Author: Dr Jean Pain

Categories
Behaviour Depression

How Depressed are you Today?

When I did my psychotherapy training we were told to treat clients with care because they were vulnerable and to listen to what they say. Whenever anyone lays down a rule to everybody I always question it. We are all descendants of survivors. The further back we go in history the worse were the living circumstances for the vast majority. I believe it is best for practitioners to talk with them as we talk to everyone else. We are all in the same boat. A client once said to me “You cannot imagine how awful it is to be depressed”. “Indeed I can. I grew up during the war and was depressed throughout my adolescence. In those days no-one paid attention to children unless they didn’t do their homework”.

My client said “Am I working with a damaged therapist?” “Of course you are. You won’t find anyone who is not. My experience is that unless we have worked through out own difficulties and come to terms with them, we are not fit to work with clients”.

One day I had a phone call from a lady who was very distressed and wanted to come to see me that afternoon. She was crying so hard I could scarcely make out what she was saying. I made an appointment in two days time. When she arrived my husband opened the door and told her to go upstairs to my consulting room.

She sat down and continued crying very loudly for a few minutes. As she slowed down I spoke to her. “How long have you been doing this?” She stopped crying and looked very surprised. “I don’t know” she said. “You must know. You are doing it” I replied. “ten years?” She thought for a moment and started to cry again. “Two weeks?” I said. “You are slowing down now. I think I can cry much better than you.” I threw myself about and made the strongest screeches I could imagine. “See what I can do! Try it again and put more energy into it.”

She burst into laughter. When she had stopped she said “Don’t you want to know my story?” “Not particularly, but you can if you must.”

She started and before long she got into her stride.. I stopped her after ten minutes. “Do you know what you are doing?” “What do you mean?” she said. “You are very good at complaining. One of the best I’ve ever had.” She paused again and then laughed and couldn’t stop. “I didn’t know psychotherapists were like this.” “No they are not” I replied.

“Can I come to see you again? I don’t know what you are doing but I feel a lot better.”

“Well I suppose so but you must practice laughing every time you feel like crying. It must be more fun.”

“You do say funny things!” she said as she put her coat on and went downstairs chuckling to herself . My husband was astounded. “Whatever did you do with her? When I opened the door she was crying and ten minutes later I walked past your door and she was laughing!” There must be something in this psychotherapy lark. Well done!”

This lady came back after only two more visits. This doesn’t happen twice. Every client is different. She was an attention seeker, a particular species that I come across quite often. All they have to do is to find a new method.

Categories
Behaviour Guilt

Animal Instincts

Being able to use words is a huge advantage and a huge disadvantage. We need to remember all the time that we are still part of the animal kingdom. All animals except ourselves just get on with their lives by following their instincts. They know what kind of animals they are. I can’t tell you how because I don’t know. All I can do is guess.

One of the ways we can explore how different other animals are from us is to take one into our house as a pet who is not put into a cage but has the freedom of the house and garden and other nearby houses and gardens. We give them a name and in many ways treat them as part of the family. We then develop a tendency to see them as anthropomorphics. We talk to them and teach them tricks and make rules for them which they learn to obey. This we call training. Note that these rules are all for the benefit of the human beings who own them.

There is an enormous popularity for stories about talking animals. Both children and adults love them. It seems to me that our species longs to make other animals more and more like ourselves. This works very well until a cat catches a bird, for example. We treat them like backward children, especially when they break our rules. Hunting comes naturally to cats and they do it whenever they have the opportunity. They soon realise that instead of people praising him for a killing, they usually scold them for it and try to release the prey.

Cats learn fast. They soon drop the habit of giving a person their prey as a gift and learn to sneak it into the house. When this happens for the first time, the cat shows us by its behaviour that it experiences the feeling of guilt. The greater the number of things the cat does that annoy their owners, the more the animal is obliged to change its natural behaviour.

When we remember that we were once animals who couldn’t talk, we can get a much better understanding of why our lives can be so difficult. We still have vestiges, deep in our unconscious minds, of the basic instincts our far distant ancestors obeyed. They often clash with the rules we are taught, mostly when we were very young: rules that have been made not by nature but by all different kinds of religions and governments to ensure that people fit into their own particular society. This is why guilt is one of the most common feelings from which we suffer.

The problem of consciousness and unconsciousness has been studied for centuries. Consciousness is how we live our lives when we are awake. Unconsciousness prevails when we are asleep. Hence we are our real selves when we are asleep and alone which is one of the reasons we are so interested in dreams. Dreams do not lie, but most of them have to be decoded because we all have elements in ourselves that we find disturbing. I believe the more individual we are and the more creative the more we dream and the harder it is us to live our conventional daytime lives. We have to know what we can say to whom or we would soon be in deep waters. Is it possible to be a real individual person and at the same time manage to find a place for ourselves where we can use our talents and maintain our own persons? It isn’t easy but it is the main underlying motive of these pieces I am writing.

Categories
How To Use Words Meaning of Words

There's Soup and then there's Soup!

Korzybski’s book “Science and Sanity” was published in 1933 and is still in print. His theme is ‘the misuse of words can make us sick.’ He is very knowledgeable in many different fields. If you only want one book on words and their use this is the one that will give you most satisfaction. I’ve read it several times. What we must remember is that “The word is not the thing itself”.

When my grandsons were 8 and 9 years old, I went to have lunch with them and my daughter. I asked her to make soup. I took with me four pieces of paper with ‘soup’ written on them.

I took four plates and spoons out and put them on the table. I placed the pieces of paper in each one. “Now boys you can eat your soup”.

They looked at me, then at the plates and then at their mother. “Eat your soup up” I said. They were dumbstruck. Finally they said “What soup?” “It is on your plates” I said. There was a short silence and my grandsons could say nothing. I took up my paper and put it in my mouth. “Mmm, it doesn’t taste a bit like soup. But the paper tells us it is soup, doesn’t it?” Finally the penny dropped and the boys laughed. They got the message, the name of the soup is not the same as the soup itself. I removed the paper and put the real soup into the four bowls. The boys roared with laughter. This is the kind of experiment that teaches children and makes them laugh at the same time: always a good combination.

Another day I was working with a client who had recovered from a severe illness after an operation for cancer. She had been looking forward to Christmas. “How did it go?” I said. She replied “I was so disappointed!” I tried to understand. She struggled to say why. “I wanted this Christmas to be this way and that way but it wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted it to be the ultimate Christmas!” I said “The ultimate Christmas?” “Yes” she said. My mind clicked . “Ah I see. The ultimate Christmas could mean the best one you ever had, or it might have been your last one.” This is another example of enantiodromia, where one word can have two contrary meanings.” YES!” she said loudly. “Why did that upset you? I said. “Well. I wanted everyone there to realise that this might have been my last Christmas, but they all carried on the same as usual.”

Two weeks later she came to see me again. She said she thought about it and said yes, she had enjoyed Christmas very much. She realised that she couldn’t expect her close friends and family to be as excited as she was after her recovery. No-one else could understand exactly the depth of her experience. Moreover it is quite understandable that they might have thought it would be tactless to bring up the feelings about her illness again.

Categories
Equality General Power and Control

Sheep!

Equality is a dangerous word. Everything and everybody is different from everything and everybody else. To stay in a state of open-mindedness is my basic premise. Every group has rules and regulations. The worst thing about them is the uniformity.

I have just joined The British Humanist Association, mainly because of my loathing of organised religion. I opened the envelope and two round badges popped out. I popped them straight into my waste basket. How could I walk around with the two messages that conveyed, ‘happy humanist’ and ‘good without god’ ? I treat the word ‘happy’ with great reservations, only as a state of mind that is one of many. Everything is defined by its opposite. Otherwise it cannot exist. A well-balanced human experiences both misery and happiness.

As for ‘good without god’ the word ‘good’ does not exist without the word ‘evil or bad’ and the word ‘god’ has as many different meanings as there are people in the world. My particular god is that of the philosopher Spinoza for whom ‘god is nature’, one of the best definitions I have come across.

After my first introduction to psychotherapy, the first book I ever read by Freud, when I was 18 years old, I have read everything I could find out about the subject. I knew one day I would be a psychotherapist. When I was in my sixties after my book business collapsed, I felt that the time was ripe. I knew I must get some sort of qualification. At that time anyone could give training or set up as a psychotherapist. Since I had a vast knowledge of many different methods, I decided to study NLP (neurolinguistic programming) which was relatively new and looked like fun. I joined another organisation that focused on hypnosis, because I am a natural hypnotist. I didn’t realise for decades that my gift for making myself invisible was auto-hypnosis which helped me through so many boring teachers.

After the failure of my business I took myself off for a trip round the world with the few thousand

pounds I had left. When I returned I set up in private practice and very soon had a good list of clients. At that time there were no regulations although many of the trainers had their own lists of rules.

Since psychotherapy is relatively new it is only recently that it has been a subjects for universities. When that happened the government began to take it seriously. That, of course, meant that sooner or later the government would interfere.

Now there is far too much interference in the medical profession, education and now psychotherapy. The UKCP was set up after I began my practice. I didn’t have to join, but it might be necessary once the government insisted.

It has taken the government a long time to know what to do with us. After 15 years I decided to give up my practice and get on with my writing and research instead. This was three years ago. I resigned from the UKCP Why? Because I was very dissatisfied. First, I resented having to be supervised when I was working in my own way and getting very good results, and I resented the movement to regulate which method was most important. CBT was the choice. You may notice in newspapers articles that tell us that we need more CBT practitioners. Don’t believe a word of it.

Now students who want to join the profession are being led by the nose to do a four year course which is ridiculous. Psychotherapy is not a science but it is treated as such. First class therapists and first class teachers are not made by university degrees. They are creative beings just as much as musicians, writers and all other creative beings who work in their own way.

Categories
Equality Intelligence

Liberty, Fraternity and Equality

The Marseillaise was the bloodthirsty war-cry of the French Revolution: exactly the sort of thing that aroused the hatred of those who sang it. Such powerful feelings were easily heightened. The three words liberty, fraternity and equality constantly repeated and shouted out loud had a powerful hold, especially on all the underdogs. Enhancing the envy of the have-nots by appealing to their grievances with emotive words has always been very effective. Here again we note the power of three. One word more or less would immediately spoil the impact. Look back to my article “The Magic Three” which tells us of the impact over the mob exercised by Mark Anthony in Shakespeare’s play “Julius Caesar”.

I shall now examine the three words, liberty, fraternity and equality and how they affect people in their attitudes to life.

Liberty is the most powerful word of the three. We all want freedom, or we think we do. So what does ‘freedom’ mean?

The psychotherapist, Erich Fromm, wrote a splendid book ‘The Fear of Freedom”. Why should we be frightened of it. With very good reason. The more freedom we have the more we are obliged to make decisions and take responsibility for them. Those people who feel insecure and won’t think for themselves still feel they want to be free. Free from what? Free to do what they like. But you can’t have your cake and eat it. Freedom is for the brave who do not depend on others and think for themselves. The American President, Harry Truman, quoted from Harry Vaughan “Don’t go into the kitchen if you can’t stand the heat.”

Fraternity comes next. I believe that what was meant here was that we are all connected and should respect our fellow beings. Weak people who cannot stand their own company, love to have lots of

folk round them for support. Real friendships are made when we speak openly to each other and do not try to make people like us.

Equality is linked to fraternity, but is not quite the same thing. George Orwell wrote in his book “Animal Farm”, “All animals are equal but some are more equal than others”: a delightful tongue-in-cheek comment in one of the best satires of the 20th century.

Equality does not mean that we are all the same as each other. It does mean that everyone should be treated in the same way in the eyes of the law regardless of their status in society. We are a long way from having reached such an attitude. People are still very much judged not by what they are but how much they know.

Categories
Equality

Snot Fair

Marx and Engels came up with some very good ideas which they hoped would completely change Russia for the better. But, however unsatisfactory might be the lives of most people, things cannot be changed overnight especially in such a vast country as Russia that had not been affected by an industrial revolution which meant it was very backward and very poor.

The paradox is that people do not like change, neither do they like starving to death. Since everyone is unique and at the same time everyone wants different things, it is very difficult for everyone to agree on what actions should be taken.

The times when bloody revolutions erupt are when things have got very bad because most people have lives hardly worth living. Two good examples are the French and Russian revolutions. When whole countries have suffered so much that a change is necessary, the first thing the sufferers think of is revenge. Most revolutions of this kind end up with the deaths of a vast number of people because the majority are so full of rancour that they cannot think straight and are led by the nose by power-hungry and unsuitable (to put it mildly) leaders.

Hitler’s case was rather different. Although he was a revolutionary, he was legally voted into power as President of the Reichstag, the German government, assisted by the SA, a branch of the army that backed up Hitler but wasn’t entirely under his command. In 1935 Hitler brought into being a new army, the SS, over which he had much more control. The German people were in a bad way economically after World War 1 and Hitler soon began to improve everyday life. Needless to say this made him very popular which was enhanced by his gift of oratory combined with a powerful charisma.

In a very few years Hitler managed to achieve full employment, impressive architecture, good roads and railways. He was also building up armaments under the excuse that Germany needed protection and more space.

Many people in Great Britain admired him. He kept very quiet about his plans for the holocaust of the Jews. Most of the German people knew nothing about it until the end of the war.

When I was a teacher for five years when my sons were small, I noticed how much importance the children gave to fairness. They loved to do things for me, such as cleaning the blackboard. I had to make sure that I asked for a different pupil every time. If I accidentally asked the same pupil who had done this small task the week before, a great outcry would ensue:”Miss, ‘snot fair. She (or he) did it last week!” Children would put up with anything, as long as it was fair. I realised soon why this was so important to them. Everyone needed to be recognised and no-one wanted to be left out.

For some reason this reminds me of the French Revolution and their cry “Liberty, Fraternity and Equality” Why these three? That will be my next article.

Categories
Health

Attention Deficit Disorders. Uggh!

Attention Deficit Disorders. Uggh! How I hate all these acronyms. How they have crept into our language, most of them to do with ‘mental illness’ which as I have said before is an oxymoron. Many children today have been ‘diagnosed’ with it as an illness and worse they have been treated with medication. I have no doubt that this is a big mistake. Too many parents believe what ‘professional people’ tell them without question.

The truth is that school is often so paralisingly boring and always has been that children do their best not to listen and they are right. George Bernard Shaw and other wise men believed that one of the main purposes of school is to give parents more freedom from having to look after their children.

I remember my own experiences in a state school. I listened only to what I wanted to hear. One of the phrases that occurred over and over again was ‘Pay attention!’ Things are not better now: they are worse because the methods of teaching basic reading, writing and arithmetic today have been interfered with by busybodies influenced by the government. Too many changes have been implemented. Things do not get better. It is very important that we maintain our public and grammar schools and bring back more opportunities for apprenticeships. Universities are important when they are free to take in only those creative people who can increase our knowledge for the benefit of everyone. The greatest mistake was to create many more universities with the aim of trying to force all children to stay much longer at school than they want.

I was horror-stricken when I heard that primary school children have to do homework! In their early years, say up to eleven, children need lots of time to do the things they want to do themselves. I remember enjoying my evenings when I got home. I read a lot of books of all kinds, only because I wanted to and I enjoyed being able to run about in the summer countryside.

Bertrand Russell, who lived with his grandparents because his parents died when he was small, said how lucky he was to be able to stay at home and read anything he wanted in the family library. He was one of the few wise men who knew what children needed. He and his wife established a private school where children could happily do what they wanted to do.

I have always followed an axiom that is, as far as possible, that we should never do what we do not want to do. All it does is breed disappointment and resentment. This I have done all my life and I have reaped great rewards. Karl Marx said “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” He forgot one important thing. Who was good enough to judge such important matters? That was the problem. The wrong people made the decisions.

Categories
Meaning of Words

Potato Found In Translation!

Power, the ability to do and act, is the first meaning given of a very long list in my Complete Wordfinder. ‘Do’ and ‘act’ are also very long. The shorter the list, the fewer meanings are given for the word. Since I am a linguist and know French and Spanish well, I am now learning German, partly for fun and partly because I have a German friend with whom we have translated each others books about our childhood experiences in our respective countries when we were children growing up in World War Two. In March we have both been invited to Leipzig for the publication of our two books put together as one. We shall be talking to readers and signing books and telling them something about our respective childhoods. I am studying German every day so that I can at least be able to say some things to the German audience, even if I find it hard to understand what they say to me.

I’ve bought one particularly interesting dictionary, German into English and English into German. It is very useful because it is also, in a small way, a thesaurus, which provides everyday phrases in both countries that reveal useful differences. Because it is much smaller than my other English thesaurus I presume that all the words that are in common usage by most people are in my German one. So it helps me to learn the more frequently used words and phrases.

What is particularly interesting is that in English we have many more phrases using the word ‘do’ than in Germany, where they have other alternatives to our ‘do’. For instance, The German for ‘do’ is ‘tun’. But we English use ‘do’ more often. Here is an example. In England we say “What are you doing?” In Germany they say “Was machst du”which translated literally is “What are you making?” If you are a translator changing German into English, you cannot write that down, you must write “What are you doing?”

In every country speaking the same language people love to give different meanings to words. But, surprisingly enough, there is a uniformity in all this that makes it easy for people to understand each other. Even a different emphasis on a syllable can change meaning.

When we first moved to South America my husband and I had recently gained a degree in Hispanic Studies. This meant that we could speak correct castillian Spanish and had good knowledge of South American history and literature. The Venezuelans were delighted because we could speak to them easily. But saying is not the same as listening. It took us several months to learn what they were saying to us including our getting used to a different accent, a number of new words and a different sense of humour. Not to mention all the cultural differences.

One of the Englishmen there had just become a father for the first time. He came running into a group of friends straight from the hospital. He shouted out “Soy papa! Soy papa!” All the Venezuelans burst into laughter. The rest did not. Why? The same word, papa, has two meanings. One has the stress on the first syllable and the other on the second. Our friend was shouting out with great excitement “I’m a potato! I’m a potato! The word for father is papa but the accent is on the second syllable, the other word, papa, meaning potato had its accent on the first syllable.

Translators beware!

Categories
Power and Control

Overcoming Power The Easy Way

There are a whole lot of unwritten rules about how we ‘ought’ to respond when someone says something to us. We have learned from what we have heard in the talk that goes on around us as we gradually acquire the gift of words. We are told that these rules constitute ‘good manners’. It makes talk easier and quicker to manage once we have assimilated them.

The ideas about what ‘good manners’ are vary in different cultures. However the reason that we need them is meant to help us not to disconcert or upset other people.

When I was a child we were taught to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ when we made a request or received a gift. No-one could argue about that. Yet it is slowly dying out and that is a pity. Families sat round the table together for meals and that happens less and less. The strength of the family is important because it gives us the chance to talk to each other in these busy times.

However, what do we say when someone asks us a question we don’t want to answer or gives us an order we resent? Do you have to answer? Do you have to obey? It depends on the circumstances. Small children were often exploited in this way when I was small. In the Victorian era and earlier it was much worse. All sorts of rules operated such as ‘children should be seen but not heard’ and ‘Do what you are told’. These have died out on the whole which is a good thing.

If an adult says something that is clearly meant as malicious or intrusive then we have every right to reply as we wish. If we retaliate by saying ‘mind your own business’ or that sort of thing, it is likely that you could end up in an argument. There are several things you can do to prevent it. A useful one is ‘why do you ask that question?’ or ‘would you please say that again. I have poor hearing?’ If you reply in a friendly fashion and they repeat what they have said it often helps them to see that they have made a faux pas. If they are so thick-skinned as not to notice, just say goodbye in a friendly way and walk off.

On the whole most of us don’t mean to be unpleasant, and if we give an unexpected answer and a smile the sour atmosphere will begin to clear. If someone confronts us in a tearing rage looking for an argument, the best thing to do is to stay calm or in an extreme case to run away. It takes two to tango.

You can say anything you like when people say disagreeable things. It can be a lot of fun. My deceased husband was a pastmaster at disconcerting people. We were at a party and we met a couple who looked about the same age as ourselves. The husband said to Bob “How old do you think I am?” This is one of those words that old people say when they like to think they look younger than they are.

Having scrutinised him carefully, Bob said “I should think about one hundred and twenty”. There was not anything he could say to that. He just gazed in astonishment.

Categories
Power and Control

The Power Of You!

We don’t know how much power we have as individuals. Most of us underrate ourselves. Remember that we are all unique which means that all of us know things others don’t know. If we are truthful we are sure we have all felt envious of others for one reason or another. We all do or say things we don’t really mean and then regret them afterwards. A great waste of time is taken up in many people’s lives beating themselves up for such silly reasons.

Many clients have begun a first session by telling me they have spent years trying to solve their own problems by thinking about them. They believe because they have built a business or have been to university that they should be able to solve such a ‘simple’ thing as knowing how to improve a close relationship. I pass on to them what a fellow therapist taught me many years ago: “You have not been thinking, what you have been doing is ruminating, in other words, worrying.” Many clever people confuse the two.

Their problems were not understanding themselves better. Our inner life, what Freud called the unconscious, is hidden from us. In our search for perfection, we don’t wish to acknowledge things about ourselves about which we are ashamed. We want other people to appreciate us. In order for this to happen, so they think, they create a false image of themselves as their idea of ‘a nice person’. It is impossible for us to keep it up continuously. People like this fall in and out of love with astonishing rapidity and then complain that no-one is good enough for them.

The only pathway to practise real, effective psychotherapy, is to help clients to have the courage to look at all the things they don’t like about themselves. Only then will they realise that every part of themselves can be useful.

It is paradoxical that the most cruel of dictators, for example Hitler and Stalin fooled themselves that they knew how to run a country successfully. Their mistrust and hatred was reflected in their private lives and extended to large groups of people.

The answer is obvious. The more we acknowledge all our feelings, positive and negative,

the more we can be kind to them and to everyone else.

I do not think organised religion is useful, but there are plenty of good ideas in most of them as well as plenty that are not. Remember everything has its opposite. Two of my favourites are:

“Love thy neighbour as thyself” and “The love of money is the cause of all evil.”

People who do not understand the meanings leave out the words in italics.

If we are brave enough to examine ourselves in depth, as have such outstanding men as Spinoza and Erasmus, we have unlimited power to control ourselves and all we do and think.