Adrian Scott Counsellor Supervisor MBACP Accred

Rat Park on Drugs
In the late 1970s Canadian psychologist Bruce Alexander created Rat Park.
Rat park was an experiment to test the effects on morphine addicted rats in pleasant and unpleasant environments. The pleasant environment in Rat Park allowed the rats to socialise in more natural surroundings. The unpleasant environment in Rat Park caged and isolated the rats. The morphine was made sugary to make the drug more appealing.
Would the rats continue to self-medicate or stay off the morphine?
The rats in the more pleasant environment avoided the morphine more than the drugs in the unpleasant environment in Rat Park. The observer article ‘The real crack is in our social fabric’ makes the case that “drugs are the symptoms of a broken society, masking the underlying issues of unemployment, lack of education, poverty, racism, and despair.”
This article appears news worthy because it is counter to the usual drug enforcement policies. Drugs are bad, addicts are bad, drugs must be kept illegal.
Significantly the article makes the point that around 90% of addicts are casual users from a range of backgrounds where the drug use is not excessive or a social problem.
The more pertinent point is that why would society not fix the social problems, and take out the drugs problem at the same time.
Unfortunately this is not taking into account the culture we live in. Winners and losers. Rich and poor. Good and bad. Capitalism thrives of the competitive nature of humans. To be a winner somebody has to be a loser. The success of capitalism thrives on unemployment, the uneducated, and poverty. It allows the elite to function unfettered. Imagine if the whole population took up its power through education and employment? What would happen to the tax avoiders and water companies’ profits? Their chances of survival would be less.
We live in an era of an uneasy balance between the needs of people and needs of money. Money needs consistency, stability, and confidence to be accumulated. People need other people, to be occupied, hope and love. If drugs were legalised the perception is that the balance would tip towards the needs of people.
Less able to be controlled and managed.
Welcome to the Rat Park.

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2013
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.

No Answers   
Whatever you might think of Sigmund Freud  – his genius was he provided no answers. For Freud – No resolution. No quick fix. He was in a position of power and influence. It must have been tempting to think that he could. Religion and philosophy aim to come up with answers. Freud’s aim was not to come up with any answers.
Problem solving, finding a solution is commonplace in modern culture. Reacting to a situation quickly to stop the problem spreading is a large part of work life. We are set up to react and resolve.

Freud’s thoughts culminating in his Theory of Psychoanalysis was that it avoided reacting and resolving. Freud has his patients lying down so that they could not see his face eliminating the reaction. Try speaking to another person about something that means a lot to you. See if you can say it without the other persons’ reactions influencing what you say. It is difficult – almost impossible.
John Gray in his book ‘The Silence of Animals’ describes Freud as not inventing anything new. He was just repeating the endless enquiry of how human beings should live. Freud’s belief was humans are unhealthy. They are flawed. The knowledge and acceptance of the flaws was where it was at. There are no answers.Freud does not offer to heal the soul. “Freud accepted that humans are sickly animals. Where he was original was in also accepting that the human sickness has no cure.” (Gray 2013 p.85)
We cannot change our fate. We cannot change the families or family environments we were brought up in. Freud accepted that our lives were shaped by fate. We can however shape our relationship to that fate. The end of psychoanalysis is the acceptance of personal fate. Freud always had a sense of humour. Whether it be recommending the Gestapo on exit papers from Austria. Or describing the badness of a good psychoanalyst. “One has to be a bad fellow, transcend the rules, sacrifice one self, betray, and behave like the artist who buys paints with his wife’s household money, or burns the furniture to warm the room for his model. Without such criminality there is no real achievement.” (Gray 2013 p.88) No answers.
Perhaps his most significant achievement is that it is not the conscious that leads us but the unconscious. We sabotage ourselves in pursuit of wants when it is our needs forced along by the hidden unconscious that begs for attention.
Freud did not share a dream of salvation. Freud believed in a particular kind of resignation. A resignation which meant accepting the fact of ultimate chaos. He meant fortifying the self so that we can assert ourselves against fate.
No answers.

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2013
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.

27. Days to Live
Days to live is phrase which provokes fear – then many questions? How do you know? How do they know?
Medical technology is a wonderful thing? It can keep us alive and predicts the end of life. But to what aim?
Sigmund Freud when dying of cancer was put out of his misery with an agreement with his doctor that an overdose of morphine would finish him when he had days to live.
The Liverpool Care Pathway was meant to be a managed way of helping hospital patients towards a dignified death in. The problem was that there was no training in end of life care for clinical staff. Standards of care were not consistently implemented. Sticking rigidly to protocol patients were being denied fluids when they wanted a drink! Dr. Shipman put the whole system into alert.
The NHS has struggled with end of life care. When is the end? Who says so? Is the patient in a fit state to have an opinion?
The only place that seems to have got it right is the Hospice Movement. Dedicated to palliative care the skills of dealing with the incremental stages of death are well researched.  Specialist skills developed with an expertise in managing dying and death are unequaled in the last days to live.
Even so at the moment there is no alternative to a slow incremental death in the UK. So much suffering and a lack of dignity. Days to live.
The generation dying of old age at the moment is stereotypically cowed by authority. Stiff upper lip. Put up or shut up. Whatever the phrase: the dying  generations are not complainers. They do not make demands. Perhaps this has something to do with the end of life care in the mainstream NHS system. There is an expectation that whatever is received patients should be grateful.
Recently a leaked report claims an increase in the numbers of older people dying: particularly in poorer regions. Cuts to funding? The statisticians do not understand and cannot discover the reason!
A lot more attention needs to be paid to the elderly and end of life care. Perhaps sheer numbers of the population reaching the end of life will force a revolution in the process of end of life dying.
Days to live.

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2013
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.

Family Anxiety
You and your family drive out to the countryside on a Sunday evening. You are walking on a hill on a beautiful sunny day. You come across a field of straw being baled. You sit together on one of the bales and take photographs as a memory of a beautiful walk.
You then continue on for 20 minutes. Just before you go into the woods, one of the parents realise that they have the lost the car and house keys. You work out that they have probably been left on one of the bales. You carry on the rest of the walk: aware that the keys are missing but it does not spoil the walk. You return to the field to the farmer loading the bales onto his tractor. The keys are where they were left on the next row of bales to be picked up! Is this stupid, negligent or confident?
Does this scenario create family anxiety?
Depending on your view will give you some idea of what kind of family you were brought up in.

Some common scenarios might be that your family –
1. Carry on leisurely to the last part of the walk through the wood
2. Walk through the wood fretting about whether the keys will still be there on your return.
3. Run back in a panic to find the keys as quickly as possible
Which option would your family chose? Another way of putting it would be how does your family deal with stress? The way families deal with stress is mainly to do with how the parents deal with stress. Or how much confidence they have to deal with stress. Some families create stress to survive: other families try to control the world around them to avoid stress.

Stress creates anxiety. An energy which indicates something is wrong with an amount of energy to put it right. When we do not know how to put it right we remain anxious so have to create a strategy. Withdraw, fight, or run away.
Children who are accepted in a family feel comfortable. If their views are respected and heard this creates a confidence and self-respect that can be held onto inside the child. When the child is stressed that confidence and innate self-respect can be used in the stressful situation.
Confidence puts the stress into context. The stress is not seen as general stress added to all others. It is calibrated and dealt with according to how stressful and what impact it has. How would you rate the scenario above? Keys are replaceable? You want to test your luck? It is a Sunday evening and nobody is around? What one family finds stressful another does not? There is no easy answer or explanation.
Family Anxiety.

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2013
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.

Pastoral Care
Do you have a job which involves pastoral care?
On the face of it some jobs do have pastoral care. Many do not. Pastoral care means caring for people’s pain and loss. Worries and anxieties. This would be usually in the helping professions. But there is an element of pastoral care in all work. Employed staff are people suffering joys, happiness, pain and loss in their lives. Colleagues and managers are surrounded by this all the time. Companies gain reputations as good employers by the way they treat their staff. The ‘care’ of their staff is at the heart of their ethos. Ironically the helping professions are not so good at supporting their staff. Overworked, overloaded with little resources the ill, sick and unable are tended by staff with honourable intentions.
The psychodynamic view is the helper is motivated to help others. This displaces the need to help themselves. There are two sets of people to look after. Themselves and the people they are caring for. There is no time or energy to look after anyone else. How much easier it is to help others than ourselves. We can feel  so unknown and frightened of ourselves. To focus on ourselves and to realise the pain of our strengths and weaknesses is profound. We are not who we think we are. Where is the pastoral care for ourselves?

Pastoral Care has a historical association with the ministry. To counsel is a part of pastoral care. To associate the verb to counsel to the word counselling is inevitable but misleading. To counsel is to give advice or learning from one wise person to a less wise person.
As counsellors are part of the helping professional professions: they have much work to do on themselves. Hopefully they have! This work gives insight. As counsellors we have to do so much work on ourselves it would be hypocritical and patronising to give advice on how others should be. So why not help the person go through their own reflective experience for themselves. Not to lay out the path but be led by the person’s own personality and life experience. This is a privilege and humbling experience for the helper.
But note that it can only be properly begun when the helper has helped themselves.

Being missed.
Missing a bus, a train, the beginning of a movie. Time and missing is familiar and frustrating to us.
In one sense we are all concerned about missing. The missing child, the missing tumour.
But what about being missed?

In a consumerist culture there are suggestions everywhere on what we should buy and what we should have. The message is that we are missing something to complete us. Goods are bought to satisfy a need: but the satisfaction is temporary. Another object must be bought. If only we could have it. We would be OK! Everything would be alright.

It is not what you are missing. But that you are being missed.
People are missed. We miss loved ones who are away. We miss those who have died. We miss a lack of something that other people give us. An emptiness reveals a missing. These people recognise and value us for who we are.
Ever started a conversation about something that bothers you with a friends or family only to have it taken away from you? The other person weighs in with their example! You have not been listened to heard. What happened? You have been missed.

Being missed is a common experience. Do we recognise it? Yet it hurts us. We collect up all these unresolved hurts. Is it more helpful to think of the opposite of being missed? Being recognised? Being accepted? Someone being interested enough to enquire about what you feel?
It is easy to be missed. Others project strong feelings onto you. People hide from being recognised preferring to be missed.
To be aware that we are being missed is key. The pain that comes with it means our emotional compass is switched on. The compass gives us direction through a feeling sense of ourselves. We are informed about what we like and do not like.
To be able to trust our emotional compass is difficult. We have to be aware of our feelings and where they came from. Are they about others’ expectations of us. Or truly what we feel?
For example: finding yourself in a relationship where you are missed might suit you. It is too painful to be recognised. But then this might not be good for you. You have a dilemma: avoid the pain of being missed, and risk never being recognised.

It is a central human need to be recognised for who we are. Yet it is painful. Our strengths and weaknesses are complex and hard to deal with. We wish we were somebody else. To deal with the reality of who we are and the repercussions that has on our lives is what our lives are about.
Being missed.

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2013
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.

Evidence
Everybody wants evidence. Evidence gives value. To have ideas without evidence makes the idea unworthy.
The battle between thinking and collecting statistics rages on.
Thinkers think that statistics minimise human experience.
Statisticians ask where is the proof for what the thinkers do?
The Counselling and Therapy industry is a case in point.
The rise of counselling psychology and its Cognitive Behavioural Therapy approach  has created a science of counselling evidence. It is evidenced by feedback from the client each session. This information is collected to create a body of evidence. It proves money spent on CBT is worthwhile.
The integrative counsellors  who have little scientific evidence for their work have tried to ignore this trend.
On the back of the 2006 Layard Report on depression in the UK the rise of CBT was in place. Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) was born.
IAPT is well funded giving GPs access to a short term CBT service for patients. The creation of Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT ) forced the integrative counsellors to wake up.
Counselling Psychologists train after they have gained a psychology degree. You can be fully trained, and working by the age of 26. Dressed like the marketing department Counselling Psychologists expect to be working in the NHS on a profitable pay scale with benefits.

Integrative counsellors used to start training at the earliest in their late 20s, and as a second career. Most of the UK’s counselling takes place in the voluntary sector. Insecure, underfunded, with low self-esteem.
Counsellors work in ivory towers – wishing to be unquestioned by external market forces.

The question of counsellors and their own therapy comes up. The amount of therapy counselling students has decreased. The apprentice system has gone when you had five years personal counselling before training. Today students decide to have a career in counselling, start training, own therapy and seeing clients at the same time.
Counselling psychologist courses vary in the amount of therapy required. The idea is that CBT can be applied with little thought to the process of the client’s story. It is a like a medical intervention.

The underfunded successful community counselling service with an excellent reputation loses its funding. The integrative counsellors cannot understand why such a valuable service is being lost. Anecdotes are given to evidence continuing funding. Little understanding of external forces and pressures in the Borough exist.
The successful community counselling service receives referrals from IAPT and statutory services. Patients’ mental health does not fall into neat categories so criteria is too strict to include longer term work and bereavement.
But in the end people in the UK have more access to talking about themselves than ever before.
Counselling and Counselling psychology is a success! Counselling Evidence or no Counselling Evidence!

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2013
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.

Stories of boys.
Whether a favourite actor, or somebody you knew dies it seems that a part of you goes with them.
The Sopranos defined an era, put HBO on the map, & reinvented the DVD boxed set. Above all James Gandolfini brought a tenderness and vulnerability to the role of a mafia psychopath.
Tony was a boy. Watching James playing Tony was a cross between looking at a 6 year old boy denied his toy, and a violent dangerous thug.
How did he do this? Apart from the support of a good cast and brilliant writing. He managed to tap into other sides of himself. As a bar tender and club manager he must have seen stuff which would have seemed natural to put into Tony. An impoverished background in an urban environment usually means a life on the borders of crime and violence.
It was also in the era before play it again. We all watched it in real time. Staying up to watch the latest episode with everyone else and feeling tired at work the next day was part of the experience.

Felix was a boy. Like all 6 year old boys full of bravado, cheekiness and endless energy. Boys want exercise and intellectual stimulation which creates a life force that ‘s expected to go on and on.
To see it stopped is a shock.
That dynamo energy propelled him into a love of climbing. Stimulating in two ways. Physically so demanding that your life depends on the fitness and stamina of your body to extreme. And dealing with the psychology of focusing of staying alive, the fear,and the excitement. It must have felt addictive.
Boys.
Today I remember as a boy my father taking me out walking in the hills. Happy Birthday.
Usually these stories would demand a fancy interpretation or comment.
Today the sadness does not allow it.

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2013
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.

Death Wishes
A dying mother leaves Death Wishes for her young children. The wishes include learning a musical instrument and going to a rugby match. The poignancy of this article is that her sons are young and have little experience of life. Their whole life is ahead of them, and they have many experiences yet to come. To be without a mother particularly emphasised over being without a Father is seen as cruel and unjust. These Death Wishes will be carried out by the Father over the young lives of his sons. This will ensure that their sons will be reminded of their mother throughout their growing up.

For the Father this might become problematic. He might have the opportunity for a new relationship in which the new partner will have to carry out these wishes as well. Taking on a step family is a daunting task a best of times.But what of adults who lose their parent at an older age? The reminder that parents are not around at significant events, birthdays, graduations, and grand-childrens’ weddings is painful.
The fact that they would have to be older 60,70,80,90yrs old? still puts the scenario in the realm of possibility which heightens the regret and sense of loss.
The fact that some parents have to witness their childrens’ death is a tragedy and a hard loss to bear.

Perhaps we lack imagination around dying and death as it is too painful and imagining too far removed from the grieving process. But … to imagine that we would want our parents around when we were dying at first sounds ridiculous. The maths contradicts the possibility. Dying at 80yrs old would mean our parents would have to be 95yrs at best: 105yrs old or as an older parent 125yrs old!!
But why not have the feeling? Your parent at your death bed showing their care, concern and love could be a comfort.
Death Wishes from the dying parent do not have to be about young children tragically losing their parents. Adults of any age can wish (whether the parent is dead or alive) to have that unique caring presence that only a loving parent can give.
Death Wishes

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2013
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.

The Selfie
The selfie is a self-portrait taken on a mobile phone and uploaded to a social media website. The first self-portrait photograph is thought to have been taken by camera pioneer Robert Cornelius in 1839.
The selfie is criticised and associated with vanity and narcissism.
A little narcissism is good.
It motivates us to develop through a love of ourselves and an expectation that others will recognise that love, and respond with love.
The selfie helps us to remember the trip out with friends, an outfit, a mood, or seeing ourselves as others see us. It reminds us of what we were like at the time. We want to check out how we are seen.
To be photographed is a relatively new phenomenon. It provides with an external reality or proof of how we looked. There is nothing left to the imagination. The photo is there in front of us. After time we might have forgotten it. We can be corrected. It was not how we remembered ourselves. We thought we looked different.
Did we really look like that? How could we have our hair cut in that way? Why did we pull that face?
Would we do that today? Who were we back then? The selfie gives us a new record of ourselves over time!
It is fixed. The selfie is permanent. The selfie does not lie.
Putting aside how the selfie will be stored over the years: the pictures of ourselves remain.

Before the invention of the camera humans did not have this option. They could see themselves in the water, or reflective glass. But the image was fleeting, passed in a moment. It was not held in a photograph. There was no evidence which could be revealed from the past at any time to ourselves and others.

The idea of permanence in our culture pervades. Is it a trick? Nothing is permanent. Everything is in transition. Yet we are duped into thinking permanence is possible. Insurance helps us to feel secure: a type of permanence. We buy property to feel secure.
Perhaps the selfie does us a dis-service. It creates the illusion that we are changeable but permanent.

Before photography humans were closer to the idea that permanence is not possible. In the modern age we are able to manipulate images, life styles and the world around us. We are removed from the natural impermanence of life. Nature is a constant cycle of birth, renewal, life and death.
To ignore this is to be removed from a natural cycle of existence.

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2013
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.