Adrian Scott Counsellor Supervisor MBACP Accred

The Other Side of Sadness.
What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss   George A. Bonanno
Basic Author s 2009 Paperback: 372 pages ISBN-10: 1459608186 £19.99

This book challenges the precepts of bereavement theory and practice by describing what the new science of bereavement tells us about life after loss. As people we are optimistic, flexible, resilient, and have a self-serving bias telling us we are stronger than we are. The author does not deny that some people are not like this – but the majority of us are suffer losses and continue with our lives.

Freud’s delayed grief work theory states if the bereaved is not completing the grief stages then they are in denial. The author refutes the idea that the unconscious bond with the deceased has to be broken. Bereaved people who maintain the bond do well. Grief is a positive experience!

The author argues that Freud’s work is poorly researched –unlike research today. Traditionally a healthy response to grief is interpreted as unresolved grief in the unconscious. Linking previous losses to the current loss is highly subjective. Theories based on Kubler- Ross and Bowlby’s work were not based on the losses of bereaved people.

Grief is described as partly made up of intense sadness which makes people more reflective. Grief work is described as relentless, whereas sadness is not. Moving between pain and sadness is important: the bereaved temporarily reconnects with close relationships , then continues the process of mourning.

The author sees Resilience as normal not exceptional. Being an individualistic culture we care about peoples’ feelings:  we expect bereaved people to feel constant sadness and grief. We are surprised when they do not. Resilient people are healthy and have good relationships with the deceased. Resilient people have positive feelings & memories, and  are unlikely to avoid the loss or pain.

No clear pattern emerges in bereaved peoples’ past that accounts for their resilience. There is no general rule to the type or quality of the relationship to the lost person that promoted the healthiest forms of grieving. The quality of relationships to others does not determine whether people cope with their loss.

The author thinks of the grief process as resilient people finding comfort from memory. The relationship is not completely gone. Resilient people are confident, and flexible. They can express emotion, but can also keep their feelings to themselves when appropriate.

10-15% of bereaved people do not recover and grief takes over. The bereaved feels everything is missing, and is cannot be positive. The pain of grief blocks all memories of the good. Prolonged grief is dominated by a yearning for the lost person linking it to emotional dependency.
The Other Side of Sadness

Bereaved people are often chosen for therapy. A therapeutic intervention exposes the bereaved to the trauma. The therapist helps the bereaved confront the parts of the trauma that are difficult. People who experience difficulty in intimate relationships have an insecure attachment style & are more likely to experience prolonged grief reactions. People who are securely attached handle bereavement better.
Freud said the bereaved has to sever the enduring bond with the deceased to resolve the trauma! In fact some people coped better maintaining a relationship with the deceased.

The dependent person clinging to the deceased’s possessions or using them for comfort made the grief worse. The dependent bereaved obsessively keeping the deceased’s room exactly the same indicated a severe grief reaction, where the bereaved felt worthless without the deceased.

Research shows that the Chinese are better at recovering from grief than the US, doing more grief work. In China grief work is not related to suffering or level of distress, but to mourning rites. It is not about the pain and suffering of the bereaved but focuses on the imagined experience of the deceased trying to enter the land of the dead and find a good life. For the Chinese the continued bond was more common and healthier as less distress was felt.

In Asia the idea of the continuing bond is sewn into the culture. Many towns have ancestral temples to honour the dead, and for the bereaved to commune with the deceased. Nothing in the Chinese ceremony is about the individual’s grief: but about honouring loved ones and particularly family and connection.

The book ends stating that in the US there is scepticism about the continuing bond because it is not woven into western culture making the continuing bond becomes less acceptable and adaptive when it is not culturally supported.
I enjoyed this book but there is an attempt to rile the reader into thinking polemically. It should be taken as a challenge and addition to current thinking on bereavement, not a replacement!
The Other Side of Sadness

Adrian Scott MBACP Snr Accred
www.counsellingme.co.uk

The Police manipulated and changed the evidence to put the blame for the Hillsborough tragedy onto football fans. This has not come to light until 23 years later after the tragedy. Believing that we live in a modern democracy in 2012 this sounds like a holiday crime novel. Yet tragically not.

How could the cover up have survived an enquiry, external scrutiny and all the people who must have known what was going on. How did this not come to light earlier?
To look at the cover up alone is not enough. It is the environment that it is held in that gives us a clue.
Was it a culture of Police impunity which created an environment where the power of the police was unassailable?

In these corrupt actions there must have been an understanding that the cover up could be successful. This understanding cannot have appeared overnight. Through the 1980s the seeds of possibility must have been nurtured, to arrive in 1989 believing that this cover up could escape scrutiny. What happened in these years before 1989 to create a culture where a cover up was possible? What other smaller (?) cover ups were there to pave the way for this big one?
Marc Dreier, a Manhattan attorney started a fraud that netted over $750 million over 6 years. His intention at the beginning was to pay back the relatively small sum he had borrowed. But incrementally the figure crept up to the point where it became unsustainable. The programme partly presented his crime as a set up. He went to a good college where expectations of success were high. He managed to bluff himself into buying his first office property with a fantastic piece of luck: the PA of the landlord had gone to high school with him and she recognised that he had been picked as one of the students most likely to succeed. She convinced the landlord to give him the chance. This reputation gave him the office space.
Mr Dreier described a line: the line that not many people are presented with, that is crossed into criminal activity. His point was that if we were all presented with this line at some time in our life: would we do any better? He agreed that many people would not cross the line: he commended them. But he held onto the idea that some people would succumb.
There is little comparison between the repercussions of what police did that day at Hillsborough and what Marc Dreier did. 96 football fans died at Hillsborough, and Marc Dreier’s behaviour did not kill anyone: yet the unknown far reaching human toll must be significant.
Yet when the policemen responsible and Marc Dreier are in their prison cells; might they not be having similar thoughts? Who am I? When was I presented with the line? How did I cross it? What is different between me and others who would not cross the line?
What made me do it?

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2012
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.

It seems there is a long way to go.
Listening to the commentary of the Paralympics athletic events last night made interesting viewing for the wrong reasons.
The camera panned across the competitors on the starting line while they were being introduced to the crowd: the commentator used words like ‘tall’ and ‘lovely’ to describe the appearance of the more able bodied athletes and did not describe the more disabled athletes.

Curiously the commentator at the biggest Paralympic event in the world appeared to have no awareness of his own prejudice: that we all have – we judge people from a norm: or what is generally considered to be acceptable – to us.

Generally this is backed up by a series of complex and hidden assumptions. For instance if you are a white male accountant of average height and build, who has a wife and 2 children, drives a Ford, has a mortgage, and goes to the football – you would be deemed to be in terms of UK culture normal and unnoticeable. Nothing about this person appears out of our comfort zone. Yet obviously many people are not like this or want to be.

We are hard wired to notice what is not ‘normal’. Walk down the street with a five year old past an adult behaving slightly outside the norm they will ask about the person, and what they are doing. We feel comfortable with what we perceive as the same as ourselves. It is a biological survival technique to protect us from threat: what is the same as us has the same motivations, the same wants and needs, so will have some sympathy and understanding to our situation.

To only perceive the world from our own stand point is natural. It takes hard work and educated enlightened individuals around us to prevent this. How would you reply to the five year old to explain an ‘abnormal’ behaviour is crucial: the tone of voice and explanation of the behaviour is the building block of human development: the response confirms the prejudice, or challenges it.

The Disability Movement made a step change when it considered itself from its own reference point, not the able bodied reference point. To see ourselves from an objective external position is important to mental health. It makes us think about ourselves and what we do, and the effect we have on others. We learn that others do not think like us or have the same experience even of the same things. It teaches us that we have to try and accept ourselves in all our strengths and weaknesses, so that we can make the best of the opportunities that come our way. The moving between and our own position and others’ positions gives a rich variation and complexity to our lives.

Recognising there is a way to go – living in the multi-cultural environment of London in 2012 watching the Paralympics is part of the antidote!

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2012
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.

Rich should pay tax
Bank Holiday Weekends are long weekends. If you are having a good time, they go quickly and you get two Saturday nights! If you are not having a good time, they seem like an eternity where you are glad to get back to your routine. Some people go away, other people never go away on Bank Holidays to avoid all the other people going away.
You would think that the extra day was a week with all that is meant to be accomplished over the long weekend. DIY shops heavily advertise before the weekend to sell their goods, because you have so much more time to improve your home. Days out are heavily targeted towards families to have a good time.

In the 1970s leisure time was predicted to increase so much that we would not what to with it. Technology was meant to do the work for us. There was a real anxiety about the amount of leisure time that we would have, and how would we have to learn to deal with it?
So what happened?

In one way the prediction was right: people are retiring for longer, but this creates problems of how it can be afforded. Back then work was not clearly seen as a privilege. To work and earn money we now recognise as a lucky thing to have, and many people across the globe do not have it. In the 1970s work was seen as easy to find. The threat of not having work was only just beginning to be understood.
The idea of machines and technology doing all the work for us, partly felt a bit of a threat. The idea of occupation with a purpose being intrinsic to a healthy productive life, was taken for granted. Only when there was not enough work to go around, did people realise the negative impact of being unemployed.
The inequality between employed and unemployed has grown but not nearly as much as the inequality at work. Wealthy organisations and institutions have given way to the availability of cheap credit to fund the business empires of super-rich individuals.

So “the rich should pay tax”? This makes sense: but will it happen? The rich have never paid their fair share of tax precisely because they are rich. Having money saves you money. Going down to the corner shop and buying one of something whenever you need it is more expensive than going to the supermarket and buying a multi-pack. To buy the multi-pack you need more money in the first place.
The expertise of tax avoidance is financed by the rich, because they have something to lose. To avoid mansion tax you have to have a mansion! There is also the mind-set. We generally fool ourselves that careers come from hard work. Not luck, or knowing someone, or being in the right place at the right time. If you are honest, and examine your work life you know that you have been lucky. You might be good at your job and have worked hard, but so have other people who are not so lucky.
The rich, and particularly the self- made rich are very good at this: they have earned every last penny through their hard work, & graft. They are not going to give it to anyone else. The business brain thinks less of humans and more of money. Their money is meant to grow, not be given away to pull the UK economy out of its hole because it over extended itself.
Hope you had a good bank holiday weekend.

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2012
All rights reserved
Disclaimer: This weblog content are the views of the writer and for general information only.
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique.

The 5:2 diet is a way of being healthy, eating what you like for 5 days and for two non-consecutive days eating 600 calories. It is a pity that it has to be called a diet – suggesting that it is about weight loss. The biggest gain appears to be that it decreases the level of human growth hormone IGF-1 which is indicated in lots of illness. Eat, Fast and live Longer seems a better explanation but then to advertise it effectively it has to be sold as weight loss: good health is not a sexy!

It is well known that we over eat, with little exercise doing sedentary jobs. Generations before either learnt restricted diets from war rationing, or expected to do a lot more physical exercise. Stories of workers in the 1940s and 1950s walking or cycling miles to work are not uncommon. Like the rest of sport doing exercise has become part of the world of marketing, and life style choice rather then something you had to do to travel to work or actually do at work.

Digging holes for water pipes is instructional: you start by digging a hole, then extend it in the direction instructed. You do this for eight hours, and then go home for the evening. You go to bed after a hot bath tending aching muscles and an overworked spine. Coming back to the hole the next day is a problem. It looks like it has been waiting for you all night unchanged ready for you to spend the rest of the day digging it. It looks fresh in the new day light, as though energised with its rest from you. It is relentless in its waiting: nobody else is going to dig the hole for you and the hole knows this. For the first few days it is painful, but then your body adjusts to the task and begins to grow muscles. Then the problem becomes the psychological tedium. Your body has adjusted to the task, and now your mind is free from physical pain. Here the road divides between being able to imagine and have satisfaction from your thoughts, or want more stimulation and become bored and resentful at the amount of money you are earning and the unforgiving nature of the hole.

Yet there is a beautiful simplicity of earning a living digging a hole. Anxiety and depression lessen as fitness develops and extra energy is used up in the hole. Travellers pay money to go to exotic parts of the world to dig a hole: ok there might be better views, better company of fellow travellers away from their sophisticated urban lives, than a road crew.
But it is similar.
So 21st Civiliseds try the 5:2 Diet and dream of digging holes in your holidays!

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2012
All rights reserved
Disclaimer: This weblog content are the views of the writer and for general information only.
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique.

The Olympics and the Lottery
So the 2012 London Olympics are over!! The Games were very successful: the number of medals won by Team GB coming third behind China, and the US, un-Britishly well- organised, and a great advert for Uk plc beamed to millions of people all over the planet. The feel good factor was felt up and down the land creating a welcome distraction to the economy and euro crisis. Team GB’s success was down to the determination and commitment of the athletes, and also to the funding received by the Big Lottery.
People with dreams funding people with dreams.
People playing the Lottery pay for a chance to escape their lives by hoping for overnight wealth which is unearned, and some would say undeserved. Lottery players are funding the dreams of athletes, going for gold, working hard, committed to long hours of practice, to peak their performance in a two week time frame. At face value Lottery players are deemed less worthy than Olympic athletes. The athletes have a purpose, a goal to pursue, supported by a history of Olympic tradition which transcends the everyday to the exceptional, to be the best in the world, to be in the sporting elite.
Under closer scrutiny the difference between Lottery players and Athletes lessens.
Both are going for gold.
The idea of competing being the ultimate Olympic ideal wears thin, with the focus on medal winners, and spectators forgetting athletes who come second. The sponsorship available for an athlete who wins gold is like winning the Lottery. Millions of pounds suddenly become available to athletes particularly in new events who have scraped a living to train and compete in the Olympics.

The Big Lottery has funded Team GB: but it is has a dark side. It corrodes our thinking about money, status and being satisfied. The smart people who have made fortunes are giving it away: having gained the wisdom that money without purpose is a recipe for disaster. For Lottery players the wish for enormous wealth far outweighs the danger underneath. Imagine giving your family and friends a million pounds each, or not! Would your relationships be the same? Yet it is not an argument.

Like countries are on the verge of creating wealth for their populations, consumerism and materialism have to be experienced for a length of time before the downsides are appreciated. The evidence of Lottery winners having miserable lives after their winning is not convincing.
Europe has understood for a time now the downside of wealth, but still holds onto it. The randomness and cruelty of the open market creating powerful international financial forces, that governments have little control over. The rise of the importance of the individual: the unhappiness and dis-satisfaction in the West with an increasing population suffering from depression and anxiety.

There is also a dark side to the Olympics. Exercise creates a mood and chemicals in the body that can make the person feel happy. Exercise is good for us. To use the jargon: it enhances our physical and mental well- being.
Yet if anyone went to their GP describing an obsessional activity, lasting over a period of four years, which took them away from themselves, families and friends would demand a treatment plan. Yet this is the life of an athlete: obsessional, driven and addictively intent on a single goal: and most importantly a goal which is highly revered and rewarded in the world of 2012. When athletes were asked continually about their feelings on winning there were stock responses: unbelievable, fantastic, incredible!! What else could they say? But perhaps exercise at an extreme level avoids extreme feelings underneath. The sight of previous medal winners commentating on the events gave the impression of a one dimensional being expert in extreme exercise holding back complex difficult feelings.

Again the message is the same from the Lottery player and the Athlete:
give me a large reward for the avoidance of me: I don’t like me, it hurts.

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2012
All rights reserved
Disclaimer: This weblog content are the views of the writer and for general information only.
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique.

Summer Holidays: What For?
There is awareness in general that the Christmas break is a stressful time for people: especially dealing with visiting relatives, for parents of consumerist kids,  those who are isolated or have no contact with family.
But what about summer holidays? There is the same huge expectation that everything must go well and be right. The break is deserved for all the hard work that has been done in the year.  People go on holiday with their friends and families who they choose (unlike Christmas). Some save for a long time to afford it.
Others are unable to afford it at all. Whichever way you look at it: the pressure is on.

If it goes well: fantastic. People return home relaxed and rejuvenated: children take developmental leaps with constant parental attention. Teenagers are allowed to do their own thing, and meet other teenagers. Wonderful sites are seen and history and culture learnt.

But … if it goes badly; your choice of family, partner, friends, and children (a choice was made to have them!) comes under scrutiny. The choice is our responsibility, where relatives at Christmas is not!!

Two weeks holiday is a compacted amount of time where friends and families get to test out their everyday relationships in the more pressured environment of time and space. More time spent together, and smaller physical spaces of a hotel rooms, cottages, apartments, chalets, and tents! Gone are the diversions and distractions of everyday life!

There are many different holidays: beach and sun, activity, historical site seeing, visiting museums, taking place at home and abroad. If you stay in the UK: television, radio, culture is reasonably familiar and understood. Going abroad where the language is not understood rests senses such as hearing and speaking, and makes TV watching senses redundant!

A couple on a beach holiday might involve one person reading a book all day, while the other heads out to a far land mass, or goes off to ‘explore’ the local amenities to alleviate the boredom and fill the void.
Children and teenagers wandering around the most significant, and stunningly beautiful buildings in the world look listless and bored. Requests to get back on their pcs, eat something, or play in the pool are met with frustration at the lack of appreciation.
Families who holiday with other families clash over the organisation of budgets, meal and bed times. Parents who want to spend more time with their children are out of synch with parents who want to spend less!!
Managers with stressful jobs stay in bijou hotels reflecting their hard work and salary. Some fly to airports and drive several hours to remote second homes. There is more control and predictability in having a relaxing time. Once it is set up only hand luggage needs to be taken on the plane, avoiding the stress of baggage claim.

Then there is the return to normality where holiday blues kick in. The higher quality of life plans talked about in the holidays appear tempered by the sight of the familiar host airport. Routines kick back in, as if the break did not happen.

People might look back in history, and see the taking of summer holidays in the 20^th/21^st century as something quite peculiar. After all it is a relatively recent phenomenon: 100 years ago workers had only one day off a week, and the affordability of air travel is only 50 years old!

Is this related to stress in the 21^st Century? and how it is built up and how it is has to be relieved? The lack of integration in our lives of work and play becomes more exaggerated. People with jobs are working more for less, and the people who do not have jobs are not able to have a break from the dull routine of unemployment. Access to the sun and living in a temperate climate has distorted our relationship to the heat. A closer examination of how we feel about our everyday lives might alleviate the stress, and expectation of holidays.
Have a good break.

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2012
All rights reserved
Disclaimer: This weblog content are the views of the writer and for general information only.
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique.

Stripping and Internet Pornography
Is sex very different for men and women? Steven Soderbergh discussing his new film Magic Mike talked about men and women visiting strip clubs. For men it is a solitary, and predatory exercise where the fantasy does not stop at the end of the show. Women go to strip clubs in groups and it is a laugh which finishes at the end of the show.

The role of fantasy for men and women appears to be different. This is a complex area with many strands. The history of men and women, of men owning women’s bodies, and  the stronger physicality of men dominating women all point to the subjugation of women. The violence in film and television towards women sexualises and glorifies violence against women. Recently the book Fifty Shades of Grey has raised the game of women’s fantasy to compete with men.
There is more sex selling products than ever before. The sexualisation of youth forces youth to start younger. Internet pornography is so easy to access that it has become normalised and mainstream. The internet enables people to disguise their identities, so that they can be disinhibited to play any sexual role without being discovered.

From the film Closer there is a sex chat room scene where two men are messaging to each other over the internet. The Jude Law character pretends to be a blonde graphically explaining her sexual masturbation and behaviour. The more naïve doctor character played by Clive Owen is taken in by this pretense, and wants to arrange a meeting.  How had the Jude Law character behaved?  Was he seeking revenge? He looked disinterested and bored. Is he using humans as objects? Is this fun?
Is this healthy?
Unresolved issues of power, control, and hatred can be acted out sexually. How we deal with this in relationship to ourselves and others starts at the beginning of our personal histories. How we learn and are introduced to love and sex contributes to our sexuality.

What is healthy has become confused. Does pornography demean women, and give men unrealistic expectations about sex in real life? Or is pornography a healthy outlet that stops the acting out of more violent sexual fantasies?
In 2012 we can be what we want to be more than ever before. The upside is that we have more choices on how to live our lives. The downside is arguable: we can be whoever we want to be: but if that is deemed unacceptable or unhealthy then there is less than ever before that people, government or state can do about it. Responsibility is the guardian of choice and freedom.
Stripping and Internet Pornography

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2012
All rights reserved
Disclaimer: This weblog content are the views of the writer and for general information only.
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique.

Moving into the grey – Slavery, Race, and Immigration
Michael Johnson’s “Survival of the Fastest” programme on Channel 4 put forward the idea that through the social engineering of slavery, only the strongest slaves survived the boat trip to Jamaica. This is part of the explanation as to why the fastest athletes come from Jamaica. The slave traders left the most aggressive, troublesome slaves in Jamaica: the last stopping off point to the New World. Modern athletes come from this gene pool. This programme is made over 150 years after the beginning of the American Civil War in 1861 which abolished slavery in the Unites States.

In 1988 Jimmy ‘the Greek’ Snyder an American sports commentator was fired by CBS the American TV network for expressing the same theory, as it was seen as racist. A white man putting forward a theory using slavery and race to explain Black athletes’ track speed was never going to be tolerated. CBS did not want anything which might negatively influence its TV ratings.

Have things changed? Over 20 years after Jimmy ‘The Greek’, Michael Johnson has the two criteria to be able to make a programme like this without causing a stir: he still is one of the fastest athletes in the world, and he is black. Could this programme have been made by Christophe Lemaitre? Who? In 2010 Lemaitre became the first white man to run 100 metres in under 10 seconds. The answer is no: because slavery benefitted whites. This is a story of oppression and shame: the shamed cannot tell this story.

But one day they might be able to. When education, job opportunity, social mobility apply to equally to all UK citizens .. maybe. The shift to equality, and rights being wronged is a work in progress. Some would say there is not a lot of progress being made in the area of racial prejudice.
150 years after the abolition of slavery in the US Michael Johnson can attribute the possibility of athletic prowess to a racial gene pool, without it being a racial prejudice.

Ed Milliband leader of the Labour Party said that the Labour Party ‘got it wrong’ in 2004 for having a free immigration policy for EU accession states in Eastern Europe. In 2010 Gordon Brown called voter Gillian Duffy a bigot when she tried to bring up the subject of immigration. Two years later Milliband says they got it wrong. It took eight years to move from the free immigration policy to Milliband saying his party got it wrong: a shift from racial intolerance to understanding the effect of immigration on local populations; and not  perceived as being racist. Racism and Immigration are complex issues: it is hopeful that there appears to be some moving from black and white thinking to grey thinking. An opportunity to think about the complexity of these issues in the grey maybe overtaking polemics.
Moving into the grey – Slavery, Race, and Immigration

Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2012
All rights reserved
Disclaimer: This weblog content are the views of the writer and for general information only.
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique.