspicion, paranoid anxiety, are regarded as the only sensible way to be. Anyone who believes in anything is a fool and gullibly naive. I want to challenge that attitude, because it seems to me to be the most pathological of all positions. Ok, we had an MP's expenses scandal. But only quite a small number of our representatives were found to be guilty, and they were severely punished. Ok, the Iraq War was not our finest moment as a civilisation. But the massive, exhaustive Chilcot enquiry found that no one actually had the overt intention of deceiving the nation. The government made many mistakes, did a lot wrong, but they did not do that. Ok, the encyclopaedic case of Hillary's emails will haunt us to our graves, probably without ever knowing what the heck the emails were all about, or whether they mattered. Ok, the judges decided that royal prerogative was not enough for the government to act in invoking the immortal article 50. They did not say: so that meant we could not leave the EU!
But if the FBI says there is no case to answer regarding the emails, why do we keep on believing that there is no smoke without fire? The answer of course is, why trust the FBI? Aren't they all in the Washington plot too? Similarly, if the Chilcot enquiry did not meet your expectation, why not dismiss it as a white wash? Weren't they manipulated by the 'powers that be' as well? There is no limit to what can be thus discounted, once paranoia sets in. Evidence, unfortunately, means nothing to a paranoid state of mind, as you will learn if you've ever tried to argue a paranoid person out of their conviction. Evidence is simply evidence that the suspect is even more tricky than you thought! If you don't believe, you don't believe believe believe, no matter what. You don't believe in belief. I have the sense that paranoia involves a desperate need to drill down into the deepest, ugliest depths of human depravity, and to expose it once and for all. No revelation is therefore dark enough to suit the enquirer. All must be exposed. There is worse under the surface of the surface, if only we can pinpoint it. We must find out how deeply and irrevocably bad people are!
I always wonder why this is so, and if we can succeed in exposing it, what's supposed to happen then? Suppose we found out that the whole Western establishment was beyond any kind of human decency to a man and woman. Would we really feel better for this knowledge? I suspect not. Could we mend the situation in that way? It's a bit like God saying to Noah, 'I'm about to destroy the human race, so get prepared!' And Noah saying, "You cannot be serious?"
Of course there are classic psychoanalytic interpretations of this search for badness. The one who is really being sought for her badness is the mother who failed to meet your needs in infancy. She was a bad breast, and no possible good could come of her! There may be deeper explanations even than this one, surrounding our difficulty in trusting. In a real sense, we were all deprived infants once, whose needs were not perfectly met. Perhaps the beginning of hope comes when we realise this, with all the pain there is, but without any longer the desire to retaliate. Retaliation, it seems, does not do it. It does not hit the spot. It doesn't heal, because it does not do anything to face up to the real pain we ourselves have suffered. Neither exposing Hillary, nor the FBI, nor Chilcot, nor the judges can heal that pain. Knowing the terrible badness of the world around us does not make us feel better. To hit that terribly painful, deprived spot, it seems we have to be prepared to change our attitude towards ourselves. At bottom, our worst fear is that we are the worst of the lot! We are surely the worst we can possibly imagine. So naturally Donald and Hillary are capable of the same, and cannot possibly be trusted!
Some modern expressions are useful, I tend to think, if pretty crude. Like: 'Get over it!' for example. If we can get over the feared badness of the world, by getting over the horror of our own badness, we can begin to look forward with a smidgeon of hope. If I am capable - well, nearly - of being loved and trusted, perhaps others are too? This change of attitude toward ourselves will have profound consequences for our relationships. It will not make other people, whether aspiring leaders, or prospective mates, or just friends, into ideal mothers, who will never let us down. Now we know better - that everyone is a flawed person who will be frequently mistaken and sometimes occasionally do wrong, just like us. But the wrong - the bad bits - does not cancel out the good bits in ourselves or others. Both exist - both the good and the not so good exist in human life, side by side, with an equal capacity to be influential, and to change lives. Knowing just how powerful these aspects of human nature can be, we may possibly tread a bit more carefully in future, in making easy assumptions about just how bad other people are.
The election has raised so many important issues for democracy that now, of all times, we need a lot less yelling, stridency, posturing and sloganising, and a lot more calm and thoughtful reflection, it seems to me. The fact is, we have lost a lot of faith in our institutions and ways of doing things, which seemed to work at one time but seem to be losing their savour a bit more every day. I don't want to repeat what has already been said in thousands of words on this theme, but to add this: we need to worry the most about our lack of trust in institutions, in other people, in the intentions of the world towards us. The dominant anxiety in our western cultures seems to be paranoia. Nobody can be trusted any longer. Everyone is out for him or herself. They have all got their snouts in the trough (notice the animal level of the imagery - other people are less human than us!) Everybody lies - it's foolish not to know that. They will get you if you let them. And so on . . . . It's not that presidential elections have not been bitter and personal before - they have. But this time, there has been an open refusal to grant the most basic honour and decency to the other side. Things have been said, as commentators remark, which may be hard to make good, whoever wins.
Well, for sure, some people are dishonest. Some politicians are not to be trusted. Some people lie routinely. Most of us do this on occasion, for all kinds of reasons, not necessarily bad ones. Parents, in my experience, routinely lie to their children, with the fixed belief that it is better for them not to know the truth. As though we could protect them from the genuine pain and suffering of the business of being a live human being. My attitude is that it's not what you say, but the way you say it, that makes all the difference. If the motive behind the words is the desire to punish, to hurt, to control, to repress, they will be damaging, because though you may deny it later, the truth of what you really meant will be heard and felt at a deep level. The denial simply adds to the pain of it.
So we all get it wrong pretty regularly. But now we seem to live in an age where mistrust, suspicion, paranoid anxiety, are regarded as the only sensible way to be. Anyone who believes in anything is a fool and gullibly naive. I want to challenge that attitude, because it seems to me to be the most pathological of all positions. Ok, we had an MP's expenses scandal. But only quite a small number of our representatives were found to be guilty, and they were severely punished. Ok, the Iraq War was not our finest moment as a civilisation. But the massive, exhaustive Chilcot enquiry found that no one actually had the overt intention of deceiving the nation. The government made many mistakes, did a lot wrong, but they did not do that. Ok, the encyclopaedic case of Hillary's emails will haunt us to our graves, probably without ever knowing what the heck the emails were all about, or whether they mattered. Ok, the judges decided that royal prerogative was not enough for the government to act in invoking the immortal article 50. They did not say: so that meant we could not leave the EU!
But if the FBI says there is no case to answer regarding the emails, why do we keep on believing that there is no smoke without fire? The answer of course is, why trust the FBI? Aren't they all in the Washington plot too? Similarly, if the Chilcot enquiry did not meet your expectation, why not dismiss it as a white wash? Weren't they manipulated by the 'powers that be' as well? There is no limit to what can be thus discounted, once paranoia sets in. Evidence, unfortunately, means nothing to a paranoid state of mind, as you will learn if you've ever tried to argue a paranoid person out of their conviction. Evidence is simply evidence that the suspect is even more tricky than you thought! If you don't believe, you don't believe believe believe, no matter what. You don't believe in belief. I have the sense that paranoia involves a desperate need to drill down into the deepest, ugliest depths of human depravity, and to expose it once and for all. No revelation is therefore dark enough to suit the enquirer. All must be exposed. There is worse under the surface of the surface, if only we can pinpoint it. We must find out how deeply and irrevocably bad people are!
I always wonder why this is so, and if we can succeed in exposing it, what's supposed to happen then? Suppose we found out that the whole Western establishment was beyond any kind of human decency to a man and woman. Would we really feel better for this knowledge? I suspect not. Could we mend the situation in that way? It's a bit like God saying to Noah, 'I'm about to destroy the human race, so get prepared!' And Noah saying, "You cannot be serious?"
Of course there are classic psychoanalytic interpretations of this search for badness. The one who is really being sought for her badness is the mother who failed to meet your needs in infancy. She was a bad breast, and no possible good could come of her! There may be deeper explanations even than this one, surrounding our difficulty in trusting. In a real sense, we were all deprived infants once, whose needs were not perfectly met. Perhaps the beginning of hope comes when we realise this, with all the pain there is, but without any longer the desire to retaliate. Retaliation, it seems, does not do it. It does not hit the spot. It doesn't heal, because it does not do anything to face up to the real pain we ourselves have suffered. Neither exposing Hillary, nor the FBI, nor Chilcot, nor the judges can heal that pain. Knowing the terrible badness of the world around us does not make us feel better. To hit that terribly painful, deprived spot, it seems we have to be prepared to change our attitude towards ourselves. At bottom, our worst fear is that we are the worst of the lot! We are surely the worst we can possibly imagine. So naturally Donald and Hillary are capable of the same, and cannot possibly be trusted!
Some modern expressions are useful, I tend to think, if pretty crude. Like: 'Get over it!' for example. If we can get over the feared badness of the world, by getting over the horror of our own badness, we can begin to look forward with a smidgeon of hope. If I am capable - well, nearly - of being loved and trusted, perhaps others are too? This change of attitude toward ourselves will have profound consequences for our relationships. It will not make other people, whether aspiring leaders, or prospective mates, or just friends, into ideal mothers, who will never let us down. Now we know better - that everyone is a flawed person who will be frequently mistaken and sometimes occasionally do wrong, just like us. But the wrong - the bad bits - does not cancel out the good bits in ourselves or others. Both exist - both the good and the not so good exist in human life, side by side, with an equal capacity to be influential, and to change lives. Knowing just how powerful these aspects of human nature can be, we may possibly tread a bit more carefully in future, in making easy assumptions about just how bad other people are.
Thursday 19 May 2016
Rupture and repair
Have just returned from an excellent workshop offered by Professor Allan Schore, American neurobiologist, and find my head chock full of his amazing knowledge and understanding of human development and its consequences for what goes right and wrong with us as adults. I think I came away with a few profoundly important messages in among the many words and slides he showed us about human beings. Some of the ones that struck me and stayed with me are:
4. The left descriptor in each case is the left brain, and the right descriptor is the right brain. They are very different indeed. And the right brain embodies our concept of ourselves - our true selves, which depend on instinctive and intuitive responses, values and priorities in the world, while the left brain contains our more cognitive and intentional control of ourselves. These Right Brain responses are pre-attentional. They don't depend on thinking things through, even in a split second. It is stuff "beneath the words." These emotional responses are already there before thought has had any opportunity to assemble and organise its ways of operating.
5. There has been a paradigm shift from attachment theory to right brain regulation theory. Attachment theory told us much that was illuminating about how mother and infant relate to each other, and what can go wrong. But now, says Schore: 'mother-infant attachment implants the developing right hemisphere for better of for worse, and can either facilitate resilience to stress or create a predisposition to affect dysregulation and thereby psychopathology." That is, the problem is essentially a matter of dealing with our feelings. When our feelings are hyperaroused (or hypoaroused, i.e. there is too much or too little response) we are then in danger of reactions and behaviours and thoughts which will cause us and sometimes other people pain. These patterns, once seeded (beautiful word!) in the psyche remain with us throughout life unless there is some exposure to means of changing them. 'Coping skills' are not that type of exposure. They are cognitive and left brain matters. Real change comes about only when the original pattern of dysfunctional emotional response is changed. Sighs of relief all around the large group of psychotherapists in the Great Hall at King's, who have been saying and practising this very approach for many years! It's not that we didn't know it - it's that it's wonderful to have this view of human being so thoroughly validated, and by a man of such eminence and experience.
- There has been a paradigm shift in neurobiology from looking at cognition and behaviour to studying emotion: the questions before us today are not what makes people behave in a certain way, but how we explain and understand the feelings which generate both behaviour and cognition. Schore is quite clear that behaviour and cognition cannot be changed independently of the feelings which drive them. And feelings are to be located in the body: they are not somehow squashed inside our skulls! 'Use your head' will not work as advice to an overwrought individual - the head not where it's at. This is the position that has been taken by depth psychotherapy for a long time.
- Schore: "Right brain affective processes operating at levels beneath conscious awareness are dominant in development, psychopathogenesis [how psychological disturbance gets started], and psychotherapy.' Throughout the entire workshop, the author of so many excellent articles and books which have illuminated the processes we wrestle with in psychotherapy consulting rooms up and down the land, made clear again and again his firm conviction that it is the right brain that is exercised in all our key experiences of emotional disturbance, our capacity for good relationships, and our most important work as human beings in creativity.
- He acknowledged the importance of the work of Iain McGilchrist (The Master and His Emissary, 2009) in differentiating the two hemispheres of the brain. Each has a distinct mode of functioning, and creates coherent, utterly different and often incompatible versions of the world, with competing priorities and values. In McGilchrist's view, the right brain is master, while the left brain is emissary. That is, right brain surveys the territory to be explored, asks the questions, and sends left brain to go out and find the data - the more detailed knowledge that will enable the questions to be answered. But left brain cannot answer these questions on its own! It returns with the data to the right brain, which then absorbs and integrates it along with all the other knowledge, experience and wisdom gained over many such surveys of the lie of our lands. And right brain makes the decisions about what is to be done about these things. Good psychotherapy is a right-brain-to-right-brain activity. Results cannot be achieved by cognition alone. We cannot simply 'think ourselves well.'
Look at these ways of thinking about the functions of the two brains:
rational brain versus emotional brain
linguistic brain versus social brain
implicit versus explicit self systems
conscious versus unconscious minds
5. There has been a paradigm shift from attachment theory to right brain regulation theory. Attachment theory told us much that was illuminating about how mother and infant relate to each other, and what can go wrong. But now, says Schore: 'mother-infant attachment implants the developing right hemisphere for better of for worse, and can either facilitate resilience to stress or create a predisposition to affect dysregulation and thereby psychopathology." That is, the problem is essentially a matter of dealing with our feelings. When our feelings are hyperaroused (or hypoaroused, i.e. there is too much or too little response) we are then in danger of reactions and behaviours and thoughts which will cause us and sometimes other people pain. These patterns, once seeded (beautiful word!) in the psyche remain with us throughout life unless there is some exposure to means of changing them. 'Coping skills' are not that type of exposure. They are cognitive and left brain matters. Real change comes about only when the original pattern of dysfunctional emotional response is changed. Sighs of relief all around the large group of psychotherapists in the Great Hall at King's, who have been saying and practising this very approach for many years! It's not that we didn't know it - it's that it's wonderful to have this view of human being so thoroughly validated, and by a man of such eminence and experience.
6. And of course the 64,000 dollar question of how change is achieved is now effectively answered for a generation - until perhaps we learn what lies behind feelings themselves. The answer is really that in the human relationship encounter (such as takes place in the consulting room), there is a possibility of a meeting of feelings - that the feelings which mother originally arounsed by her face, touch, the sound of her voice with the baby will now recur, maybe with increasing calmness and harmony and lack of the dysregulation that characterised the early mothering experience. Psychodynamically, we have long called this meeting transference and countertransference - probably unhelpfully - and clearly this is not confined to consulting rooms but takes place wherever human beings meet together. And this experience constitutes a gradual repair of what has been previously ruptured by too much or too little of what was needed at the time. The brain is highly plastic, we now know, and can repair itself - but it must have the kinds of experiences that enable it to recover from the early difficulties. Repetition of more of the same will not do it. So we therapists have to find out what it was like in those early weeks and months for the neonate, and find ways to make it different this time.
7. Perhaps you're wondering how we find out? Naturally this is not a straightforward business - much that went wrong early on is pre-verbal, and the patient or client simply cannot tell you what it was like. In addition, Schore posed the hypothesis that what goes wrong in hyper- and hypo-arousal states is that the set point of normality in feeling, as it were, is changed, so that what seems 'normal' to the infant is now a higher (or lower) state of arousal than before. And that there is a point where dissociation kicks in - because so much 'too much' has been loaded on to the infant brain that it cannot tolerate the state of dysregulation any longer, and erases the whole experience - dissociates from it. But this dissociation is an unconscious process, and hence the infant does not know that this has happened, and therefore cannot report it later on to the therapist. NB: dissociation is not the same as repression, which is about pushing away stuff that is already known and experienced, however briefly. Dissociation involves 'not knowing' from the first instant by not experiencing it. Thus, the only way to retrieve these memories is to experience them, either in a clinical setting, or via some equivalent human contact. There are times, for instance, when a patient experiences anger for the first time, and it can be revelatory.
It is re-experience - sometimes (in dissociation) a different experience with a different outcome - in the presence of the other that constitutes the repair process. Reading the book, researching it on the internet, will not do it. It is not possible to do it alone - think in terms of like emotion arousing like responses, and they must be feeling and not purely cognitive responses - not advice on how to cope with 'your' stuff, such as partners frequently give each other in an argument! When you cry at the cinema, you are being aroused by something that has already taken place in your psyche, and now you are remembering feelings and reprocessing those 'feeling memories,' even though it is hard to recall precisely what memories. Indeed, have you not been utterly surprised at how much emotion a simple play or a film or a TV programme can arouse? Or a book or a poem? Better yet, the showing and telling of it to another human being is key - when your friend cries, you often cry in sympathy. This is the repair process at work - and the repair is for both parties involved - it is not merely for the one who has been designated 'client.' Both must be involved, and thus, psychotherapy is a relational process, pure and simple, depending utterly on empathic attunement by the therapist, and cannot be any other way. More sighs of relief round the room!
6. Schore calls this process the rupture and repair cycle, and of course where there has been significant unconscious dissociation there are powerful defences against the arousal of feeling which was, after all, unmanageable before. They will not loosen up in a second, or a session. We need to think in terms of a graded, step by step process of repair which takes place over a period of time. How long? As long as it takes, is the only possible answer. Time limits are meaningless to the unconscious psyche. The psyche takes its own time, like it or not - indeed, it could be more accurately expressed as a case of the psyche being unaware of the existence of time! Which of course always raises questions about cost but rarely about cost-benefit. I would have thought that governments and caring bodies of all kinds would have been only too glad to know that we can now repair a great deal of psychological disturbance - even if it takes some years to complete. Yes, it costs money, but have you any idea of the cost to the national economy and culture of mental ill health? Bearing in mind that one person's ill health affects many others around them and is not an individual matter alone.
7. It's important to say here that the therapist's own capacity for feeling in the session is critical to making the rupture/repair process work. Schore goes further and assures us that the single biggest blockage to successful treatment is the therapist's own defences - his or her personal taboos against feeling with the patient. These are of course rooted in the therapist's own psychopathology. Hence the emphasis we have placed in the psychoanalytic field on personal therapy as a key part of the training of a therapist is entirely validated. You can't go in 'cold' to a patient in distress, without having experienced your own distress, harbouring perhaps a defensive conviction that 'you're ok' and need no work on yourself. You need a great deal of therapy as preparation, in fact, regardless of how well you feel you may cope with your life. Remember that 'coping' is a cognitive process which has little deep root in the right side of the brain. I have always been good at coping - until I discovered how much of this 'coping' was only skin deep.
As an energy therapist as well as a psychodynamic one, I found much to think about in the above work. We have I think restored an important dimension to therapy by emphasising the importance of the body in psychological disturbance. Working with the body allows a trickle-down effect on the psyche of the patient, because of the association between unconscious processing and the body systems. The subtle energy system ('the feeling unconscious') impacts significantly on the patient's emotional state, and if we learn how to communicate with it skilfully we certainly produce results, often far-reaching and surprising ones in fields like early trauma and obsessive-compulsive disorders which were formerly hard to reach.
The questions I was left with were: how far does this communication go? Is it deep enough to influence the early neurobiological disruptions which have caused the problem in the first place? How is the touch factor in energy therapy experienced by the deeper right brain psyche, and how does it impact on the dissociated unconscious? Are those energy modalities that use relatively little touch likely to have a deeper impact? In particular, how do we ensure that the key relational aspects of the work are not sabotaged in the exciting business of working with the subtle energy system?
7. Perhaps you're wondering how we find out? Naturally this is not a straightforward business - much that went wrong early on is pre-verbal, and the patient or client simply cannot tell you what it was like. In addition, Schore posed the hypothesis that what goes wrong in hyper- and hypo-arousal states is that the set point of normality in feeling, as it were, is changed, so that what seems 'normal' to the infant is now a higher (or lower) state of arousal than before. And that there is a point where dissociation kicks in - because so much 'too much' has been loaded on to the infant brain that it cannot tolerate the state of dysregulation any longer, and erases the whole experience - dissociates from it. But this dissociation is an unconscious process, and hence the infant does not know that this has happened, and therefore cannot report it later on to the therapist. NB: dissociation is not the same as repression, which is about pushing away stuff that is already known and experienced, however briefly. Dissociation involves 'not knowing' from the first instant by not experiencing it. Thus, the only way to retrieve these memories is to experience them, either in a clinical setting, or via some equivalent human contact. There are times, for instance, when a patient experiences anger for the first time, and it can be revelatory.
It is re-experience - sometimes (in dissociation) a different experience with a different outcome - in the presence of the other that constitutes the repair process. Reading the book, researching it on the internet, will not do it. It is not possible to do it alone - think in terms of like emotion arousing like responses, and they must be feeling and not purely cognitive responses - not advice on how to cope with 'your' stuff, such as partners frequently give each other in an argument! When you cry at the cinema, you are being aroused by something that has already taken place in your psyche, and now you are remembering feelings and reprocessing those 'feeling memories,' even though it is hard to recall precisely what memories. Indeed, have you not been utterly surprised at how much emotion a simple play or a film or a TV programme can arouse? Or a book or a poem? Better yet, the showing and telling of it to another human being is key - when your friend cries, you often cry in sympathy. This is the repair process at work - and the repair is for both parties involved - it is not merely for the one who has been designated 'client.' Both must be involved, and thus, psychotherapy is a relational process, pure and simple, depending utterly on empathic attunement by the therapist, and cannot be any other way. More sighs of relief round the room!
6. Schore calls this process the rupture and repair cycle, and of course where there has been significant unconscious dissociation there are powerful defences against the arousal of feeling which was, after all, unmanageable before. They will not loosen up in a second, or a session. We need to think in terms of a graded, step by step process of repair which takes place over a period of time. How long? As long as it takes, is the only possible answer. Time limits are meaningless to the unconscious psyche. The psyche takes its own time, like it or not - indeed, it could be more accurately expressed as a case of the psyche being unaware of the existence of time! Which of course always raises questions about cost but rarely about cost-benefit. I would have thought that governments and caring bodies of all kinds would have been only too glad to know that we can now repair a great deal of psychological disturbance - even if it takes some years to complete. Yes, it costs money, but have you any idea of the cost to the national economy and culture of mental ill health? Bearing in mind that one person's ill health affects many others around them and is not an individual matter alone.
7. It's important to say here that the therapist's own capacity for feeling in the session is critical to making the rupture/repair process work. Schore goes further and assures us that the single biggest blockage to successful treatment is the therapist's own defences - his or her personal taboos against feeling with the patient. These are of course rooted in the therapist's own psychopathology. Hence the emphasis we have placed in the psychoanalytic field on personal therapy as a key part of the training of a therapist is entirely validated. You can't go in 'cold' to a patient in distress, without having experienced your own distress, harbouring perhaps a defensive conviction that 'you're ok' and need no work on yourself. You need a great deal of therapy as preparation, in fact, regardless of how well you feel you may cope with your life. Remember that 'coping' is a cognitive process which has little deep root in the right side of the brain. I have always been good at coping - until I discovered how much of this 'coping' was only skin deep.
As an energy therapist as well as a psychodynamic one, I found much to think about in the above work. We have I think restored an important dimension to therapy by emphasising the importance of the body in psychological disturbance. Working with the body allows a trickle-down effect on the psyche of the patient, because of the association between unconscious processing and the body systems. The subtle energy system ('the feeling unconscious') impacts significantly on the patient's emotional state, and if we learn how to communicate with it skilfully we certainly produce results, often far-reaching and surprising ones in fields like early trauma and obsessive-compulsive disorders which were formerly hard to reach.
The questions I was left with were: how far does this communication go? Is it deep enough to influence the early neurobiological disruptions which have caused the problem in the first place? How is the touch factor in energy therapy experienced by the deeper right brain psyche, and how does it impact on the dissociated unconscious? Are those energy modalities that use relatively little touch likely to have a deeper impact? In particular, how do we ensure that the key relational aspects of the work are not sabotaged in the exciting business of working with the subtle energy system?
Sunday 1 May 2016
Jung and Energy Psychotherapy - Next workshop, date to be announced
It has taken some time to decide on a theme suitable for my next workshop. At last I have come round to the idea of presenting a day which will begin in the morning on the more difficult work of C G Jung, which will perhaps be called 'Archetypes', and will go on after lunch to make links with this work and the current cutting edge therapy which is now called energy psychotherapy in this country.
Archetypal psychology can seem obscure when couched in the language of fifty years ago. But the fact is that archetypes are all around us all the time, and indeed our present culture is saturated with them. If I said, 'superhero,' 'zombie', 'alien abduction', Thor, Jurassic Park, Star Wars, Hercules, and many other popular ideas resounding in the culture, I would really be talking about archetypes. Archetypes are energetically encoded aspects of our culture, which it seems are inherited. They are themes and personalities which recur in generation after generation in new 'uniforms'. A hundred years ago, students would have been quite familiar with entities like 'Ulysses', the heroic journey, the underworld, the fall of the walls of Jericho, Dr Faustus's pact with the Devil, the Ark of the Covenant, the discovery of the sword in the stone - and on and on. Today's archetypes contain the same germs of ideas and characters, only in different dress.
These ideas, in turn, were often rooted in Greek, Roman, Chinese and Hindu literature and religion - depending on which culture influenced you in particular. Now, we unhesitatingly call them mythology - but of course, for the Greeks, or the Chinese, many names/concepts on this list were religion - taken just as seriously as the crucifixion of Christ and the thoughts of Mohammed are now.
The word 'myth' is greatly abused in our time. We think when we use it that we are describing 'fiction' - something unbelievable. Actually, however, a myth is not some kind of incredible tale, but an account of the nature of human experience, as seen in a particular age or culture. Myths contain germs of truth about ourselves, in other words, expressed in story form. We find in our clients expressions just like this of their life difficulties - encoded in modern life as, shall we say, envious stepmothers to be coped with, or difficult labours to be performed, or immensely tough life journeys with perils along the way to be faced. Sometimes, putting your finger on the appropriate myth being enacted, you can help to explain the client's dilemmas in a new way.
Jung took on board much of Freud's idea of libido, which however he called 'energy', since libido tends to imply sexual energy for orthodox Freudians (remember Oedipus?), and Jung thought that energy was a wider field than that - as do I. Oedipus was not the only classical Greek figure of importance! The others have plenty to teach us too about what it means to be human. Human thinking and experiencing is all around us in every field, just encoded differently for a different age, Jung says. And this 'being human' he calls 'archetypal.' It is, like everything else, about energy.
But now, helped by new psychotherapy practice and rapidly developing neurosciences, we are beginning to understand just how far and deep is the reach of human 'energy' in making us who we are. Energy in the sense of 'energy psychotherapy' refers to the 'subtle energy system', which is sufficiently subtle to be less than obvious in everyday life! Some lucky people are born able to see it, but most of us have to rely on trained sensing, imagination, intuition and the often remarkable consequences of working with it, via the meridians, the chakras and other entry approaches, which enable us to manipulate the system to our healthful advantage. We think now, for example, that 'the unconscious' (not a helpful way of describing that phenomenon, with hindsight!) is actually another way of talking about the subtle energy system. It is not 'somewhere in the head' but all around us! But as Einstein asserted, all of it is still energy - including matter itself. There is a continuity, if you like, between the body and its surrounding auric field - they are not somehow separate from each other. If you manipulate the biofield, the result is a 'trickle down' effect on the actual body - which can be a surprisingly influential impact. This can be extremely beneficial in working with psychological, emotional and physical disorders of many kinds.
So I am thinking in terms of trying to link up these two approaches to psychotherapy in a way that may be beneficial for practitioners of counselling, therapy of all kinds, clinical psychology and related fields. I will demonstrate some work with volunteers on the subtle energy system, and I will attempt to do a whole group exercise or two which should be fun as well as illuminating!
Which this space for more information.
Update:
The workshop will now not take place until the spring. I have deferred it for health reasons, but not abandoned it at all!
Update 2:
The workshop is scheduled for June 24th this year. Details from nwcounselling.org.uk
Archetypal psychology can seem obscure when couched in the language of fifty years ago. But the fact is that archetypes are all around us all the time, and indeed our present culture is saturated with them. If I said, 'superhero,' 'zombie', 'alien abduction', Thor, Jurassic Park, Star Wars, Hercules, and many other popular ideas resounding in the culture, I would really be talking about archetypes. Archetypes are energetically encoded aspects of our culture, which it seems are inherited. They are themes and personalities which recur in generation after generation in new 'uniforms'. A hundred years ago, students would have been quite familiar with entities like 'Ulysses', the heroic journey, the underworld, the fall of the walls of Jericho, Dr Faustus's pact with the Devil, the Ark of the Covenant, the discovery of the sword in the stone - and on and on. Today's archetypes contain the same germs of ideas and characters, only in different dress.
These ideas, in turn, were often rooted in Greek, Roman, Chinese and Hindu literature and religion - depending on which culture influenced you in particular. Now, we unhesitatingly call them mythology - but of course, for the Greeks, or the Chinese, many names/concepts on this list were religion - taken just as seriously as the crucifixion of Christ and the thoughts of Mohammed are now.
The word 'myth' is greatly abused in our time. We think when we use it that we are describing 'fiction' - something unbelievable. Actually, however, a myth is not some kind of incredible tale, but an account of the nature of human experience, as seen in a particular age or culture. Myths contain germs of truth about ourselves, in other words, expressed in story form. We find in our clients expressions just like this of their life difficulties - encoded in modern life as, shall we say, envious stepmothers to be coped with, or difficult labours to be performed, or immensely tough life journeys with perils along the way to be faced. Sometimes, putting your finger on the appropriate myth being enacted, you can help to explain the client's dilemmas in a new way.
Jung took on board much of Freud's idea of libido, which however he called 'energy', since libido tends to imply sexual energy for orthodox Freudians (remember Oedipus?), and Jung thought that energy was a wider field than that - as do I. Oedipus was not the only classical Greek figure of importance! The others have plenty to teach us too about what it means to be human. Human thinking and experiencing is all around us in every field, just encoded differently for a different age, Jung says. And this 'being human' he calls 'archetypal.' It is, like everything else, about energy.
But now, helped by new psychotherapy practice and rapidly developing neurosciences, we are beginning to understand just how far and deep is the reach of human 'energy' in making us who we are. Energy in the sense of 'energy psychotherapy' refers to the 'subtle energy system', which is sufficiently subtle to be less than obvious in everyday life! Some lucky people are born able to see it, but most of us have to rely on trained sensing, imagination, intuition and the often remarkable consequences of working with it, via the meridians, the chakras and other entry approaches, which enable us to manipulate the system to our healthful advantage. We think now, for example, that 'the unconscious' (not a helpful way of describing that phenomenon, with hindsight!) is actually another way of talking about the subtle energy system. It is not 'somewhere in the head' but all around us! But as Einstein asserted, all of it is still energy - including matter itself. There is a continuity, if you like, between the body and its surrounding auric field - they are not somehow separate from each other. If you manipulate the biofield, the result is a 'trickle down' effect on the actual body - which can be a surprisingly influential impact. This can be extremely beneficial in working with psychological, emotional and physical disorders of many kinds.
So I am thinking in terms of trying to link up these two approaches to psychotherapy in a way that may be beneficial for practitioners of counselling, therapy of all kinds, clinical psychology and related fields. I will demonstrate some work with volunteers on the subtle energy system, and I will attempt to do a whole group exercise or two which should be fun as well as illuminating!
Which this space for more information.
Update:
The workshop will now not take place until the spring. I have deferred it for health reasons, but not abandoned it at all!
Update 2:
The workshop is scheduled for June 24th this year. Details from nwcounselling.org.uk
Tuesday 12 January 2016
Test 5
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Vestibulum pretium sodales arcu, vitae laoreet tellus iaculis a. Praesent convallis, diam vitae congue cursus, massa diam lacinia ligula, vitae faucibus arcu sapien eu ex. Integer eu mollis enim, sit amet interdum massa. Curabitur volutpat at turpis dictum gravida. Sed enim nibh, ultricies nec sodales ac, auctor posuere nisi. In quis varius urna. Vestibulum volutpat volutpat lacus non venenatis. Vivamus condimentum felis est, eu vehicula nulla rhoncus sed. Nulla eget aliquet nisi. Quisque condimentum nibh risus, vel suscipit nulla ultrices at. Nullam convallis nibh id nunc bibendum, sit amet efficitur sapien sagittis. Aenean porta placerat blandit. Fusce pulvinar odio non pulvinar semper. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus
Vestibulum eu dolor eu ligula pulvinar condimentum ac nec tellus. Etiam iaculis arcu nec ex bibendum fermentum. Proin nec pulvinar erat. Aliquam vel ante sit amet purus lacinia vestibulum a vitae purus. Vivamus a pulvinar velit, eu varius libero. Nullam eu tempus purus. Donec vestibulum vestibulum quam vitae vulputate. Nunc tempor felis vitae erat finibus, ut accumsan quam ultrices. Proin volutpat nisl in nibh accumsan, dignissim elementum lacus euismod. Donec at ornare nunc. Morbi tortor justo, consequat vel bibendum et, lobortis consequat leo. Suspendisse maximus sapien et mi tincidunt, sed cursus turpis maximus. Nunc vitae hendrerit orci.
Vestibulum eu dolor eu ligula pulvinar condimentum ac nec tellus. Etiam iaculis arcu nec ex bibendum fermentum. Proin nec pulvinar erat. Aliquam vel ante sit amet purus lacinia vestibulum a vitae purus. Vivamus a pulvinar velit, eu varius libero. Nullam eu tempus purus. Donec vestibulum vestibulum quam vitae vulputate. Nunc tempor felis vitae erat finibus, ut accumsan quam ultrices. Proin volutpat nisl in nibh accumsan, dignissim elementum lacus euismod. Donec at ornare nunc. Morbi tortor justo, consequat vel bibendum et, lobortis consequat leo. Suspendisse maximus sapien et mi tincidunt, sed cursus turpis maximus. Nunc vitae hendrerit orci.
Test 4
Vivamus luctus dolor vitae massa luctus, et sollicitudin magna dictum. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Aenean tempus eros sapien, in vehicula nunc volutpat a. Nam tellus felis, dignissim sit amet pellentesque non, feugiat eget nulla. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Morbi facilisis velit justo, vitae lobortis ligula rutrum in. Nullam at congue velit. Maecenas feugiat magna dui, vel semper nisi tristique non. Mauris fringilla porttitor purus, sed rhoncus nulla. Sed placerat nunc eget eros scelerisque, eu vestibulum dui porta. Fusce nunc enim, commodo non velit sed, luctus porttitor odio. Praesent placerat risus at ipsum porttitor consectetur. Suspendisse potenti. Aliquam ac felis rutrum, molestie urna id, tincidunt enim. Aliquam auctor nec sem in iaculis.
Nulla quam sem, feugiat ut nisl in, ultricies placerat neque. Donec imperdiet vitae lorem sed ultrices. Maecenas molestie feugiat scelerisque. Donec varius sagittis neque ac rhoncus. Vestibulum vitae tempor erat. Aenean pretium metus a luctus molestie. Sed ullamcorper pellentesque eros, sed cursus orci vulputate ut. Curabitur pulvinar purus sem, quis laoreet purus gravida non. Proin dapibus feugiat efficitur. Nam rutrum varius urna, mattis ultrices tortor.
Nulla quam sem, feugiat ut nisl in, ultricies placerat neque. Donec imperdiet vitae lorem sed ultrices. Maecenas molestie feugiat scelerisque. Donec varius sagittis neque ac rhoncus. Vestibulum vitae tempor erat. Aenean pretium metus a luctus molestie. Sed ullamcorper pellentesque eros, sed cursus orci vulputate ut. Curabitur pulvinar purus sem, quis laoreet purus gravida non. Proin dapibus feugiat efficitur. Nam rutrum varius urna, mattis ultrices tortor.
Test 3
In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Nam at facilisis sem. Duis fermentum ac urna vel tincidunt. Etiam consectetur, nibh sit amet pellentesque porttitor, turpis turpis scelerisque lorem, vel congue odio quam id lacus. Phasellus ac erat efficitur, lacinia turpis ut, egestas ante. Nulla bibendum lobortis mauris non porta. Donec vitae orci ligula. Proin in magna accumsan odio pretium ullamcorper.
Phasellus lorem dui, tristique in ante vel, pulvinar elementum arcu. Ut ac orci eget ligula ullamcorper efficitur. Donec at lacus dapibus, venenatis nulla ut, ultricies neque. Etiam commodo leo vitae auctor congue. Mauris aliquet pellentesque ullamcorper. Cras bibendum, enim sed mattis vestibulum, sapien tortor maximus magna, sit amet posuere tellus dolor a mi. Donec mi ante, lobortis non ipsum ac, ullamcorper rhoncus nulla. Praesent ut nulla ut urna sollicitudin dignissim faucibus vitae massa. Maecenas sit amet tellus sit amet quam facilisis semper quis non diam. Sed eu lacus quis lectus congue pellentesque eu ut mauris.
Phasellus lorem dui, tristique in ante vel, pulvinar elementum arcu. Ut ac orci eget ligula ullamcorper efficitur. Donec at lacus dapibus, venenatis nulla ut, ultricies neque. Etiam commodo leo vitae auctor congue. Mauris aliquet pellentesque ullamcorper. Cras bibendum, enim sed mattis vestibulum, sapien tortor maximus magna, sit amet posuere tellus dolor a mi. Donec mi ante, lobortis non ipsum ac, ullamcorper rhoncus nulla. Praesent ut nulla ut urna sollicitudin dignissim faucibus vitae massa. Maecenas sit amet tellus sit amet quam facilisis semper quis non diam. Sed eu lacus quis lectus congue pellentesque eu ut mauris.
Test 2
Etiam consectetur nunc eu pellentesque pretium. Aenean laoreet leo lacus. Maecenas eu odio eu metus facilisis vehicula nec sed velit. Fusce in rhoncus nisl, vitae malesuada lorem. Nam commodo neque non lacus fermentum convallis. Donec vehicula tellus erat, quis tincidunt est dapibus sed. Aenean vel sem non ipsum egestas ullamcorper. Nam sed volutpat nunc, eu elementum felis. Integer justo mauris, feugiat ut est eu, tempor feugiat enim. Nullam turpis nisl, auctor vehicula lobortis vel, malesuada non nibh. Vestibulum mollis, erat vel commodo fringilla, ligula lacus ornare diam, nec ultricies turpis enim et quam. Donec viverra venenatis ligula sit amet ornare. Nulla aliquam orci vel tortor tristique, eu euismod augue venenatis. Praesent iaculis metus quam, at posuere nisl vestibulum id. Nam quis nisl placerat, tincidunt ante sit amet, tincidunt mi.
Vestibulum porta ornare purus. Nam metus felis, pharetra ut felis vitae, volutpat dapibus nisl. Sed sagittis augue diam, id fringilla dolor semper at. Pellentesque a massa id lectus dictum congue. Donec eros arcu, ullamcorper in metus vel, ultrices ornare ligula. Nunc et pretium libero. Nam tempus, ante in facilisis mattis, ante ex consequat sem, ut sagittis quam mi eget orci. Nam nec iaculis magna, in elementum lacus. Sed faucibus nulla id efficitur efficitur. Ut facilisis iaculis vestibulum. Nam imperdiet ullamcorper consequat. Nulla sollicitudin tempor arcu vitae volutpat. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Vivamus lacus dolor, iaculis eget urna at, tempus fermentum nisi. Sed ac mauris velit.
Vestibulum porta ornare purus. Nam metus felis, pharetra ut felis vitae, volutpat dapibus nisl. Sed sagittis augue diam, id fringilla dolor semper at. Pellentesque a massa id lectus dictum congue. Donec eros arcu, ullamcorper in metus vel, ultrices ornare ligula. Nunc et pretium libero. Nam tempus, ante in facilisis mattis, ante ex consequat sem, ut sagittis quam mi eget orci. Nam nec iaculis magna, in elementum lacus. Sed faucibus nulla id efficitur efficitur. Ut facilisis iaculis vestibulum. Nam imperdiet ullamcorper consequat. Nulla sollicitudin tempor arcu vitae volutpat. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Vivamus lacus dolor, iaculis eget urna at, tempus fermentum nisi. Sed ac mauris velit.
Test 1
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nulla luctus, nibh condimentum tincidunt imperdiet, turpis diam vulputate leo, venenatis consectetur tellus metus auctor leo. Fusce sit amet tincidunt nisi. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Aenean eu bibendum urna. Vestibulum et nisl suscipit, hendrerit lectus eget, laoreet erat. Maecenas porta neque eu nisl elementum, ut imperdiet sapien tincidunt. Ut feugiat auctor erat, sit amet feugiat leo semper sed. Maecenas vulputate mauris justo, at consequat orci fringilla id. Vestibulum eget diam lacinia, commodo nunc eget, tempus enim. Ut ut quam lacus.
Nam pulvinar mollis ante at tempus. Nullam in nisi lorem. Curabitur imperdiet scelerisque dui, consequat tempor risus ullamcorper eget. Donec accumsan quam nec luctus dignissim. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Nam ut orci sapien. Morbi libero ante, dignissim sed ultrices non, tempor sit amet purus. Pellentesque sollicitudin hendrerit tortor sed faucibus. Quisque blandit lobortis aliquet. Mauris auctor leo quis nisi luctus bibendum.
Nam pulvinar mollis ante at tempus. Nullam in nisi lorem. Curabitur imperdiet scelerisque dui, consequat tempor risus ullamcorper eget. Donec accumsan quam nec luctus dignissim. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Nam ut orci sapien. Morbi libero ante, dignissim sed ultrices non, tempor sit amet purus. Pellentesque sollicitudin hendrerit tortor sed faucibus. Quisque blandit lobortis aliquet. Mauris auctor leo quis nisi luctus bibendum.
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