The Coronation: Reflections from a Republican Therapist

I don’t bear King Charles or the royal family ill-will. My guess is, like most of us, they’re decent human beings trying to do their best for themselves and the communities around them. William and Kate, I know, have done some valuable work around child mental health. And if people around the world find community, meaning, and pleasure in the royal family and royal celebrations then good for them. I kind of wish I did. There’s enough misery going on in the world that having something to celebrate can’t be bad for people’s psychological health.

But what I worry about is the kind of mind-set that is fostered by the coronation, the royalty, and particularly the recent invitation to ‘swear allegiance’ to the King. We’ve been invited to ‘pay homage, in heart and voice, to our undoubted King, defender of all,’ and swear, ‘true allegiance to Your Majesty, and to your heirs and successors according to law’ (see here). Personally, as a therapist, I just think, ‘What the ****’ Here’s why…

When people come to therapy, it’s rarely to do with insufficient homageness/subservience to authority, or lacking some sense of a sovereign being in their lives. That’s rarely why people suffer.

Rather, in many cases, psychological problems come down to: (1) A lack of self-esteem, and/or (2) Not feeling empowered or being assertive, and/or (3) Deferring choices to others and then not feeling that one’s life is as it should be. People who come to therapy often have a pervasive—albeit implicit—sense of powerlessness: ‘everyone else can do things but me’. So choices don’t get made, others are seen as being more responsible, clients feel that they can’t say or choose towards what they want. And then life becomes unbearably empty and dull: ‘I don’t have what I want because I’ve never felt able to try and get it.’

Here, the role of therapy, so often, is to help clients see that they do have choices. Not all choices—not that they can do whatever they want—but that they have some choices, and that within those limitations they have contingent power, they can move forward. They don’t have to rely on others to lead them and to tell them how to live their lives.

So, to me, pledging homage and subservience to royalty seems the kind of thinking and behaviour that’s associated with poorer mental wellbeing, rather than better. It’s about deferring to authority, seeing someone as better and more important than you and with some god-given right to do something that you can’t do yourself. It’s an ideology that seems to run counter to the the work that therapists do: to help people feel like they’re an equal, that they’re capable and able, that their lives are their own rather than another’s.

Therapeutic wellbeing, so often, is about helping people own and embody their power. It’s about supporting people to recognise that they are ‘adults’, that they’re responsible human beings who can (and need) to take part in the development of their communities: not expect others to do it for them: they’re ‘citizens’ rather than ‘subjects’ (as Deborah Flynn-Harland wrote in response to an earlier draft of this blog). These are people that have the capacity to take leadership: who recognise that we can all lead, and develop, and be brilliant—not just a chosen few.

As a society, we worship all kinds of celebrities. Football players, musicians, artists, business moguls. That’s probably not ideal too. But the difference is that these people, in most cases, have at least done something—we look up to them because of what they achieved and what we might not be able to do ourselves. But with the royals—or with nobility and other inherited privileges—they haven’t actually done anything special or different to earn their status. They just got born into a particular class. So when we pay homage to them, when we look up to them, we’re essentially regurgitating an ideology that says, ‘You are not as good as others just because of who they—and who you—are. You’re not as worthy because you are you.’ And what does that do to people’s psyches?

I’ve been reading Jonathan Haidt’s The righteous mind (Penguin, 2012), and it’s a brilliant book about how we develop and maintain particular moral positions. Haidt argues that a morality based around the principle of obedience to authority is just as valid as one based around principles of care or fairness. It’s an interesting and challenging argument, but I think Haidt is wrong. Care and fairness advantage multiple people, it helps to create a world in which more people can benefit more of the time (as I’ve argued in my recent book, Psychology at the heart of social change , Policy, 2023). But what does obedience to authority benefit? Perhaps it gives people a sense of security, perhaps it gives society some stability. But it has so many downsides too: inequalities, marginalisation, oppression, a lack of freedom or creativity. If obedience to authority was core to wellbeing, then why isn’t it at the heart of practices like therapy, or other wellbeing-oriented practices like social and emotional learning in schools. I can’t think of one therapeutic practices that tries to help clients be more obedient to authority as a means of fostering psychological health. I can think of hundreds that try to improve self-esteem, assertiveness, and a willingness to be ‘adult’.

Actually, having said that, there is one approach to mental wellbeing that does advocate a more hierarchical approach: positive parenting. Here, in this well-evidenced practice, you do try and encourage your children to listen to you and follow you, even if, at times, you can’t fully explain why (screams: ‘Don’t cross the road, a car is coming’). But positive parenting is what adults do with children, so it begs the question, are we children to the royals? Are we their infants and they our parents? Perhaps, psychologically, we can become so; but in a world facing climate catastrophe, war, genocide, do we need more infantalised adults? Rather, I think we need more adultified adults: who can take on responsibility, and feel that they are—and can be—the backbone for a future.

When I was a teen, I was of the ‘hang the monarchy’ persuasion. Now, I think that kind of ideology is as inhumane, destructive, and unhelpful as a pro-Royalist one. And I’m going to be having fun on Saturday: albeit at our ‘Definitely Not Celebrating the Coronation’ house party. But for all the pomp, pageantry, and ‘glamour’ of the coronation (and expense!), I really can’t see how reinforcing subservience and homaging is going to help us move in the direction of personal, social, and/or environmental wellbeing—directions we so desperately need to move in right now.

Acknowledgement

Photo by Jared Subia on Unsplash

SMART Goals for Counselling and Psychotherapy? Try HEALING CRISPS

It’s often stated that people should aim for SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Assignable, Realistic, and Time-related). However, most of the research and theory for this comes from the field of profit and productivity maximisation. So while SMART goes might help people to hit performance targets, they’re not necessarily the ones that are going to maximise wellbeing and help clients overcome psychological distress. A person, for instance, might achieve a SMART goal of increasing their earnings by £5,000 within a year but, as the research shows, such ‘extrinsic’ goal achievement is not actually associated with greater happiness. 

So what kind of goals might clients be encouraged to consider if goals are going to be used in the counselling and psychotherapy work (and research suggests that most clients do like having goals). This is a question that I asked in my new book, Integrating counselling and psychotherapy: Directionality, synergy, and social justice (Sage, 2019) and will be explored in a one-day CPD workshop on ‘Working with Goals in Counselling and Psychotherapy’ on Sunday 5th July. It’s also a question I would have loved to come up with a brilliant new acronym for. Unfortunately, after many hours on acronym generator programmes, the best I could come up with was ‘HEALS CRISPS’: that clients’ goals should be: Higher-order, Effective, Approach, Longer-term, Synergetic, Challenging, Realistic, Intrinsic, Small steps, Process-focused, and Specific. Sorry!

‘Higher-order’

Generally, clients should be encouraged to identify goals that relate to those things that are most, fundamentally, important to them: for instance, relatedness, self-worth, or safety. As discussed below, goals also need to be relatively specific and realistic, but ensuring that they link up to something of ‘higher-order’ value is essential in making them meaningful to the client.

Effective

A client’s goals need to be credible ways of actualising their highest-order wants and needs, rather than random strategies; so it may be important to reflect with clients on how, and whether, their goals are really going to help them get to where they want to be. If a client, for instance, says that their goal is to lose weight, because they wants to be happier, some discussion might be needed about whether this is actually going to get them there.

Approach

Research suggests that it is better for clients to be oriented towards positive, promotion goals (for instance, ‘Increase my social networks’), rather than negative, prevention goals (for instance, ‘Stop feeling so alone’). The latter may be particularly problematic if all of a client’s goals are avoidant rather than approach: essentially, this means that they are asking the therapist to help them ‘go nowhere’. For Elliot and Church, therapists should be ‘discussing the ineffective and potentially problematic nature of avoidance goals [with clients], and working to reframe these goals in terms of approaching positive possibilities’. Similarly, where clients want to reduce ‘unhealthy negative emotions’, such as anxiety, it may be helpful to refocus them on increasing ‘healthy positive emotions’, such as concern.

Longer-term

Many psychological difficulties may relate to the prioritisation of very short-term goals over medium or longer-term ones. It may be helpful, therefore, to encourage clients to look towards longer-term objectives, as well as short- and medium-term plans, so that there is a focus beyond immediate obstacles or rewards. At the same time, however, clients’ goals need to be realistically attainable (see below). Again, then, it may be important that clients strive for goal balance, where they are pursuing a range of short, medium, and long term goals. 

Synergetic

Goals should be supportive of other therapeutic goals or, at least, not in conflict with them (for instance, ‘I want more time on my own,’ when the client has already stated ‘I want to be closer to my partner’). Therapists should be particularly mindful of ‘rogue goals’: where the client’s stated objective seems to run against many other wants in their lives. An example of this might be a client who wants to get fitter; but where time spent at the gym is damaging their family, relational, and work life. Generally, clients should strive for goal balance, where they are pursuing a broad number of goals, through a range of strategies, rather than being too focused in any one area.

Challenging

While clients seem to benefit from realistic, small steps; therapists should also bear in mind the psychological research that difficult goals tend to lead to greater overall progress. A client whose goal, for instance, is to cut down to six units of alcohol a day might be encouraged to consider whether two units might be a better objective. For Ford (1992), this is the ‘optimal challenge principle’: working with clients to set goals that are difficult but still attainable.

Realistic

Clients’ goals need to be achievable within the therapeutic time frame. Goals that are based on unrealistically high expectations should be challenged, especially when these are expectations of feelings or other ‘metagoals’ that may fuel vicious cycles (for instance, ‘I want to feel calm all the time’). Equally, therapists should challenge goals that are unrealistic because they are dependent on others, or the world, doing something (for instance, ‘I want my girlfriend to stop criticising me all the time’). These should be reframed in terms of what the client, themselves, can do (e.g., ‘I want to feel confident to challenge my girlfriend when she criticises me’). Therapists should also be mindful of the number of goals that clients are setting: are there too many to be realistically achieved (or too few to be sufficiently challenging)? If, as the work proceeds, it becomes apparent that clients’ goals are unattainable, it may be important to support them in the process of disengaging. 

Intrinsic

Closely related to the above, clients’ goals should be directly related to their own, personal higher-order desires and values—such as connectedness, autonomy, or self-worth—rather than contingent on the attitudes or actions of others (‘extrinsic goals’). Clients who are oriented towards such ‘intrinsic’ goals are likely to be more committed to those goals, take greater ownership of them, and experience them as more appealing.

‘Small steps’

Although, ultimately, clients should be aiming towards higher-order, longer-term goals; in many cases, the importance of being realistic means that it may be most therapeutically beneficial to set smaller subgoals with clients. These are objectives that they can succeed in, one step at a time. This process, also referred to as ‘goal stepping’ or ‘goal laddering’, can help boost clients’ self-efficacy and hence their ability to achieve subsequent goals, in a virtuous cycle. For instance, if a client wants to develop relatedness in their life, an initial goal might be to join a club, followed by a goal of forming a friendship, followed by a goal of sharing more personal narratives. Research suggests that this process of breaking down superordinate goals into more manageable tasks is experienced by clients as helpful: facilitating both a sense of achievement and relieving pressure. Given such perspectives, Ford (1992) suggests that the best approach to goal setting may be to have a, ‘strategic emphasis on attainable short-term goals combined with a periodic review of the long-term goals that gives meaning and organization to one’s short-term pursuits’ (p. 99). 

Process-focused

Goals that extend over time (for instance, ‘enjoy my final year at college’) rather than a single endpoint (for instance, ‘get a good final grade’) may support a more ongoing sense of wellbeing and be less pressurised.  As Miller et al. (1960), for instance, write:

successful living is not a “well-defined problem,” and attempts to convert it into a well-defined problem by selecting explicit goals and subgoals can be an empty deception.... it is better to plan towards a kind of continual “becoming” than towards a final goal.  The problem is to sustain life, to formulate enduring Plans, not to terminate living and planning as if they were task that had to be finished. (p. 114)

Specific

Goals that are specific: clearly-defined, concrete, verifiable/measurable, and simple (e.g., ‘Talk back to my bully at work’); may be preferable to goals which are vague, abstract, and complex (e.g., ‘Be assertive’).  In part, this might be because they are easier to monitor.  However, the specificity of goals needs to be weighed against their relative order (see above).  Also, goals that are too specific may lack flexibility, and make it difficult for the client to revise their goals to a more meaningful, or realistic, objective.

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In day-to-day counselling practice, it is not easy to remember all these characteristics. But perhaps the three standout ones are approach, intrinsic, and small steps: helping clients establish goals that are positive strivings, towards things that they really want, and that are manageable within a relatively well-defined time frame. A lot of this is about fostering the hope-generating element of goal-oriented practices: where goals work (and not all clients want, or benefit from, goals), it is often because they can help clients feel more about positive about where they are going—and their possibility of getting there.

[Adapted from Cooper, M. (2019). Integrating counselling and psychotherapy: Directionality, synergy, and social change. London: Sage. Image by Marco Verch (CC BY 2.0)]

A Chinese translation of this blog is available here

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Personal Therapy: A Reflexive Account

What have I, as a client, found helpful in therapy? What have I found unhelpful? And, What, for me, has been the process of change?

We're currently working on an analysis of young people's experiences of school-based counselling in our ETHOS trial and, as part of the preparation for that, we wanted to look at our own. This reflexivity is an essential part of good qualitative research: the more we can be aware of our own experiences, the more we can bracket it and ensure that we don't impose it on what our participants are telling us.

So below is my summary based on those episodes of therapy, with therapists from a variety of orientations: person-centred , existential, psychodynamic, and cognitive-behavioural. Of course, this is just my experiences and perceptions, and someone else may experience therapy in entirely different ways (indeed, that's the whole point of the exercise).

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I have had 12 episodes of therapy over the last 38 years, from 12 different therapists. These have practiced from a variety of orientations: person-centred, existential, psychodynamic, and cognitive-behavioural.

Helpful

In terms of the person of the therapist, I’ve found it most helpful when they’ve been warm, friendly, and showing genuine care and interest.  It’s been important to me that I feel respected by them: on a human-to-human, adult-to-adult level.  At the same time, I have appreciated some professional ‘distance’ rather than over-familiarity.  So someone who achieves a balance of being open and ‘human’, but at the same time capable of—and focused on—doing their job.  Not too ‘sloppy’ or unstructured or laid back.  Along these lines, therapy has been most helpful to me when I’ve felt that the therapist is someone who I can learn from, who ‘knows’ more than me in some area.  Not necessarily ‘sorted’ or without their own problems, but someone who can help me discover things I didn’t already know.

It’s been helpful for me when therapists give me space to talk through, at my own pace, my problems.  Also, it’s been really important to me that the therapist understands, deeply and fairly easily, how I experience the world.  That they ‘get’ what life is like for me—as it actually is—and that they can help me (for instance, through reflections or questions) go more deeply into my experiences: talking about areas that I might only be dimly aware of.

Sometimes, insights from the therapist have been helpful to me (for instance, in relation to my past): particularly where put tentatively, and where I’m given space to work out their meaning for myself.

I have sometimes found psycho-education, or information from the therapist, very helpful.  However, although this has often taken the form of specific guidance or exercises, it is generally the overall message that has been most helpful to me.

Unhelpful

In terms of the person of the therapist, I’ve found it least helpful when they show coldness, indifference, and a lack of care; and worse when they relate in ways that are aloof, arrogant, condescending, dismissive, and critical.  I have also found it unhelpful when therapists engage in mechanistic and ‘by rote’ ways.  Another thing I find very unhelpful is when the therapist seems to be making assumptions about who I am or how I experience the world, or wants to ‘impose’ their perceptions over my actual lived-experiencing.  Along these lines, I really react when therapists, through interpretation or guidance, seem more interested in ‘proving’ the truth of their particular therapeutic model or dogma, rather than listening to how I experience my world, and helping me work out what’s best for me.

 The other side of this is that, if a therapist is too vague, woolly, and ramshackle, I can end up feeling a bit lost in therapy and losing confidence in them.  As above, for therapy to be helpful, I need to feel that the therapist is someone I can learn from—and develop in relation to.

Process of Change

Most of my change in therapy has come through developing insights about what I am doing, why I am doing it, and how I am really feeling; and then finding ‘better’ ways of doing things—ways that are more satisfying, fulfilling, and rewarding.  This has nearly always come about through a two-way dialogue between myself and the therapist: questions, reflections, and gentle insights and interpretations from the therapist; space for me to reflect, process their perceptions, and disclose further; more input and encouragement from the therapist.

Sometimes, particularly when things have felt very difficult, it has been helpful just to have lots of space to talk and put everything ‘out there’.  This has made things feel less overwhelming and tangled up. 

Knowing that there is someone there who I can turn to for help and support—someone ‘solid’, dependable, and knowledgeable—has been really important at times.

Learning, mainly through cognitive and behavioural therapies, that it is better to face fears than avoid them has been very helpful for me. This guidance has been a constant companion throughout my life, and has helped me to live ‘out in the world’ as fully as possible. 

Sometimes, just being given accurate information by a therapist has allayed fears.

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Exploring your own therapeutic experiences: A reflexive exercise

If you're interested in exploring your own experiences of therapy then you might be interested in the steps I used to do this for myself. These are as listed below. (Please bear in mind, of course, that this is at your own risk—it can be painful or upsetting to think back on therapy—and do ensure you keep anything you write down stored safely) :

1. List all the episodes of therapy that you have had (you can include group as well as individual, whatever is meaningful for you).

2. For each one, write down (approximating where you don’t know for sure):

• A title for it that’s meaningful for you (e.g., ‘Gestalt Therapist’, ‘College Counsellor’)

• Who the therapist was

• Dates

• Location

• Number of sessions

• Presenting issue(s) (what you came to address)

• ‘What I experienced as helpful in this therapy’

• ‘What I experienced as unhelpful in this therapy’

• ‘The process of change in this therapy, if any’

• A rating of overall helpfulness from 1 (Not at all helpful) to 10 (Extremely helpful).

3. Now go through your answers for the three penultimate questions (i.e., helpful, unhelpful, and change process) and try to summarise in a few paragraphs for each. So what, across therapists, you have experienced as helpful and unhelpful in therapy for you, and any change processes you went through.

As with reflexivity in research, perhaps a final step is then to consider how much your own perceptions might get ‘projected’ onto clients. The more we know what it is that we want and don't want from therapy ourselves, the more we may be able to step back from that and allow the genuine 'otherness' of the client to come through. For instance, if what we found was helpful was lots of space to talk, do we assume that all of our clients want that too? Are we open to the possibility that some clients may want something very different, for instance practical guidance? That doesn’t mean we then have to offer that, but it may be important to talk through with our clients what they do actually want (and not want), and what we can actually offer them: a process of metatherapeutic communication.

What Does it Mean to Say that Life is Meaningless? A Directional Account

Imagine there’s a chandelier above your head. One of those long, dangly ones with branches of glass hanging down. It’s throwing light all around the room. Now imagine that you look at the base of the chandelier and realise that it’s not, actually, attached to the ceiling. It’s just hanging there, suspended in space. Right above your head.

Hold that image.

So this blog is about something I’ve struggled with for years and years and years and have found a way of conceptualising it that makes sense for me. It’s not a particularly upbeat or reassuring blog, so if you’re struggling with things and feeling low at the moment you may want to stop reading now.

The blog is about the notion that life is meaningless, and what that actually means. It’s a key tenet of a lot existential thought (though by no means all of it). Camus, for instance, writes about the ‘absurdity’ of existence; and Yalom, in his classic text on existential therapy, describes various therapeutic strategies that can be used to help clients address profound feelings of meaninglessness in life. But what does that ‘meaninglessness’ actually mean?

Here’s one way of describing it. The term ‘meaning’ can mean many different things. But when we speak about the ‘meaning’—or ‘meaninglessness’—of life, what we are asking about is its significance: the reason why it is there. It’s like, ‘What’s the meaning of work?’ or ‘What’s the meaning of going out every Friday night?’ We’re asking what those things are trying to achieve. Why we’re doing them: for instance, ‘to make money’, or ‘to make friends’.

From a ‘directional’ standpoint, this is about going up to a ‘higher order of direction’. That sounds horribly jargonistic but let me explain. It’s based on the directional framework that I’ve recently outlined in my book, ‘Integrating counselling and psychotherapy: Directionality, synergy, and social justice’ (Sage, 2019), which draws on the work of highly-respected theorists like Powers and Grawe.

So the directional framework says that we do things for reasons (i.e., we have directions in life), and we can trace those reasons up and up and up to higher and higher orders of directions. So, for instance, we go to work to make money, and we make money because we want to have leisure time, and we want to have leisure time because we want to have pleasure. And we can also trace those directions downwards, and we do that by asking ‘how’? So, for instance, How do we get to work? We did training, and we got trained by turning up at college every day, etc. And then we could go back up the hierarchy from turning up at college to training to working to money to leisure to pleasure. From this standpoint, everything has a reason for it, and everything has a way that it’s done (right down to the very micro motor movements that help us make things happen in our lives). And we can think of the whole thing like that dangly chandelier, with a few highest-order directions (like pleasure, or love, or actualisation of potential) right at the top, and then branching down to an increasing number of lower-order directions as the means to achieve them.

You can probably see where I’m going with this. The thing is, we can go up and up and up to highest-order directions like pleasure but then, when we ask, ‘What is the meaning of pleasure?’ we’re stuck really. There just isn’t any answer. Or ‘Why actualisation of potential?’ or ‘Why spirituality?’ They’re there, but there’s no real way of going above them to something higher order. One option might be to say that these directions contribute to a wider social direction, like global harmony or planetary healing but still, then, so what? What does that lead up to. Essentially, there’s nothing ‘fixed’ up there. Nothing solid that we can hang the whole chandelier on. Nothing that can help us make sense of our lives and our worlds. And that’s why, sometimes, standing underneath it, we can feel that sense of dread that everything is about to come crashing down. That everything that shines light on everything is just an illusion and there no real meaning or purpose to any of it at all. For Heidegger, these were moments of genuine insight and authenticity. When we see the world for exactly what it is. Baseless. Unattached. Dangling.

Of course, most of the time we’re not that focused on that chandelier. We’ve got things to do, getting on with our lives. And anyway, like Yalom’s Staring at the sun, there’s limits to how much we can look into that direct light. Indeed, some people have probably never looked up at all. Or looked up and never seen that that base is unattached. But for others of us, even if we’re not looking up, there’s some constant awareness—sometimes better, sometimes worse—that something isn’t quite right. A sense of uncanniness. Unease. And for others of us, it’s like we’ve been born staring up and just can’t pull our eyes away. Once you’ve seen how unattached things are, it’s something you can never forget.

Camus talks about building castles in the desert. We can create, and commit to, local meanings, even if there’s nothing ultimate solid that they lead up to. Similarly, Yalom writes about re-engagement with the world. But, personally, I think there’s just no way out of recognising that life is, ultimately, unattached to any fundamental meaning, and that’s just a really painful, dreadful ‘truth’ that many of have to live with. Indeed, I think it blasts a fairly sizeable hole into all of our therapeutic practices, including existentialism and pluralism, because it means that a lot of our anxiety and sadness just can’t be ‘therapised’ away. However much CBT someone has, or psychoanalytic psychotherapy, the reality is that many of us live in the deeply unsettling, deeply ‘rational’ knowledge that there is no real, fundamental reason for anything we do.

At best, perhaps, talking about these things can help us feel that, at least, we are not alone with it—that’s there’s others there standing, staring up and feeling unsettled too. So if you’ve ever wondered what it’s all about and felt despair at the apparent purposelessness of existence, at least know that I’m there as well, and so is Albert Camus, and perhaps many others: great and not-so-great minds alike. And as Viktor Frankl put it, the great meaning-centred therapist, it can ‘never be taken as a manifestation of morbidity or abnormality’ to challenge the meaning of life. Rather, ‘it is the truest expression of the state of being human, the mark of the most human nature in man.’

Synergies are Good: Why ‘Win-Win’ Configurations Matter More than you Might Think

How can you help people make positive changes in their lives?  

If you’re starting from the position that people are getting things wrong—maladjusted, dysfunctional, misinformed, etc.—then it’s pretty straightforward: teach them the ‘right’ way to do things.  But if your starting point is that people are already doing their best—for instance, that they have an ‘actualising’ tendency, as the humanistic and person-centred therapies hold—then it gets more complicated.  Because how do you help someone who is already actualising to actualise more?

One way of tackling this might be to say that, ‘Ok, the person does have a potential to actualise, but the problem is that the environment they’re in gets in their way.’  So it’s not that the person isn’t capable of actualising, it’s that their world isn’t letting them.  Problem is, that then makes the person little more than a pawn to their world.  Are we really so powerless?  And, if so, what does that say about the human being’s natural capacity to actualise?

For people who believe in an innate human ability to ‘grow’ and act in prosocial ways, there’s a similar paradox at the socio-political level.  It’s easy enough to explain social ills if we start from the premise that people can be intrinsically selfish and competitive; but if people are inherently prosocial, how do you explain gun crime, or homophobia, or Nazism?  How can something so bad come out of something so potentially good?

This is where the concept of ‘synergies’—and its opposite, dysergies—comes in.  Synergies are win–win relationships: where two things go together to make something more than either alone.  Let’s take a really simple example.  Narek wants to be in a relationship and so does Paul.  Narek and Paul get into a relationship together.  Now they’ve both got more together than either had alone.  So we can say here that there’s a synergetic relationship between Narek’s desire for a partner and Paul’s desire for a partner: because the more that one of these things happens the more the other thing does too.

Synergies have been described by Peter Corning as ‘nature’s magic’ and, in a way, they are magical, because they make something out of nothing.  They’re where 1 + 1 = 3.  Here’s Narek, and here’s Paul, and without either bringing in more than what they’ve had, they’ve managed to create something more than what they were.  That’s amazing, isn’t it—something out of nothing?

Synergies don’t just operate between people, they operate within people as well.  Say Narek, like most of us, wants to feel good about himself, and he also wants to have a relationship with another man.  So if he can feel good about himself as a gay man, he’s got a win–win relationship on the inside too. 

Contrast that with a dysergetic internal relationship, where Narek doesn’t feel good about being gay.  Now his choice is to either (a) express his gay side and feel bad about himself, or (b) try and feel good about himself by suppressing his gay side. But either way he loses out: 1 + 1 = 1.

What this example should also begin to show is how the concept of synergies and dysergies can answer the opening question in our blog. Because it’s totally fair enough that Narek wants to feel good about himself, and it’s totally fair enough that he wants to express his gay side.  Both of those are parts of his actualising being.  But because they are pulling against each other, he ends up getting less out of life than he could otherwise.  He’s an actualising being that’s not actualising to his full potential.  And it’s not because he’s maladjusted, dysfunctional, or misinformed; it’s because the things he’s trying to do, with the best will in the world, are dysergetically-related rather than synergetically-related.

Ok, so here’s where I want to make a really bold claim.  I think that nearly everything we do in therapy, whatever orientation, and whether we consciously call it as such or not, is about helping clients reconfigure their ways of doing things so that they are more synergetic.  What we do is we help them think about their lives and how they’re acting, reflect on what’s working and what isn’t, and then think about ‘better’ ways of moving forward (better, of course, for the client, not for us).  So that might mean, for instance, reflecting on ‘defensive’ strategies that have emerged in their childhood, and thinking about whether they want to continue with that; or looking at black-and-white patterns of thinking and seeing if it’s better to see shades of grey.  And it may also be about helping clients to process things at more embodied levels: for instance, to really feel their anger and hurt towards their parents, and to recognise that those feelings are really legitimate.  But, in all of this work, what we don’t do is to pathologise their ‘unhelpful’ ways of doing things.  We don’t intimate to clients, for instance, that their defense mechanisms are really dumb, or that black-and-white ways of thinking are just pointless.  And the reason we don’t is because we can see the intelligibility of these ways of doing things: of course, it makes absolute sense that we want to protect ourselves, or that we want to see the world in more simple ways.  It’s just that those ways of doing things act against us in other ways and are ultimately unproductive. So the question is not about right or wrong, but about how we can get all our needs met in ways that support each other: i.e., how we can be more synergetic.

So I’m suggesting that positive change at the individual level works through the development of synergies; and I think positive change at the social and political level can be conceptualised in a similar way too.  Two communities talk across their differences and start to value each other, nations move from the ultimate dysergetic state—war—to peaceful co-existence, people learn to live in synergetic harmony with their environment.  Groups, striving to do their best, strive to do their best in ways that other groups can also do their best. 

This is a humanistic perspective: not a radically socialist or a radically libertarian one. It’s a politics of understanding rather than a politics of blame. It’s saying that people, even when they act in oppressive or highly damaging ways, aren’t generally setting out to do so. Rather, even the most oppressive people are essentially like us: trying to get their needs met. Only they’re doing it in ways that are incredibly dysergetic to the rest of us, and not always willing to recognise that they’re doing so.

What does any of this mean in terms of what we can do—at the personal or socio-political level—if we want to try and make things better?  In my just published book, Integrating counselling and psychotherapy: Directionality, synergy, and social change (Sage, 2019), I try and outline some of the principles by which synergies can be developed, whatever the level.  There’s establishing trust, and communicating more clearly, being assertive, and embracing creativity and difference and diversity. 

I guess my hope is that, by seeing positive change in this light, we can begin to try and understand the common principles that make things synergetic or not.  As things stand, the development of synergies is always implicit: an underlying process that we try and make happen, without much conscious thought.  Perhaps we can move to a place where we more consciously think, ‘How can we create synergies here?’  And we can also look at the limits and challenges of synergetic processes (for instance, over-compromise), and perhaps develop even deeper and more integrative principles of positive change.

Perhaps, most importantly, what the concept of synergies does is allow us to understand people, and societies, as doing best but could also do better. It means that we can engage with people in deeply respectful ways, while also holding on to the potential for improvement and change. That’s something that, albeit implicitly, is right at the heart of our therapeutic work. And if we can also put that ethos at the heart of social and political change activities, I really believe it maximises our abilities to bring good things about.

If people have a natural tendency to 'actualise' their potential, how is it we get so f...ed up?

It’s the quandary that just about every trainee on person-centred or humanistic courses asks (or, at least, thinks) on the first day of their training program… If human beings have a natural tendency towards self-healing, if they know what’s best for them, if they have an ‘organismic valuing potential’—why is it that we can end up in such messes in our lives?

An immediate answer might be that we have this natural tendency towards actualisation and growth, but it gets suppressed by the world and others around us. The problem with that, though, is that if we’re such actualising beings, why is it that that tendency so weak? Why does it just give up the ghost the moment it gets challenged? Not much of an actualising tendency!

Based on the work I’ve been doing for my new book: ‘Integrating counselling and psychotherapy: Directionality, synergy, and social change’ (Sage, Feb 2019), here’s three inter-related answers that, for me at least, can help to resolve this quandary.

First, we might know and feel what we want and what’s best for us, but we don’t always know how best to get there. I know, for instance, that I want to be close to my friends, or that I want to feel calmer in my life—and that’s my internal, organismic sense of what’s best for me—but that doesn’t mean that I’ll always have the skills or tools to make that happen. With the best will in the world, sometimes we just haven’t learnt the best ways of doing things (I still haven’t learnt how to change a car tyre), or we’ve learnt ways of doing things that might have worked in the past, but don’t work in our present circumstances. Maybe I learnt as a boy, for instance, that the best way to make friends was to act cool and distant because people respected me that way, but as an adult what that actually does is just keep people away. And, of course, people who have been traumatised and deeply hurt in the past learn that, to keep themselves safe, they may need to do things like avoid relationships and intimacy altogether. That’s exactly what they might have needed to get through life as a kid, but as an adult, when the world is different, it’s now become a barrier to closeness. So although we can say that people are always striving to do their best, doing our best isn’t always the best thing that we could be doing. Sometimes we need to learn better ways towards getting the things that we really want and need in life: and that’s something that therapy can be great for. We start with working out what we really want—self-worth, relatedness, autonomy, safety, etc—and work back from there to think about how we might get it more effectively.

Second, sometimes the things that we want are pulling us in opposite directions, so that the more we actualise one potential in our lives, the more we can end up actually getting less of something else that is really important to us. For instance, we really want to make the most of every moment in our lives. We want to be always doing things and being active and engaging with the world around us; but then that takes us away from actualising our potential to have a calm, relaxed, and relatively sane existence. And, of course, the basic tension at the heart of person-centred theory can be understood in this way: that we really want people to like and value us, but the problem is, the more we strive for that, the more we end up doing things that don’t suit other parts of ourselves: for instance, our desire for creativity or freedom or being unique. Again, that’s where therapy can be really helpful because it can give us a chance to weigh up these different wants, and also to find ways of living our lives more ‘synergetically’: that is, getting more of what we most deeply want more of the time. For instance, if the problem is that we want to be really creative, but the people around us are judgey’ about that, then maybe we can come to see that we need different people around us in our lives so that we can get creativity and relatedness at the same time: they don’t need to pull in opposite ways.

And that brings us to the third possibility: that some times the world around us makes it really difficult for us to get to the places that we know and feel, deep down, we really want to get to. An asylum seeker, for instance, wants safety in her life, and to feel self-respect, but living in the midst of a racist social context makes it really difficult for her to get that. And note here, it’s not that her actualising tendency gets squashed or suppressed or goes away, it’s that, with the best will in the world, she can’t get to where she wants to be because her world is standing in her way. In fact, when we look at both of the two other answers above, they’re also very much about a person’s social context. So, for instance, we don’t learn from the world about how best to actualise our most important directions; or the world creates conditions for us (like judgemental friends) that means the actualisation of one direction means the undermining of another. Here, therapy can help us think about how we change our world; but, as in the case of the asylum-seeker above, it sometimes needs more than that. If the problems are obstacles in the world, it needs real social and political change—equality, social justice, ending racism, etc—to help more people get more of what they deeply want more of the time.

So, for me, it makes really good sense to say that people know, deep down, what they want in their lives, and what’s good for them. No-one can tell me that what I really need in my life is closeness, or becoming a writer, or caring for others. I know, ‘inside’, what works best for me, what feels right. But when it comes to me trying to actually achieve that, things can get a lot more complicated, and however much I might try and do my best, I’m not always, necessarily, doing the best thing that I could be doing. Sometimes, for the world I inhabit, it’s not always the most effective way, or the most synergetic way—and that’s where therapy is great. But sometimes, however smart I am, the world just isn’t going to let me get to where I know I want to be: and then we might need to change that world, through personal or collective action. As human beings, we can be amazingly smart, but that doesn’t mean we always get it right all of the time. Recognising that things can be better—both at the individual and at the social level—is what gives us our incredible capacity to grow.

Critical parent or lazy slob? What's the real conflict at the heart of human being?

At the heart of each of the different approaches to therapy is an understanding of human beings in terms of a core inner conflict, and each one sees it in a slightly different way.

In the psychodynamic approaches, it's like a fight between a lecherous, aggressive drunk and a police officer who's wanting to keep the peace. And with a bossy, nasty magistrate pointing fingers over the police officer's shoulder.

In the humanistic approaches, it's like the battle between a free-spirited child and a critical, controlling parent who's worried what the neighbours will think.

In the existential approaches, it's like an argument between two disputants who cannot--and will not--seek a compromise. It doesn't matter what they're arguing about. You can guarantee that one of them will always disagree.

And in the CBT approaches, it's like a row between two flatmates: one a sensible, hardworking student (who's not averse to having fun), and the other a lazy slob who has never really developed the skills or confidence to make the most of things.

Which model is right? When you look at it this way, it's clear that there's no right or wrong, because all these different kinds of conflicts can happen between people--and within people--and there's no reason to think that only ever one of them is the 'right' one. Sometimes, we're lazy and need to give ourselves a kick, sometimes we clamp down on ourselves too much, sometimes we just can't stop arguing with ourselves and need to accept that there's always going to be some element of that. And when we view people in terms of all these possibilities, we get so much more of a richer view of human being than any one perspective can provide on its own.  All our theories are great, but they're even greater when we see them as a rich diversity of resources that we can draw on in helping to understand clients, rather than as exclusive truths. 

How do you go about getting what you want from life? Seven stages that might get missed

‘The central “business” of human life,’ writes James Bugental, the existential-humanistic therapist, ‘is the translation of intentions into actuality as we try to have the living experience which we believe we need and want.' In other words, human living is about striving towards the things we want--for ourselves, for others, for our world--and, ideally, with passion, excitement and success.

But how do we go about getting what we want? Based on the psychological theory and research, it's possible to identify seven stages in this process: 

1. Emanation: the bubbling up of wants and desires.

2. Evaluation: checking these out against reality and working out what's best to do.

3. Intention: making a commitment to achieving particular things.

4. Planning: Working out how we are going to do it.

5. Action: Getting on with it, and maintaining our activity.

6. Feedback: Monitoring how we're getting on and making any necessary changes.

7. Termination: Disengaging with our goals and bringing things to an end.

Of course, all these stages are entirely interlinked. And there can be multiple processes going on at once, all at different stages.

Ideally, we go through each of these stages--at least to some extent. So we give our wants and desires free flow to bubble up, and then we think about them in a reflective and mature way, working out what makes sense to take forward. We spend some time thinking about plans for making this a reality, and then get on with it, all the while keeping an eye to what impact this seems to be having. And when we've done enough, we're ready to disengage, enjoy our successes, and turn our attention to something else.

The problems can come, though, if any of these stages get missed out, done badly, or if we get too focused on them to the expense of other stages. So you might find it interesting to think about the stages in this process that you do really well, and those that you could pay some more attention to.

Emanation: Are you someone who pushes down your wants and desires, who finds it hard to be in touch with your intuitive sense of things? Or, conversely, are you someone who has so many different wants and desires bubbling up that they feel overwhelmed and in chaos.

Evaluation: Sometimes it's great to go with our desires. Sometimes, they can take us to some crazy places. So are you someone who tends to skip the evaluation phase, and just pushes on to doing things without putting the effort in to weighing up what's best? Or, conversely, are you someone who spends so much time evaluating and balancing things up that you never actually make a commitment to doing anything?

Intention: And then, do you have the passion, conviction and confidence to try and take forward what you know is best, or falter at this point and go back to evaluating? This is the big existential leap--into the unknown. The point of no return where, yes, you'll either fail or succeed and what you're wanting to do. But maybe, conversely, just run at intention and commit yourself to everything without really filtering down to what your priorities are. We can't do everything we want: try to do it all and you can sometimes end up doing nothing.

Planning: Some people are great planners. Some people are obsessive planners and drive everyone else crazy because they seem so locked in to the planning stage. And other people just think 'What the hell' and skip this stage entirely: leapfrogging from emanation to intention to action. But a bit of planning and forethought can go a long way: research shows, in particular, that working out what you are going to do when things go badly can be essential in reaching your goals.

Action: Once you get going, do you persist with it, or do you get distracted and go onto other tasks before you're anywhere near completing your current one? A million jobs left unfinished?

Feedback: Research shows clearly that attending to how you're doing helps you get to where you want to go to. If you're trying to make friends, for instance, is it working, or do you seem to be putting people off more than attracting them? And do you get defensive and obstinant, and push on regardless. But conversely, are you so concerned about feedback that you're bending and twisting like a willow, always trying to get it exactly right?

Termination: Keeping on regardless can be a waste of energy, particularly where goals are unattainable or futile.  But some people do exactly that. And the research shows it can lead to depression, and may also be tied in with things like obsessive behaviours. Some times, you need to let go, and knowing when to 'hold them and fold them' is, perhaps, one of the greatest life skills.

***

None of us are perfect at getting from where we are to where we want to be. And if you think about the millions of things that we're all trying to do at any one time, it's not surprising. But thinking about the places where you might tend to go wrong could be helpful: getting a bit more balance in your life, and a bit more of what you want out of it.

If you're 'prevention focused', don't expect to be happy (and don't expect to be calm if you're focused on promotion)

I love the chapter in the Oxford handbook of human motivation by Abigail Scholer and E. Tory Higgins (2012): 'Too much of a good thing? Trade-offs in promotion and prevention focus'.  Basically, it says that people vary in terms of how much they are 'promotion-focused' (trying to make good things happen), or 'prevention-focused' (trying to stop bad things from happening). But the really interesting point is that if you are a very prevention focused person--someone who's always trying to stop catastrophes from happening--then you can't expect to experience too much happiness: after all, that's not what you're aiming for. At best, what you're going to experience is calm and relief.  And the same thing holds for people with a natural tendency towards promotion: if you spend your life trying to get new experiences (that's me), then you can't complain if you don't have much calm or respite in your life (that's me too). What's the solution? Scholer and Higgins suggest that it may be best to have a balance of prevention and promotion focus, so that you can make the most of whatever situation and circumstances you encounter. So the first thing to ask yourself is whether you're a promotion or a prevention kind of person. Then think about whether you want to bring a bit more of the other one into your life.

Approach trumps avoidance

Just back from PRIDE in Brighton with our kids. So great to see so much celebration: of diversity, of partying, of doing things differently and having fun. Creativity and pleasure and colour and experimentation; and people doing it and other people watching it and everyone enjoying everyone else doing things they love.

It's such a million miles away from so much of what's going on in the world today: walls, fear, wars, people fighting other people and getting scared of things that are different and new. Brexit.  Retreating back into our homeland island out of fear of foreigners coming over and destroying what 'ours'.

In recent years, some psychologists have talked about their being two basic forces, two things that we strive for: 'approach' and 'avoidance'.  Approach is about going out in the world. About learning and growing and diversity and fun. It's about moving towards things--things that we might not fully know--and embracing them in all their otherness. And then there's avoidance, which is about keeping away from things. Pushing things back. Trying to protect what's out. Pride and Brexit. Love and fear. Expansion and contraction.

Of course, we need both. We need to learn to love and grow; but if a rabid lion is coming at us, it doesnt do much good to embrace it with a welcoming grin. We need to protect ourselves and the ones we love. We need to have the ability to shut down.  But there's reasons, psychologically, why taking an avoidance stance towards life tends to cause more problems than an approach one; and that's well supported by the psychological evidence. For instance, people who are more avoidant tend to have poorer mental health, and also tend to do less well in therapy.

So why does avoidance get trumped by approach? First, if you're focused on avoiding things, there's no real way of knowing when you've got to an endpoint.  A person striving for more friends, for instance, can know when they've achieved that goal.  But a person trying to avoid loneliness can never fully know if they've achieved that, as there's always the possibility that it'll return.  Second, closely linked to this, we're less likely to be successful in achieving avoidance goals because the warded off state, in most instances, simply can't be eradicated.  So you can try and 'get rid of foreigners', but you're never going to fully manage it: there's always that lurking feeling that it's never fully done. Third, the means towards avoiding something is often less clear than the means towards approaching something.  How do I avoid loneliness, for instance, when there are so many different ways in which it might be evoked?  It's like trying to hold back the tide.  By contrast, if I'm trying to achieve something, I can create plans and goals and work out a way of doing it.  Fourth, if I'm trying to get TO somewhere, there's likely to be a boost to my self esteem when I get there. But successful avoidance is unlikely to leave me with a sense of achievement.  Finally, trying to avoid things is inherently problematic because it requires us to call to mind the thing we want to avoid, hence making it more salient.  If I want to get rid of foreigners, for instance, I have to think of them, and then that gets me more fixated on what I'm afraid of. 

So while we all get scared of things, and all want to be avoidant at times; it's a philosophy of approach that is generally better for us--and almost certainly for the people and the world that we're engaging with. And I do believe, perhaps naively, that over time our world will move in the direction of approach.  I think it's a natural thing because, at the end of the day, avoidance so often just doesn't get us anywhere. Ten years ago, maybe even five years ago, there's no way that the police would have had a float at the PRIDE parade. But who does that benefit? Who gets something out of it? By contrast, today, seeing the lorries full of gay and lesbian police officers: they're having a great time, the crowds are having a great time watching them. They're off to a party. Is there really, any, sense at all in winding the clock back?

I guess, ultimately, what I'm trying to say here is that there's a good, strong, logical argument for why things like PRIDE and celebrating diversity make so much more sense than things like Trump's wall and ethnophobia. It's not just about being nice and sweet to people and rainbow flags, it's about a rigorous philosophy and ethic of what makes this place a better place for us all.

Feeling good means 'actualising' our directions in life

A lot of contemporary models of human being suggest that we are basically 'directional'. What that means is that we are always 'going to somewhere', always pointed in particular directions. We're striving, trying to improve things, trying to be something and somewhere more than we are: even if it's more chilled out! If that's the case, then we can understand wellbeing in terms of how much we're able to 'actualise' this direction: how much we're aligned with where it is that we want to go.

This actualisation process can be understood in terms of six As. First there is awareness: knowing what our goals are and where we are trying to get to. Second there is anticipation: having a sense that our goals are possible and things that we can achieve. Third comes approach: progressing towards the things that we want; and then comes acceleration: moving towards our wants at an increasing speed. Importantly (but maybe not the most important thing) is then achieving our goals. Finally, and particularly one that may become more important with age, is appreciating what we have achieved.

So, viewed from this perspective, the 'good life' is one in which we have things in life we're striving towards which are important to us, and we have a sense that we're making some kind of progress towards them. We don't have to get these goals all the time, or move rapidly on to other things, but just a general sense that we're pointed in a direction and that we're able to attain it in some way.  And from this perspective, psychological problems are associated with not being clear about what we want from life, or knowing what we want but feeling that it is impossible to get there--or not making any progress at all. Or even it might be about getting to our goals but then not taking the time to appreciate what we have achieved and just rushing on to the next one.

Last thing: if we think about wellbeing in this way, it also shows how what we feel is both about ourselves AND our social and political environment. I might not progress towards the things I want because I don't have good strategies for getting there.  But I also might not progress towards the things that I want because the world is telling me about all these amazing things I should have (a perfect body, the latest phone, a devoted partner) and then not providing me with any possibility at all of getting there. So helping people change the way they go about things can be important--through therapy or self-development work--but what can also be really important is focusing on social and political change. If we create a fairer world with more resources for everyone, then more people can move towards more of what they want more of the time.

Forging new habits

This isn't the most exciting story--it's about trains and commuting--but there's a point to it. When I first starting working at the University of Roehampton up in south London, I would get the 170 bus from Clapham Junction. It was slow and crowded--crawling along the South Circular with the school runs--but it got me there; and it was what I knew. A few people said to me that another way of doing this would be to get an overground train from Clapham Junction to Barnes first, and then get a quicker bus. But when I thought overground train I thought 'unreliable,' 'slow', 'waiting for ages'. And it was one more change. So I never tried it.

Then a colleague starting doing this journey with me. She was very nice, and even though she normally took the overground train first; she got the bus with me because it was my way of doing things. Then, after a while--and after a while of her hinting that maybe we should try the overground train--we did. Well, it wasn't miraculous, but the overground train came pretty quickly, was a lot calmer, and saved about 15 minutes on the journey.

Next time, on my own, I did the journey by 170 bus again; but it was so slow and painful compared with the overground train that I went back to the train, and have pretty much continued doing that ever since. And the overground trains are actually pretty regular--much more than the busses--and they're faster and more reliable, and it gets me into work a bit earlier now and a lot less frazzled.

So what's the point of this story? Sometimes, we don't do things that are better for us because we have assumptions and prejudices, and we don't think to challenge them. Indeed, we sometimes don't even know that they can be challenged. It's just the way that we think things are. So changing for the better means being flexible and open about how we see things, and always being alert to new possibilities and options. It means taking the risk of trying out something new. It means attending to feedback from others and hearing from them how we might do things differently. And once we've found better ways of doing things, it's about bedding them in so that they become new habits. Change, perhaps, comes about through forging one new habit at the time: making the things that we find out are better for us the things that we just naturally do, even if it's finding a different route to work.