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I’ve been perusing my collection of articles lately and came across some helpful tips on running groups. You don’t have to be a “group therapist” to run groups. Groups are defined as any gathering of three people or more, and “group dynamics” pertain to these gatherings. Committees, colleagues in the workplace, family parties, book clubs are all examples of groups.

Groups go through predictable, inevitable stages. One theorist describes a stage of disintegration, marked behaviors such as backbiting, attrition, and other toxic expressions of “resistance.” Disintegration can be triggered by many factors, especially “anomie,” or the fear that they may not have the resources available to complete a task. The important question is how the leader can facilitate re-integration.

I appreciated the author’s suggestion that to help a group re-integrate, it may be wise to assign “a small, attractive task.” I imagine this might provide a shot of confidence to group members who might be daunted by fear of failure even when those fears are unconscious.
“Process” (as opposed to “content”) issues in groups are mostly below the surface. Although it’s is the job of the leader to make the unconscious conscious by putting observed process issues on the table for discussion, leaders may not have the training or comfort level needed to make this happen. When that occurs, process issues can get acted out in toxic ways. Taking on a rewarding, easily accomplished job can often provide the internal comfort needed to overcome these tricky  process issues and strengthen the group.

These observations were delivered by Dr. Salman Akhtar at the ACAP conference June 2017. This writer is grateful to him and to ACAP for bringing him in.

Dr. Akhtar distinguished between courage and fearlessness: courage is a response to, and not an absence of, fear. It is the willingness and choice to bear consequences and to act.

All animals fear:

• Something moving fast
• Something with big teeth
• Something with big claws
• the capacity to jump
• heights (my note: except for lemmings, and what good does that do them?)

The above fears are part of our animal nature and have to be available to us. In fact, his description of the goal of psychoanalysis is for the individual to achieve “the greatest amount of pleasure with the greatest safety and the greatest amount of moral ease.”

What is “cowardice” then? He describes the experience of “cowardice” as the fear of being alone and separate from the security of mom and dad. This is a deeper dive into the concept as described by Wiki as “…a trait wherein fear and excessive self-concern override doing or saying what is right, good, and of help to others or oneself in a time of need-it is the opposite of courage. [Acting in a cowardly fashion]…indicates a failure of character in the face of a challenge.”

To me, the difference between the Akhtar description and the Wiki definition is the compassion inherent in the former. The Wiki terms “Excessive self-concern” and “failure of character” grate on the ears of the psyche as being judgmental and harsh. Akhtar describes “cowardice” from the inside, and thus normalizes the universal human experience; who hasn’t been a “coward” from time to time? Wiki speaks from the perspective of an outside observer or an internal judge.

Courage is not just on the physical plane; it can be experienced on the intellectual and emotional planes as well. Dr. Akhtar stated that Freud and other great minds contradict themselves, and that it takes courage to do so. This needs some clarification, however. When a great mind contradicts itself, it is often without bluster and broken promises made with little forethought. After all, a little mind can also contradict itself.

I have a cherished friend who had been emotionally assaulted (treated rudely) in a group by an individual who sounded to me to be grandiose and narcissistic. My friend said to this individual “You don’t have to like me, but you do have to treat me with respect. I grew up believing, as my parents did, in  treating others as equals, not in putting oneself above others. And if you continue to disrespect me, I promise you, I will make you feel very, very bad.” This took courage: she said, as Wiki describes above, what was right, true, and of help to others as well as herself. I am happy to report that the individual must have found this feedback to be helpful since my friend was offered a heartfelt apology.

 

 

 

 

 

“I wonder if you will permit your mind to ask…”

“Do you mind if I make an observation?”

“I’ve nothing more to say…that I know of…”

Patient: “I’ve got nothing more to say.”

Therapist: ” Should I ask some questions? What should I ask?”

…more to come…

Salman Akhtar, MD, recently gave a lecture on some of the origins of generosity. His frame of reference was the stages of development according to Psychoanalytic thought. Although Dr Akhtar did not mention the “oral stage,” we can safely assume, since basic trust is established in that phase, that the ground is laid there for the experience of receiving love, without which it seems impossible to give love in return.

In the “anal stage”, the task of which is toilet training, the little one goes in the toilet “to make mom happy.” He/she also learns that “not everything about me is good.” I’m not entirely certain that the good doctor was referring to odors emanating from one’s productions, but you can bet on the fact that that is a universal phenomenon. Except perhaps in Japan where I hear that they have pills that remove odor from one’s digestive waste products as they move through the body. That and mochi makes me want to pack for a trip to Japan right now. Also those toilets that wash and dry you and practically do your laundry…

So I learn as a 2-3 yr. old that I have to give up some of my own needs to make someone happy. I learn to give up, to comply, and  to give. When I get to the “Oedipal stage” around 4 yrs. old, I am subject to a shock: I am not just connected to Mom and connected to Dad. They are also connected to each other. And I am excluded! I must learn to bear the pain that my mother and father are already married. I learn that I must give them their time.

These are the developmental origins of generosity: attainment of basic trust, learning that not everything about me is good, and in order to receive connection with loved ones, I must give some things up.

“…most couples who seek therapy feel extremely lonely in their relationships. They miss and long for their partners…I use the phrase ‘moments of loneliness’ to capture the emotional shift that occurs when couples become-in what appears to be an instant and without a trace of doubt-heartless persecutors of each other rather than trusted and dependable partners. ”

“The capacity to bear loneliness is an impressive and hard-won developmental achievement. Loneliness begins in the earliest days of infancy and the shadows of that primitive experience leave their imprint on our ongoing ability to mitigate loneliness in later life….focusing on loneliness keeps loss and mourning in the forefront of our shared minds, and now and then allows a bridge to be built from blame to empathy.”

…”there remains in each of us an unsatisfied longing for understanding-without words-and for the idealized mother who never disappoints and never stimulates aggression. The ongoing for this irretrievable loss contributes to our sense of loneliness.”

When we are upset with our partner, it’s often because of one of two dynamics (or both…):

1. We perceive our partner in a particular way: We experience our loved one whereby parts of ourselves, combined with disappointing bits of parenting figures, are projected into our partner, who is then related to as if he/she possesses these projected attributes.  “You’re just like my Dad,” right?
2. The “good partner”, who represents the ever-available mother in our deepest imagination,  turns into “the bad partner”, who reminds us of the moments of intolerable disappointment when we were very little. We feel abandoned, rejected, assailed. Then we get mad! The ability to miss someone, or be disappointed in the connection, without lapsing into anxiety or feeling of rage, is an outstanding and often transient accomplishment.

Being able to penetrate the often intolerable tangle of these confusing emotions and simply say “I miss you”, ” I need you,” “I’m sorry,” which is no simple task, makes couple therapy rewarding.

___________________________

Quotations above from Alperovitz, Sharon. (2014). Moments of loneliness: A shared experience of learning from impasse in couple therapy. Couple Family Psychoanalysis, 4: 69-85.

How does the therapeutic relationship help couples in conflict to be able to talk it out? It’s hard to tolerate all that anger, whether we’re feeling it toward our partner, from our partner, or even being the therapist in the room. Here’s what David Scharff has to say:

“The degree to which early experiences might lead to later aggression varies. But in general, poor regulation of early aggression leads to incapacity of the growing child to regulate aggression. This is exacerbated when there is an experience of trauma and neglect early in life, leading to impaired containment, that is, a defective capacity to deal with disappointment and frustration, and a tendency to seek out more traumatic experience or traumatizing relationships in later life. When this happens, partners tend to see each other as posing danger…and they fear retraumatisation as a result of being in an intimate couple relationship.”

“Through the countertransference, we invite their excessively aggressive bond to infect us, and as it does, we work within ourselves to understand and detoxify it, and then to move it from wordless emotional experience within us to being something we can think about and therefore talk about with them. It is usually a painful inner experience for the therapist. But it is this process-using ourselves as therapeutic instruments through a willingness to tolerate, live with, and transform aggression-that we convey new possibilities to the couple.”

Scharff, D.E. (2014). Aggression in Couples: An Object Relations Primer. In Scharff and Scharff, “Psychoanalytic Couples Therapy: Foundations of Theory and Practice”.(PP. 59-70,) London: Karnak Books.

 

 

 

“I just need you to be more AVAILABLE!” How many times have you heard…or felt… that one? Or “I just want someone RESPONSIVE to my needs!” Of course you do. Here are some definitions that might help clarify what all that really means:

“Secure attachment relationships are characterized by conscientious, even painstaking availability and responsiveness-physical, emotional, and relational-which goes so far as to include appropriate self-denial and self-sacrifice for the other’s well-being.

Availability is defined as a partner’s willingness to care about and engage with all aspects of the other and also willingness to both disclose and receive personal information to allow shared knowing and accessibility/availability of the whole person to the other.

Responsiveness is defined as a person’s empathy for the other, acceptance and valuing of the other, and the person’s trustworthiness to be a “gentle holder” of his or her partner’s inmost, vulnerable self, including holding personal information private.  Such behaviors stem from a deep welfare regard and represents an unencumbered, unconflicted ‘being for’ the other.”

Yes, and yes.

Butler, M.H., Harper, J.M. & Sedall, R.B. (2009). JMFT, 35 (1), 125-143.

Why do we behave aggressively toward our partners when all we want is love? In the past, the infant’s normal demands for attention, feeding, etc. can be felt as both néed and rage. We’ve all heard that mixed-up brew when we hear a screaming, crying baby.

C. Rabin, in Winnicott and Good Enough Couple Therapy, states that: “Winnicott proposes that the mother who turns away from the aggressive child or retaliates [creates a dynamic that is]…so dangerous to the child that the child will develop a false self to attempt to comply with rather than aggress against a mother who is not capable of surviving the infant’s attacks.” The author goes on to say that when this baby, (whose expression of its primal needs were rejected,) grows up and is part of a couple, “turning away, retaliation, and cutting-off are typical couple moves that turn what might start out to be a bid for connection to a destructive sequence.”

That’s why.

What is “love” anyway? Yes, certainly, it is the thrill of the locked eyes, the feeling of “I just knew!”  It is also supportive commitment despite the inevitable discovery of differences and disappointments. How do we get from point A to point B?

“…In spite of our belief that what we seek in romantic love is something new and different, in fact we are searching for something that is old and familiar: idealized mother love. Just as we expect mother love to be the nearest thing to perfection on earth, so, too, do we make these same demands on romantic love.”

“Romantic love is blind because it thrives on fantasy and illusion; it looks inwardly at one’s own hopes and desires rather than at the reality of who the other person is. Since the lovers don’t really know each other, romantic love is a perfect, idealized love, imagined to fulfill what ever it is that we feel we need or want the most.  But such an imaginative love is fragile. When the truth is fully exposed, there is a tendency to flee. We experience shock and disappointment, even rage… When we discover the complete, unvarnished truth about our beloved-their imperfections and their all-too-human traits-we feel betrayed by both our lover and our love.”

“The challenge of…marriage is to find a way to accept all parts of [ourselves] and each other, and not to put into destructive action the pains and hurts and disappointments… It is only when the ‘in-loveness’ of romantic projections ends that cooperative love-the love between two separate identities-can begin.”

That’s a start!

J.G. Goldberg, 1999. “The Dark Side of Romantic Love.” The Dark Side of Love, (pp. 173-196). New Brunswick: Transaction Publisher.

Here’s a reminder of the ephemeral nature of our journey together.

Traveler, by Anthony Machado

“Traveler, the road is your footsteps and nothing more

Traveler, there is no road,

you make the road when you travel

And when you travel you make the road,

And when you look back,

you see a path upon which you will never return.

Traveler, there is no road,

only waves upon the sea.