Should we be careful what we wish for?

We're told that the current political and constitutional crisis simply bored to death a lot of the voters who elected Mr Johnson. They wanted the government to 'get on with it.'  And they elected someone they believed would do that. I'm often sceptical about what pollsters and political commentators say, but on this occasion I'd guess they were right. However: what exactly is 'being bored to death' about? We seem to take it for granted that we know what this means.

We have prided ourselves on being a stable democracy, where we decide things in the calm atmosphere of an ancient, venerable building beside the sweetly flowing Thames, where a firm Speaker keeps everyone with extreme views in order. Didn't we have pictures, from time to time, of half empty chambers, with one old stager rambling on, while the rest slept?

Not any more.

It is the MPs who are agitated to the point of exhaustion, while they bore the voters to death with their arguments, and demands for action that no one seems able to make happen.  I have a mental image of them scurrying from place to place, from phone call to Whats App, and from secret meeting to secret meeting, plotting this and planning that, looking for allies, struggling to make sense of an old constitution where it's often hard to tell what powers you have to do anything. Some people seem quite surprised that MPs talk to each other at all. What did they think the Westminster Parliament was for, I wonder? Is there an idea abroad that you just take your manifesto pledges to the House, and make decisions, decisions, decisions about how to put them into action, and if you don't there is something wrong with you?

Problem is, there would be no point in a Parliament if that were the case. You'd just elect a government, not a Parliament at all. Dictatorships have done this, historically. The worst-case scenarios are where 'government' shrinks to a handful of people who just 'get on with it' big time! And no one else gets a word in edgeways. Be careful what you wish for! Dictators can be more efficient, for a while, since they lack the time-wasting business of having to discuss things in boring meetings. Mussolini, they said, made the trains run on time. And also he agreed a pact with Hitler which prolonged the Second World War and brought Italy to its knees.

What is this boredom stuff? I'd suggest that, from a psychological point of view, boredom expresses our inability to bear unpleasant feelings. Being left to yourself, with nothing to do, is probably one of the biggest tests of psychological maturity. Can you remain happy, or at least content, in those circumstances? Do you have internal resources sufficient to carry you through it? Many people do not. Action is always their solution to pain of any kind. Do something! 

We don't expect children to be able to hold themselves together for long periods without things to do and adult people to help. This is normal. Without such support they may become depressed and listless, even traumatised in some circumstances. But the point of growing up is that gradually we learn to overcome such anxieties. We take on the job our parents began and learn that we live in a wonderfully interesting world where there are excitement and sources of contentment round every corner. We are glad of family and friends to enhance our lives, but we do not die of boredom when they are not available.  We know how to deal with it - go for a walk, look at the stars, read a good book, attend a council debate, make a model ship, cook a meal, paint a picture, decorate the front room, dig the garden, go on a march, and so forth. There are plenty of things to do every day. I came across medical advice on what to do when you are depressed, which ran to a whole close printed A4 page of suggested activities. Very helpful and also missing the point! The point is, some people do not have the sheer level of psychological stability needed to be able to do those things without a companion! They remain stuck, at some level, in childhood. They cannot read the book for themselves that a parent once read to them. They haven't moved on.

How do we 'move on', assuming no one gave us much of a model of psychological maturity? You can, but you need to choose it as a goal. It won't be delivered from the planet Mars by an alien on a space cycle. You need to watch out for periods of boredom, and what you tend to feel, and do, with them. If you tend to feel irritable, upset, uncertain, anxious, depressed, then I recommend you start some psychological self-help. Try not to suppress the feelings, but rather to work alongside them. Be a good companion to your upset and anxious state of mind. Allow it to exist, and take it for a walk, help it decorate the front room, or allow it to watch the stars with you. You can't force it to go away. It will however sink into its natural place, as part of you, but not the whole of you, if you just let it be. Letting it be is not allowing it to dominate either. It gets woven into the fabric of the life you choose, not the one it wants to thrust upon you.

I think the current crisis has tested our psychological maturity as a nation almost to destruction. And you might think I'm about to say that we failed the test. But I'm not. I'm surprised every day through the nightmare of the last few years, that civil war has not broken out. For some of us - a minority, but still a powerful group -  boredom and uncertainty has been beyond their ability to cope. They have started incandescent incidents involving throwing bricks and getting arrested. Some politicians have subtly encouraged this, seeing it as a weapon in their armoury helping to bring about change, by threatening the rest of us with civil disorder if we don't agree to this or that. (Fascist groups have used this tactic. It is not new, but it is new when it comes from Parliamentarians!)

I repeat:  be careful what you wish for! It may seem like a good strategy now, but a year down the line it may seem like horror and devastation. The last Civil War which began in 1642 lasted nine years, bringing about destruction across the country, and it was not until 1688 when William of Orange arrived on these shores that something like normal life was restored. This could never happen again, you are thinking? Sorry, wrong. Actually, the whole of UK history is peppered with desperate conflicts between one side and another over this or that. Parliament grew directly out of the need to compromise. The need not to be held to ransom by a single unelected monarch's particular opinions, but to consult the whole population from time to time. Talking is not an incompetent substitute for action. Over the centuries we have passed thousands of acts of Parliament which have changed this country out of all recognition, and they all came out of choosing a talking shop instead of a war. They came from the need to substitute the demand for action with conversation. Parliament was, frankly, a talking shop and still is. Those who are easily bored, who think MPs don't do a proper job, might remember this. Talking shops have their advantages. Boredom is an inevitable part of life, but it is not the whole. It is not unbearable, though it may test your resources.

And until something better presents itself, why not get out that list of do-it-yourself jobs you made last winter? There is action, and then there is action! 'Do something', if you must, but do a constructive something for yourself and your world. Until something better happens along.

Depression is a stuck place

Last year I wrote about grace as the infallible pill of recovery. I explained how regulatory systems long present and buried in our human make-up allow us to keep on a relatively even emotional balance. If our parents were well regulated people, their task will soon become ours, as our systems mature. We will not need to apply to others for support every time we feel angry, discouraged, anxious, resentful, or distressed. Nine times out of ten we can deal with these feelings ourselves. The simple way to work with feelings is just to feel them - just to be patient with ourselves, and wait for the anger to pass, the sadness to fade away, the exhilaration to motor down to a level which is no longer disturbing. Trust me, this will happen, with varying degrees of speed, depending on how severe the emotional upset is.

There are two common fears about feeling our feelings. One is that they will never end - that depression, if we allow it in the door, will be a life-time state, that if we acknowledge anger instead of trying to suppress it, we will feel nothing but enraged ever again. This is an unnecessary fear. Feelings are not like that. We cannot sustain high feeling levels for long. We have built-in regulatory systems which cool down our highs and warm up our lows, so there is an inevitable turning in our mood, after a period of either gloom or anger or excitation - and it happens automatically. Desire in all its variety is a classic example - it is powerful in the moment, but we don't carry it around every minute of every day. (It's a myth that men think about sex every minute!) Thankfully, or we would get nothing else done! It happens at certain times and places, hopefully when we can respond to it. If something frustrates us in the need to respond, however, our desire still fades away when it is obvious there is not much we can do about it right now. And its strength varies from individual to individual, just as everything else about us is individual.

However, notice also that if we persistently ignore it, desire can become something we experience less and less frequently, until we feel like asexual beings. My sister once told me she was never hungry, for example. As she doesn't employ me to be her psychotherapist, I usually try to avoid commenting in situations like this, but it made me think. The question is, why not? Given that hunger is central to human processing, and therefore to our survival. There is a powerful SEEKING system (much under-explored) in the brain, not just about sex, which urges us to go seek, go discover, go experience, go try out, go find what we want... (I didn't assume my sister was anorexic, by the way. Anorexics are as hungry as we are and more so, but they cannot allow hunger, it seems, and become expert at denying it. This is what I'm talking about.) Any system will work less well if we persistently behave as though we don't have it. People come to therapy because they fear they cannot allow their feelings to get out of control. But others come because they fear they have no feelings at all. They have often suppressed feelings for too long, until they no longer seem to exist. (The word 'psychopath' lurks in the background, souped up by generations of movies who love them!) We always find out that they do with some careful exploration.

We do have feelings, whether or not we seem to lack them - but often we have not allowed them enough license for too long. Either way, there is nothing inherently wrong with us that a little attention to our emotional states will not help. Do not suppress feeling - better out than in, is my philosophy. Trust your brain to do its job, which is to keep you well regulated, in a reasonable 'calm' mood. And the dark mood will lighten, sure as night gives way to day.

The second big fear of feelings is the one about fear of being unable to control yourself.  For example, "If I allowed myself to be angry I would kill him/her." The chances of this are not high. Murder is still far less common than road accidents! Heart disease is the big killer globally at 31.8% of the population. Homicide comes a long way down the list at .72%. You might say or even do something you regret. This however is part of the learning process of working with your feelings. The first time you tried to ride a bike you probably fell off. You might have felt a fool and scraped your knee, but your recovered, and this is the learning point to take away. With practice, you will learn to feel and sometimes articulate your feelings, and you will be able to tell when each is appropriate.

Our fear of feeling is rooted in modern society in the belief that we must use our intellects to drive our lives and keep us under control. This is the negative legacy of our pre-frontal cortex. Discovering our higher than average intelligence in the animal kingdom was a turning point in human development. With it we began to claim and rule the planet, and this brought us many advantages. However, it also brought the big disadvantage that we began to discount all the other legacies we inherited from our animal ancestry:  like instincts, powerful intuitions, great sensing capacity, the ability to care for and not frustrate ourselves perpetually. The ability to play, to rest, to care for ourselves and others. These are habits which animals possess without even trying, and which we still share with them. But because we have intelligence, we soon began to grossly overvalue it. We now think intelligence is all we need to live the good life. This is far from the case.  Feelings are built into our systems, just as intelligence is, and cannot be erased when we find them inconvenient. The pre-frontal cortex is not all wise, and cannot be allowed to rule every aspect of our lives. (If you don't believe me, read Iain McGilchrist's amazing book 'The master and his emissary', where he demolishes once and for all the idea that the left brain has everything we need to live well.)  The principal function of the pre-frontal cortex, based on neuroscience findings, is actually to give us the option of inhibiting action. It allows us thinking time. Which other animals do not have. When a tiger is mad, it goes for the one who is provoking it. When the dog wants a walk, it jumps up and down and demands attention. It does not have a mechanism like us for thinking,  "Is this a good time for a walk?" The pre-frontal cortex cannot rule our lives on its own. It needs all our other functions as well to do that.

Depression is a typical example. When something bad or disappointing happens to us, we may respond with depression. This is perfectly normal and nothing to be surprised about. It's pointless say, "I should not have been upset."  Your reaction is what it is, and you need to start from there. I've had patients say things like, "I lost my partner last year, and this year I had to move house to a strange new neighbourhood, and now my son has been in an accident and is in hospital. Why am I so depressed!"  To which I will say, "I would be worried if you weren't depressed in the light of those circumstances!" This is a perfectly normal reaction to events. (They don't say it all at once. They tell me about their depression at great length in the first session, and after three sessions may mention in passing casually that their son is in hospital. And gradually we learn more. Fed with little drops of their emotional life, as though it were the most trivial aspect of them, the one I will be least interested in!)

Actually cyclic periods of depression and upbeat mood are common and normal. They are nothing to worry about, and you do not need a pill to take it away. And it is not only life changing circumstances which drive it. Perish the thought. We react with sadness and a sense of loss quickly and easily, even to trivial matters like being unable to attend a favourite football match. What you do about it is nothing. There is no need. Feel it and wait for it to pass. And it will. We find ways of compensating ourselves for disappointment, too. Sometimes it is helpful to say to a patient, "What makes you feel good?" Because the patient usually knows: what they don't know is that it is ok to use that knowledge to help themselves through a bad patch! They frequently disaprove of trying to help themselves, as though it were a sign of character weakness. Some may connect self-help like this with addictive behaviours causing them trouble in the past. Don't indulge yourself, a grim voice whispers, or you'll get hooked on it! But this is rarely the case. Addictive behaviours of all kinds are made worse by not knowing what else makes you feel good. If you have no hobbies that please you, habits that you thoroughly enjoy and can lose yourself in, no other ways to feel on top of the world, you are more likely to turn to the old enemy. 

Does any of this apply to bereavement? Yes. Because bereavement is heavy, painful and prolonged you do need time out for something you can enjoy, like digging the garden or going to the park with the grandkids. However, bereavement, if of a close, intimate relationship, will take much longer to heal, and unlike the loss of possessions or a job, will stay with us probably all our lives. What happens, though, is that the sense of loss will gradually be integrated into our lives so that we can function in many normal ways together with the presence of the loss. 'Integration' is not the same as blending. It is not like making a smooth soup, but more like making a chunky one. Each element of the soup remains available to us as a separate and individual taste - but also it is now part of a larger whole, and can function together with all the rest of the ingredients to bring a combined taste as well as an individual one. Bereavement then is not THE ingredient of your life, but ONE ingredient. The lost one remains as an individual person in our minds and hearts, but is now part of us and not someone that dominates our minds all the time. And we will return to the sense of loss from time to time, and give some due weight to it, by feeling our sadness and loss once again. If we could not bear loss, as human beings, how would human kind possibly have survived? The fact is that the history of our species is fraught with just such loss and the pain and suffering of it.  It is utterly painful, sometimes beyond words, especially at first, but it is endurable as time passes. It is not the time that heals, though - beware of such easy comfort. It is the integration that heals. When we feel it, take it in, and make our sadness an authentic part of our whole character, but not all of it, then we have done the job of grieving. And it will take time - think in years, rather than weeks or months.

Is there a difference between depression and sadness? Yes. Sadness comes to us through events that occur outside of us, and often outside of our control. Depression arises from inside. It is a response to something going in within us, much less to something happening outside of us.  

Such as, you might think? For example, depression arises often from memories rising to the surface of our past. The job I failed to get. The woman who did not love me. The mother who hated me. The way I gave way to criticism of my daughter too often. Essentially, the depressed one is ruminating perpetually upon mistakes and guilt and failures of the past. These are feelings, and what is more, have never been named, and never been made open to processing. The feelings of the past rise up inside us, no matter how hard we have practised intellectual suppression. We don't bury feelings dead. We bury them alive, and they rise up to haunt us, unless we agree to look at them, to do the work of processing them. It is important and valuable to do that work now. This is what your depression is telling you! Find someone to talk to who will be able to listen and understand that you still feel bad about your broken marriage, or your mother's death. Depression is not a visitation from Mars! Trust me, it is about something in you - and your job now is to find out what that something is, and deal with it. Any kind of talking therapy will help and has the advantage hopefully of being with someone qualified for the job, and unknown to you:  who has no previous baggage of a relationship to bring to the task.

Friends and family may help, but not always. They feel anxious about you and want you to be 'your old self.' This is their way of saying, "I can't cope with your depression!" You are best not confiding in them as they will tell you kindly to 'pull yourself together', which is not helpful. Instead, find someone to talk to who has no vested interest in viewing your present state this way or that, but who will, rather, ask objective questions about it. This will be a shorter and truer road, even if more expensive. 

Should I take anti-depressants, people ask. No harm in a short course, in a genuine emergency or to help you over a rough patch. My advice if asked is always, if you've been taking them for a long time, years perhaps, you need to reconsider. But do it with your GP, not alone in a heroic attempt to 'get off' them. The problem is that many anti-depressants create dependency, and that is not a help. But also they work best by attacking the very roots of your capacity for feeling. Which was already in trouble! If you think you would like to try stopping the pills, and the decision is always yours, then do it sensibly, and a therapist will help and support you also, as well as a GP, along the way.

Democracy: the liquorice allsorts of politics

The word democracy seems to be dragged into every argument lately that I hear or read about, whenever someone wants to give power to an argument. 'It's democracy' is their killer blow!

Anybody would think we are all constitutional experts who understand these things as our birthright. But we don't. We have to be taught, and some have been taught badly, or did not listen in their constitutional history class. Democracy has long been misunderstood. People seem to think it means "my way should be the way we go." I'm afraid it doesn't. 

There are basically two types of democracy:  the direct way, and the representational way. The direct way means, 'government is by the whole population' and 'representational' means we are governed through elected representatives. Now, if you think about this, it's obvious that democracy cannot mean 'my way or the highway.' If government is by the whole people, then the inevitable way to go is through endless referenda, because how can a voting population of 40 million decide anything? Whereas representational democracy happens by regular elections, in which those who receive the most votes are then endowed with the power to decide on our behalf.

I think none of us need reminding that both ways can be pretty toxic and ultimately lead to no action at all. Once you accept the principle of government by referendum, it means that decisions are rarely final, and lead to the demand for further referenda to clarify the question, to to make more options available, to consider new developments and so on. These are not wrong demands, they are the inevitable result of having posed the question that way. Many types of question are unsuitable for referenda. They work best with clear moral and social choices:  Is hanging an acceptable form of punishment? should we make gay marriage legal? The decision here has some chance of being viewed as final, at least for a generation or two. And it is clear how to implement it. You need to change the law, and then it is done and we can move on. There will be consequences of changing this law, but they can proceed as part of normal parliamentary business. Complex political questions such as 'should Scotland become independent' and 'should we leave the EU' are hopelessly inadequate to be dealt with via referendum. The choice is far from clear: what kind of leave, what kind of remain? when? how? what are the consequences likely to be of each choice? To say that we dealt with these questions during the preceding debate is dubious to put it mildly, when each side had its own entrenched political position and gave different answers that suited them without being required to fact check what they said, and when there is no such thing as a whole nation debate, so some people heard some answers and some heard others! Listening to current debates on the subject of Brexit, you would think that some people did not take part in the debate at all, given their fanciful accounts of what happened.  However, the most important flaw in the process was it was never clear from the outset how the answer would/could be implemented. Nobody seemed to think that question important. Yet, since it was clear that it would have to be implemented by Parliament, it was surely clear that those involved in the campaigns would need to know what Parliament thought about it, since they would be the ones who would have to implement it! No such research took place, as far as I know. 

Representational democracy has its limitations too. A good deal of trust has to be placed in the elected representation, and he or she needs to be given plenty of latitude to listen to debates, do their research and follow their own consciences. At one time we took for granted that elected Members of Parliament were honourable and trustworthy people. Now we do not. And they themselves have not helped their reputations with events such as the expenses scandal, and other signs that some MPs don't take their responsibilities as seriously as they should. However it is simpler and has on the whole served us well in past times. Nowadays, it is not so clear that it does, in a world where there are wide differences of opinion which are clearly not fairly treated in a first-past-the-post voting system, and where the margin seat is the only one that gets real attention.

However, if you wish to create a perfect political storm, try combining both methods of democracy! Which is exactly what we did three years so with the EU referendum, when we casually moved from one system to the other because it suited the Prime Minister of the day, who needed a means of disciplining his own party. Then stand back and watch the results!

I'd like to suggest that we need constitutional reform, and Lord Kerslake's paper to the Annual Chamberlain Lecture in London June 25th is a good place to start. Listen to it here on https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0006sw1/briefings-lord-kerslake  But also we need to think again about our concept of democracy.

Democracy is not a process for making sure the winner takes all! Nor is winning all that matters. Dictators have used the zero-sum game to their own benefit easily. If you're not fussy about how you get votes, you can get people to agree to anything. The ancient Greeks intended it as a process for opening up debate widely. These debates took place in the Forum which was the town centre, essentially, and were not universally franchised according to our standards. What they did was share power for the first time, to the extent that they enabled public participation in decisions about the country. Everyone qualified could have their say, and to that extent it was a major innovation.

I think it's time we revived this aspect of democracy. Stopped viewing it as a weapon for killing off the opposition and started using it as a method of encouraging participation. It's the values that underpin democracy that count, and that we seem to have forgotten about. The values of democracy are openness to public accountability, readiness to make participation easy and barrier free, fairness in giving equal opportunities to all to take part.

Democracy is not a guarantee that you will get your own way! It is a way we can all hear and share the debate, listen well and carefully, and perhaps come to different conclusions from the ones we started with. Changing your mind is called growing up! You win some and you lose some, and you need to be prepared to accept that. But people will never accept a vote that did not seem to them to be fair, open or accountable. It was the values underpinning the choice that caused the ructions, and those won't stop until we find a method of testing public opinion that seems to them to be genuinely rigorous and fact checkable and implementable!