Paradox and Passion in Psychotherapy

An Existential Approach

Emmy van Deurzen

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781118713846, 9781118713853
• eBook ISBN: 9781118713839
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

Paradox and Passion in Psychotherapy , second edition, is a fully updated edition of a classic guide to existential psychotherapy by one of its leading practitioner.

• Examines the personal and subjective dimensions of psychotherapy in a fresh and bold manner
• Offers practical and common-sense approaches to tackling sensitive issues when working with clients with an emphasis on transparency and authenticity
• Weaves together concepts of existential psychotherapy with case studies and the author's experiential observations in a seamless narrative
• Covers a wide range of intimate existential issues, including loneliness, survival, self-understanding, love, and passion

 

Section 1
Paradox

Introduction: The Central Role of Paradox in Human Existence

Human living is based on movement and change. We move from birth to death and on our way encounter many challenges. As soon as we are conceived, our cells begin an unstoppable process of division and multiplication, which leads to a moment-to-moment transformation as the blueprint of our genes executes its programme of creation of new life. After the programme is completed and we are ready to be born, new transformations are triggered immediately in our system. As we enter the world, if all goes well, we find it ready to envelop and receive us, providing us with all the experiences and relationships of challenge, care and learning that we need to become fully functioning human beings. Much of this learning is about becoming aware of the daily tasks we have to accomplish and the choices we have to make. We continue to evolve until we are capable of autonomy. We learn to feed ourselves, relieve ourselves cleanly, walk by ourselves, talk effectively with other human beings, dress ourselves and take care of our body, and eventually we learn to go out in the world to earn our keep and work for a living. Alongside this process our relationships with others shift and change and gradually become more important as we learn about love. The explorations of our early years, however, are mostly focused on learning these survival skills that will help us stay safe by our own means, without any further protection from others. When we look at this process of evolving, learning, growing up and changing we immediately notice it is about a gradual mastery and adjustment to the facts of life, the demands of the physical and social world. As Piaget said, we assimilate these facts as best we can and learn to accommodate to that world to the best of our abilities. But what is it that we assimilate and accommodate to? What is it that we feed off, learn from and try to master so that we don’t go under?

Every child has to learn to know the boundaries and steer a safe course in between the opposites that surround us. They learn about differential, about the way in which life proceeds by the balancing of energies. We teach our children language by pointing out the polarities and oppositions in the world. We show them that one thing is big and another thing little. We point out that they are young whereas their grandparents are old. We point to the sky that is up above and to the earth that is down below. We show them the difference, which they recognize instinctively anyway, between moving forwards or backwards, left or right, up or down, to or from. And while the words are new, the concept of differentiation between things in the world is easy to grasp and makes the world meaningful. Discrimination between what is good and what is not good is essential. We say: ‘feel how cold this ice-cube is, be careful for your fingers will stick to it' and ‘don't burn yourself on this stove, for it is hot'. We point at animals and draw the child's attention to the way in which the tortoise moves slowly and the rabbit runs fast. We immediately start evaluating these distinctions and apply them to the child's behaviour, too, praising or chiding according to what we think is most desirable at any one point. The child learns to distinguish between the importance of going slowly when they do something new or dangerous and going fast when they have to perform a routine task or show their mastery. They learn to make sense of these differentiations, except if the messages they receive about it are confusing. Eventually they start forming their own opinions, as they begin to make sense of it all. They know that this office building in the street is tall and this birdhouse in the garden is small. But the difference between the sizes of different houses in their neighbourhood and the desirability of living in a big or small house is dependent on a much more complex way of processing polarities. The same goes for information that comes from the physical world and the body. We tell them that this carrot is good to eat and this dirt is bad. Our children learn that the sweetness of fruit (good), is outstripped by the sweetness of ice-cream and cakes (naughty) and they immediately know that they prefer the latter, only to be told, confusingly, that they have to eat their carrots before they can have dessert. Why does anyone have to be told that one thing is good and the other bad, if it doesn't seem to match reality? It should all be so very clear. Initially flavours seem sufficient. Kids know instinctively that some things are yummy and other things yucky. But they can’t rely on this natural source of information as our world has been cultivated in so many ways and thus has been distorted. Human beings have been far too clever for their own good and have altered the world to such an extent that cultural learning is now as important as physical learning. For instance, for a young child who lives in a pre-industrial countryside, it is self-evident that light and dark are meant for different things: light is for playing and working and dark is for resting and sleeping. We get up in the morning, when it is light, and we go to bed to sleep at night when it is dark. Our body clocks were designed to keep track of these natural distinctions and set off the correct physical responses in us. But children in post-industrial cultures see their parents staying up late at night, in bright artificial conditions that allow them to relish relaxation and other special activities that become highly valued. So, children want to be part of the lamplight world and begin to feel that sleeping is for losers and that night adventures are the best ones and can be enjoyed by those who ask for them assertively. Parents have some trouble in setting boundaries around this. They mostly do this by resorting to the distinctions between what is good for the young as opposed to what is good for the old. There are other things that remain uncontroversial and universal. Kids soon realize that cold and wet weather is to be feared and pleasant warm weather is to be welcomed. Parents caution them about exposing themselves to the elements in winter and encourage them to play outdoors in summer. Parents have many choices about how they differentiate all this learning, by, for instance, favouring winter sports, or camping in all conditions. The more children discover about how they can adjust to a variety of conditions the more physical freedom they will have. Parents often encourage obedience instead of experimentation. They easily undermine the child’s natural curiosity by stopping them playing in rain, in deep puddles or in mud. They expect children to learn from being told instead of by finding out for themselves. The experience of good and bad weather is pretty universal. It takes some special wisdom to begin to appreciate all weathers and find pleasure in storms or showers. Even in equatorial countries children learn about wet and dry seasons and the different ways of life associated with them. They quickly pick up what feels right and what feels wrong. That original distinction between what is pleasant and what is unpleasant is soon driven home. Children come to realize that nature and circumstances of fate play a big role in life. Their parents will constantly comment on social, natural, physical, emotional, familial and cultural experiences, according negative or positive values to them all the time. It is one of the parental tasks to acculturate children to such basic experiences, but it does not take them any effort. Children pick up automatically from ongoing attitudes and conversations what is supposed to be good and what is supposed to be bad. Very soon the physical realities of the world become understood in terms of parameters of safety and these are interwoven with social and personal values. As we grow up we learn to see that we have to make daily choices about what is good and what is bad for us, but also between what will bring us parental approval or disapproval. We have to find our ways across the boundaries, too, sometimes, for we discover that some things, like spicy food, are hot and good and other things like burning matches are hot and bad. Categories get more and more complex and mixed up. Then again we may discover that the hot food we liked initially makes us have tummy ache, or the matches that we were warned against are a source of fun things like warm and cosy fires in the grate on a winter's day. We have to wend our way around the contradictions and oppositions to find a safe way across and it is often confusing and complicated to know which is which and how to go and work out what is top and what is bottom. It helps a lot to get exposed to other families, to read books and to watch films, or play games, in which new experiences can be had. Contrast and context are everything. What is sometimes good is at other times bad. Sooner or later we discover that not everyone attributes the same values to the same things, especially not if they come from a different class or live in a different culture. Children's books often have simple moral narratives that simplify our understanding of life by providing simple role models in attractive heroes and heroines that get things right on all counts, often after some misadventure. Religious heroes, like saints, gurus, buddhas, bodhisattvas, prophets or martyrs are similarly useful devices to help us find our way across the contradictions and find a sure path through the confusion towards all things that are good and away from all things that are dangerous or bad. As we know, this pursuit of the good tends to be challenged in adolescence and during teenage years, when young people start looking for alternative role models, in pop stars, celebrities or anti-heroes, who provide images of a braver and more interesting trajectory through the world, where we do not become quite so stolidly frozen in anxious attempts to stick with the safe path of parental prescription. Rebellion and early adulthood experimentation are an important part of becoming a person. We have to try being bad before we can find out how to be good.

But neither the pursuit of the good or the bad will provide the final solution to our searches. To become a mature individual with a reasonable amount of flexibility and freedom we have to master a more complex way of living: a way of life in which we are aware of the contradictions, the conflicts and the dilemmas. Our consciousness has to become raised to that level of awareness. When we are capable of seeing the whole range of what is possible, from one extreme to another and we can weigh up the pros and cons of all of our choices and we do not get frightened by this responsibility, then we can begin thrive on the adventure of living. It means we have multiple or even endless options and possibilities, and we can play and experiment and relish some degree of originality and creativity. We no longer worry as much about our responsibility as we did earlier, but we are more aware of our authorship and our capacity for making things different. We have choices and we relish exercising our authority.

It is hard to get to this level. Nobody explains to us that many of the tensions and contradictions of life will never resolve and that they do not have either/or answers. We may be fooled for a while in the belief that being young is better than being old, because it affords us exemption from the ties and bonds of work and responsibility, but we will be wondering, deep down inside, about the sleights of hands involved in all these matters and the way they are presented to us. As children we may be well aware that adults have more freedom and more ability to make choices than we ever do as children. Nevertheless, adults keep referring to the wonders of childhood and the alleged freedom we have. They appear to experience their own existence as devoid of freedom and seem to resent it as a kind of slavery. If we are children who grow up in a dysfunctional family or in the midst of trauma, we are less likely to be fooled by what is said. We are more likely to long for adulthood and for the escape from the unpleasant realities foisted upon us. We will be fairly sure that being a child is nothing but a recipe for disaster and long to even the score. Childhoods of suffering are forced upon us like a sore. Some people have easy beginnings where adults wait on their every wish, but even this does not lead to contentment. Most of our lives are troubled by some suffering or displeasure. All of us have to accept that life is about learning to take the good with the bad and getting better at coping with unpleasant realities. We may deduce that life is a bore or an impossible proposition where we can never do well or win. Some of us may opt to chuck it all in before we have even properly begun. If we are lucky we may find some good older people who can guide us when things are hard. If we are very fortunate we find someone to love and be loved by to make things easier and more attractive for a while. Some people have more luck than others in how their life starts. They may have relatively charmed lives, where they wrongly learn that the world turns around them. Sooner or later they will find out that this was an illusion that rather foolishly raised their expectations of an easy ride. People suffer emotionally for many different reasons. Yet we all share one reality, which is that our lives are framed by some unavoidable and inexorable tensions and contradictions that we have to learn to accept and work with. We are born to life in the certain knowledge that we shall die. We aim to be vital and thriving, whilst life continuously exposes us to potential illness and the threat of poverty and scarcity. We crave love and yearn to be loved, but are continuously afraid of being hated, despised, rejected or isolated. We like to think of ourselves as special, strong and successful, but we are inevitably faced with failure. We value truth, meaning and purpose but are often confused or unclear about what is true and regularly confronted with things that make no sense and do not seem right or fair.

We want happiness and pleasure, but cannot have endless supplies of these, though we may believe that being happy would solve all our troubles (Deurzen, 2009). Life decides otherwise. Fate brings us worries, challenges and disappointments, and we need a lifetime to learn to cope with these problems without floundering or sinking into despair and despondency. One of the obvious tasks of living, from which nobody is exempt, is that we have to find ways of dealing with unhappiness, pain and discomfort, loss and disappointment. Those of us who were over-protected as children have as much of a problem in finding our way in life as those who were over-exposed to problems. We do not stand a chance to live a decent life, unless we learn how to balance our happy moments against our unhappy ones and find a place at the centre of ourselves from which to draw strength and reach out for the next discovery. Many people initially misunderstand this and reach out to others for help and support, clinging to relationships as if life depended upon it. It is a paradox that we cannot do well in relationships until we learn to stand strong on our own. We have to discover how to approach others from a settled feeling of inner value rather than in despair, need and emptiness, or worse, from a position of anger, mistrust and resentment. The flip side of the paradox is that we cannot learn to be strong in ourselves without being challenged as well as loved and protected by others.

Life constantly bounces us from one polarity to the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• About the Author
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface to the First Edition
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Section 1 Paradox
• Section 2 Passion
• Section 3 Existential Psychotherapy
• Section 4 Illustrations of Existential Work
• Conclusions
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement