Client Stories - "Superwoman"

In today’s society, women have taken up the mantle of full time employment, but often without relinquishing much of their traditional, and also full time role in looking after their children and house-keeping. This week’s blog is the story of a type of client with whom I have had many dealings. This is not the story of any one person, but a composite based on many clients with similar issues.

She is used to being the strong one in the relationship, has always worked hard, both at home and in paid employment and has been successful in both.  Other people come to her with their problems and she is happy to take on this role and is good at being there for others. She has good relationships with her partner and family who are supportive. However, over many months, pressure at work has been building progressively and she finds she is struggling to cope.  Despite being desperately tired, her sleep is disrupted with her waking up early and being unable to get back to sleep worrying about work and not feeling rested in the morning.

The final straw came when a colleague had criticised her work.  She burst into tears and withdrew to the toilets. She was not used to crying, let alone in front of others, and even worse, at work, so she went home early, feeling ashamed, confused and overwhelmed.

She contacted me seeking help to “get back to my normal self as this just isn’t me”. In the first session, she told me her story as above and a bit about her background. When talking about the situation at work, she became tearful for which she apologised. When I said that she didn’t need to apologise for expressing her feelings and that it was important for our work together that I heard and acknowledged her feelings, she started to cry but quickly stopped. I wondered with her how she felt about crying. She said that she felt stupid & weak, which she hated. I asked her where she had learnt this, but she didn’t know. I asked her how she would feel if her daughter cried. She recognised that she didn’t think her daughter was stupid or weak when she cried and would comfort her.  I wondered with her about why it was different for her than her daughter. We agreed that we would continue with the sessions in an open ended contract to help her cope with the pressures she faced.

Over the course of several sessions, we explored various aspects of her life in relation to her current situation & feelings.  Having initially talked about how her childhood had been “fine”, as we explored the way the current situation resonated with her past, she began to realise that any tears when she was growing up were “shushed” and she was told not to be so silly.  She had quickly learnt that such expressions of hurt would not be heard or acknowledged in her family, so it was better to “toughen up” and “get on with it” – this isn’t about blaming her parents, but developing a compassionate understanding for her experience as a child. 

Ignoring her difficult emotions had worked well for her until recently when she had become overloaded, so now a new way of dealing with them was needed. She had forgotten that she had needs, having for so long prioritised her family’s needs and those of her employers. She realised that she had not allowed time for herself for ages.

Whilst she understood her need to pay attention to her emotions intellectually, the habit of ignoring them had been learnt unconsciously in childhood and unwittingly reinforced throughout her life. Thus, it took some time for her to start to practice paying attention to, and finding expression for, her emotions in our sessions, through my questions exploring her experience. 

After so long ignoring her needs, she had felt like a passenger in the car of her life, allowing her direction to be chosen by the circumstances of the moment without really being aware of it.  As she began to notice her own wants and needs, she spent progressively more time in the driving seat of her life which enhanced her growing self-confidence. She decided to take some time each week in an activity she had loved earlier in her life but had been phased out whilst focusing on her family.

She discussed her workload with her manager. Whilst the pressure of market forces remained intense, she agreed with her manager a process by which she could feed back to him when her workload was becoming too much.  They could then re-prioritise her workload, identifying what might be delayed or shortcut with the least impact. In the past she had spent time, both in and out of work, worrying about how to manage her workload. The recognition from her manager implied in this process freed her up to be more productive.  Now she was worrying less, her sleep became less disrupted and she felt more rested in the morning. 

She realised that through stress she had become tetchy with the children when they misbehaved. She now felt differently in her relationship with them. She spent more time playing with them and clearly, she and they enjoyed this time together. They behaved more calmly as a result. They still had their moments, but even then she was able to manage their crises without feeling stretched.  Following open discussions with her partner, they decided to regularly spend some time with just the two of them away from the children.  Just the act of deciding together to do this re-established the strength of their relationship and more explicitly expressed loving feelings between them.

Her thoughts now moved towards her future and what she wanted from her career and life in general. She was considering various options including reducing her working hours & specialising in an aspect of her current career. She also started thinking about what they might do once the children had left home.

By this time, she felt she had got what she wanted from the therapy and was ready to leave.  The changes had crept up on her incrementally. So, when reviewing her progress in our work together, as part of the usual work of ending therapy, she found it hard to imagine herself as she had been prior to starting the sessions.  

She recognised that there was potentially yet more we could work with, but felt that what had been achieved was enough for now and would take some time to consolidate these benefits on her own.  She was aware of the warning signs and knew what to do if she started to feel stressed at work. However, she strongly felt that having got back in the driving seat of her life, and with all the supportive mechanisms she had put in place, she was unlikely to let that happen again.

She had valued our relationship, appreciating what she had learnt about herself in the process, and was sad that it was ending. She felt that if she needed to, she would imagine discussing things with me and find her own way forward. 

If you have any questions about this blog or any of the issues raised please feel free to contact me via my website: http://www.garycooktherapy.co.uk

Head and Heart

Many clients have a clear understanding of their issues, but find themselves behaving in ways that they know are inappropriate or unhelpful to them and can’t seem to stop themselves. In this week’s blog we will be looking at how therapy can help with this dilemma.

I use a simplified concept of head and heart to represent these two aspects of a person. This does not relate to the physical organs. It is merely a way of helping the client to understand that they hold within them two perspectives which disagree. This is most often a thought process versus one based primarily in the emotions. E.g. “I want to eat more even though I know I've had enough”.

In my experience, the emotions have their own logic – what I term crudely as “heart logic”. This may be more subtle and harder to uncover than “head logic”.  At its core, “heart logic” usually has an underlying message. All emotions may be thought of as messages from ourselves, to ourselves. For example, anger is a prompt to action, hence we get all fired up in readiness for that action.  Fear is a prompt to take defensive action in anticipation of some threat.

Babies need their caregivers, usually their parents, to help them learn how to manage their emotions.  No parent is perfect, so there can be issues for the child in this learning process. For example, anger or sadness, crying or complaining may be seen as “negative emotions”. The implication is that such emotions are not desirable. The child may infer from this that such emotions threaten their relationship with their parents on whom they are dependent for survival. This can make it a matter of life and death. Little wonder they try to swallow their anger, or feel ashamed if they are sad. “There must be something wrong with me”.  All of this typically happens outside of their awareness. In addition, Western society privileges an objective stance, which typically means logical thinking without emotions.  Thus, the emotions may be seen as irrational. 

Once the client has learnt that emotions are irrational, unhelpful, to be suppressed, kept within a particular range (no outbursts), then they are likely to respect their head logic at the expense of their heart. This means that the messages of their emotions are not being received. When they are not received, then those emotions try again and again to find a way to be heard.  It is at this point that the dilemma is born. As an adult, the client is not under the same threat as they were as a child, but now the “heart logic” has been buried in the unconscious, they don’t know that. So when a desire surfaces the client has no idea why it is so powerful.

Helping the client develop a compassionate understanding of the underlying logic of their emotions is an important part of the process of therapy. For example, they may realise that they hold a profound shame about some aspect of themselves that they are unloveable, too sensitive, too much, too needy, spoilt. They yearn to soothe this deep wound by any means. If the values in which they were brought up associated food with caring, then perhaps overeating is the heart’s “logical” response.  The next step is for the client’s compassionate understanding of their heart logic to enable them to work with processing the difficult emotions which prompted its necessity. When the emotional wound is healed through a loving relationship towards themselves, the message of the historically unacknowledged emotion is finally delivered. That emotion is satisfied and can now withdraw. Thus, the heart logic becomes redundant, resolving the dilemma.

This sounds all very straightforward. However, it can take time in establishing the therapeutic relationship to such a depth that a lifetime of unconscious and subtle defences dare to relax. Then they can start experimenting with expressing their most vulnerable parts of themselves. In becoming open to their whole being (head and heart) they can become more fully engaged with others.

If you have any questions about this blog or any of the issues raised please feel free to contact me via my website: http://www.garycooktherapy.co.uk