The Psycho-Education Blog
Welcome to our blog - To help develop our understanding of human nature and the challenge of changing how life is. We will add new thinking to this blog at the beginning of each month so you can check back for the next instalment!
The latest blog post is always at the end of our home page each month! But here is where it starts if you want to read from the beginning...
Jan 2025: The Brain, the Nervous System & Change - part 1.
Change is sometimes easy to make - If we get tired of watching the ITV news, we can give the BBC a go. But most change that we seek to address (often through therapy) has varying degrees of difficulty, - as you probably know. There are many complex reasons for this, and many different theories (hundreds in fact) that the psychological professions have come up with to try to understand why and what can help overcome the difficulty. All these theories hold some value and some truth, but just like with the laws of physics and ideas in economics, none of them are complete.
You have possibly come across the idea that the human brain is the most complex structure that we know of in the universe. In recent years neuroscientists have understood more to confirm this reality. We now know, that we are born with around 86 billion neurons in our brain, which then connect with each other on multiple levels as we experience life and develop an understanding for how the world works. These connections form a neural network, with more synaptic connections between the neurons than there are stars in the universe. And there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on planet earth. And all this by the age of 5 - yes, 95% of your neural network is formed by the age of 5!
So, when people come seeking counselling and psychotherapy at our Oxford & Witney centres, sometimes th ey don't always appreciate why change can be so difficult, they just know that it is. But, when we think about the complexity of the brain which I have just outlined, which forms alongside our nervous system during the first years of life, we begin to appreciate why neuroscientists are now confirming what Freud was theorising about 120 years ago, that we are predominantly 'unconscious'.
More on this next month...
Feb 2025: The Brain, the Nervous System & Change - part 2.
Last month, we referenced the neuroscience which now appreciates that the vast majority of the structure of your brain and nervous system as you read this text formed by the age of 5. But if we asked you to write a book about all you could remember of those first 5-years, how big a book could you write? Most people, when we ask them this question would answer with, a page or two at most; with some people saying they have no memory of this brain and nervous system forming time at all.
There is a concept called ‘Neuroplasticity’, which refers to the ability of the brain to change through further experiences beyond the age of 5, and indeed, throughout life. We know that with new information for example, our opinions can change. Some opinions are however, more resilient than others. A good example would be with voting in general elections. ‘Floating Voters’ are known as such because their vote changes from one election to another. For others, they would never vote anything other than conservative, or labour for example. Why is there this difference between floating and committed voters?
For the purpose of this blog, let us imagine that a client came to therapy because they were a fixed voter, and wanted to become a floating voter (or vice versa), and they wanted us to help them with this ‘problem’. At this point, we don’t need to develop an understanding of why someone would have a problem like this - after all, it is often the case that we don’t understand the problems other people have at all. We are really just fleshing out some of the landscape as to why change might be difficult, and how we might begin to think about it with this voting client. So, between now and next month’s blog, you might consider reasons why some people are floating voters and some are not, and what the implications are for the therapist they want help from.
March 2025: Change and the ‘floating voter’.
Last month I invited you to think about change with regard to a voter. The first invitation for your thinking was regarding why some people are floating voters and some are not. It doesn’t seem too big a stretch to think about it being to do with influence from their family of origin and upbringing. Sometimes people will develop very strong fixed views about their own politics which is in keeping with their families, and sometime it is in opposition to them. There are many, many subtle and unconscious factors at play which have an effect on whether you adopt your families ‘culture’, or grow to oppose it. The idea that, because some people adopt and some people oppose any given aspect of family culture, that it is random, is wrong, but hard to prove. This is because there are so many factors at play. You could google ‘attachment theory’ on the internet for example, and you would find that some people develop as securely attached and some people as insecurely attached. When you understand the details around how these attachment styles (and there are other styles and other theories) develop, you would conclude that this isn’t random either.
Next month, I will talk more about these complex variables, but before then, I wanted to say something about the second query I left you with… ‘what are the implications for the therapist the voter wants help from’, to change their voting tendencies (floating or fixed)? There are two major implications for the therapist. Firstly, it feels impossible doesn’t it - to get someone to be a lifetime conservative voter from now on, if they have always been a floating voter? Or to get a staunch Labour voter to contemplate floating over to the ‘right’. How would you do it? When we appreciate that our personalities, character traits and values are essentially hard wired in, you begin to see the challenge.
Although we are looking at a request for help that I can’t imagine ever being asked for, the principles around the difficulty are nevertheless real, and widely applicable. The next implication for the therapist is a dilemma. Clearly, a part of this client is attached to one position (be it floating or fixed) and another part of this client wants to change it. The words we use to communicate just don’t do justice to the complexity of human nature - who is the client? Is it the one who ‘says’ they want to change their voting habits, or the one that ‘acts’ to keep them the same? Which one of them should the therapist support? As this blog continues, we will uncover more about the complexity of ‘us’, and the implied complications for therapy! Until next time…
April 2025: Who am I ?
Last month, I introduced the idea of us having different parts. Simple versions of this which might be most recognisable to you in the real world, unlike the voting example above, might be when a part of you would like to do one thing, and another part of you another. For example,
* You want to go the party vs I’m too tired
* I want to buy a new car vs I should save the money in case that redundancy happens
* I’d like to go to therapy vs I don’t want to spend money on that
Etc.
In the above examples, we can say that one part of us is in conflict with another part of us. Like all conflicts, sometimes they are fairly easily resolved, and sometimes not so easily.
States of conflict is an important way in which we understand the human condition at OTS, and I will write more about this as time goes on in this blog series.
Many of the hundreds of different theories about human nature and how therapists work with them, include ideas around us having parts, as opposed to us being one singular coherent mind.
One of the most well known ways of differentiating the parts of us can be attributed to TA therapy (Transactional Analysis). In it’s simplest version, they differentiate a person into three main parts, Parent, Adult & Child. You may recognise these parts in yourself, in times when you feel childlike, or young; or when you feel like you are telling your partner what to do and they seem to be behaving childishly - there are differences between the way two adults might be talking to each other as adult to adult, and when they are talking as if one was the parent of the other.
This is an example where we are experiencing one part of ourselves , and are in conflict with a part in another person.
So conflicts can be interpersonal or intrapersonal, between two people, or between parts of ourself!
So far we have talked this month about conflicts which we are consciously aware of. Next month I will begin to explore how it gets much more complicated!
May 2025:’I think, therefore I am’
You may recognise this phrase as the most well known of phrases attributed to the 17th century philosopher René Descartes. It is a phrase that is understandably assumed to be logically true. When you have a thought, it’s you that is thinking it isn’t it? After all, it’s in your head, so it must surely be you, and your thought!
Let me explain why it doesn’t make such simple sense to me and others I work with. When I was young, in my twenties and psychologically ignorant in these areas, I recall getting cross with children at the dinner table when they kept putting their elbows back on the table, having been told several times to take them off. I was asked why I was getting cross, and I could only come up with the dumbest of answers … ‘because!’
I was helped to recognise that not only was this a dumb answer, but that the only reason I was giving this instruction was that I had been indoctrinated in the rule by my parents. When ‘I’ thought about it, I didn’t want to teach children rules I had no good reason for them to learn, and more importantly, I didn’t want to get cross with lovely, well behaved children for not immediately and consistently obeying a rule. Even if it had been a good rule like, look right and left before crossing the road, which it wasn’t, we need to allow children time to learn ‘useful’ rules, and not get cross with them for not fully learning it to our timetable.
I further got to understand that such crossness as I felt and expressed to these children also had come from my parents. When ‘I’ think about it, I don’t want to be like that.
Ultimately, I found it made more sense to me as a way of understanding, that my parents were at that dinner table - not me. If ‘I’ had been there, free of their influence, I would not have been like that.
Whilst we could fill many websites exploring parenting, this blog is not currently focussed on this, but to make the point that it is rather more complex than it seems when ‘we’ have thoughts. It is worth saying, that this is not about blaming parents, but understanding that they had parents too, and that thoughts, feelings and behaviours can be passed down through the generations unconsciously.
The ‘I’ that I started putting in single inverted commas in this month’s blog was definitely more conscious than the ‘I’ who was at that dinner table. Unfortunately, it is not straightforward to simply let go of the influence of our parents with which we have become ingrained. We become quite habitual with their influences. Hence internally, when we become more conscious, we can become aware of more of the conflicts in our system.
So, if Descartes had been more appreciative of the conflicted and different parts ourselves, he may have written, ‘I think, therefore they are’ or, ‘We think, therefore they are’. If you join me next month, we will go further down this rabbit hole!
June 2025:Further Down The Rabbit Hole…
In the film, The Matrix, Morpheus famously says to Neo (the Keanu Reeves character),
<“li>You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes."
Long term and deeper therapy processes can be like taking the red pill, when we really enter into a curiosity about the uniqueness of our own human condition and psyche.
One of the trickiest aspects of having a mind, is that it likes to be right and it often likes to be certain. Some folk are (I would say) lucky enough to have developed in such a way as to be ok with uncertainty, but many of us can feel anxious without it; it all depends on the influences on us in our early development.
The problem with this need to be right and certain, is manyfold, but let us just look at two aspects for now…
Firstly, we generally identify ourselves as our minds. When we refer to our bodies, perhaps holding up a hand, we would say, ‘this is my hand’, not, ‘this is me’. We talk about my stomach, as though it is something that belongs to us, but not us. Well, ironically we also say ‘my mind’ as in, ‘I have made my mind up’. So, we talk as though we are not mind, even though we generally think it defines us. But who are we if not mind and not hand, and not stomache. This is clearly a difficult philosophical question, as well as a difficult psychological one. I am not trying to give you or lead you to definitive answers, but to invite you to think about the complexity of you (and me). Because, when we develop our capacity to be curious in ourselves, in others and the relationship between us, we might learn something new. The more attached we are to our own dogmatic beliefs and truths, then we can learn very little.
It is hard to be this curious however, when we have strong reactions to each other - like in marriages (generally after some period of time), or in therapeutic relationships, again, generally after some period of time. But why does it take time before relationships really start to break down?
To answer this to some extent, let’s look at the second aspect of mind, which needs us to revisit some of the points made in previous months’ posts, that it seems more valid to contemplate ourselves: a) as having a multiplicity of parts/minds/self-states; and b) that we are predominantly unconscious of what is going on in ‘our minds’. When we are in conflict in ourselves, say for example between a desire to be fit and join the gym, or a desire to watch the latest episodes of our favourite programmes and ‘veg out’, then we have two different self-states battling for dominance; as opposed to when we are in conflict with another person, when we might be in one dominant mind or self-state, and the conflict is with someone else.
Given that the mind wants to be certain and be right, we often battle for dominance between one internal mind or state and another, or between the minds of two different people. And it is often a battle! Learning to be curious, and not so attached to being right and certain brings possibilities other than winning or losing the battle.
Learning to be curious rather than dogmatic is a skill we can learn and practice. Not doing so, relates to the question I posed earlier - regarding. ‘why does it take time before relationships really start to break down? The simple answer is, that we didn’t get enough practice in being curious, before it was too late, and the full blown war with years worth of ammunition (unresolved mini-conflicts) erupted! The less simplistic answer, we will return to, next month!
July 2025:The Law Of Unconscious Attraction (part 1)
One of the first books that I read on human nature was called ‘Women Who Love Too Much’, by Robin Norwood. In it she talked about her research interviewing women who had gone into refuges to escape abusive relationships with alcoholic men. She found many women who had been married several times or, been in relationships several times with alcoholic abusive men. She also interviewed women who said they didn’t understand it, as ‘John’ didn’t drink when she met him, and he was lovely to her. How then did this keep happening?
This section is definitely not to excuse or blame behaviours that are clearly not ok, but it is about wondering how relationships can come about and develop, seemingly according to some kind of patterning. Norwood also found that the women she had interviewed had predominantly had alcoholic and abusive fathers. Which is what we might think about, in terms of where the ‘patterning’ begins.
Being around one’s parents, is like staring at the sun for a long time; it burns an image into your retina. Look at it long enough, and the image never goes away - which is why we are told from when we are small, don’t look at the sun! Being around parents as our dominant influence has the same, though much more complex effect on our neural network and our nervous systems. Have you noticed how many parents are walking along with their children, and paying more attention to their phone than the child? We might wonder what messages the child is picking up in terms of their importance and value in comparison with the phone!
There are many different models of thinking about how we develop in childhood, how patterns of relating, both to ourselves and others, get set up. But again, referring to early threads in this blog, if we take the neuroscience seriously, the degree of unconsciousness which we all have means that it is often difficult to see the patterns, and how they are manifesting all of the time, not least in our choice of romantic partner.
We can think of relationships as developing out of attachment styles, or within the TA model of ‘Parent, Adult, Child’ relationships (as two of many), but whichever model we use, I don’t think we can get around there being unconscious processes at work in our choices.
If you ask people why they fell in love with their husband or wife, my experience is that you get responses from a fairly limited and superficial range of conscious reasons. I don’t mean superficial in any derogatory way, but to refer to the fact that they are reasons which our limited conscious minds can make sense of.
But again, if we take seriously the idea that our patterns of relating to ourselves and others get set up in childhood, then we might come up with more complex answers than the common ones of:
Next month we will continue with Part 2 of ‘The Law Of Unconscious Attraction’
