My way of working with clients involves seeing them (and myself) as made up of different parts. While we may think that we are unified, coherent personalities, when we pay attention to what is going on inside us we often discover a collection of many different parts, or sub-personalities.
Relationships can bring joy, but we also need time on our own
In this time of lockdown, when many of us have been confined with partners, families or friends, I’ve been thinking about how relationships contribute, or not, to our happiness levels.
This topic was highlighted in a famous research project, the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which in 1938 began investigating the happiness levels of more than 700 men. It is still ongoing even though many of the original participants have died.
It’s one of the longest running and most in-depth studies into what brings happiness and one of its main findings was that it’s not money or success that generate contentment, but rather close and meaningful relationships with partners, family, friends and community. The researchers found that those with such relationships lived longer, healthier and happier lives.
Read more: Relationships can bring joy, but we also need time on our own
Our attachment to being right
‘The most destructive element in human relationships is the urge to make other people bad or wrong, and then judge, reject or punish them for that.’ - John Welwood
The controversy over how different countries have responded to the coronavirus challenge has brought up yet again the danger of assuming that our own opinion or outlook is somehow correct and ‘good’ and that other opinions are obviously wrong and, in some cases, ‘bad’ or ‘wicked’.
This is a tendency I recognise in myself. Sometimes it just seems so obvious that what I believe is the truth and what others believe is simply wrong.
Couple therapy – making sense of emotions
Recognising and naming what we are feeling is a valuable part of couple therapy, but it’s not something that comes easily to most of us.
It is important to learn how to recognise and name what we’re feeling because, in one sense, we are what we feel. It is often through our feelings that we reveal ourselves to others, that they get an understanding of what we want, what we’re passionate about, what moves us. And that helps create intimacy.
The power in therapy of ‘talking to yourself’
One of the revelations that many who enter therapy experience is that the process becomes not just talking to the therapist but also, in a deeper, way talking to themself.
This was highlighted recently by artist and cultural commentator Grayson Perry, in the BBC Radio Four programme Start the Week. (see link at bottom of this post).
Why detaching from conflict can kill a relationship
Many people believe that fighting is bad in a relationship and of course that’s true if the arguing is toxic and non productive. However, for a couple therapist the worst indicator for the relationship is when one of the partners seems to have given up.
This partner may have got to the stage where everything seems to hopeless that they detach from the relationship – they no longer even care enough to get angry.
Read more: Why detaching from conflict can kill a relationship
John Bradshaw – championing your inner child
This is a great talk by psychologist John Bradshaw about the inner child, in which Bradshaw talks about the importance of “championing” that part of ourselves. This idea is developed in his book Homecoming, published in 1990.
Bradshaw, who died in 2016, was from Texas and has the style of a Southern preacher in his public talks.
Developing a healthy ‘internal leader’
Is there a hierarchy of grief?
I recently attended a talk given by Julia Samuel, a grief psychotherapist and author of Grief Works, Stories of Life, Death and Surviving.
She talked about a ‘hierarchy of grief’, in which certain kinds of loss are deemed to be worse than others. For example, when someone dies we mostly assume that those most affected will be the person’s close family – especially spouse and children.
