Tony White

I "teared" up a bit today. That means I got some tears in my eyes whilst I was working with a client. I have done this on and off over the years. I wouldn’t say that it is a common occurrence indeed I would say that it happens uncommonly. Today it was more than what would be average for me. I just get watery eyes and it stays there for perhaps a minute or less and then goes away.



Today's client obviously saw that this was happening to me. So one could say that it was a bit of self disclosure, involuntary self disclosure one could call it. In the past sometimes I try and hold the tears back and are successful to varying degrees but today I didn’t. He also was slightly crying at the time. They were tears of compassion on my behalf as he was not saying anything really sad at the time.



I feel for this guy, obviously. A good father and husband and a guy who basically has done the right thing by others, most of his life. He also manages to enjoy himself but generally his needs would get met second in most circumstances. He is in a high powered job and it is finally getting to him and he is coping less and less. If he goes on unchanged he will have a breakdown and at the moment he is just going to continue to ‘tough it out’.

I would say that we have that special ‘click’ that client and therapist can have at times. So should I have allowed him to see the watery eyes? Some say self disclosure is a negative thing in therapy. I could have made out that I had to scratch my eyes because something was in them, or held the tears back more. When he first noticed I saw a slight smile appear on his face although nothing was said by either of us. From a purely therapeutic point of view it was probably one of those spontaneous situations that is going to enhance the therapeutic relationship and his health.



Part of me does not like saying what I just said. It kind of is an insult to what was just a empathetic moment between two people.

Graffiti.

Holley Molley!!

Here is a picture of my office taken by some plebeian!



I can see this picture on the www and do a whole 360 degrees around the road, up and down the road, down the side street and so forth.

Some one (or probably a lot of people) have got a lot of time on their hands and a very calloused finger from taking so many photographs. I assume this applies for every house, in every major city, in most parts of the world.

Graffiti

This is from a workshop I did in 2005. I usually dislike reading stuff that I wrote a few years back as it always seems so awkward and corney but this one was not too bad

Assessing Children’s Problems
with the “goodness of fit”

A child is brought to a counsellor because it has the problem of bedwetting. One thing that the counsellor must do is then make an assessment of how much is this a problem of the child and how much it is a problem of the parent or at least a problem with the relationship between the parent and child.



For instance, if the child wets the bed and the parent does all the right things in dealing with it sensitively then that means it is less of a parent problem and more down the end of the child’s problem. If, on discovering a wet bed the parent launches into a rage, hits the child and publicly embarrasses him then that is clear partly a parents problem.

One way to make such an assessment is to do a goodness of fit assessment.

All parents have a personality and all children have a personality. All parents have a Child ego state and thus that Child ego state will react to the personality of the offspring. Just because a child was born to a parent does not stop the parent’s Child ego state reacting to its offspring. In most cases the parent will be more forgiving and compensatory of the parts of the offspring that their own Child ego state has difficulty with, (than say if two people were just friends.)

With friends we see in the diagram that the two have no obligation or responsibility to the other party so the relationship at least initially is based largely on the Child ego state of both parties. If both sides have a liking for the other person then the relationship is likely to continue and grow. If both or one of the parties does not like the other then the relationship is likely to falter at that point and not continue.



With a parent and offspring it is meant to be different as was mentioned above. Dislikes by the parent to the child tend to be minimised and likes tend to be maximised. Thus we have the saying, “Her child had a face that only a mother could love”. The more the parent’s own Parent and Adult ego states are weaker the less influence they will have have and thus the more Child ego state response you will get from the parent. Hence you can get situations where the father may start competing with the son in say career because the father has not got enough Parent and Adult to rise above that and delight in the son’s success in his career, rather than taking it personally.


Parent and biological child

However despite this the parent still does have Child ego state reactions and they still have an impact. As we know in any relationships there can be personality clashes and in other relationships the personalities have a natural click and cohesion. The parent child relationship is no different. This can be a problem in itself because some parents think that they like love and feel the same to all their children. This is not so. The parent will react differently to every person they meet including their children. So with some there is a contamination.



The different reactions to each child by the parent depends in part on the goodness of fit between the parent and child’s personalities.

Graffiti

I have written before about how we can begin to understand who we are by defining what we are not. As a society we can begin to get a sense of our own identity by seeing that we are not those who are in prisons and this could be one of the purposes that prisons serve for us.

This same process can be at play on an individual level, but sometimes it does not work I am afraid. Or more correctly some people people will use the mechanism of “I am not...” to try and be something else.

Perhaps the first psychotherapist many years ago was our friend William Shakespeare. He wrote that famous line said by the Queen in Hamlet, "The lady doth protest too much, methinks."



At an individual level some times there is pathology in defining what we are not. One finds no better example than the US televangelist Jimmy Swaggert. He moralised vehemently and vigourously against sin and of course that included improper sexual behaviour. Thus in this way he and his followers were defining what they were not and they were doing it with great vigour. From a psychotherapist point of view that rings alarm bells. When ever someone protests a lot then that makes the psychotherapist suspicious about the person’s motives.

Indeed as this video shows our man Jimmy, behind closed doors was employing the services of female sex workers. He was doing the exact thing that he was sermonising against.



So in all his protestations he was not really trying to convince his congregation against sinful sex but he was actually trying to convince his own Child ego state.



He was aware at some level (often unconsciously) that he had Child urges to have sex not permitted by the church. His Parent ego state was repulsed by that and thus they are driven out of his awareness. But of course they don’t go away, in fact it just makes matters worse. So he endeavours to stop these desires in himself be protesting very loudly. He is trying to convince himself and thus he ends up preaching against the very thing he is doing himself.

So in saying, “I am not that” he is trying to create an identity of who he is by using the same process as was discussed before. The problem is, by just saying what he is saying he is not, cannot simply make that go away.


You cannot make the Child just go away



If he had gone to a psychotherapist and it was drawn out that he did want to have sinful sex then that would have defused the problem. If he had dealt with his own Parent belief system and openly acknowledged to himself that he did have sinful sexual urges then the problem is defused. He has to accept a part of self that his Parent found disgusting to and that was the problem.


The human personality is a balancing act



So if you find you are protesting against something with great vigour perhaps part of you wants to do it or be it. Think of someone who really pisses you off. What is it in them that you truly dislike and then own that part in yourself.

The moral of the story. The more you accept the disliked parts of self the less of a problem they will be, methinks!

Graffiti

In Transactional Analysis we have the six drivers.

Work hard
Be strong
Be perfect
Hurry up
Try hard
Please me



Who ever thought up calling them ‘Drivers’ did a good job as that describes exactly what they do. They drive the person to be a particular way. A person with a “Work hard” driver feels driven to be like that. A person with a “Be perfect” driver feels driven to behave in a perfect manner.

These drivers are what parents communicate to their children as they are growing up. The father who says to his son, “Son it does not matter if you win or lose , just as long as you try hard”. This child is not getting strokes for success but for trying to succeed. So the son spends his life trying to succeed, not actually succeeding. And on those occasions when he does actually succeed it feels like an anti climax.



The “What will the neighbours think” family, breeds children who have a Please me driver. When mother hangs out the laundry on the clothes line she always hangs the underwear on the inside so the neighbours will not see them. Mother who tell her daughter, “Always wear your good underwear in case you have an accident and have to go to hospital”.

In each of these instances the child is delivered the message:

“To be OK I have to “X” (Be strong, Be perfect, Hurry up...). That is the key part of the driver. If I don’t behave in a driver way then I am not OK. My sense of worth is diminished. So it tears at the core of the person and their very sense of self. Hence they feel driven so as to protect that and are very reluctant to give it up.



So this raises the interesting question that KazzaB proposed. Can a person be an olympic swimmer just because they are passionate about the sport? Or, because of the huge effort and sacrifices that are required the swimmers have to be psychologically driven like has been just described? Would a person put in all those years of work just because they are passionate about the sport. Is it enough or does the person have to be driven to protect their own sense of self worth by achieving at such a high level?

In my view they would need to be psychologically driven, but that is just an opinion. I can not really provide any type of data to support that.

Graffiti

Love mixed up with achievement

With the olympics at hand now it seems timely to have such a post as this, and a follow on from the post “For love or money”.

Working as a psychotherapist in private practice one spends most of his time working with people to become less conforming. Most people in western society are too psychologically conforming. They need to reduce their Conforming Child and increase their Free Child.

After doing that for 20 years I ended up in a prison where I was working with people who have either too much Free Child or Rebellious Child. All of a sudden I was working with people who were needing to become more conforming. That took a bit of time to get my head around and to get the feel of doing that sort of psychotherapy.




So on the normal curve above the psychotherapy was to make the prisoners more normal and more mediocre.

Then we have the other end of the curve. Those who are not the norm but for the right reasons (at least according to society’s values). Why would someone get up at 4 am almost each and every day for years on end to swim up and down a swimming pool for a number of hours each morning. To do so one would have to be driven and if that is the case what is the drive. As in the previous post I talk about the game, “Higher, faster, longer”. The individual will have some other psychological motive. “If I can jump higher, swim faster or run longer then mum will love me”. “If I can win the gold medal then dad will finally notice me”.



Of course if one goes to counselling the approach would to be less driven. The ‘drive’ is the neurosis so to speak, because of course winning olympic gold will never make anyone feel more loved by mother. If the person is less driven then they will never win the gold and they move more back to the norm part of the curve. In this way they become more mediocre but more emotionally healthy. Psychotherapy breeds mediocrity.

Interestingly enough the field of sports psychology is supposed to make the person a better athlete and achieve more. This is seen a bit disparagingly in the psychology profession as it is a very superficial approach to psychology. It basically uses things like meditation and visualisations to help the athlete and in no way delves into any ‘serious’ psychology.


Being happy and content feels good but you are less driven to achieve. Neurosis breeds achievement.



Finally one sometimes hears the comment that anyone who has achieved highly in commerce and politics must have at least to some degree features of the anti social personality. To get to the top of those fields you have to trample over others somewhere along the line and sometimes on many occasions. So one has to be conscienceless to some degree. One has to be a bit psychopathic. Bill Gates is reportedly like this due to his ruthlessness in business and desire to crush the competition.



If he came to counselling my first question would be, “Bill, you have 4 billion what difference is 1 or 2 more billion going to make”. Hence I am inviting him to become aware of his psychological motives and what drives him in this neurotic way. Obviously its not about the money, but about something else. If he responded to treatment and became less driven he thus moves more back to the norm and becomes more mediocre.

Graffiti

A game children play
In this game love and money get mixed up. The parents believe they can express their love to a child by giving it things. They may even end up saying to the child, “Of course I love you look at all the things I have given (done) for you”.

So the parent is for what ever reason unable to express feelings of love or affection to the child. (Their parents may have done the same to them, they have a “Don’t show your feelings” injunction, they may have their own closeness issues, they may equate affection feelings with sexual feelings and that scares them, they may just be self centred and have little interest in giving affection to the child because they want it themselves, and so on).


Human relationships.



So the parents give things instead showing love or affection. A prime example can be boarding school in some instances. “I have sent my daughter to a very expensive boarding school so she gets the best education”, (and by the way it also gets her out of the way).

In this game, over time the child’s bedroom begins to start looking like a “Toys-r-us”. The child gets a never ending series of toys and things with which it can play or be entertained by.

The problem with this game is that it half ‘hits the spot’. And that can trick both parties Child ego states. They think they are being shown love when in fact they are not. As we know all humans have a need for love. That need can only be fully met when it is shown to the person first hand (so not mother telling the child that father loves her), face to face (so not via email or even the phone to some extent), with emotion involved, and with some form of physical contact. If that happens then the Free Child need of the person for love is fully met and satisfied.



I sometimes hear clients say; “I know my father loved me, even though he never told me that”, or “I used to over hear my father tell others how much he loved me but he never actually told me”. Unfortunately these only half meet that Free Child need for love.

This is summed up well by Coleman & White (1988), “To clarify this point, consider the example of a parent and child playing a game of cards. We would invite such a parent to consider the following question : Are you playing cards with your child, or are you playing with your child and that just happens to be cards at the moment? Toys, games and play activities can provide an effective way of avoiding contact with a child. They can allow the parent and child to become side-tracked into the activity and avoid closeness, contact or openness with each other.”(P13).



A derivative of the game, “for the love or money” is the game of “Childhood obesity”. In this game love does not get mixed up with an expensive gift but instead love gets mixed up with food. The parent has the mistaken belief that it can express its love to a child by providing it with food and the child begins to take this on and when it feels full it feels loved. So it is provided with lots of food and it eats the food in its desire to feel loved. Again this only half “hits the spot”. For a brief while the Free Child need for love is met when it eats but it does not last because the need is not really getting met in the way I described above.


It half 'works' and confuses the child.



The other derivative of the game, “for the love or money” is the game of “Higher, faster, longer”. In this instance love gets mixed up with achievement in the child’s mind. “If I can jump higher, swim faster or run longer then mum will love me”. “If I can win the gold medal then dad will finally notice me” The child believes that if it can achieve success in sport, business, education and so on then the parental love that it craves will finally be given. I would suggest that many high achievers are of this ilk. What person is going to be driven to do all that training if there is not a ulterior pychological motive in there as well.

Again, it works for a little while, and the parents may in fact provide the contact with the child when it does achieve. The problem is there is always another race, there is always more that could be achieved. So the child never gets to the end and often high achievers are left with a hollow feeling as they look at their trophy cabinet, investment portfolio or degrees hanging on the wall.


Every child wants this from mother. Looks simple.

It really is as simple as a parent saying “I love you” with meaning to a child. It may be simple but that does not make it easy.

Graffiti

Not too sure how long this one will stay posted

Yesterday I was going through some old papers and I came across the suicide note that my mother wrote in 1992, addressed to me. I’m not too sure if she did one for my two siblings but anyway I got one. Last night I had a dream about her around that time. Funny how the old unconscious works isn’t it, coming out at night when there is no Parent or Adult ego state control over it. Obviously reading the note had an impact on me that I was not aware of.


My mother and I



It was not a bad dream or scary dream just one of those sort of remembering dreams. I did not feel distressed by it. And one other thing, I have always had very literal dreams. I hear clients report dreams that are about their mothers and they are very metaphoric or symbolic. Like it might be a dream about a school teacher which is really a symbol for their mother, or about the bright nurturing sun which is also a mother symbol. When I have a dream about my mother it’s my mother in the dream! Obviously my unconscious is not very symbolic in how it thinks. A bit bland really.

It was interesting to read again after all this time and I was not aware of any distress when I was reading it. If anything I felt a good connection with her as I held the paper knowing she had written on it and seeing her handwriting again.


My mother and I on a camel



I don’t hold any angst towards her for taking her own life. I understand why she did it. She would not have seen it so much as suicide but more of her euthanising herself. She was a very strong willed woman and she did things her way in life. So when it came to dying she did not wait around to be ‘taken’ by death, she ‘took’ death and did it her way. I kind of admire her for that. She died in a way that was so typically her and of that I am glad.

Tony

I made a comment in the last post on how as a couples counsellor one not uncommonly sees husbands who have married their mothers and wives who have married their fathers. Why would this be so?

The psychological explanation would be that a child learns how to be in its formative years and that includes how to be in relationships as well. Each child is born with its innate temperament and as it grows though out childhood it has various experiences which impact on its personality as well.

In childhood the child is developing a whole series of templates one could say. It is learning for example about its own OKness and the OKness of others. If a child gets a clear sense of it being not OK then that becomes the template which it takes into adulthood. It will thus structure its life so that its sense of not OKness is repeatedly reinforced and proven over and over. It sets up relationships where it gets walked on, beaten up, used, cheated on and so forth.



This is why I have always said that for the drug addict the drug is not the real problem. The person is simply using the drug as one means to live out its sense of not OKness. If you could actually make a society drug free all the addicts would simply live out their not OKness in another way. However one must say that that maybe in a less dramatically destructive way.

It also develops relationship templates. The young child watches mother and father relate and that forms part of its template. It experiences a relationship first hand with mother and father and that forms its relationship template also. Indeed anyone who is emotionally important for the child will contribute to template formation and that can include siblings, friends and other rellies as well.

So the young girl has a relationship with father where he is distant and a bit critical. Inside her head she develops a strong desire to finally have a father who gives her recognition and approval. The template is established. As she goes through life she meets various eligible men and when her intuition picks up that this one will eventually be distant she will feel an attraction to him. This is the one she will feel the ‘chemistry’ for and the one she will fall in love with. That is why it is sometimes said that you should marry the one you don’t have the chemistry for but have a good workable relationship with.


Establishing her template



I have heard many women say that they promised themselves never to marry a man like their father but sure enough over time the same father daughter relationship is re-established in the marriage. These templates are very powerful and unfortunately there are not easy to change and thus you get people behaving in repetitive ways in their relationships over and over again.

Now hold onto your hats! What is being said here is that we develop psychological templates of our parents that we then use to form romantic relationships with others in later life. So what this means is that your Child ego state is picking a person it perceives to be a facsimile of mother or father. So what this means is that when the woman is having sex with her husband she also has a psychological understanding of him as being her father. She is having psychological incest with father when she has sex with him! TMI!

Then you get the relationship where the Nurturing Parent ego states (NP) of the hubby and missus are not even. The diagram below shows one of the bases of a good relationship. If the two parties are capable of (and do) showing caring and kindness to the other especially when they are in distress, then that is a very good thing. It is an excellent way of keeping good will in a relationship and it very much encourages the Free Child ego states of both parties to stay invested in the relationship.



Rarely are the NPs even. One will tend to be the nurturer ‘manager’ and the other will be less likely to do so. If the difference is not too big then it does not matter. Sometimes it is big and then you get wives saying he is like a child and I have to be his mother. Or the man says that she is child like and he has to be like a parent to her.


The drug or alcohol user in the relationship often will assume the child role and want the spouse to be the parent.



What most clients will expect to happen and what couples counsellors often do is focus on the party who is meant to ‘grow up’. The man who wants the wife to be his mother and keeper will be seen as needing to grow up in the relationship. Most often this is not the main problem. The main shift that needs to take place is that the mother (wife) needs to ‘grow down’. Whilst this is realised by many couples counsellors I would suggest that very commonly it is under emphasised in the counselling.

Sometimes you hear the wife complain endlessly about how he is so much of a child and how she always nurturers him and she never gets any back and so forth. Often that is not the core problem. She is also not mentioning that being the ‘big person’ in the relationship suits her very well. She is in control, she does not have to be emotionally vulnerable or has to emotionally trust hubby. She can be very resistant to doing such things as they can terrify her. So when you hear someone complain that they are like a parent to their spouse remember that it is likely that the person also has a child inside that is terrified of letting the other party take control and be vulnerable and trusting of them.

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The need to define what we are not.

When I did my time in prison I got quite friendly with one of the officers. We had many a good discussion over the years and I found him to be a very bright man with some quite insightful thinking. Often when there was ‘lock down’ of some kind (and thus he had little to do), he would come down to the ‘psychs’ room and we would have our fervent discussions. As I said he was very bright but somewhat of a lost soul. One of those people who are just passing through life with little direction. I must also add that he and his wife and various others did engage in some quite unusual sexual practices. However enough said of that!

Over time I sort of became his defacto counsellor as he began confiding in me more and more, which I was prepared to go along with. Why? Firstly because I liked him, I also liked our stimulating debates and thirdly because he was of a significant standing in the politics of the prison officers. When working in a prison there are some who are real ‘hard arses’ on the staff so it is a great idea to have a foot in the door with the officers. If you get on the outer with the officers they can make life very difficult for you. So he was sort of an insurance policy for me in that way.



One of the arguments that I would present to him to which he would vigourously debate against was that society needed its prisons and prisoners. They had a positive effect on society and that if ever there were no prisoners or law breakers then society may eventually collapse in on itself. This could happen because the society would loose its sense of identity.

Prisoners allow us to define what we are not. “Those people in prison are prisoners and we are not like them”. It allows us to get a sense of “Them and Us”. By doing that we then begin to get a sense of who and what “Us” is and thus we get a sense of our group identity in that way. Prisoners allows us to maintain our group identity in this way.

Indeed then we have wars. One sometimes hears the phrase, “The war on crime”. When ever a society in engaged in some kind of war it allows it to define what we are not - we are not the enemy. Thus we get a sense of who we are, we get more of a sense of what “Us” is. If we didn’t have this then perhaps the groups identity would fade and that is one thing humans do not like at all! So this could be argued as one of the psychological bases of war.



At an individual level we find the same psychological mechanism at work. We hear a lot about the child’s separation from the parent. After it forms an attachment to mother it then sets about breaking that down by separating from the parent. It actually does two things. It separates and it individuates. As the young child separates it stops using mothers identity and must begin establishing it’s own and thus becomes its own individual. So how does it do that?

At birth an infant is all Free Child and has no identity of its own. It has no individuation. Its separation and individuation is seen to occur at three crucial stages of development. 2 years of age, 4 years of age and adolescence. It is at these three ages when it develops its own identity.

These three stages are know as the negativistic stages. That is, at these ages many of the children are found to be highly negativistic, antagonistic and rebellious against the parents. Why would they be like that? One reason is that they are defining what they are not, they are establishing who the enemy is, which is most often the parents. This of course is when the RC or Rebellious Child ego state is extensively used by the child and teenager.


He has defined what he is not.



So the teenager finds out what he is not which partially allows him to define who he is. If he is also allowed to do lots of different things then he also finds out the things that he actually likes himself. If he is allowed to do things then this allows him to develop his views and beliefs on this and that then he will complete the identity establishing process. He becomes fully individuated. Slowly he starts to shift from individuating by rebelling to individuating by the Free Child. If he is afforded the opportunity to define what he is not then he can start to define what he is.



This is a delicate shift for the parent or psychotherapist to handle. The child’s shift from RC individuation to FC individuation. Generally there will not be a clear point at which the change occurs but the process usually starts off with a dominance of RC individuation as the diagram shows. If the normal process is allowed to evolve then slowly there is a shift to FC individuation. This means for some time there will be RC and FC individuation occurring together until the RC ceases and one is just left with the FC individuation.


Why do teenagers do this? Because they can. FC individuation.




So firstly the child sets about defining what it is not and then it can start to define what it is. If the parent makes the wrong ‘moves’ then the child can get stuck in RC individuation and the FC individuation is hampered. If this happens to a significant degree then the person will lack a sense of its identity. Unless he can change it though some intensive psychotherapy he will then spend the rest of his days being rebellious or conforming and he will never really be able to answer the question, Who am I? That can only be done when the FC individuation is allowed to occur.

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