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Tuesday, 31 July 2007
Anxious attachment
At last I am getting to where I was meant to be going. The link between anxiety, panic attacks and attachment.
We all have basic feeling systems deep down inside in our character. On the surface each day we have a wide variety of feelings from anger, to scare, to sadness, to sexual, to embarrassment to happiness and joy and so on endlessly. These come and go many times each day. We also have a consistent feeling in our character that changes very little.
Some people have an angry character or a sad and melancholy character or a happy character. It is just there all the time in the background with us and sometimes it comes out into the fore ground. But that feeling state is with us usually for the rest of our days. It is not an easy thing to change. Changing one’s character is a very difficult thing to do.
Some people of course are of an anxious character. There is a sense of anxiety that pervades in the background for us. It can be quite mild or it can be quite intense. This varies from person to person. What causes it? Probably we are born with a propensity to a certain feeling state and then how we are raised determines the rest. So a combination of both. What I will look at here is one way a person can develop an anxious character and that relates to a child who develops an anxious attachment to a parent.
Here is the separation continuum. Well it is actually half of it. This looks at the various levels at which a child can be emotionally abandoned by mother. It goes from the normal range to complete abandonment. The other half of it, pointing in the other direction goes from the normal range to complete smothering or over protection by mother, but that is another story.
Children who fall on this side of the scale are the ones who have been under protected. Those children who have been forced to stand on their own two feet before they were psychologically ready. Often this child is the oldest child, who is given the responsibility of looking after the younger children before he is psychologically capable. In other cases, some parents have their own personal problems which restrict them in how much support and nurturing they give to their children. Often these are the parents who are there, while not being there. That is the parents who provide physically but not emotionally. This leaves the child feeling emotionally abandoned.
Parents can be physically and psychologically unavailable in varying degrees. The more severe the unavailability, the more damaged is the resultant character feeling in the child. If the parenting is just outside the normal range then the child will develop an angry character. Statements such as, "It's not fair" are common for children in this group. The anger is not of a very severe nature, however the child who is consistently raised in this way, will have an angry character which is basically an attempt at paying back the parents. Sometimes you will observe a young child who has been left by mother who had to go to an appointment or such. On the mother’s return the child will say things like: “I don’t want you”, “Mummy is naughty” and may even hit out at mummy physically. The child feels angry that it was ‘abandoned’ at least in its eyes. This chastisement by the child of the parent is done so the parents will not do it again. The child is telling the parent off for their neglect.
Developing healthy attachments with children is a hard thing for parents to do
If the unavailability of the parents is more prolonged and pronounced, then the child will become anxious or scared. Some phobias or panic attacks can result from this basic scare which the child feels towards her 'abandonment'. The child begins to realise that this emotional abandonment is more serious than first thought. Initially it could be angry but it now sees that the parents are serious about not emotionally being there and thus it reacts more with scare than anger. It stops chastising the parents and goes more into survival mode. “I can’t make these people look after me by getting angry at them so I am going to have to survive by standing on my own two feet”. Hence we get the term, the “Hurried child” or the child who is required to be emotionally self sufficient before they are able to do so.
So here we have the term the “Anxious attachment”. The attachment between mother and child is structured such that it promotes anxiety in the child. So what happens to such children?
This can sometimes lead to the ‘Good child’. This child decides, “What I have to do iskeep a low profile, do the right thing, behave and conform and that will keep them around. That will then make me safe”. Whilst it does not make the child safe it does make them feel a bit safer and a bit is better than nothing. The unfortunate thing for this child is they rarely get identified. They don’t complain and they don’t make trouble so they are assumed to be happy children. But underneath the goodness is anxiety.
"If I study hard and get good grades, then they will be happy and want me to stay around"
As they grow into adolescence they can still remain unidentified or they can develop other difficulties like self mutilation or perhaps an eating disorder. Teenage girls with an eating disorder are often nice conforming people with some anxiety. The other thing that such a child can decide is: “There must be something wrong with me or they wouldn’t be treating me as such. There must be something bad about me or they would look after me properly” and thus you can get the self mutilative acts, eating disorder, self loathing and low self image. At times these can be quite pronounced and then you can have a third degree impasse.
However if they remain unidentified then when they are in their late 20s or early 30s the bubble finally bursts an they end up in my consulting room. They can no longer cope with the panic attacks or the anxiety that they endure day after day. So they will seek help of some kind or turn to drugs and alcohol to self medicate the anxiety away.
Some children from an anxious attachment wont be so conforming and they can act out and do things like School Refusal. The child starts refusing to go to school. (There are other causes of school refusal such as maternal over protection as well). Obviously this then leads to some action being taken and often the child is diagnosed as having Separation Anxiety. Such a child decides, “Being away from mother is frightening so I will stay around her as much as possible and then I will feel safe”. Again it does not make the child feel safe but it makes them feel a bit safer and a bit is better than nothing. So the child will not go to school, or on camps, or even do sleep overs with friends. Sometimes they will even try and sleep with the parents in their bed as many nights as they can get away with. Sometimes bed wetting is a symptom of separation anxiety. If a child wets its bed then it is much more difficult for it to stay away from home over night. They seek to maintain as much geographical proximity to mother as they can, and this in turn makes the anxiety less, temporarily.
To complete the separation continuum.
If the emotional abandonment is even more severe the child goes beyond scare and becomes despairing. This child is considering giving up, because life seems too bad. He tends to have poor emotional development, be apathetic, display rocking behaviour, have a weak cry, sleep excessively and show little spontaneous excitement. We saw examples of this when Romania was liberated with the TV images of orphanages showing young children with blank expressions in cots just standing there displaying very little movement or emotion. If these people survive then they can have significant psychological disturbance.
Romanian orphanage. The blank expressionless face shows a despair and "I give up" attitude.
The final group is that of marasmus and death. Whereas in despair the child was considering giving up, in marasmus the child has given up, and so will not even give a weak cry of help. Such children have been abandoned psychologically and physically. With little physical or psychological attention, a child will develop mental and physical deterioration even to the point of death. This tends to occur to children in large institutions who are rarely picked up or touched.
Graffiti
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Monday, 30 July 2007
Attachment & detachment
Kahless wrote:
“I have been surprised on occasion by attachment having crept up on me.”
I think this is a good point. I am often asked how do you know when you have an attachment to someone. There are two different answers to that. The first is you can feel it, but the most sure way you know is when the person dies or leaves.
The amount of grief you feel about the loss of that person is directly proportional to the amount of attachment there was to that person. The diagram below again shows the attachment diagram.
If the person dies then the attachment most often will break down and eventually disappear. The part of you that is in the bond with the other person slowly disappears. How this happens is by the grief reaction. With a strong attachment this will take anywhere between 6 months and 2 years under usual conditions. By grieving and going though the grief process the bond slowly but surely disappears. When the various emotions of loss, sadness anger, despair, fear and so forth are felt and dealt with then the bond breaks down.
Of course this can be a very painful process and people can do all sorts of things to trick themselves that the other person is sort of not really gone. When this happens you can find situations where you go to someone’s house and there are pictures of the deceased everywhere and they died 10 years ago. Or the deceased’s bedroom may be still exactly how it was when the person died 5 years ago. Or some times you come across people who will talk like the person is still alive and they regularly reminisce about the person. All these occur because the person does not want to the bond to break down and thus have to accept that person is really gone. The Child part of the person finally recognises and accepts that the person has gone for ever. This is a painful process indeed and some simply will not accept it and they ‘pretend’ to themselves for the rest of their days.
The problem with this pretence is that attachments take up energy and thus if you don’t let go then you are sort of psychologically trapped in the past. Your ability to form new attachments with people in the present is reduced and confused and thus that adversely effects your current relationships.
Maybe we would all love it if our attachments were this sturdy and strong
There is one other way attachments can disappear. For an attachment to form you need to have regular contact with the other person. The more there is face to face, emotional and psychologically intimate contact with the other person then the more there will be an attachment. The more physical touch there is the more there will be attachment formation. Indeed this is one reason why the victim can form quite a strong attachment to their abuser. There is strong emotional and physical contact between them.
The counter to this is the less you have to do with the person, particularly face to face contact the more the bond will reduce. Of course you can have phone and email contact and that can maintain the attachment to some degree but under normal circumstances the bond will still weaken. So for two people who have a strong attachment, then over time they begin to see less and less of each other, then that bond becomes less and less no matter who it is.
Even if it is your mother, children, siblings or whoever. The less contact you have with them the less of a bond there will be and thus the less you will grieve for them should they pass away. This can cause some distress for people who go to the funeral of their mother and really don’t get all that sad. They can feel guilty and bad about it because they think they should be grieving whole heartedly for their mother. Mind you the son has worked overseas for the past decade and had little face to face contact with her during that time.
So the more attachment you have the more pain you will suffer should that other person die or leave. This can lead to some people resisting forming attachments in the first place. As soon as you begin to attach then the more you loose control. The more power you are giving to the other person, the more you can get hurt and the more you can be manipulated by the other person.
The techniques of the withdrawal of love and threats of abandonment are very effective and potent ways to get the other party to do what you want them to. They know that if you leave then they will suffer the large pain of grief. So by threatening to abandon them you can get them to behave how you want. It is powerful and it works.
Withdrawing love can leave your partner feeling like this
They can even just do the withdrawal of love. If you aren’t doing what they want then they can withdraw love, give the cold shoulder, behave in a way that shows you do not care and so forth. Again powerful stuff that works.
As with so many human features, it is the attachment that provides humans with the intimate closeness and is an enormous supply of strokes they need. It provides them with that sense of connectedness which all humans hunger for. At the same time because the attachment is so central to our emotional health it can be used as a powerful means to coerce others into doing what we want.
Humans are often an enigma. So often their psychology can be used to grow and develop themselves or to maniupulate and deceive others.
Graffiti
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Sunday, 29 July 2007
Attachment
Have you ever noticed how sometimes someone who you know quite well seems quite a different sort of person when they are with their partner. Its almost like they have a different personality. Well they do actually.
Have you ever heard of Couvade syndrome. Research shows that 11% of all expectant fathers exhibit symptoms during the wife’s pregnancy which are of a similar nature to the symptoms of pregnancy. These symptoms have no physical basis but are psychologically caused. For example these men can complain of labour pains, pressure sensation in the pelvis, nausea and vomiting, tightness in the abdomen, mood swings, variations in appetite and so forth.
There are many explanations for this “sympathy pregnancy” and there may be different causes for different men but one group has been identified. These are men who come from backgrounds where they were overly attached to their mothers. They had a very strong psychological symbiosis with their mother’s. Consequently they became overly attached to their wives to such a degree that they would experience the same physical symptoms that her.
This is technically known as an attachment problem. In this case they are overly attached and his identity or sense of self is excessively fused or confused with hers. In any relationship there are actually 3 people and not 2, see the diagram below:
There are the two individuals who have a sense of self (individuality) and thus they will have their own personality. If these two people spend time together and begin to relate in an emotionally intimate way then they will begin to form an attachment or bond. When this happens their personal boundaries or sense of self starts to get confused with the other person. There is a merging of identities and then one has a sense of being psychologically attached to the other. This then forms the third personality in the relationship.
Usually this third self is not all that dissimilar to the individual selves. However sometimes they are. So if you know a person in the work place you will be seeing them in the individual self. If you then happen to see them with their partner you will see them in their relationship self. If that relationship self has quite a different personality then the person will seem quite different than when you knew them at work.
Attachment problems are basically of three kinds:
Not enough attachment
Too much attachment
Ambivalent attachment
Those with not enough attachment resist the urge to enter into the relationship self. They will resist their natural urge to form an attachment or bond with another for what ever reason. They maybe a commitment phobe, they may have fear of emotional closeness, or they might just feel like they are getting trapped and loosing control.
For some people a relationship feels like getting closed in by this.
The downside to this is stroke deprivation. A relationship that has a strong bond provides strokes that really touch deep into the psyche. Also these people have a sense of aloneness, obviously! With that can go a whole array of problem such as depression, anxiety and despair. Humans are basically relationship beings and if this ‘need’ not met then sooner or later the person will suffer some form of emotional distress.
Too much attachment
Sometimes when I go to christian weddings I cringe when the ceremony mentions that “this couple will now complete each other”. When you hear someone say that, “I feel my husband completes me” that is not a good sign. It means their individual self feels incomplete and thus they will seek a relationship out of a need for completeness and that is not a good way to enter into a relationship. The man with Couvade syndrome is like this. His own sense of self is fragile or weak that he then overly attaches to the wife.
Finally we have ambivalent attachment. These are the people who don’t know if they are coming or going, with the main example being the Borderline personality. In their individual self they feel lost, alone or fragile so they seek out a strong attachment. Once they get it, they don’t want it. It is found to be too claustrophobic or too painful for what ever reason. So with the ambivalent attachment the person’s history is marked by a series of unstable relationships that are of the on again off again variety.
Graffiti
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Wednesday, 25 July 2007
Panic attacks
I suppose it happens in every industry but in my work all of a sudden I have had a number of people who present with the difficulty of panic attacks. Just coincidence I think and no I am not going to come up with a new disorder to explain this sudden ‘rash’ of panic attacks in society, which is of course the fashionable thing to do these days.
Maybe I should. I could call it TAD. Terrorist Anxiety Disorder, very topical and sounds fairly impressive doesn’t it. I will write a book on it and get on Oprah for sure.
Perhaps panic is like this?
I don’t think that I have ever had a panic attack but there have been a few times when I have felt I suppose a strong surge of anxiety. But from what is reported they are very unpleasant episodes including terror, intense anxiety, fear of heart attacks and dying, derealization, depersonalisation and so forth.
Depersonalization. Imagine feeling like this?
Lots has been written on the treatment of anxiety disorders like panic attacks but when working with a person who reports such anxiety I usually do something or suggest something that I have not seen written elsewhere.
Of course early on one requests the client to explain what is a panic attack for them. What are the physical symptoms, thoughts and so forth that occur during the panic attack. As they describe the panic attack most often the person will begin to feel a bit of anxiety. Then I ask the person to exaggerate the symptoms and have a panic attack now. Most look quite perplexed by this, some refuse and say they are coming here to NOT have panic attacks. Others say they are too scared to do such a thing. But by and large most in the end do so. I should not be letting out my trade secrets here!
Why would I request such a thing? Because there is a phobia called Phobophobia.
What is such a phobia? It is the fear of fear. Many people who have panic attacks are also phobophobics. After one has a panic attack the first thing they do is to try and control it/self. “What do I need to do, or how do I need to be to avoid another panic attack in the future?”, is what is commonly thought by the person. This commonly ends up in phobophobia as they try to control self and the panic attack becomes something that is greatly feared. So the person actually ends up with two problems, panic attacks and phobophobia.
Phobias come in all shapes and sizes
Commonly anxious individuals are tense and uptight people anyway. So increasing the self control only will exacerbate the difficulties. To give the person permission to have a panic attack is completely contrary to the approach they have been using up to date. I am asking them to loose control of themselves and to descend into this thing called panic. This also stops the panic attack being this really, really big deal.
If the therapist just works with the client in the usual way to stop having more panic attacks, then what is that saying to the client. It is saying, “Yes panic attacks are these really, really, really bad things”. This of course just increases the phobophobia.
What Charles is about to do would give anyone a panic attack
I am not for a moment discounting the terror that some people feel having a panic attack. From what I have seen they seem to be very unpleasant things indeed. One also needs to keep them in perspective.
No one has ever died from a panic attack.
No panic attack has ever lasted for ever, they all come and go.
The worst that can happen is the person will faint and then they will wake up.
So by highlighting this approach it defuses the power of the panic attack. It is dealing with the phobophobia. So in the end most clients do have a panic attack in front of me in my consulting room. What does this also do? Well if these people want to feel in control of a panic attack one of the best ways to do that is by having one on request. It shows to the person that they can turn a panic attack on if they want and thus they are at least in control of it in that way. It also allows me to be there “interfering” in the neurosis as it happens in front of me. Neuroses don’t usually like that!
Graffiti
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Monday, 23 July 2007
Just hit the delete button
I have just been over at the Queen of Dysfunction's (QofD) place and she talks about the waste of space when some times we conflict.
I was doing my usual daily walk about an hour ago. One of the streets I walk on is quite thin and there were cars parked on one side of the road so only one car could get through at a time.
Two cars driving the opposite way fronted each other so no one could get through. One of them had to back up so the other person could proceed. This was happening right in front of me so I stopped to watch the action.
Sometimes you just wish you could have one of these for events in our day to day lives.
One car had an elderly woman driving, it was sort of a beat up car. The other was a big expensive four wheel drive thing with a woman with young kids in the back.
That's right not a man in sight, so this one can't be blamed on male neanderthal behaviour. They just stopped and looked at each other with no one saying anything. After about a minute they started doing hand gestures to indicate that the other should back up so they could get through.
Maybe they were just both tired like this lady.
I was standing right there watching it all. I thought this is great. I might be a witness in a murder trial.
No one moved and eventually the woman in the expensive car put her head out the window and asked the other woman to back up. She wasn't abusive or threatening her. But she was obviously pissed off and being assertive. The elderly woman did nothing and said nothing back except to flick her hand indicating that the other should move back.
Sometimes perhaps priorities in life get lost in what's unimportant. Now this guy's priorities are very clear!!
Eventually the woman in the expensive car got out and walked to the window of the other woman's car. At this point I thought "Woooaaa", this is getting really good now. Again she talked loudly to the elderly woman, like she was deaf or something, but not abusive. While all this was going on other cars were now backing up because now they couldn't get through either. Mind you no one tooted their horn, I guessed they sensed the hostility in the air.
I thought I should be running a 'book' here and taking bets on who will actually back up their car. The woman eventually got back in her own car and the elderly woman very slowly backed back so the expensive car could just squeeze its way though and they both drove off.
Isn't life and human nature wonderful. Psychologists are going to be employed for ever and ever.
Graffiti
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Saturday, 21 July 2007
The things boys do
I have been working with this guy recently and have seen him about a dozen times. He was initially kind of sent to counselling by his partner but he was relatively open to coming anyway. A few sessions ago he stated at the end, “This is actually working”. Which of course means that he had assumed that it wouldn’t and part of the reason to attend was just to placate his girl friend.
However as we know when working in the relational (which means working with the client therapist relationship) both the client and the therapist are transformed. Well I can report that I have been transformed by the relational contact with this client!
He is in his 30s and works as a factory manager for a large auto electrician. His job it to make sure the factory functions well. There about 50 people who work in it and they are all male. There is not one female there and because of his job he has first hand contact with everybody at some time.
Listening to him talk I am reminded (transformed) of how males act and relate to each other when there are no women around. They relate in quite a specific way and when a woman comes into the situation they automatically change even without knowing it. I assume it is the same for women when a man appears in the situation, but obviously I can never know that as I am a man and am not in the habit of cross dressing to pass myself off as a female to spy on them.
Listening to him has showed me how in recent years I have had very little contact with groups that are solely male. Coming from a school that was just boys I certainly had it there and in my twenties and thirties I did then usually through some sporting activity or perhaps by going fishing or shooting or something like that.
Men relate by doing stuff
When guys get together they ‘do stuff’ and they relate through doing the activity. They don’t get together to just talk, so they don’t just visit each other for a cuppa and a chat. Even at the boozer they do an activity like playing darts, watching the mud wrestlers or playing pool or something like that. The last time I was with an all male group was when we went deep sea fishing and that was about a year ago. In my job it is numerically dominated by females both as the therapists and the clients.
Obviously there are many different types of male groups but the ones I am discussing here are the very male or ‘blokey’ type groups. Not irregularly when a conversation gets a bit close to some emotion or is about relationships and so forth one of the males will quickly drop in the “we don’t go there guys” signal. This is usually done by making some joke comment that puts down the subject matter and maybe even the person who is making it. This lets all those involved see that if you talk about such things you will publicly be made fun of and thus the conversations just don’t go there. Most are quite happy with that anyway because they are a frightened of their feelings and so forth.
School boys learn that to touch other males affectionately is not the thing to do
When guys get together they act gross. As boys some one would inevitably spit a big ‘gooly’ onto a wall and then watch it slowly slide downwards with great delight. At all ages someone may fart and that generates numerous comments about the foul odour, “Ring of fire” jokes or “what died”, and so forth. Or they will be manly around cutting the guts out of a fish or looking at the kangaroo with its head blown off. They tell dirty jokes or make otherwise foul commentary about masturbation and the likes. Some may blow up condoms until they burst or perhaps use them as a water bomb. The more adolescent ones may even produce a love doll and as the night wears on and more alcohol is consumed there will be simulated sexual acts with it for everyone to hoot about and cheer the ‘performer’ on. If it is like an after game footy club get together there may even be a porno movie or two shown.
Males will do all sorts of things to be 'male'
Then there is the competitivness. They tell of their conquests with women usually with some form of code. So they will tell how last night they made it to first base, second base, third base or they may have even hit a home run!. The general rule of thumb in such discussions is to take what the guy reports on such conquests, divide it by two and you are then getting somewhere near the truth.
Often when the guys get together there is gambling. Most often with cards but if there are no cards they will find something else to gamble on. With a card game someone may produce cigars for all to smoke. They all do and make out like they are seasoned cigar smokers when in reality the last time they had a cigar was 5 years ago. Some one may even comment on the good texture of the cigar and its smooth taste which is meant to impress all when they in fact know nothing at all about cigars.
Cigar store - secret men's business
Another person may comment on the malty taste of the beer and how its darker coloration adds to its enjoyment. Of course it is all bullshit as the different beers taste exactly the same, but it is meant to be impressive that you actually know something about beer. Others may boast about their high level of alcohol consumption and how ‘shit faced’ they got the other night. Then of course there are the inevitable jokes about how there seems to always be bits of carrot in the puke. Some of the more basic males will have drinking games where you prove your manhood by being able to drink more and faster than anyone else.
Secret men's business of course has no cultural divides
The other things guys do when they get together is they hurt each other, physically. It’s almost like this is how they can feel safe to make physical contact with another male. At swimming training at school or at the beach there would inevitably be fights where you flicked your towel at the other boys and let me tell you when someone got you a good one, it hurt. Then there were the ‘thumps’. For some reason the boys at school would just punch each other in the upper arm and sometimes the punches where hard.
I recall when I was about 18/19 we used to frequent a bar where again it was an all male domain. There was a definite heirachy and where you sat at the bar reflected your particular status in the group. There was the low status end of the bar and the high status end of the bar. I can even still remember the name of the guy who always sat right at the high status end - Bryce. He was feared and loathed at the same time. Besides bragging about how he would bash his girlfriend, Bryce would do the nipple twist. If you were not alert enough and were distracted whilst playing pool, Bryce would come up behind and grab you by the nipple and twist it as hard as he could. This would cause much howling and hooting amongst the various patrons as the poor guy reeled in pain.
There is one exception where males behave like I have described when there is a female present and that is with bar maids. Why? I don’t know, perhaps it is because there is a barrier (the bar) that separates them from the boys. But the barmaid is the exception to the rule in this way. Indeed the ‘skimpy’ bar maid will increase this type of ‘maleness’ and they will behave in an even more primitive and primate type of way.
I would always wonder how the bar maids got their head around that. Here we have two women, one fully clothed and the other wearing almost nothing working side by side serving beer. They were approximately the same age, doing exactly the same job, at exactly the same time of day and the skimpy was paid three times as much as the clothed barmaid. How did they reconcile that in their own minds?. However it was good business. When the skimpys were there the bar was always full. Which in the final analysis does not really portray the male psyche in a very good light!!
Graffiti
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Wednesday, 18 July 2007
Free Child and compassion
Fellow blogger Madeleine writes:
“I think children are born with the position of I+U?. Children do not naturally have compassion for others, it is something they learn.”
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Below are the 7 life positions. These are the basic view on life that each of us have. They don’t change from time to time or place to place. Another way to put it is that these are your basic character.
I’m OK, You’re OK - I+U+ (The martyr)
I’m Not OK, You’re OK - I-U+ (The depressive)
I’m not OK, You’re not OK - I-U- (The suicidal position)
I’m not OK, But you’re worse - I-U-- (The paranoid)
I’m OK, You’re irrelevant - I+U? (The narcissist)
I’m not OK, You’re irrelevant - I-U? (The borderline)
I’m a little bit more OK than you are - I++U+ (The healthy position)
The paranoid person basically sees the world as a dangerous place. They do not trust people, they are overly suspicious and hypersensitive. They see that the best form of defence is attack and thus they are often angry people. Sometimes the anger is openly shown and at other times it can be well hidden. They feel they are unfairly treated and that they give out much more than they get back. There are more males who are paranoid then females.
Sometimes the world seems so dangerous we want to do this.
There are of course situations where such a person like this will feel less threatened and more trusting and that will vary but the life positions do not refer ot his. Each of us has a basic character that will determine how we act in all situations over time and of course there are variations in that depending on the situation, but the basic approach is always the same.
I agree with Madeleine that when a child is born it has the life position of I+U? (I’m OK and You’re irrelevant). It only has a sense of self and very little idea and therefore regard of anyone else. It looks out for number one and others really don’t enter into any decision making. When a young child has got gas it cries out and that is meant to get someone (mother) to come along and do the right thing and make it feel better. The infant has no concern that it is 3 am on a freezing cold morning and mother just got to sleep an hour ago.
So in this sense it can be said to be compassionless of mother’s needs. It’s not that it does not care about mother’s need for sleep. It just does not even consider it in the first place. So this is pure Free Child. The new born infant is pure Free Child and is totally focused on only its needs and wants
Of course as a child develops the Conforming Child starts to get more and more. The youngster starts to fit in more and more with mother’s needs and schedule. At the same time of course the Adult and Parent ego states are developing. With this combination we then start to have the development of compassion, empathy and the understanding of some one else’s point of view. With these new ‘ego states’ available it stops being all about us and the person will develop another life position.
So a person who is high Free Child and low Conforming Child will tend to be quite narcissistic and have the life position of I’m OK, You’re irrelevant. They are not against others its just that they don’t consider them in the first place. It is often said that these people have superficial relationships. Such individuals love themselves so much that there is no room left to love anyone else, and hence the superficiality and the Free Child nature of such people.
In the myth of narcissus, he is one day walking through the Aegean forrest and comes upon a pond where we sees his reflection and the story goes:
Upon seeing his reflection, Narcissus is taken with "another" for the first time, and only comes to realise that it is he himself when he bends down to drink. Bereft of an object of love extraneous to himself, and "having got to know himself" as Teiresias prophesied, he remains transfixed and, unable to prise himself away, eventually starves.
So some never develop past this narcissistic stage of development and remain high Free Child there whole lives. This can happen for a whole variety of reasons. One scenario is with the child who is totally indulged by mother, often it can be an only child. In this obvious case the child never has to develop a consideration of mother’s needs as he is over indulged and she does not want him to anyway. Interestingly enough in the histories of the criminal personality not uncommonly there is an overly indulgent mother and a critical and somewhat distant father. Then when he grows up his partner can often become the overly indulgent wife.
So with the personalities like the narcissist, the psychopath, the hysteric and the borderline you can get high Free Child and very little compassion or concern with others needs and wants
It should also be noted that most of us go through a high FC narcissistic stage of development during adolescence. Teenagers as a group tend to be quite narcissistic and research has shown that the personality profiles of the teenager and the criminal personality are quite similar.
Teenagers doing drinking games
The other thing about teenagers and the high Free Child is that they are often called risk takers. Risk taking is seen as a normal part of this stage of development. To my mind this is a misnomer. Teenagers are not risk takers because of the feelings of omnipotence of the Free Child instead they feel indestructible. They are somehow special and the exception to the rule and if they put themselves into high risk situations they know they will not get hurt. So they are not risk takers because they don’t perceive what they are doing as risky to them.
Below are two videos that show young adult males with high Free Child. You can just feel the energy and feel the adrenaline rush that these people must be experiencing. A good pictorial representation of the Free Child and its sense of omnipotence and indestructibility.
In the state where I live, it is the Road Safety Council which swings into action when one of these people get killed as inevitably happens.
So what does the council do?
Well they do things like double the demerit points for such driving. As if that is going to make any difference whatsoever to the person who will do this sort of driving. It represents a complete misunderstanding of these young people, what they are doing and why they are doing it. Do you really think if one of these young men make the decision to ‘have a go’ at driving like this, are they actually going to consider that they might get double demerit points off their license for doing it. I think not.
Where I live there is a big park in the middle of the city called Kings Park. At night it is quite deserted and there are no street lights on the roads through the park. When I was about the age of these young males a car load of us would go to the park in the middle of the night. You get a up a good speed in the car and then turn off the headlights. It takes about 10 to 20 seconds before your eyes begin to adjust to the reduced light after the headlights are turned off. (It seemed like 10 to 20 minutes!!). Why did we do that? I’m not too sure but it was awfully exciting at the time particularly when negotiating a long bend.
Undiluted Free Child in action
Why?
Because you can?
Graffiti
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Sunday, 15 July 2007
Dealing with the difficult client - Free Child, Conforming Child & Rebellious Child
Kenoath says:
I think its easier to get a conforming client to be more rebellious than the other way around. What do you think Graffiti?
These three parts of us I would suggest all have their advantages and difficulties. I have talked about two of them in two previous posts.
As I have mentioned the highly rebellious client gets caught up in so much self defeating behaviour. These people are eternally fighting fights that they do not have to fight. Thus they waste large amounts of time and energy, that they could instead be using for them to get ahead in life.
They will do things that are to their direct disadvantage even when they know it and want the opposite. For example a client refusing to attend counselling as a means of rebelling against the therapist who is perceived as the authority figure. Here is one situation where they have an opportunity to get out of the self defeating patterns and they refuse it even when at their more ‘lucid’ times they will say they see the absurdity of what they are doing.
Another good example is those people who drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes from a rebellious position. “No one is going to stop me from smoking or drinking” is what they say. They will drink or smoke even when they don’t want to, and they feel hung over or their lungs feel like trash. BUT that is seen as less important to the highly rebellious person. To defy authority is the most important thing, even if it kills them. And often it does.
If this person drinks from a rebellious position then she will see this as an insignificant price to pay compared to her defiance of authority.
The highly conformist person can also be very difficult to treat. The good part about rebellion is that it is active. This is where the old reverse psychology can come into play. If the therapist can say to the client, “I don’t want you to give up smoking” the rebellious person may then fight that and give up because if represents defiance for them.
The conforming person is in a state of inaction. They do what they are told so they are not fighting anything. So what does the therapist do with that? The conformist in order to get to the Free Child usually needs to go through the Rebellious Child. So the therapist says this to the client and the client then does that. But she is being rebellious because the therapist told her to, so obviously this is just another form of conformity and the person is no more near the Free Child than they were originally.
I would suggest that a lot of such clients slip through the cracks of counselling and are misdiagnosed by counsellors. They say and do all the right things in counselling. They make the counsellor feel like they are really good at their trade, because look at the changes that the client has made. When they are in reality just conforming to the therapist. Then you meet these people ten years later and they are still as lost about what they want out of life as they always were.
The highly conforming person fits in like this. If you tell them to not fit in then they will fit in by doing just that.
As mentioned before the usual way to get to Free Child is to go through a stage of rebellion first. For most people this works. However with the highly conformist client this often does not work and one has to find ways by which the conformist can access their Free Child directly. This can take some fancy foot work on behalf of the counsellor and if the therapy is being observed by others, as in demonstration group therapy, then the counsellor is often told they are doing the completely wrong thing with this client. Which can lead to very interesting group dynamics I can tell you!!.
Then finally we have the person who is high Free Child and low Conforming Child. Of all difficult clients this one is probably the most resistant to treatment. I remember Mary Goulding saying to me many moons ago, “It is much easier to treat a tight wad than a spendthrift”. Of course the spendthrift is high FC.
Mary Goulding and myself doing co-therapy at a 4 day demonstration therapy workshop.
They were good days. Many good memories for me particularly from a psychotherapy point of view. So I thought I would put in another photograph!
People who have anxiety or depression have lots of FC motivation to stop such feelings because they feel bad. Some times it feels very bad so the FC has a lot of motivation to do something about it. The FC does not want it. The person who drinks alcohol feels good. Alcohol and drugs make the person feel good, so of course the FC likes that. It thus has little motivation to stop it and this is why drug counselling is notoriously difficult. With the FC having little involvement all change becomes a Parent contract to some degree.
The same applies for sex offenders. If one finds exposing self or spying on naked people erotic then that is Free Child. It feels good and so the Free Child will have little investment in stopping such behaviour. You can tell the person that such behaviour is wrong for this and that reason and that they may end up in prison and so forth. The person will hear and understand it all, but it still feels good to the Free Child and thus there is always a lack of deep down basic motivation inside the person to alter such behaviours. Sex offenders, alcohol and drug users and the criminal personality are all high Free Child and thus they are notoriously difficult to counsel.
Graffiti
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Friday, 13 July 2007
Dealing with the highly conforming client
These people make great clients. They make therapists feel good. The highly conforming client does and says all the right things at all the right times. When they learn how the system works they know all the right things to say and feel at all the right times.
Many clients stop being who they are and become something else
Therapist’s can pull out all their sophisticated techniques and the client will do them all. They do ‘good work’ as it is said. Therapist’s go home feeling chuffed at at their artistry as a therapist. The problem is, that with the highly conforming client it isn’t good work at all.
Lets look at what a new client is confronted with.
Here is a person who seeks out the counsellor, they may even be referred by someone else who tells them that this person is ‘really good’ at what they do. They phone the counsellor and ask if they can have an appointment. The counsellor tells them what hours they work and how long they will have to wait for an appointment. The client then fits in with that. Often the client has to pay quite a considerable amount of money to see the counsellor.
The client then comes to the counsellor’s office at the designated time. If the client gets the time or date wrong then the client still has to pay. If the counsellor gets the time or date wrong then it is just a mishap and the client is rescheduled.
So the client is out of their domain and enters into the counsellor’s domain, the counsellor then defines the whole procedure. Where they sit, what magazines they read, if there is coffee or not and so on. The counsellor defines the whole procedure for the client while they come to this place that they are really stressed out about coming to anyway. Indeed they are coming there because they are not coping and having a ‘nervous breakdown’ of some kind. This makes them highly vulnerable even before they get there in the first place.
We all are defined by our surroundings. This is no more obvious than in the counselling setting where people are very vulnerable even before they get there.
When they enter the counselling room the counsellor has the paperwork on the walls (the degrees) to show that they are the expert. Because of this they know all about the client and the client is the ‘thing’ that is diagnosed and answers many questions about themselves. The therapist then decides on the treatment that the client receives and so on endlessly.
As you can see even if the client was not highly conforming before they got there they certainly are after going through all that.
The problem with all this is the client stops being who they are and becomes this person called the ‘client’. They take on the role of the client. As soon as that happens then the therapy looses it effectiveness. For most people this is a drawback but you can get around it at least somewhat. The problem client, much more so than the highly rebellious client, is the highly conforming client. They truly take on the role of the client and stop being them self. Usually they don’t even know what their real self is.
This snow maker makes false snow. People can then pretend or lie to themselves that they are skiing on real snow. They become fake skiers like some clients can become fake people in the counselling setting.
But the real problem is, when the counsellor brings this to the client’s attention they just agree. The agree to be disagreeable. They conform to not being a conforming.
If a person takes on the role of the client then you are only ever going to deal with the surface issues. Of course you are, because that is only what the counsellor ever gets to see. But to make matters worse they look like they are doing really good therapy because they know what to do and say and feel at the right times. It is inevitable that the client will work this out. Most clients want to please the counsellor at some level so they work out the right things to say and do.
So the counsellor has to always be fighting against this. Clients will inevitably be drawn into the client role and the more they are the less effective the counselling will be. The more surface it will be. Sometimes I have clients, who when walking out the door at the end of a session will say, “Well that was no good as I don’t feel any better than when I walked in”. When that is said then I know I have done good work in that session.
Graffiti
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Thursday, 12 July 2007
Dealing with the highly rebellious client
So there you are, the counsellor sitting in front of a person, perhaps a teenager who is clearly in a very rebellious frame of mind. How do you deal with such a person. It is unlikely they will be there voluntarily but have been sent to you by some one in some way.
So what are the options
1. You could tell them off. Give them a good talking to and tell them how they should act. This is useful in some circumstances and not others. If you do this you can get an escalation of the rebellion. If the person displays this rebellion obviously then they will do something like telling you to ‘fuck off’ and walk out of the room, never to be seen again. If they are sent by the courts for drug counselling (so its counselling or prison) then they are more likely to go silent and say very little, agree when they have to and not listen to a word you are saying.
Some may move into the conforming position when being told off. So the telling off moves them from the RC to the CC. So they move into an conforming position and they will do what the person directing them says. For instance the counsellor may be telling them how bad it is to drink alcohol excessively and the client in essence agrees with this and resolves to stop drinking. This may work for some time. The problem is that they will have a tendency to fall off the wagon because the motivation to not drink is coming from an adapation not from a Free Child want. So in most cases the success will be relatively short term because the Free Child of the client is not involved in the decision.
For those who have a long history of drug dependency then this realistically is probably the best (only) solution. The drug user finds some person or system who will regularly reinforce the Conforming Child adapation to no alcohol and drug use. AA is a classical example of this approach, others can use religious organisations for the same goal. I have heard argument against this that the person is simply giving up an addiction alcohol and becoming addicted to say “Born Again christianity”. My response to that is, so what? Its much better to be addicted to religion than it is to alcohol. The problem with it is if the person begins to drift away from the organisation then the risk of relapse significantly increases. However some can use this CC response to stay alcohol free for long periods of time and thus seems a reasonable solution to me.
2. You could suck up to the rebellious client. This counsellor tries to become the client’s ‘friend’. They go to their level and may delight in their ‘crimes’ or misdeeds in order to try and get the client on side. The counsellor may adopt some of the same language and try and play with the client to win them over. To my mind this is the least successful approach and eventually the client just gets bored with it all and very little is achieved.
3. You be who you are. This is probably the hardest approach to do because it involves moving forward and engaging the client and then drawing back and disengaging from the client, many times over. When and how you do that involves much flying by the seat of your pants. You don’t try and be their friend and you don’t tell them off, you treat them with a sense of respect and demand that they do the same to you in a subtle kind of way.
Dealing with the rebellious clinet is like gambling for high stakes. Cut and thrust, bluff, never really knowing what the other party is going to do next.
To this client you are the enemy even before they get into the room. So they may initially attack you in some way, or they may seek to provoke a Critical Parent response form you. Each time the response is listening to what they have to say, not accepting the attack by whatever means and giving them respect. Yes you can also play with them and stroke them but this is usually after the initial cut and thrust stage has been traversed.
There must also be times when the counsellor hits out at the the rebellious client. Obviously verbally, and not in a malicious way. There needs to be a series of well timed short sharp confrontations. This needs to be such the at the client is ‘sat back in their chair’. Why? Becuase that is what they are doing to you, that is where their head is at and thus they understand and can relate to that sort of communication. It adds a bit of unpredictability and danger into the counselling and that is what the Rebellious Child understands and indeed thrives on.
Rebellion involves danger and that means sometimes you get hurt and suffer pain. That is what makes it so exciting in the first place!.
In essence you begin to gain a bit of respect from them. If the Rebellious Child starts to respect the counsellor as a person, then the individual becomes far more receptive to the therapeutic benefits of the counselling. So the initial stage of counselling the highly rebellious client involves no obvious counselling in terms of techniques and contracts and so forth. Instead it is learning how to dance with each other, sorting out the relationship and developing a bit of respect on both sides. Sometimes that does not happen, the client leaves with little being accomplished. If the counsellor can establish a bit of respect from the rebellious client then a major step forward has been made.
Graffiti
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Monday, 09 July 2007
Downloads available on website
On April 6th, 2007 I wrote a post about my motivation for having a blog:
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I instantly saw the potential it had for the communication of technical and clinical material that could be easily spread to a wide audience over the www. I already had a website and on that I had put many downloads but as I don’t talk “website speak” it was difficult for me to make additions to it on a regular basis. My first website guy took his own life, and then my next website guy is great and very helpful and does lots of things for me but I don’t want to be hassling him too much to be constantly making more download additions. He has already done numerous things for me.
I saw in a blog that I could make many additions on a daily basis. So there now was the way to make regular additions and comments about technical and clinical information relating to my field of psychology, psychotherapy, human nature and so forth.
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A lot is said about alcohol and drug use
The blog postings I have written since June 19th, 2006 have not been in any order. They have just been written as they come to mind. Often one idea will develop over 3 or 4 postings and often there are a couple of ideas on the go at the same time. So I have set about compiling them into a coherent form for down loads on my website.
Plenty is said about family dynamics and relationships
There are now 35 of them available for download. All for free! All I ask is that if you use some of the material please reference the source.
To get to the website just click on the link on the left hand side of this blog or go to:
www.ynot1.com.au
Then click on "Blog Postings" and there they are.
Many a discussion of the strange things that some people do
Tony White
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Saturday, 07 July 2007
The psychology of the lie
I found this in some desperate blogger’s blog. I thought it was quite a good statement and was well written
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Today I read an article from Glamour. The title of the article was "The guilty confessions of women who LIE".
It was reassuring to know that other women lie from time to time, or actually, most of the time. It made me feel normal.
There are a lot of reasons people lie. I had a look of some of the reasons listed in the article:
• To make life easier or more interesting
• To appear more in control or more likeable
• To cover themselves
• To spare someone’s feelings
For me it could be all of above, or none of above. Simply because, I have no idea about myself, let along the reasons I choose to lie.
Can a person “choose” to lie? Sometimes I think it’s more spontaneous. Lies just come out naturally. As if, they were the truth. And sometimes when we tell enough lies it become the reality. Because we actually living in lies.
Very existentialism.
I look at myself. Why do I lie? Is there any thing wrong with my life that I had to lie to make it better?
I have a gorgeous husband who adores me dearly. I have a beautiful contemporary inner city apartment in one of the most desirable cities. I am still young and still turn heads.
And, I am not happy.
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Graffiti
I once wrote this:
Some young children play the game of: “Liar, liar pants on fire”.
This is the child who is a repetitive or compulsive liar. They habitually or continually tell falsehoods or lies. There are two main types of compulsive liars:
a) The child who tells a lie where they are obviously going to get caught - why do they want to get caught? It can be for attention (strokes), there is some bigger issue going on and they want it brought out into the open (e.g. abuse of some kind, bullying at school), the child is a drama queen, the child is crying out for limits to be set and so forth.
b) The child who lies for expediency. To avoid conflict, punishment, escape the consequences of behaviour or obtain money/property. This is a more insidious type of lying and can reflect the beginnings of the development of the anti-social personality type.
An adult version of the game, is the game of “The affair”. This is not that type of affair where it is a one off. For example both parties get drunk at the office christmas party and have a quickie in the storeroom. Instead this game refers to the affair that is ongoing and involves planned deception. For an affair to continue for any length of time there must be an ongoing series of falsehoods being told.
The affair - the false kiss, annoymous love.
These are type A lies if the parties in the affair start taking more and more risks and thus continually increase the chances of getting caught. They want to get found out. Often this type of affair occurs because at least one party is desperately unhappy in a marriage and does not know how to get out or to deal with it, so they create a situation that brings it to a head. Finally, the ‘innocent’ husband or wife forces the issues to be dealt with when they find out.
There are other affairs that are long term and no one ever gets found out and these would involve more of the type B lies.
Game antithesis -
Type A - find out what the motive for the lying and wanting to get caught is and then deal with that.
Type B - consequences of behaviour, developing a sense of morality and the rights of others as being important.
Also, as with any piece of behaviour lying can become habitual. One particularly sees this with drug users. To live in the drug subculture one has to lie at least reasonably often, so it becomes a habit and then you find sometimes drug users will lie when there is no reason for them to. They simply do it because it is a habit.
The lies start to flow like wine when one habitually hears no evil, sees no evil and speaks no evil
I remember a long time ago a twentysomething year old woman came to see me. When asked why she was there she announced that she was a compulsive liar. The first thing I did was to get her to redefine herself as a creative story teller rather than a compulsive liar
Another possibility for such individuals is for them to consider creative writing. The good liar is a good story teller. Hans Christian Anderson was a very successful liar. He had the ability to present “false facts” in a convincing and effective manner. He made his lies seem very believable and thus people would ‘get into’ the story being told.
On June 23rd I wrote a post called Teaching the Child. In it I described how I will draw out the Child in people I was about to teach to. On June 20th I presented a video of me actually doing some of those things. I am getting these people into a state of mind so they are ready to receive the information I was about to give them. I was manipulating them. Any good teacher is a good manipulator because he does not just give the information. Instead he gets them into a certain state of mind and then gives the information. The good story teller and good liar do the same. They get the person into a state of mind where they themselves will want to believe the lie even before it has been told.
This is done through the relational. If a man is about to deny to his wife that he is having an affair. He does not start with, “I didn’t do it”. Instead he starts with, “You know I love you”. He gives the wife exactly what she wants to hear because she at least partly wants to be lied to because the facts are painful for her. She does not want to believe the truth and by professing his love to her the errant husband heightens her desire to not believe the truth. It’s not about him convincing her its about her convincing herself.
Because without a doubt, we all lie and the person we most lie to, is ourselves. Humans are continually lying to themselves. We are very good at telling ourselves lies and then believing them. How we do it, is by such mechanisms like denial, repression, intellectualisation, catastrophizing, projection, sublimation and so on endlessly. Technically these called the defence mechanisms, more accurately they could be called, “The ways we lie to ourselves”.
When the truth hurts the Child just closes its ears and eyes. Complete denial = problem solved.
When the truth is psychologically painful for us we immediately set about telling ourselves lies. We all do it each and everyday.
Graffiti
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Friday, 06 July 2007
Solihull UK
Here is a picture of my mother, myself and my sister in Solihull, Kahless.
This would have been soon after we first arrived in the UK. As you can see my mother was a learner driver at that stage. She had to get from school to school as she was a school psychologist in the area.
You will also see that I have bare feet! No shoes!
Apparently this caused quite a stir amongst the neighbours who had a meeting and then approached my mother about this obvious child neglect. Aussie kids ran around in bare feet all the time. Apparently this was not the done thing in Solihull at the time. I suppose you have cultural differences, as you do.
But in the vernacular of Wallace and Gromit I had a grand time. I learnt how to created an ice slide in the school playground, but nothing beat learning how to play conkers and I developed quite a mastery of the art of conkering I may add.
Tony
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Wednesday, 04 July 2007
The NOW generation
Hello punters,
A number of people have asked me what is this video about, and am I OK?
If you play it backwards it says:
"I am the devil, I am the devil..."
As the end credits say this is some images of the NOW generation, so it is my statement of what that is. Who are the NOW generation? The current teens and twentysomethings of our society. I currently have 2 sons in the now generation, so I have a personal interest in it as well as a professional interest.
As I wrote in a post once, “I listen with my eyes”. I am a visual type of person. My favourite artists are of the likes of Salvador Dali and Andy Warhol. So it is quite in your face art. It is by no means gentle art.
I like some landscapes and water colour type paintings. To me some of them are very nice but they don’t “speak” to me. I have nothing against them, they are just not my ‘type’ of painting. I want a picture to slap me in the face then it has some meaning for me. I almost feel some ‘connection’ with it.
Clockwork Orange is one of my most fav movies as it is full very strong images like the first picture in the video. Hence the title of the video, “I like a bit of ultra violence”, which is a line out of Clockwork Orange.
Very powerful visual statement, with obvious violent over tones.
The now generation have violent video games as I have shown in the video, so Clockwork Orange is a way of communicating my understanding of the NOW generation in that respect. Many of them like this video violence so I am just saying I suppose that I understand that.
Fortunately my sons tell me some stuff about their lives and I see them with their male and female friends at my home. The images of the women in the video is my understanding of the NOW generation and how men and women get on in part. Its all very primal and tribal and remarkably similar to how it was when I was a twentysomething. Not much has changed in that respect.
When my son was recently in hospital for a routine thing he had visitors. One day I came to see him and he had a RALPH magazine there. That is a very politically incorrect magazine full of half naked women - tits and bums stuff. It had been given to him by two of his female friends, not males as I had assumed. Having seen them at parties at my house some of these young adult females behave in a very sexualised manner when around the boys. Hence the images in the video. Just one way of me expressing in image form this important part of the NOW generation world, as the titles said it was.
Graffiti
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I like a bit of ultra violence
Graffiti
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Tuesday, 03 July 2007
The other side of me
Graffiti
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Monday, 02 July 2007
Now that is what you call a kilt
Another one for Rob van Tol.
Not being a scotsman, indeed being a bit of an Aussie bloke, the idea of a guy wearing a skirt (kilt) is quite a large pill to swallow. It takes some getting your head around to find some sort of acceptance of the idea.
However I came across this. I have not seen a kilt picture for 3 months probably and all of a sudden I find two in a row.
Now this guy knows how to wear a kilt!!
He gives kilt wearing real style!!!
A great look indeed!!
Graffiti
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Sunday, 01 July 2007
Magical thinking
One of the good parts of my job that I always delight in is seeing raw unadulterated Child.
A few posts ago I wrote about that woman who displayed such pure feelings of vengeance. A delight to see. Us adults are very good at making the raw and pure seem nice and unclear. As I said most people will say they are wanting justice, when in fact they are wanting revenge. Justice sounds so much nicer.
The other type of Child commonly seen is magical thinking. Like the belief that there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Here is me aged six. I was there shooting the bad guys, “This is not make believe, this is real”. At that age the child really does believe in magic and the unreal can be real.
None of us actually believe in the newspaper horoscopes but we all read them just in case. None of us think that walking under a ladder will bring us bad luck, but we all avoid them just in case.
Then there is the common magical thinking in counselling of believing in santa clause. Hey santa is true, here is me actually with him.
People will spend long periods of time, sometimes a life time waiting for santa clause to arrive. That is, for the event to happen that will make things better or for the right person to finally turn up. And of course santa clause never arrives. Indeed santa clause is often already there right before your eyes. The woman waiting for the right man to turn up, is missing seeing the right man who is right there in front of her already!
But the one I mostly see, particularly with females is the magical belief that you can change others. In the counselling business this is called a ‘change others’ contract. If I had a dollar for each time I have seen a woman who believes she can change her man I would be a rich indeed.
She thinks, “I know he does not show his feelings and never tells me that he loves me, but when we are married I know I can get him to change so that he does”.
5 years later she walks into my counselling room, sits down and says:
“I want my husband to say that he loves me”
To which I respond:
“Can’t do that it’s a change others contract”
I love seeing magical thinking in action. Seeing the Child in its true and purest form is delightful.
Graffiti
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