Adrian Scott Counsellor Supervisor MBACP Accred

Whenever Gene Hackman came on screen you relaxed into knowing his role or this part of the film was going to be great. And so it was. The ease and minimalism belied a complexity of presence and feeling that you wondered how he packed it all in onto a pin head of presentation. He was never movie star handsome: but such was the strength of his onscreen persona that you never thought about it. He was attractive through character.
Here he is being interviewed in The Actors Studio

He mostly played nasty male roles where you couldn’t dislike him but rather saw the complexity and humanity of the contradiction of good and bad. He had a fierce intelligence, and anger which you could easily imagine made him ‘difficult’ to work with.

He had something to prove. Constantly told that he would never make an actor: he used these rejections to fuel an intensity that lit up the screen. This feeling of himself against the world never left him.

In The Firm 1:19 he played the seducer managing to turn sleazy into something vulnerable and honourable: then sleazy. He played the cop roles (The French Connection) with a gusto to relieve his primitive rage at the world. He was always yelling and rampaging through protocol intense on the mission at hand. His ease and simplicity in front of the camera was the culmination of hard worn skills worked through & discarded to gain a mastery of his craft.

A mixture of guile, rage, intelligence, and sensitivity – he created a new genre of Hollywood Man: deep, multi dimensional, in an age of macho action heroes.
Gene Hackman 1930-2025

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2025
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Ever feel something is not quite right? Or perhaps you feel something is wrong but nobody else notices?
You’re right. It’s not you.

Hypernormalisation is the idea that something is going on while everyone around you is either unaware or ignoring it. The classic example is the Soviet Union where everyone knew the system was failing but nobody could admit it or imagine an alternative. In the UK for example it might be the NHS. But no politician will fully admit it. The running down of institutions as a precursor to privatisation. Without recognising the running down.

Watch the Adam Curtis Documentary Hypernormalisation here

It is not surprising that Hypernormalisation appears in societies: as it also works within humans. We want to think that all is well & normal. We are doing ok. We are coping. We want to be so ok.  We will go to extraordinary inner lengths to deny, distract, defend ourselves against an unpleasant truth, characteristic, or simply something we have said, not done so well.

When people come in – they want reassurance that all is well. Though we both feel the latent feeling: that we are struggling to understand or process what has happened. It is not going so well. We are holding both perspectives, yet the latent is dangerous & painful.
We need someone to accompany us through.

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The 45 day Maha Kumbh Mela, aka Great Pitcher Festival will attract over 400 million people.
For many it is a once in a lifetime event happening every 12 years. The aim is to bathe in the sacred waters to be spiritually cleansed.

Another demonstration as if we needed one illustrating the enormous power of living a human life under the dominion of a higher power. An attachment to a God can help bereavement outcomes.

There are a few interpretations of religion. Freud would say it was a defense against the meaningless of death. Then conversely he thought that the Unconscious doesn’t recognise death or an end – forcing us to live each day of our lives as though there is no end.

Marx’s interpretation of death was that it was a perspective on society. “Religion is an Opiate of the Masses” is mis-understood. A heart in a heartless world. A way of trying to keep our human dignity where subjugation, poverty and now capitalism is trying to erode. It allows us to have an idea of ourselves escaping the reality of our lives. So we become weak and apolitical.
Rid yourself of idealism and then you can really see society and how it is treating you.

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2025
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John began by telling me that he didn’t want to marry his fiancee. “I love my girlfriend, we’ve been together for three years. Some days getting married seems like the best. Other days I cannot bear to think about it.” I asked him what the feelings were around these two contradictory positions.
He struggled – stuck to the narrative and said he didn’t understand it – he loved his girlfriend.

Over the weeks months he revealed scenarios that demonstrated his ambivalent attachment to his girlfriend. He wanted to be loved but at other times couldn’t tolerate it. His recollection of the first five years of his early life were patchy. He dismissed them as irrelevant.

After going to a school friend’s wedding in his hometown – he came to the session distraught. Not about the wedding. He had had a rare conversation with his mother about his elder brother. She had had an elder son who died at a year old. And John was born a year after his death. He was a Replacement Child

John lay helpless in his mother, in the womb liquid, then came out into an atmosphere of death & life. The young psyche only able to contemplate a black and white binary was confronted by death and life. His mother the rescuer who gave him life, and the symbol of creating a previous death: which he might also experience. A Replacement that might fail.

Men can idealise women their mothers for giving them life. And hate them for it. Depending on how this is emotionally negotiated. But wih the spectre of a previous death – this creates an unbearable tension. Again being associative the baby’s psyche interprets the mother as life and death. Rescuer and Killer.

Naturally John took his birth scenario and associatively recreated it in his adult romantic relationships.
Love and Fear towards women. Go to … Get away

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Sybil Phoenix fostered many children in Lewisham. Against the racism in the UK she managed to survive the odds and rescue children who had no families to go to. The infinte visceral hatred she had to endure from the community and the National Front.

The establishment was so horrified that she might refuse an MBE that she managed to negotiate a new premises for her work. The association of Empire to colonalism was very close.

What gives some the huge amount of fortitude and strength against the odds to succeed, to be torn down, and succeed again. The narrative motivation is straight forward. In this case helping children.

But the emotional motivation is more complex and more powerful. We like to think we are motiivated by circumstance, situation, & sometimes admit to luck. But the deeper wounds that we want to resolve through our stories, are too painful for us to contemplate.

So we parallel. We help others to help ourselves, so not to connect with ourselves that need the help! The psyche is not altruistic. It is self serving. From this perspective so are we – however grand the narrative.

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2025
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This weblog is the view of the writer and for general information only.
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique
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Silence in the therapy room is not in fashion at the moment. Strategies, courses, reading, exercises & self help is what the profession promotes. Rather than wait for something to emerge from a quiet silence of Free Association: doing is immediately more satisfying. Accompaniment with curiousity creating a deeper relational depth is too slow too inactive.

Ask counsellors in training they say they want to help. To rescue? But under a more detailed scrutiny it is our own pain of hopelessness and helplessness that we all want to avoid. We work like ships passing in the night. We want to rescue ourselves. But it is too hard and painful. So we try to rescue others.

The profession has evolved. The emphasis was firstly on own therapy, then supervision then training. Now with the industrialisation of the profession the emphasis is firstly on training, then supervision, then own therapy.
This is a reflection of the world. Quick on the click. Value for money. Action Thought Outcome. Rational measuring.

Andy Rogers says it better:
Don’t just do something: The vanishing art of sitting there in counselling & psychotherapy
through the music of Talk Talk and examples of different therapy approaches

https://www.andyrogerscounselling.com/therapy-blog/2024/12/09/dont-just-do-something-vanishing-art-sitting-there-counselling-psychotherapy

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2025
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This weblog is the view of the writer and for general information only.
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique
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John 22yrs old came to his first session with his mother. After an explanation that it would be better for him to attend the sessions without her: she went to the shops and picked him up at the end of the session.
Over the following weeks he came alone. He described his family where his father was an verbally abusive alcoholic, and his mother tried to protect him from his father. His Mother a saint. His Father a devil.

This idea of his family was fixed. John like Min in the previous case study was stuck. Stuckness is to be avoided. We run from it: or try to. Therapists try to fix, soothe, comfort rescue in the hope that someone like John will snap out of it.

Continuing on from the last blog Creative Indifference – The Fertile Void describes a Getsalt principle to create an opportuntiy in the clinical relationship. Something that comes into being: from the potential of emptiness. A new discovery of the self emerging out of nothing. The Void like a blank canvas is ready to be drawn on.

With John he repeated the same Parent narrative over and over. A coping strategy. A wall of defense concealing something behind. I asked him again to describe his family. Always returning to the same narrative. He turned to silence. There was nothing to say. But in the silence which is never neutral there was an emptiness, helplessness, & hopelessness. He started to come late – a precursor to not attending.

I asked him how therapy was going in the vain hope that he might be angry with the therapy or with me. But like his mother – I was the saint – to be protected. We went back to silence. I asked him if there was anything that was different about his life. He shrugged. I felt angry. Rejected. Useless. No impact. As an aside which I didn’t hear the first time he said that he had begun to feel annoyed with his mother. The balance of saint & devil had in that moment shifted.

Over the following months slowly a different narrative came out. Applying a stance of creative indifference through the idea of a Fertile Void John re-invented the parent story. His mother kept on going back to the Father against the pleading of her children not to. The Father had a kind intelligent persona when sober which he understood to be love. The mother a critical person dominated and controlled her children in fear of the Father with little love.

Our childhoods are not want they seem: but we want them to be. Rooted in a child’s perception of good/bad, black & white: understood & warmed in its simplicity. The simplicity soothes us of complexity, nuance and strong opposing feelings.
Our story is a coping strategy: which got us through. We survived.

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2024
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Creative Indifference is a term in Gestalt Therapy to describe a state of unbiased awareness. Creative can mean the doing of something artistic: that comes from the heart not the head.
Here it means a familiarity: a yearning for emotional contact but not being able to connect.
What Freud called the “uncanny”. Something special in the ordinary.

“Uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.”

This may occur when sitting with a person, paying attention, and they communicate something to you: which you can feel but is just out of reach. This psyche appears to work in layers. So conscious debris has to be pushed away to uncover what cannot be reached underneath. See this Case Study where no judgement is placed on missed sessions. Rather an attention to understanding what missing might mean.

Indifference here is not uncaring. But a neutral attention that carries no weight or prejudice. For example when you read the words “giver and taker” you immediately ascribe a positive value to giver and a negative value to taker. But nothing is so simple when we are taught/influenced. This indifference allows something in sense to come up detached from value, bias, prejudice so that it can emerge liberated from repression.

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2024
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This weblog is the view of the writer and for general information only.
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique
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“I think therapy is making me depressed” Gia announced. Gia’s relationship has drifted away, and she is left abandoned, alone. Depressed. Whatever is thought about Klein and her depressive position there is a period of therapy usually about 18 months in when the mist lifts. Some cannot reach this point.

But Gia has. The point when she gets an inkling that all is not what it seems. The awareness dawns that she lives in repeats trying to soothe her pain. Even the intellectual noticing of these forces is dynamic. The real relationship is to maintain the aloneness that cannot be soothed. She cannot go back with this knowledge. She cannot go forward afraid of the new unknown.

Gia realised that the point of her relationships is to attract the gap and non-committed. She has done this a few times that the evidence becomes irrefutable. She begins to feel the loneliness and emptiness, rather than avoid – so that acting out these feelings in a relationship becomes less effective.

But her psyche has layers of defenses to protect her. It senses that she has made a part discovery of its inner workings. A breached defense. So her psyche tries to retreat further back into the shadows: the depression.

Not having interest in her work and friends Gia’s psyche creates a kind of cocoon in the hope that the old story will return. She has stopped going out, feels fatigued, and spends time in bed. The body has to recuperate. The psyche discovery has given the body a blow. The body shuts down when allowed – to try and recover.

One notable UK therapy organisation took pride in its data recording where the client’s feelings scores went down: noting a treatment success! Counter intuitively it can be that we have to get worse to get better. Like an old skin that is shed creating vulnerability. While we feel our way into a new skin. To emerge with a better more authentic breathable skin of protection.

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2024
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This weblog is the view of the writer and for general information only.
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique
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The Democrats have lost again. Twice. For similar reasons.  
They missed: blinded by their own light.
In 2016 they missed the Deplorables. In 2024 the Working Class feeling poor.

Their outlook of fairness, reasonableness, with no discernable policies was projected into a loss. Like all groups of people we don’t learn from the repeat unless forced to. Like the Johari Window we can only see what we want to see because it is familiar. We are blind to difference, frightened by unknown values.

Democrats and their principles are founded on an educated elite which the majority of the American people feel excluded from. The frontier country wants something more dynamic. Of action. Not caring what that action might be.
“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are” Anais Nin

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2024
All rights reserved Disclaimer:
This weblog is the view of the writer and for general information only.
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique
Details changed for confidentiality