Looking for the Child ego state in counselling **

In the counselling session one must at some point touch the Child ego state of the client. It needs to feel that there has been some contact with the therapist. If this does not happen the client will feel that not much is happening and drift away. Once the Child is touched or cathected then it can be worked with to change the thoughts and feelings associated with the current script.

Many, many ways of doing this have been devised by therapies over the years. For example; free association, hypnosis, redecision, dream work, two chair, psychodrama, art therapy, primal scream, flotation tanks, EFT, dance therapy, massage, rebirthing, EMDR, body work of various kinds and so on endlessly. Usually when a new psychotherapy technique hits town this is what it is. It is a new and undiscovered way for people to open up their Child. Hence it is usually seen as exciting and for some it becomes the panacea of all the ills in life. Over the years many a snake oil salesmen has used this need of people to have a new way to release the Child ego state and cashed in on it, at times very successfully.

I am not saying that new psychotherapy techniques are the equipment of charlatans. The more techniques the better as each of us will fit better with one way of opening up our Child ego state than with another. It is better to have the choice of ten medicines than to be restricted to only one choice of medicine.

How Child is brought into the counselling session

1. Feelings. The client can present their Child with the expression of feeling. The client may have had some event happen such as the death of a loved one, they got the sack, they are bullied at work, their spouse has threatened to leave and so on endlessly. By the pure act of talking about it the client starts to show feelings and hence the therapist is left sitting right in front of the Child ego state.

What does one then do? First allow the expression which is therapeutic in itself (usually) then look for how the feeling is used to support the script. The client who is emotional is in a unbalanced psychological state and thus they are more ready to be able to change their script than if they are balanced and stable emotionally. This is where the intellectual and cognitive therapies can get into trouble because they do not do this.

2. Contracts for taking the client out of their comfort zone.

This can be seen as putting the client on the left foot. Do not give people what they expect. If a client comes to therapy and gets exactly what they expected then the session would have been of limited use.

One looks for the major factors in the persons life that currently keep them in their script. It could be a particular job, a relationship, a recreational activity such as substance use or promiscuous behaviour, a particularly discounting peer group, dangerous behaviour of some kind.

Suggest some contract that puts the Child ego state under pressure and pushes the client a bit such as a home visit counselling session. Something that makes them take a risk. This is at times necessary. If it was easy to do the client would have done it already and would not need a therapist’s help. This is where the non-confrontative therapies can fall down and flounder. Unfortunately love or unconditional positive regard for the client or whatever you want to call it is not always enough. It is a great help but not enough on its own.

Sometimes you hear therapists say that the client must not get angry at you or they wont come back. Or if the client feels unhappy when they leave then they wont come back. I have found the opposite to be true. They are more likely to come back than if they stay in their comfort zones. Psychotherapy is not meant to be a happy pill.

3. Polarities.

Look for the polarities in the client which in one way is doing the same as number 2. Polarities allow the client to hide from self. We all have a personality that has certain features or characteristics. We have these because we have discovered that they work for us in the world. They allow us to get on in a way that allows our script to continue and get strokes. So in this way our personality characteristics are an adaptation and we tend to get stuck in them and avoid the opposite or polarity of those.

The therapist searches for the polarity and then urges the expression of it. This will to some extent be the expression of the Free Child. If a client is loud and brash find the quiet timid part and urge its expression. Look for the male and female components to the personality and urge the expression of the polarity. If the client is active look for their passive side and encourage its expression. Think of a couple of features of your personality and then be the opposite as this is what you are hiding from.

Conclusion

These are just three ways by which the Child ego state in the client can come into the therapy room and be met by the therapist. It has to happen one way or another. I would want it to happen at least once in each session I have with a client. If this does not happen the client will have sense of therapy not really getting any where and they drift off and understandably so.

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Projection as a defence **

I was asked a question about projection today. I have put some of my response here.

Projection is what is called a defence of defence mechanism. It allows the person to psychologically defend them self against something. One thing that I have learnt over 20 years of psychotherapy is that humans are very good at lying to themselves. They are very good at hiding from themselves.

To really understand what a defence is in this sense it is advantageous to understand where the concept came from.

Freud postulated ‘projection’ in the late 1800s when he lived in Vienna, Europe.

In this diagram he suggested that a person at any one time has 5% of material in their conscious and 5% in their preconscious and the other 90% resides in their unconscious. When a person felt or thought something that was not acceptable to him he would place that thought or urge into the unconscious. For instance the married man who felt lust after his neighbour’s wife may find this quite unacceptable to him so he ‘placed’ such urges in his unconscious. Then he no longer has to worry about it (in the short term).

Remember that where Freud lived (Vienna) and when he lived (Late 1800s) sexual repression was at it highest perhaps in the history of modern mankind. Sex was completely taboo. So when people had sexual thoughts of some kind they would feel repulsed and disgusted as they had been trained since early childhood to think such things. So the unconscious allowed people to cope with such things (in the short term).

The problem was that the urge did not go away, It had just been shoved into the “too hard basket”, and in the longer term it would keep coming back. That is it would spontaneously arise from the unconscious into the conscious. This meant that in the longer term the person had to defend them self against that urge and hence the development of the defence mechanism.

In Transactional Analysis we have the ego state explanation of the dynamics of a defence such as projection. This is shown below:

This is sometimes referred to as the hydraulic theory of personality. The Child ego state has an urge. For example a married man my feel sexual attraction to another man at work. But he has a Parent ego state which believes that this is totally immoral and disgusting. So the ‘force’ from the Child and the Parent collide. There is an impasse as they say. This collision is like a wave hitting up against the rocks on the shoreline.

When two opposing forces collide there is always a result. In the human psyche it is a symptom of some kind.

The resultant collision provides the force or the energy for a symptom or defence mechanism to develop. For instance the symptom may be anxiety or depression or even something like homophobia. The man can also develop the defence of projection. In this instance instead of acknowledging the homosexual impulses in himself he will project them out onto others. So he will see other men as being homosexual or behaving in homosexual ways when in fact they are not.

So projection allows the man to trick himself or lie to himself. “I wont see my own Child homosexual desires, instead I will see others as being like that”. This allows him to feel relief that he is not homosexual but he must continually guard against other homosexual men because they seem to be everywhere. When in fact he is really guarding against his own unconscious (Child) homosexual impulses that keep arising into his own conscious. Thus his projection defends his positive view of himself.

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Website update

There has been new additions to my website

Four new photographs

And six new blog compilations

The pre-verbal client

Rebirthing as a therapeutic technique

Trauma debriefing and trauma management

Self harm, sex addiction and dissociation

The psychology of sorry and revenge

The psychology of christmas

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Jealousy and narcissism **

I have mentioned before that sibling rivalry and jealousy are a normal part of child development. Indeed one could go even further and say that these feelings and the disruption they can cause in the family are an integral way by which the child resolves its primary narcissism.

Primary narcissism, as distinct from secondary narcissism, is the state of mind a child has from birth to 5 years of age. It perceives itself to be the centre of the universe, omnipotent and all valuable. The child believes it is more important than others, that it is special and that it should get favourable treatment.

This attitude is meant to decline as the child learns that it is not the centre of the universe and there are others on the planet that are of equal value and importance. Realising the importance of others reduces primary narcissism.

Most theorise that the narcissistic person has the life position of I’m OK, You’re not OK (I+U-). As a result they behave in a way where they view their own needs and self as more important than others. Others are therefore treated as being of less worth and value.

I have questioned this else where. I propose that the narcissist has the life position of I’m OK, You’re irrelevant (I+U?). If this is the case, others are not viewed as second class or of less value, instead their worth and needs are not even considered in the first place. The person has such a focus on self that they never actually get around to thinking about the other. Or the other is only considered in a superficial way.

This makes sense from a child development point of view. The young child in a state of primary narcissism is very self focussed. When they are dealing with others their focus is on how does this effect me. They are not yet capable in any substantive way of seeing it from the others perspective, thus displaying empathy.

Due to this high degree of self focus it does not even consider the question of, Are others OK or not?

Me, me, me

How does the child learn that others are relevant and are of importance. This is where the child’s jealousy and disquiet achieves importance. It is one of those things in life that just does not feel good but you have to go through it any ways. Its like going to the dentist. Nobody likes going because it feels bad but you have to go anyway.

If left to its own a child will not naturally evolve out of its narcissism. The child will learn that others are relevant when it is imposed on them and children don’t like that. It does not feel good and it means their here and now needs do not get met.

There is one piece of cake left and the younger brother has it because he has not had any cake yet. The older sister has already eaten her piece but she wants the last piece as well. The parent intervenes and gives the last piece to the brother much to the loud protestations of the sister. The brother ‘relevance’ and worth is imposed onto the psyche of the sister in this instance by the parents intervention. When this happens the sister’s primary narcissism reduces a little bit more. This feels unpleasant to her so she protests with anger and crying.

Hence we have the developmental importance of sibling jealousy, rivalry and envy. The pain the child feels with the jealousy and rivalry is what she remembers and thus she understands a little bit more that her brother is relevant in her psyche. If she did not feel the pain of the jealousy the process would flounder and she would never learn about the relevance of others and remain in the state of primary narcissism. As I mentioned before if a child is left to its own devices it will not naturally evolve out of its narcissism.

This not only happens with siblings or peers but also in the child’s relationship with mother and father. As the child grows mother begins to express her own Child ego state needs to the daughter. More and more the girl learns that mummy has needs and at times her needs are second and mummy’s needs are first. Again this happens because the mother imposes it onto the daughter and as any parent will tell you there can be loud and long protest when this happens. The mother forces her own ‘relevance’ onto the child to which the child feels ‘pain’ and then can get angry and so forth. The child is forced to recognise that others do exist in the world and they impinge on what it wants at times.

With sibling rivalry and jealousy most parents fail to see the developmental importance of these feelings as I have just described. They tend to simply react to the disquiet being expressed in such a ways that it ceases as expeditiously as possible. Their usual goal is to circumvent the rivalry or have it quickly resolved by some means. They fail to see that the children are using it in an endeavour to move through the developmental stage of primary narcissism. Hence they impede the child’s psychological development in this way.

When asked I usually highlight three things to parents in how they can assist the child to use its feelings of jealousy and rivalry to master this developmental stage.

1. Allow the child to experience the jealousy and rivalry feelings. To be aware of and experientially understand the feeling and that this shows that others do exist in the world and are relevant. Obviously this is presented to the child in a way that it can comprehend for its age.

2. Adult information is given to the child about what is happening

3. Role plays are a great way for a child (and indeed and adult) to learn the skill of empathy which is also needed to master narcissism.

These are not meant to stop at age 5 years but I would suggest carrying these on all the way through childhood and adolescence. Indeed there can be considerable feelings of rivalry and jealousy in adolescence which is a fairly narcissistic stage any way.

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Rebirthing as a therapeutic technique **

In my early years of training in psychotherapy I went around the world learning about and looking at different types of counselling and psychotherapy. One of the places I went to was San Francisco in the USA and other places in southern California. At that time the human potential movement was rolling along like a freight train and I trained in various things such as Transactional Analysis, gestalt, bioenergetics and rebirthing.

The leaders of the rebirthing movement at that time were Leonard Orr and Sondra Ray. They said birth trauma was experienced by us all and this was the cause of many psychological problems. They devised a way of returning to the womb and redoing ones birth. One could either have a wet rebirth or a dry rebirth.

In a wet rebirth the client would be placed in a hot tub (spa) that was 98 degrees which is the same temperature as the womb apparently. The person was then surrounded by others who formed the womb, they would then simulate contractions and the person was born out of the hot tub, through the vaginal canal to the waiting mother. Nobody had any clothes on so as to get the skin on skin effect that happens during birth and in the womb.

Rebirths in the hot tub

This type of psychotherapy could not exist today. The professional organisations and the press would sexualise it and that would be the end of that. The rebirths that I saw were not erotic at all and were not a sexual experience. I never experienced a rebirth myself.

It is unfortunate how those watching for any aberration would sexualise such a therapeutic process as it can be a powerful technique that can help people in distress. This can not now happen. Any ways at that time I saw many varied styles of therapy which I am glad I did. I saw types and ways of human relating that went beyond the average. I suppose that is why it was called the "human potential movement".

Dry rebirths in group therapy

In our early therapy groups sometimes clients would do a dry rebirth. We debated whether the people would be naked during the rebirths and decided against it for the reasons cited above.

In the process the client would lie on the floor curled up often sucking their thumb. A few other group members would sit next to the person and form a womb around him. At the baby’s head there was an opening left and two or three other group members would lie side by side to form the vaginal canal through which the baby was going to pass. The ‘womb’ would then begin the contractions. I remember at one point someone found an audio tape that was a recording of the noises inside the womb. You could hear the mother’s heart beat, blood flowing and so forth. This was meant to be played to new-borns to help them go to sleep. This tape was played during the rebirth.

This is at a month long training experience at the Western Institute for Group and Family Therapy in southern California which I attended. You can just see the top of my head right at the back. This is what is known in the US as a hot tub. In Australia we call them spas. Some nights the workshop participants would see if they could break the record for the most people in the hot tub at one time which is what was happening here.

As the womb started contracting there was a midwife who would begin pushing the baby on their backside forcing the head to the opening towards the vagina. The group members were meant to resist the movement as happens in a normal birth and the baby is slowly forced out of the womb and into the vagina struggling as it goes. Eventually it would be born with the whole process taking about 10 to 15 minutes. When born the baby would sometimes have a prearranged mother to be there who would breast-feed usually for about 5 to 10 minutes. And then the rebirth was complete.

And my point is?

First, I think it is safe to say that this would not be considered a mainstream type of therapy and hence many will write it off as fringe and wacky. Maybe it is and maybe not, but what it gave me was a better understanding of people and their psychology. It allowed me to see people involved in unusal therapeutic techniques, how they reacted and responded. In my view it allowed me to gain a wider and more robust understanding of the human psyche.

In this profession I am surprised at how quickly people will discard a therapeutic approach as nonsense. To my mind they see the trees but forget to see the forrest. In one way it does not matter if the therapeutic technique is effective or not. To see people behave as they do in differing therapies as I said allows for a deeper understanding of the human psyche. I have found that anyway. Perhaps people are a bit too willing to cathect their Parent ego state when they see something new or different.

The other point that rebirthing techniques can highlight is Child ego state magical wishful thinking. As a therapist one needs to be careful of this. The rebirthing process described could be seen to imply that you can redo a birth, have it be a good experience and this somehow negates the bad experience of the first time around.

Psychotherapy can add new experiences but it can never take away the bad ones and one needs to be careful that the client does not start to believe this. If one was abused as a child then one has memories of that which can never be taken away or some how extinguished or removed. The Child ego state in us all would very much like that to happen. One needs to be careful that the client does not start to believe that can happen.

Some clients can start to think, “If I do rebirth then I am sort of starting again and this time I can make it right”. This cannot happen as one cannot start such a thing again. When we did our rebirths in group therapy we were doing something but we were not redoing a birth. What we did, seemed to give good results but it did not allow the client to start all over again. Each of us gets only one chance to do birth and childhood. When the time has past it is gone forever. We can add in new contrary experiences through therapy but that cannot extinguish the past.

The other area where this type of magical thinking can occur is with the transference relationship. The wishful thinking of the client can be, “Through the new relationshiip with the therapist I can erase the old origianl parent-child relationship and have a new one”. As I mentioned before such erasure cannot happen and at times it seems the therapist would need to check if the client is doing such magical thinking.

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Psychological polarities **

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks”.

William Shakespeare (Hamlet)

I ran a therapy group lately where one client made the statement, “I hate victims”. As soon as she said that I knew she had polarised the victim in her and thus the treatment plan was for her to acknowledge the victim in her and to accept it. Once done it gets ‘integrated’ in to the personality as they say. If this happens then she will no longer ‘hate’ victims.

She may dislike them but the deep core level dislike and angst will not be there. The reason why she has strong feelings about such people is because she has that quality in herself which she finds repugnant. The strong dislike of others in this way allows her to not see that quality in herself. It becomes a distraction. Also by focusing on others like that she is trying to convince herself she is not like that.

Exercise

Write a list of the people who you dislike and what you dislike about them. It is best if it is people who you have known personally.

Will you own the disliked part of the other and accept yourself as that?

Psychological polarities

There is a concept in psychotherapy which refers to polarities. The therapist looks for polarities in the client such as shown below.

I hate victims -------------------------------------I am a victim

I hate critical people------------------------------I can be excessively critical

I hate war mongers --------------------------------I desire to be a warmonger

The psychologically healthy person sits some where in the middle and not at the polar ends of each continuum. If a client presents at one of the polar ends then the therapist would be looking at them accepting the other end of the polarity in their personality. This concept shows one other interesting aspect of the therapeutic mission and highlights what we are actually suggesting to our clients.

Psychotherapy breeds mediocrity, exceptional people who do exceptional things (both good and bad) have to be neurotic to some degree. The psychologically healthy person does not have the drive to strive for the exceptional. They do not have the inner torment that makes exceptional people exceptional. For instance all olympic gold medalists would be of this ilk.

To do something exceptional such as win at the Olympics means one has to push through a pain barrier, often many pain barriers. If they didn’t have to do this then every one would be doing it and thus it wouldn’t be exceptional. The psychologically healthy person would not waste their time doing such things. They are not going to get up at 4 am 6 days a week to swim up and down a pool for 4 hours each day for years on end. People will only do this when there is some underlying psychological angst and drive that forces them to go through such ‘pain’.

They have to be obtaining some other psychological advantage by doing so rather than the possibly of just winning a gold medal. It is their neurosis that gives them that psychological advantage. Winning the medal means something extra to them that it does not mean to the psychologically healthy person. It can be a wide variety of things such as “If I win then mother will finally love me”, “I will show them that I can do it”, “If I come first then father will finally notice me” and so on endlessly.

The other thing about exceptional achievement whether that be in sport, the arts, science, politics and so forth is the person has to prioritise. To achieve something exceptional some where along the line they have to put in the long hours at their task. This means their family relationships have to suffer. Their achievement becomes more important to them than their family relationships which would usually be defined as a state of psychological ill health.

People will only do this if their potential achievement has some extra psychological meaning for them like I mentioned before. The more we encourage our clients to move away from the polar ends the more psychologically healthy they become and the more mediocre they also will become.

The individual gains and the group looses.

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Dependent drug use

People use drugs for a wide variety of reasons. Four of the most common are cited as

Experimental use

Recreational use

Symptomatic use - used to relieve some painful symptom such as anxiety, depression, shame and so forth

Dependent use - the true ‘drug addict’ who finds it very difficult to stop.

By far the largest group in number are the recreational users and the smallest group in numbers would be the dependent user. The group which uses up the most community resources such as health, counselling, police, courts, relationship disharmony, social security are the dependent user and the least would be the recreational and experimental users. So the smallest group tend to use up most of the resources.

People being people they tend to think that the rest of the world thinks, feels and behaves the same way they do. Indeed in the training of new counsellors this is one of the main concepts to learn. Others don’t think and feel the same way I do. To believe this at a Child ego state level is a difficult thing to achieve.

A common example of this is with depression. Everyone has been depressed in their life at some point which can be seen as normal persons depression. However there are others who are ‘abnormally’ depressed and even clinically depressed as it can be called. The average guy in the street will tend to believe that these neurotically depressed people think and feel the same way he does. Hence they will tend to think that such depressed people are just wallowing in their own self pity, or they should just ‘jolly’ themselves out of it, or just think positive thoughts, or just take a bit of a holiday and so on.

Hence the person with neurotic depression can be misunderstood as they can’t just think good thoughts or take a week off work to have the depression lift. The layman will often not understand this because they think others think and feel like they do.

The same applies for the dependent drug user and the layman cannot understand why they don’t stop using when it is destroying their health. For instance the person who wants to give up smoking. Mr average thinks they are just weak willed because all it really takes is just enduring a couple of weeks or a month of strong pangs and then they go away. They believe everyone else thinks and feels the same way they do but the dependent user of nicotine does not think and feel like that.

With other drugs like heroin the dependent user can have an attachment problem. Some come from a background where there was a disrupted attachment with mother and as a result they form a psychological attachment to the drug that is overly dependent. When you listen to people like this talk about their drug there is an uncanny similarity about their relationship with the drug and about their relationships to people. They talk about an attachment to the drug in a similar way one would talk about an attachment to another person.

This allows one to understand what the dependent drug user thinks and feels. One can indeed experience it first hand. One of the principle features of an attachment is the desire to maintain proximity. Never under estimate the power of human attachment it can be an very strong motivating force. People will expend very large amounts of time, energy and money to seek out the other so as to maintain proximity to them.

As an exercise recall a time when you were in love with someone and they did not love you back. All the things you tried to do and angst you had about this unrequited love. The drive you had to want to be with that person. The amount of thinking and feeling you had about the person and the relationship. If you can recall this then you know how some drug dependent users feel about their drug. You now can begin to understand the desire they have to maintain the proximity to the drug and how hard it is to give up.

As a second exercise recall a close loved one who died or for some reason left you for ever. Again recall the desire you had to once again be reunited with that person (maintain proximity). The pain and distress you experienced each time you realised that the proximity or a reunion was never going to happen. Remember what that felt like and how long it took you to get over it. If you can do this, then you begin to understand how some dependent drug users feel about their relationship to their drug.

However it is even worse for the drug user. If a close loved one dies you cannot ever again maintain proximity. So the break is forced upon you. However the dependent drug user can easily again maintain proximity by simply going and buying another deal.

If some how by magic you could spend $50 to get one more day with your deceased loved one, would you? How many times would you spend $50 for that one extra day? And when your money ran out how motivated would you be to steal or defraud to get one more $50? If you can understand these questions then one is gaining some kind of experiential understanding of how the dependent drug user thinks and feels.

Finally it should be noted that the drug addict type of drug user does not have great difficulty getting off drugs. They have most difficulty staying off drugs. In their histories one finds most have gotten off drugs on a number of occasions but the desire to return (proximity) is just very strong.

Addiction and fixation

Whilst on the topic of the dependent drug user it is probably pertinent to note that whilst some may end up a dependent user because of an attachment disorder it is also possible to have another aetiology. This can be due to a fixated development. The person gets stuck at a childhood stage of development and the drug addiction occurs due to that psychological basis.

The most obvious example of this is an addiction to cigarette smoking and a fixation at the oral stage of development. This can either be at the oral sucking stage (0 - 8 months) or the oral biting stage (6 - 18 months). For some reason the person never successfully completed either of these two stages of development. (This may also be the psychological basis for some very resilient eating disorders).

Satisfying oral stage needs

These people not only have the habit of smoking cigarettes to break and the addiction to nicotine. They also have the constant need for oral stimulation which is provided by smoking the cigarette and it is this point that makes it very difficult for them to stop for long periods of time.

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