Adrian Scott Counsellor Supervisor MBACP Accred

Carapace
Carapace literally means a cover or shield for animals such as crabs or turtles. This shield is used to protect the animal from external enemies or attack.
Humans also need a cover or shield to protect us from outside attack: a psychological carapace.

This in the “safe” modern world is usually a psychological shield. We build up shields in early life to protect us from early bonding relationships which we find threatening or unsafe.

We grow up with the shield un-adapted. So that when we reach adulthood the shield actually is serving a purpose that is no longer useful. In fact it has become unhelpful. The shield has become a liability preventing us from loving or being loved.

This can happen when the early mother infant relationship is reversed. When the baby becomes a container for the mother’s bad feelings instead of the mother being a container for the baby’s bad feelings.

Clinical Example: a young man presents to the service unable to maintain relationships with anyone. He isolates himself living in sheltered accommodation. Everyone is a threat to him. He knows nobody. Coming twice a week to therapy the contact with the therapist is the only relationship he has with anyone. To avoid contact he buys food in a series of different shops so that he does not become familiar to anyone. He was referred by the community health team for neglecting himself and self-harming. In the therapy room he could not sit down or make eye contact with the therapist. His history was of a single parent drug addict who led a precarious life as though she was alone without a baby. She never showed the client any affection or care. He grew up uncared for and neglected. He was farmed out to grand-parents at weekends who tried their best to care for him. But he refused care: he did not eat, relate with feeling, or care for anyone.
His carapace developed as a baby protected him from his mother. The shield was to rely on nobody. Have no wants or needs so that he could never be disappointed. The carapace was not adapted to protecting him just from his mother but from everyone. The carapace does not discriminate. As kids our shields are primitive and simplistic. This man’s carapace was to protect him from his mother, but allowed nobody else in.
The carapace also ‘protected’ from the therapist. To create a trusting relationship with the therapist was the challenge for the client.
We all have carapaces. The healthy among us learn to adapt the carapace to discriminate. The shield becomes flexible, bendy, porous from a brittle rigid material.
Carapace.

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Disclaimer: This weblog is the view of the writer and for general information only.
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique.
Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2014

Alexander Herzen  1812-1870 was a brilliant Russian writer and thinker known as the “father of Russian socialism” and created the Free Russian Press in London. He lived in London between 1852 and 1864. He was a revolutionary and a revolutionary thinker. He fought against Christian hypocrisy for individual self-expression.
Herzen fled to Britain because of his revolutionary failures and personal tragedies. He was depressed for a number of years. But in London he gained new energy for political and literary work to help the Russian peasantry he idolised. His work My Past and Thoughts was compared to the writings of Rousseau, Tolstoy, and Goethe.
For Russians he is as famous as Carl Marx and Tolstoy. So how come nobody has ever heard of him?

History is full of characters who are forgotten pioneers and thinkers in different fields.
Alexander Herzen was one of these thinkers.
Why has nobody heard of him? Nobody seems to know. In the Brilliant Rage of Alexander Herzen by Michael Macdonald states that critics such as Dwight Macdonald in 1948 were trying to raise interest in the work of Herzen.
He could only say that he did not travel well. His efforts to publicise him were in vain.

Later in 2002 English playwright Tom Stoppard, wrote a trilogy of three-hour plays, Voyage, Shipwreck and Salvage, collectively known as The Coast of Utopia.
This was the complicated story of Herzen and the group of 19^th Century Russian revolutionaries.  Stoppard’s trilogy was successful in both London and New York. Unfortunately Herzen being portrayed in a play was not like reading his brilliant writings. But it did bring him more recognition then ever before.
My Past and thoughts by Alexander Herzen      
Bloomsbury Walks with Chris Roberts and
Sean Mitchell

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Disclaimer: This weblog is the view of the writer and for general information only.
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique.  Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2014

Morality Mortality

Morality is a set of rules usually given to us by our family or family experience. Religious values, sexual mores, prejudices are taken from modelling of significant carers all give us our moral compass to direct us on how we lead our lives. We can either accept what we were taught about morality or reject it to try and create another way of living. Katy Perry raised by parent pastors in a deeply religious family might be an example of this!?
Morality Mortality

Freud took the view that religion was a self-deception to protect us from our loneliness and fear. In this theory presumably the freer you are from loneliness and fear the less you need religion? Whatever your morality Freud believed it was fuelled by deep unconscious traumas hidden in our psyche which we are unaware of. Hurts that we have repressed fuel our morality. At the same time our morality keeps these hurts hidden and protected.
Our morality keeps us from the pain we suffered from hurst at the time they happened.
Morality Mortality

Our sense of mortality is always under threat but becomes more threatened the older we get. Death of parents, family, or friends can bring our morality into sharp relief whatever our age. Pain from bereavement brings us into an unwelcome part of ourselves: the pain area. The pain and hurt of bereavement exposes other pain and hurts that our morality before has hidden. If this is the first time the person has fully experienced the full force of their present and historical pain the person can strongly react. Relationships end, houses and flats are sold, dreams are attempted to be fulfilled.
Ongoing work on the self can mitigate bereavement into a crisis that can be managed – just!
Morality Mortality

Does mortality affect morality? Bereavement entails a re-adjustment of rules and values that we live by.
This re-adjustment can consolidate our rules and values: or challenge them and make a change.
How far we know ourselves and how our morality has been formed is important.
Knowledge of the self and how we get to be who we are makes us more prepared for a crisis. A constant re-examining of our morality makes small adjustments to our morality. The person who has done little work on themselves and enters into a crisis has to make big adjustments. This can be a shock themselves and others around them.
Mortality Morality

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Disclaimer: This weblog is the view of the writer and for general information only.
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique.
Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2014

Is love magic?   Magic Love?

Sometimes it is easy to forget. Happy in a relationship? Unhappy and want to get out?
Not in a relationship? Want a relationship?
Whatever your love status it is easy to lose sight of the joy and pain that love involves. If you have been in or out of a relationship for a while it is easy to forget the tempestuousness of the early stages of love.
Do you protect yourself from the first stage of love? Are you around people you find attractive? Do you avoid them? Have you developed a hidden mechanism which puts people you like off? Do you sabotage anyone getting close to you because of a previous bad experience?
You meet someone or have been around a person for a while who you have developed feelings for. What are these feelings about? How strong are these feelings? What do the feelings mean? Do you talk yourself out of them? Or do you take the risk of telling the person how you feel? Magic Love.

Whatever your feelings the decision to let the other person know is difficult. Did you tell them sober? Without drink or drugs? Did you not need to say anything as you join together? Are you already in a relationship and don’t want to say? Or have you already said something? Do you regret it?

The body goes into a joy/panic state. Obsessing about the love object. Love is a drug.

The drug of love takes you out yourself. You are yourself but in a more heightened way.
You feel somehow bigger? Somehow smaller? Love is all around.

Are you in love? What does it mean?
Whatever it is, love is all around. It is everywhere in one form or another. The intensity of being in love is unique but is obviously not the only type of love. Family, children, friends, pets, hobbies, past times all involve a love of one kind or another. A person alone without love is seen to be pitied, and to feel sorry for.

Perhaps the most neglected and challenging love is the love for oneself. It is so much easier for us to outwardly love, then inwardly love. In fact how many of us know how to love ourselves?
Magic Love.

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2014
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Disclaimer: This weblog is the view of the writer and for general information only.
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique.

Sunny Low Mood

Have you ever felt low or depressed?

Perhaps you have suffered from a bereavement, or relationship break up. Perhaps you have suffered from feeling low for a long time for no particular reason. Depression can be a habit that we cling onto for comfort. It is familiar. For others it is a debilitating condition with no escape. The winter suits depression. The thought of staying in bed or curling up on the sofa to watch the TV is allowable if the weather outside is cold and wet. The mood of depression and the weather are in sync supporting each other.
Sunny Low Mood.

The problem is when the spring comes. The weather becomes warmer and the sunshine seems brighter after the long winter months. Then the suicide rate rises.

One of the reasons is that the mood of depression no longer is in synch with weather. The mood appears darker in contrast to the light of the beginning of spring. This can be too much for the depressed person to bear. The depression might not actually be worse but in contrast to the weather appears so. Light and Dark. Black and White. Low and high. Loud and Quiet.

The concept of contrast cannot be underestimated in mood and the way we think about ourselves. When we are happy or light we use this is as a mood mark or measure with which we measure all our other moods. We compare our moods to the ideal of the happiness mark. Like a tide gauge we aspire to the highest measure. The problem is that most of us have a mark much lower than our ‘ideal’ happiness mark. This is a real problem. If our mood mark is a 5 out of 10, and we aspire to a 9.5 we are going to be constantly disappointed. It might serve us better to be more realistic and to become more familiar with our lower mood mark rather than feeling we are eternally failing to attain happiness.
Great for the market though. We are consistently bombarded by messages telling us to buy stuff to attain a happier mood! Topic for another blog!

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2014
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Disclaimer: This weblog is the view of the writer and for general information only.
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique.

Death Protest
In protesting against their governments people are being killed. A beauty queen in Venezuela  and dozens of protestors in Ukraine.
To most people this makes no sense. How can this happen? What is the point? What was going to be achieved?
We tend to learn about what works for us.

Once established what works for us we continue to repeat it, and repeat it and repeat it. This could be doing a job at work, at home, with children. You can see this particularly in small organisations. Staff do things in a way that they have always done it. It does not matter if it works well, or how efficiently. The way of working remains fixed. It develops a kind of permanence. Go into a failing school and you can witness teaching practices that are out of date and irrelevant. The teacher was taught this way 20 years ago: and does not want to change. Founder’s syndrome is similar. The founder creates a relevant useful organisation: which then becomes out of date and irrelevant. The organisation tries to change and adapt but is sabotaged by old ways of working created by the founder. Death Protest.

The problem comes when we have been doing a task a certain way, and we are asked to change. We want to know why and what is the point? Is it because somebody with power above us wants it done differently? Or is there some tangible benefit? Even when we are told to do something differently the hope is that we can still carry on doing the same thing. So when we are told do something differently we have another go at doing it the same.
Just once more! Just once more before we have to change! Death Protest.

It is the same with regimes. They have been murdering and torturing their people for years. They do not recognise that the outside world has changed. When under threat they continue to do what they have always done: use force. They will only change once they absolutely have to. Until then they will keep doing what they have always done. In extremity they would rather destroy what they have been trying to protect: rather give up: as in Syria.

It is a part of human nature to resist change and stick to the old ways, back in the good old days.
Whatever the cost. Death Protest.

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2014
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Disclaimer: This weblog is the view of the writer and for general information only.
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique.

Capacity to be Alone

Part of successful child development is the capacity to be alone.
This state is created in the relationship between the mother/primary carer and infant. The infant is a lone in the presence of the mother. You might argue that being alone is being on your own. Yes it is – but this ability to be alone is first experienced with the mother. The mother is reliably present, even in the symbol of a cot/pram or the general atmosphere of the immediate environment where the infant feels safe to be alone in.

This environment appears very delicate as all environments are. It is exposed to change, and ultimately cannot be controlled. The environment between mother and baby is set up by the skills of the mother to create a safe and learning environment. Donald Winnicott well known psychoanalyst called this relationship ego-relatedness. That is a relationship between two people, one or both are alone, yet the presence of each other is very important.
The capacity to be alone is also defined by the Internal Objects relationships theory of Melanie Klein. That is the capacity to be alone has a platform of good internal objects inside the infant so that being with oneself is a safe comfortable experience. What are internal objects?

Well .. a kind, gentle mother would be an experience that would be taken in by the infant as a good object. That experience would give the infant confidence that has been internalised and used in the rest of the infant’s life. It is not difficult to imagine a mother/primary care giver who was distressed, angry, unavailable, depressed, anxious or using drink or drugs, giving more problematic internal objects that the infant would never feel secure with in their lives.

The Capacity to be Alone is grown in the presence of another usually the mother. But the ability to be alone literally rests on how comfortable and reassuring the original ego relatedness was!

This can be related to living in Western industrialised countries in 2014. We are marketed at with groups. Groups of friends going on holiday, Families at Christmas, the Idealised couple, not often about being alone. Yet as a culture as communities and relationships are broken up by the market economy we spend more time alone. The elderly are isolated, cities are lonely, GP surgeries full of people who are alienated and cut off from communities and support. The market economy defends us from being alone: something we dread so are willing to spend to avoid it. Yet it also harms us by tricking us into thinking that the Capacity to be Alone needs no attention. With less and less support for young families it seems that ego relatedness will become harder to achieve. So we have little capacity to be alone, are tricked not to work on it, and have a social environment where loneliness and alienation abound.
The upside is that there is much more awareness about our internal objects and inner worlds. There are many more professional opportunities like counselling and therapy, support groups etc to discover our own Capacities to be Alone than ever before. Perhaps like never before an openness of parents, families and friends, who can see the importance of early childhood experiences & talk about them.

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2014
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Disclaimer: This weblog is the view of the writer and for general information only.
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique

Aston Martin Music

Aston Martin Music is a rap track by Rick Ross.

It begins with Rick Ross as a young boy watching a 1985 Aston Martin V8 Volante droptop
pulling up outside a neighbour’s house.
One day will Rick be able to afford one of those cars? One little girl says no, another says yes.

The song can be written off as the usual misogynistic, fast cars, fast drug, illegal, easy drug money,
high living, rap track. But listen closer and it is more subtle and nuanced illustrating a light and dark side.
A conscious and unconscious view of a rapper’s life.

The track is composed around a happy hopeful treble synthesiser refrain: which continues all the way through. Underneath is the bass synthesiser growling away in the front of the mix constantly interrupting the sweetness of the treble refrain. This combination of treble and bass portrays ambition, hope for the high life and doing what you like but with a sense that it is dangerous, flawed, superficial and unsatisfying.
The misogyny is obvious and moves between the oppression of women and being oppressed by women. Women are revered and denigrated at the same time.
The dark side of the song with is expressed with verses like “When I’m alone in my room sometime I stare at the wall / Automatic weapons on the floor, but who can you call?” expressing desperation and no one to turn to.
Towards the end of the song a yearning for a simple straight forward life down south, of being with your roots and family with an honest type of love.

Aston Martin one of the few genuine British iconic marks remaining is the centre piece of the song and video. It shows five models of Aston Martin cars from the 1980s to the present day.
So what’s the point? Entertainment, misogyny, fantasy? Whatever it is, the cleverness of the song is how it glorifies and undermines a gangster’s life style at the same time.

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2014
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.

Killing Time

“Modern man thinks he loses something –time –when he does not do things quickly; yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains except kill it.” (Fromm 1995 P.86)

In his book the Art of Loving Erich Fromm talks about the Practice of Love and that it needs discipline.
Mastering any Art needs discipline. ‘Being in the mood’ and deciding if you want to start something or not means it is a hobby. You will never become a master of an art this way. To make up for the rigidity of work modern man is undisciplined outside work. To counter the routine of the 9-5pm modern man wants to be lazy, slouch or relax – a reaction to the routinisation of life. Fromm goes on to say that man rebels against this restriction of being at work for another persons’ agenda in the form of infantile self-indulgence. In the battle against enforced authoritarianism he has become distrustful of all discipline. He cannot discriminate between irrational authority and the rational discipline he can exert on himself. Without discipline life lacks concentration. Killing Time.

Fromm argues that much of modern life is unconcentrated and diffuse. We are consumers with our mouths wide open to eat, drink, smoke & watch TV. This lack of concentration is shown in our inability to be alone with ourselves. To sit still is impossible. People become nervous and fidgety.
The third ingredient needed for the mastery of an art which is lost in our culture is patience. Everything is set up for quickness. Machines, transports, IT are all set up to do things quickly! Killing Time.

Does the tendency to relax against the rigidity of work, the inability to concentrate and have patience means we become unfocused and unhappy? Or is the world of work selling us our leisure time to prepare us to go back to work? Whatever our view it seems our leisure time is dominated by our work time, and shapes the way we use it. We do and expect things to happen quickly to create more time: yet squander it in unconcentrated & impatient periods of relaxation. Killing Time.

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2014
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.

Hurt in the Bridge

Actress Sofia Helin playas Saga Norén, the lead homicide detective in the TV series the Bridge.
The twist in her character is that she has Asperger’s though this is never stated. A brilliant mind with sharp deducting skills she makes a brilliant cop. Yet she has no idea how to relate to people. She speaks her opinion without censorship. This hurts other people. They are not used to the raw data coming out of her mouth. There is something attractive in Saga’s naïve honesty. She is not malicious. There is a just a bit missing in her head that takes into account politeness, social etiquette and other peoples’ feelings.
Perhaps we all wish to be like this. Yet probably we are more interested in not being hurt ourselves.

In a rare moment of the tables turned: a junior colleague insults Saga making the assumption that she will not be hurt. She explains to her cop partner that people always think that she cannot be hurt but it is not true. A clever plot point of the main character who causes people hurt every time she opens her mouth, is not immune to being hurt herself.
What is it about hurt? Why do we not want to cause each other hurt? What is the guilt about when we hurt others? We are programmed not to cause hurt.

The perhaps we are missing something. We would all agree that physical hurt is very helpful to us. It protects us from our own stupidity and carelessness. It helps us stay alive and injury free. It protects from harm. More importantly it is a good teaching tool. We learn that some people or situations cause us physical pain so that we can avoid them in the future.
Yet it would seem we cannot transfer this idea to psychological hurt.

Hurt is a good learning tool. We hurt in love, bereavement and loss. We hurt when an important person in our lives thinks we are someone we are not.
Even more so psychological hurt can teach us about ourselves. How we are under stress learnt a long time ago before we were conscious. Learn who we are? How we love?

Is it good for us? Do we keep repeating the same patterns with the same kind of person? If you are open person why do you cause yourself pain by choosing the other who is closed?
You learnt this a long time ago. But now can you do something about it?

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2014
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.