Why the most important person to love this Valentines Day is yourself (and why that isn’t selfish)

Tomorrow is Valentines Day. Set aside the fact that this is the bizarre practice of spending lots of money on cards, flowers and overpriced dinners to celebrate a third century martyred clergyman, it does gives us an opportunity to reflect on love, what it is, and why is matters.

Valentines Day focuses on the idea of romantic love, but I would argue what we should all be focusing on is self-love. Now, the idea of self-love has come in for some criticism. It is associated with selfishness, being self-centred, or even narcissistic. It certainly is possible to appear to love yourself selfishly, but I am not sure this is really self-love.

Eric Fromm wrote the book ‘The Art of Loving’ over 60 years ago, yet what he has to say on self-love is possibly more relevant today than it was back then. Unfortunately, some of Fromm’s ideas on other things are now very dated and quite frankly offensive – he has some pretty sexist and homophobic views, which make the book problematic. However, I do think the way he explains self-love is worth considering.

Fromm argues that genuine love is care, respect, responsibility and knowledge, not for one individual, but for humanity. Therefore, we don’t love ourselves or others because of individual traits that we find attractive, we love ourselves and others because we are all part of humanity.

He goes on to argue that if we cannot love ourselves – that is care for, respect, feel responsible towards, and have knowledge of, ourselves, then we also cannot genuinely love others. This is because if we can’t love ourselves as a human, how can we love others as humans? Therefore, self-love is the ultimate expression of love for humanity. He says “if you love all alike, including yourself, you will love them as one person…Thus he [sic] is a great and righteous person who, loving himself [sic], loves all others equally” (1957: 49).

Now, why, I hear you asking, should we love humanity. Aren’t we capable of horrific cruelty, greed and carelessness? Yes we are. But Fromm has a response to this. It is precisely when we have lost our love of humanity, that cruelty, greed and carelessness flourish. He argues that it is when we do not care for, respect, feel responsible towards, and have knowledge of all of humanity: that is ourselves, our friends and families, our communities, and, most importantly, strangers, then we will not treat each other humanely. Fromm argues that modern humans (and remember he was writing over 60 years ago – I think things have only got worse since then) have alienated ourselves from ourselves, our fellow humans, and from nature. Therefore, we have lost our ability to genuinely love.

He has a particularly interesting reflection on how the idea of romantic love has contributed to this alienation. He talks about romantic relationships being exchanges in ‘personality packages’ (it is almost like he predicted Tinder!) He describes a modern relationship being like a ‘team’, where each individual is a commodity who is exchanging their worth. If you think about how we talk about relationships, you can see what he is referring to. We say people are ‘out of our league’, we say people are ‘boyfriend/girlfriend material’, we list the ideal ‘traits’ that we are looking for in a potential partner on our online dating profiles (as well as listing our best traits, and sharing our best photos, to attract a potential partner).

Fromm’s book comes to the depressing conclusion that the way our current society (in the West) is structured, makes genuine loving a rare occurrence. It is not impossible, he argues, but the implications mean living very differently.

I think the most important conclusion of Fromm’s book is that true self love means there is no difference between love for one’s self and love for strangers. In fact, he argues they are mutually dependent, we cannot love ourselves, if we do not love strangers, and we cannot love strangers, if we cannot love ourselves.

When I am working with clients who find it hard to love themselves, perhaps they are extremely critical of themselves, or they feel they are weak for being vulnerable, I often ask them to imagine that a stranger was telling them the same story that they have told me. What would their reaction be? Would they be as critical? Would they think the stranger was weak? Almost always the answer is no, but it is always easier to be less harsh on a stranger than oneself. But I wonder why? We are all human. We are all fallible, we are all shaped by experiences beyond our control, we are all faced with situations in which we have to do our best to cope. This can lead us to do things we regret, hurt others, or make decisions we wish we hadn’t. Despite this, we are all worthy of love, because we are human.

New year, new you? Why that might be a toxic way to start 2020.

Social media is awash with it at the moment. People talking about their new year resolutions, detox plans, and how things are going to be different this year. The desire to be a better person isn't in itself a bad thing, it is what may lie underneath that desire that can be toxic. Our desire for self-improvement can come from two motivations. The first is to learn, have new experiences, develop healthier relationships with other people, and generally feel more content with ourselves. No problems there. However, I think if we scrape below the surface of many people's desire for self-improvement, the motivation is actually self-loathing: a hatred of ourselves for not being perfect. This is toxic because nobody can be perfect, so no amount of self-improvement is ever going to take this self-loathing away. When the self-improvement 'fails', the self-loathing turns into low self-esteem, which can cause anxiety and depression.

So, for the sake of your mental health, rather than making a new years resolution is improve yourself, why not make a new years resolution is be ok with yourself - just as you are, imperfect.

If only it were that simple. The problem is, being ok with imperfection isn't something we are encouraged to be - our parents, teachers, bosses, and the entire advertising industry spend most of their time encouraging us to be better. The motivation for this is often well intentioned (although in the case of advertising, the motivation is to make us buy stuff that we think will make us feel or be better). However well intentioned, the unintended consequence of constantly being encouraged to improve ourselves, is that we can assume that we are never ever good enough as we are, and we believe that any imperfection makes us unlikable, unsuccessful, and unlovable. We end up not liking ourselves very much.

So, if you are going to make any new years resolutions, I would suggest making a few tweaks to the way you make them. First, make one of the resolutions that you are going to try and accept and like yourself as you are - warts and all. Then, any other resolutions can start with "it would be nice if...", rather than "i must...". Then, if the resolution fails (and evidence shows that it probably will), you will be ok with it, because you are ok with imperfect you.

Dealing with the family dance at Christmas

Next week is Christmas, and many of us will be spending time with our extended families. Ram Dass, a clinical psychologist and spiritual teacher, once said “If you think you are enlightened, go and spend a week with your family”. This slightly tongue in cheek quote rings true, because when we spend time with the family we grew up with, we can feel a whole mix of complicated emotions.

Systemic approaches to psychotherapy (mainly used when working with couples or families) has an explanation for this. It is called the ‘family dance’, a term coined by Minuchin (1974). The theory is that each family has a ‘dance’ and everyone in that family has a particular set of ‘dance moves’ that they ‘perform’. This isn’t something we do consciously. Nobody explicitly tells us what our role is. As we grow up, we instinctively learn how to fit in with the rest of the family, and perform our role as best we can, and we mostly assume that this is normal or natural. However, when we grow up and leave the family, perhaps spending time with other families, we notice that other families have different ‘dances’, and members of those families have their own ‘dance moves’ to perform.

In my family, one of the ‘dance moves’ I instinctively learnt to perform was ‘helper’. As I have grown up, I have taken that role with me out into the wider world. I have been attracted to jobs that I perceive to ‘help others’ (like counselling) for example. However, sometimes the roles that we learn to perform in our families can cause us problems. There is a fine line between ‘helping’ and ‘rescuing’. In a blog a few months back, I wrote about the drama triangle, in which someone tries to rescue someone else and becomes resentful and bitter when that help isn’t welcomed. Well, that is what can happen to ‘helpers’ when they perform the role that they learnt in the family dance blindly, without reflecting on whether their help is really needed or appropriate in the current circumstances.

So, as we grow up and spend time living away from our families of origin, we can gradually change our ‘dance moves’. This can happen consciously, when we become aware of the roles we played in our families, and reflect on whether or not they are the roles we want to play in life. Or we can change unconsciously, as we develop new relationships in which new ‘dance moves’ are required – so we shift our roles in relationship to other people.

However, often the original ‘dance moves’ we learnt in our families of origin are pretty powerful and hard to change. They are particularly hard to change when we spend time with our families. That is why, when we go back to our parental homes, we can suddenly be thrown back into those old roles, and start performing those ‘old dance’ moves without even thinking about it. It is like an automatic reflex. We might start squabbling with siblings in the same way we did as teenagers, or find ourselves feeling resentful of being expected to be a certain way – the way we were expected to be as children. The problem is, if we try to perform different ‘dance moves’, perhaps ones we have learnt outside the family, we mess up the ‘family dance’. Other members of the family will find this disconcerting, confusing or even a betrayal. A dance only works if everyone performs their dance moves correctly.

So what if you are fed up of performing your old dance moves and want the family dance to change? Systemic theory argues that it is precisely by one member of a family performing new dance moves that the overall family dance changes. It is like a system, and when one part of that system changes, the rest of the system also has to as well. Once one person performs the dance differently, the rest of the family have to change their performances to adapt.

So, you have a choice this Christmas. You can either perform the dance moves you always have, or you can throw some new moves and step back and watch a new dance emerge.

What's Power got to do with it? How power relationships can hurt us psychologically.

During my training, one of my tutors said something that stuck with me. He said that feelings of mental distress, such as despair, hopelessness, or anxiety are trying to tell us something, they are trying to tell us that something isn’t right. In the same way that physical pain tells we are hurt, mental pain tells us we are hurt. But hurt how?

The underlying causes of mental distress are complex, but a basic model is the biopsychosocial. This model says that some of the causes are psychological, perhaps traumatic or difficult experiences and relationships that have led to psychological distress and pain – feelings of low self-worth for example. Some causes are social, perhaps our circumstances have caused us distress and pain, like a marriage break up, or the death of a loved one, or stress due to insecure work. Some causes are biological – where negative thoughts become our automatic reaction because neural pathways get reinforced the more they get used.

These three causes will be inter-related, and each person’s distress will have a unique set of complex causes – there is no model that fits everyone. However, the one thing that I believe this model can help us understand is that mental distress can be a “meaningful, functional and understandable response to life circumstances” (Johnstone, L. & Boyle, M. 2018: 5). Rather than showing you that there is something ‘wrong with you’, mental distress may be showing you that something about your circumstances or experience needs to be addressed. It should lead us not to ask ‘what is wrong with you?’, but ‘what happened/is happening to you’? ‘How did you get hurt?’

A group of clinical psychologists, led by Lucy Johnstone and Mary Boyle, published a framework for understanding mental distress in January 2018 called the Power, Threat, Meaning Framework. It takes into account the multiple factors that may be contributing to a person’s mental distress. In particular, it takes into account power. As an academic, I have spent the last 11 years trying to understand how power relations affect social change, and I have always believed that power relations affect individuals at a subjective/psychological level, I believe power relations can hurt us at this level. This framework not only acknowledges this, it develops an operational way in which this can be used by clinical psychologists, psychotherapists and counsellors.

The Framework poses four basic questions:

1.    What has happened to you? (How has Power operated in your life?)

2.    How did it affect you? (What kind of Threats does this pose?)

3.    What sense did you make of it? (What is the Meaning of these situations and experiences to you?)

4.    What did you have to do to survive? (What kinds of Threat Response are you using?)

Interestingly, exploring the answer to question 4, clients often discover that their mental distress is a kind of ‘threat response’ – it is how they are coping or surviving. For example, depression can be a form of withdrawal from a world that experience has taught you can hurt you if you put your head above the parapet. Anxiety can be a way of feeling some sort of control when experience has taught you that life can be scarily beyond your control. And it is through exploring the answers to questions 2 and 3 that clients can start to become aware of how they might find a way to respond differently to life’s circumstances, or how they might try to change those circumstances altogether if they can.

Unfortunately, some circumstances can’t be changed by the individual alone, and this is where I believe we need a wider societal response to the challenging and stressful circumstances many people find themselves in. For example, feeling anxious about having an insecure job is a perfectly reasonable threat response to life’s stressful circumstances. Rather than pathologising the anxiety, we should be focusing on making sure people can find secure work. The power relationship here, between insecure employee and their employer, is hurting the employee not just financially, but at a psychological level too. However, the power relationship is the one that needs to be changed, dealing with the psychological hurt alone isn’t dealing with the underlying cause of mental distress.

This is why I believe anyone who cares about the alleviation of mental distress has to understand how the wider circumstances of a person’s life contributes to mental distress. This isn’t something that can be dealt with only in a counselling room, it requires us to be campaigners for policy changes too that shape people’s circumstances and change power relations.

Are you suffering from SAD?

As the nights draw in at this time of year, many people can start to feel more tired than usual and there seems to be a natural instinct to slow down. However, some people experience extreme low mood at this time of year. They experience a severe lack of energy, lose interest in things, and often feel worthless. This is more common than you might realise, and it is recognised as seasonal affective disorder (SAD).

Whilst causes SAD is not fully understood. It is thought to be linked to the shorter days, and therefore reduced sunlight, at this time of year. The theory is that lack of sunlight increases your production of melatonin, which makes you feel sleepy; lowers your serotonin levels, which can make you feel depressed; and disrupts your body clock. Suffering from SAD also appears to run in families.

It can be really difficult to deal with these feelings, as they appear to come from nowhere. Your low mood and lack of energy can be made worse by feelings of guilt about feeling this way when nothing appears to have triggered it. The first thing to realise is that there is nothing to feel guilty about. Something has triggered this, lack of sunlight. The second thing to note is that there are ways to address SAD.

• Get as much natural sunlight as possible. Go for walks at lunchtime, sit by a window. Get outdoors during daylight hours as much as you can.

• Exercise. Any amount of exercise is good for boosting your mood. Even just going for a short walk is enough, but something that gets you sweating is even better.

• Light therapy. A light box is a special lamp that mimics natural sunlight which you sit in front of for a specified time every day.

• Talk with a counsellor. Making sense of your feelings can help you deal with them better.

When you aren't good enough...

I am going to make an assumption. Secretly, deep down, you don’t feel good enough. Nobody else knows this, or very few people do. To the outside world, you might appear ‘successful’, maybe even happy, but the underlying feeling you have is that you could, and should, be better. Here are a few things that might resonsate with you.

• You put certain things off, or even avoid doing them altogether, because you fear you will fail at them.

• You take on tasks, even when you are already overloaded, because ‘if you want a job done well, you should do it yourself’.

• You find accepting compliments difficult, or even uncomfortable, but if someone criticises you, it stays with you for weeks, possibly longer.

• There is a voice in your head that constantly says, ‘why did you say that?’, ‘what does this person think of me?’, ‘stop talking now, you sound like an idiot’.

• When you make a mistake, you feel like it is catastrophic and entirely your fault, and it negates any good work you have done previously.

• You basically don’t like yourself very much.

If some, or all, of these things resonate with you, you probably have what psychotherapists refer to as a ‘be perfect’ driver. What this means is that you are driven by a desire to be perfect, and when you fall short of this unrealistically high expectation (which is most of the time, as nobody can be perfect), you feel bad about yourself. This is difficult to live with. On the one hand, it can make people extremely successful, as their desire to be perfect makes them work incredibly hard. On the other hand, it can also lead to severe depression and anxiety, as the expectations you set for yourself and others are unrealsitic and can never be met - you are constantly disappointed with yourself, and quite often others, and nothing is ever good enough. This is a hard place to be.

If someone with a ‘be perfect’ driver comes to counselling, we often end up focusing on two areas. The first is where they get their sense of worth from. The desire to be perfect often comes from a place of wanting to feel worthy - of attention, love, respect, or admiration. There is often a strong need to get a sense of worth from others. The rationale is, you are only worthy and a ‘good person’, if other people think you are perfect. If you are constantly dependent on people thinking you are perfect to feel good about yourself, then no wonder you often don’t feel good about yourself. You can’t please everyone, you can’t constantly be perfect, and all humans make mistakes. So, where could you get your sense of worth? From yourself.

This is where the second area of focus comes in, becoming perfect at being imperfect. The great thing about having a ‘be perfect’ driver is that you probably want to improve yourself. Once you have identified that your desire to get a sense of worth from others is unhelpful, and that you are constantly setting yourself up for failure and disappointment by expecting perfection, you will probably want to change this. So, you need to start being perfect at being imperfect. This is hard though, because it involves accepting yourself as a flawed human being, and starting to like that flawed human being. Ironically, in order to change, you have to accept yourself as you are, warts and all. Imperfection is good enough.

In counselling, the trusting relationship between the counsellor and the client provides a space for a client to be accepted - warts and all - by the counsellor. When you share your deepest fears and imperfections with a counsellor, and they accept you without judgement, this can be a powerful experience in which a client can slowly come to accept themselves as an imperfect, but good enough, person.

I wish it wasn’t necessary to go to counselling to realise this. I wish we lived in a society where we were more forgiving and accepting of ourselves and others. However, judging others, and caring about what others think of us, has become the norm. Social media, especially Instagram, enables us to show a filtered version of our lives. The number of ‘likes’ we get, makes us feel a sense of worth, and reinforces the idea that we have to be this perfect (fake) version of ourselves to be valued. If you have a ‘be perfect’ driver, I have one more recommendation for you. Avoid Instagram.

Is your relationship stuck in a drama triangle?

Do you feel like there is a significant person in your life with whom you just keep going round and round in circles? Maybe you feel like whatever you do or say, you can’t win, and nothing seems to change?

If so, you may be stuck in a drama triangle. The drama triangle describes some pretty simple, but I think very common, roles we can adopt in relationships. Let me start off with a fictional conversation.

Person A: “I’m so stressed out right now. I have way too much work on, and I just can’t see a way of getting it all done?”

Person B. “Maybe you should delegate some of your work to other colleagues, or talk to your boss about it?”

Person A: [in a defensive tone] Are you kidding me? Everyone else is really busy too, and I don’t want to look incapable in front of my boss! You just don’t understand.

Person B: [also in a defensive tone] Sorry, I was only trying to help.

In this example, the two people are moving between different roles on the drama triangle.

Drama triangle

Partner A started out playing the role of the ‘victim’, feeling sorry for themselves and all the work they had. Person B immediately responded to this by playing the role of ‘rescuer’, offering advice in order to rescue them from their victimhood. However, Person A then responded to this by shifting to the role of ‘persecutor’, rejecting Person B’s advice and accusing them of not understanding. Finally, Person B also shifts to the role of ‘persecutor’, feeling annoyed at Person A for not appreciating that they were only trying to help.  As long as both people stay in roles on this drama triangle, they will continue to feel misunderstood and unheard by each other. So, what needs to change?

The key issue here is responsibility. What might the conversation look like if both people were thinking about responsibility.

Person A: “I’m so stressed out right now. I have taken on way too much work, I don’t know how I am going to deal with it all?”

Person B: “That sounds tough. You must be feeling under pressure if you have taken on more work than you can deal with. Is there anyone at work you can talk to about it?”

Person A: “Yes, I feel under a lot of pressure to say yes to my boss. The problem is, everyone else at work seems busy too. I do need to talk to my boss though, could we talk about how I do that without looking incapable?

Person B: Of course.

In this example, the two people are moving between similar but slightly different roles on the winner’s triangle (not a term I am that fond of, I prefer to think of it as a less dramatic triangle), where they have taken a healthier attitude to responsibility.

Winners triangle

Person A is no longer playing the role of the victim. Instead, they are admitting to being vulnerable, but also self-aware enough to recognise their responsibility in taking on too much work. They are in the role of being ‘vulnerable’. Person B doesn’t immediately take full responsibility to rescue Person A by telling them what to do. Instead, they acknowledge the vulnerability of Person A, show they care, but leave the responsibility for solving the problem with Person A. They are in the role of ‘caring’. Person A responds by re-stating their vulnerable position, but instead of blaming Person B for not understanding, they take responsibility for getting their needs met. They explain why they can’t talk to people at work and state what they want from Person B. They are in the ‘assertive’ role.

Of course, conversations rarely go this smoothly, and you are only ever in control of your part of the conversation. However, it is very hard for another person to stay in the drama triangle with you if you refuse to play these roles. If someone is talking to you in the role of ‘victim’, make a conscious decision to not play the role of ‘rescuer’ or ‘persecutor’. Show you care, validate their experience, but don’t try and rescue them or get angry with them for refusing your advice. Give them space to take responsibility. Likewise, if someone is trying to ‘rescue’ you, and you are feeling like they are bossing you around, rather than get angry with them, think about what you actually want from them – is it just someone to listen to you – then tell them that is all you want.

Accepting responsibility for ourselves, but also recognising the responsibility other people have for themselves, doesn’t mean we can’t be vulnerable and in need of support, and it doesn’t mean we can’t care for others. What is means is we can have relationships based on mutuality, not co-dependence, which means a lot less drama!

Can a mid-life crisis be an opportunity?

I have just re-read ‘The Middle Passage’ by James Hollis, a brilliant book about why so many of us go through a ‘mid-life crisis’ and, more importantly, why it is actually an opportunity for positive growth and change, if we are willing to embrace it. I am re-reading the book partly because I am at an age one might classify as ‘mid-life’, but also because an increasing number of the clients coming to see me are at a similar time in their lives. It seems that as we approach the half-way point, we seem inclined to want to take a look back at our lives, take stock, and assess if we are where we want to be, and re-assess where we want to go. Counselling is a good space to do this.

According to Hollis, a Jungian psychoanalyst, as children and young adults we develop a ‘provisional personality’, based on our early experiences, how our parents treat us, and how we observe people behaving around us. As we grow up, leave home and form new relationships outside our immediate family, we start to see that our view of ourselves, others, and the world, which has been based on those inital experiences, is quite limited. There may have been aspects of ourselves that we never explored, or even admitted existed, because they didn’t ‘fit’ with our ‘provisional personality’.

Mid-life is often the time when the clash between that ‘provisional’ self and the hidden and emerging aspects of ourselves becomes obvious. We might suddenly feel like we don’t know who we are anymore, or we might realise that our life choices haven’t fulfilled us in the way we thought they would. We will ask ourselves questions about the kind of person we want to be, and how we want to live our lives. Hollis argues that this is an amazing opportunity to move from living the life we believed we had to - the provisional life - to living the one we need to - what he calls the authentic life.

The idea of authenticity is often misunderstood. I don’t use it here to imply that there is one ‘true’ life or self that we all need to find. Living authentically means that we are making conscious choices about what we need, rather than reacting to life in a knee-jerk way - doing what we have always done, or what we believe we ‘should’ do. Hollis says “we must accept responsibility for ourselves, and know that the path taken by others is not necessarily for us, and that what we are ultimately seeking lies within, not out there” (p.115).

So, if you have that creeping feeling in your gut that something isn’t right, maybe your career, maybe your relationships, it is quite likely that you are starting to feel the clash between your provisional life - the life you created from that limited view of who you are based on your early childhood experiences - and the authentic life that you could be choosing.

This is scary, especially when it means having to change jobs, leave relationships, or shift your way of life. As you change and make more conscious choices, people around you will notice this, and may not like it. However, if we continue living life in way that was shaped for us by others, not ourselves, we will feel increasingly disillusioned, anxious and uncomfortable in our own skin.

Counselling in mid-life can help us understand the clash between our provisonal life and our authentic one. We can look at who you believe you are and explore what that is based on, identifying who you really need to be, and what aspects of your life can be discarded as things other people thought you needed to be. It can be a safe space to test out making more conscious choices and finding ways to make changes in your life that are sustainable.

A mid-life crisis is scary, but if we can embrace the opportunity to question our assumptions about who we are, we can discover a whole new (and I would argue better) way of being for the second chapter of life.

Tips for dealing with a midlife crisis

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01 : Don’t ignore a gut feeling that something isn’t right - trust your instinct. Talk to someone, don’t pretent everything is o.k.

02 : Reflect on your values, which come from your family, which come from broader life experience - do any clash and which values are most important?

03 : Think about the future, how do you feel about doing the same job/being in the same relationship etc. in ten years time?

04 : This may seem morbid, but imagine that you found out you only have 6 months left to live, what haven’t you done that you wish you had?