Toxic Young Adulthood

Therapy and Therapeutic Ethos

Del Loewenthal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032196053
• eBook ISBN: 9781000630275
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Salud mental en psicología

This book is for those interested in providing psychotherapy and counselling for young adults, and those who wish to bring a therapeutic sensibility to working with this client group.

Two main questions are addressed: What are the implications of providing a therapeutic ethos for young adults; and what, if any, additional training might be required for psychotherapists and counsellors working with this client group? In so doing this book explores what has too long been seen, at least for childhood, to be an urgent need for a therapeutic ethos. Such an ethos is to bring both therapeutic and educational sensibilities to bear on preventative and curative approaches to issues of young adults' well-being.

The chapters in this book, except one, were originally published in the European Journal of Psychotherapy& Counselling.

The time it takes; How do we understand personal growth in an age of instant solutions?

Rowan Williams

ABSTRACT

One source of the mental health challenges facing contemporary people, especially younger people, is the increasing commodification of experience: phases of life, human encounters and so on, which were once part of a connected narrative are seen as items to be purchased/acquired/accumulated by a curiously contentless desiring ego. But the effect of this is a sense of pervasive loss – characterised as loss of rhythm, narrative and future. There is a loss of connection with the processes and agencies of the natural world, a loss of a continuous narrative of the self and a loss of a manageable or desirable future (individual and social). Creating the conditions for mental health (not simply providing ambulance services) requires cultural resistance in all these areas; it is important to identify and nurture signs of such resistance as part of any strategy for improving mental health.

Die Zeit, die es braucht; Wie verstehen wir persönliches Wachstum im Zeitalter sofortiger Lösungen

ABSTRAKT

Eine Quelle für die psychischen Gesundheitsprobleme, mit denen zeitgenössische Menschen, insbesondere jüngere Menschen, konfrontiert sind, ist die zunehmende Vermarktung von Erfahrungen: Lebensphasen, menschliche Begegnungen usw., die einst Teil einer zusammenhängenden Erzählung waren, werden als zu kaufende/zu erwerbende Gegenstände angesehen. Angesammelt durch ein merkwürdig inhaltsloses Wunsch-Ego. Der Effekt davon ist jedoch ein Gefühl des allgegenwärtigen Verlusts - gekennzeichnet als Verlust von Rhythmus, Erzählung und Zukunft. Es gibt einen Verlust der Verbindung zu den Prozessen und Agenturen der natürlichen Welt, einen Verlust einer kontinuierlichen Selbsterzählung und einen Verlust einer überschaubaren oder wünschenswerten Zukunft (individuell und sozial). Die Schaffung der Bedingungen für die psychische Gesundheit (nicht nur die Bereitstellung von Krankenwagen) erfordert kulturellen Widerstand in all diesen Bereichen. Es ist wichtig, Anzeichen eines solchen Widerstands als Teil einer Strategie zur Verbesserung der psychischen Gesundheit zu identifizieren und zu fördern

El tiempo que se requiere; ¿Cómo entendemos el crecimiento personal en una era de soluciones instantáneas

RESUMEN

Una fuente de los desafíos de salud mental a los que se enfrentan las personas contemporáneas, especialmente las personas más jóvenes, es la creciente mercantilización de la experiencia: fases de la vida, encuentros humanos, etc., que alguna vez fueron parte de una narrativa conectada y que son vistos como elementos para ser comprados/adquiridos/acumulados por un ego curiosamente sin contenido. Pero el efecto de esto es una sensación de pérdida generalizada, caracterizada como pérdida de ritmo, historia y futuro. Hay una pérdida de conexión con los procesos y factores del mundo natural, una pérdida de una narrativa continua del yo y una pérdida de un futuro manejable o deseable (individual y social). La creación de las condiciones para la salud mental (no sólo la prestación de servicios de ambulancia) requiere resistencia cultural en todas estas áreas; es importante identificar y nutrir los signos de dicha resistencia como parte de cualquier estrategia para mejorar la salud mental.

Il tempo che occorre; Come comprendere la crescita personale in un’era di soluzioni istantanee

ASTRATTO

Una sfida per la salute mentale che deve essere affrontata dalle persone del nosro tempo, in particolare i giovani, è la crescente mercificazione dell’esperienza: fasi della vita, incontri umani e così via, che un tempo facevano parte di una narrativa sono visti come oggetti da acquistare/acquisire/accumulato da un ego desideroso curiosamente privo di contenuto. Ma l’effetto di questo è un senso di perdita pervasiva - caratterizzato come perdita di ritmo, narrativa e futuro. C’è una perdita di connessione con i processi e le agenzie del mondo naturale, una perdita di una narrazione continua di sé e una perdita di un futuro gestibile o desiderabile (individuale e sociale). Creare le condizioni per la salute mentale (non semplicemente fornire servizi di ambulanza) richiede resistenza culturale in tutte queste aree; è importante identificare e alimentare i segni di tale resistenza come parte di qualsiasi strategia per migliorare la salute mentale.

Le temps nécessaire; comprendre le développement personnel à une époque de solutions instantanées

En matière de santé mentale, un des défis auquel les gens d’aujourd’hui sont confrontés, et plus particulièrement les jeunes, est la tendance à la hausse de la marchandisation de l’expérience: les phases de la vie, les rencontres humaines et ainsi de suite, qui constituaient autrefois les éléments d’un récit connecté sont maintenant considérées comme des objets à acheter/se procurer/accumuler par un ego désirant mais curieusement sans contenu. Le résultat est un sentiment de perte omniprésent – caractérisé par une perte de rythme, de narratif et de futur. Il y a une perte de connexion avec les processus et le pouvoir de la nature, une perte de narratif continu de soi et une perte d’un futur gérable ou désirable (individuellement et socialement). Créer les conditions pour la santé mentale (et pas seulement octroyer plus de moyens aux services ambulanciers) nécessite une résistance culturelle dans tous ces domaines; il est important d’identifier et de cultiver les signes d’une telle résistance comme faisant partis de toutes stratégies visant à améliorer la santé mentale.

Ο χρόνος που χρειάζεται. Πώς αντιλαμβανόμαστε την προσωπική ανάπτυξη σε μια εποχή στιγμιαίων λύσεων

ΠΕΡ’ΊΛΗΨΗ

Μια πηγή πρόκλησης στη ψυχική υγεία των σύγχρονων ανθρώπων, ιδίως των νεότερων, αφορά την αυξανόμενη εμπορευματοποίηση των εμπειριών: οι φάσεις της ζωής, οι ανθρώπινες συναναστροφές και ούτω καθεξής, που κάποτε ήταν μέρος μιας συνδεδεμένης αφήγησης. Πλέον θεωρούνται αντικείμενα που πρέπει να αγοραστούν/αποκτηθούν/συσσωρευτούν από ένα άδειο εγώ που έχει περιέργεια και επιδιώκει. To αποτέλεσμα όμως, είναι μια αίσθηση διάχυτης απώλειας - που χαρακτηρίζεται ως απώλεια ρυθμού, αφήγησης και μέλλοντος. Υπάρχει απώλεια σύνδεσης με τις διαδικασίες και τις υπηρεσίες του φυσικού κόσμου, απώλεια μιας ενιαίας αφήγησης του εαυτού και απώλεια ενός διαχειρίσιμου ή επιθυμητού μέλλοντος (ατομικό και κοινωνικό). Η δημιουργία συνθηκών ψυχικής υγείας (όχι απλώς η παροχή πυροσβεστικών λύσεων) απαιτεί πολιτιστική αντίσταση σε όλους αυτούς τους τομείς. Είναι σημαντικό να εντοπίσουμε και να καλλιεργήσουμε σημάδια τέτοιας αντίστασης ως μέρος οποιασδήποτε στρατηγικής για τη βελτίωση της ψυχικής υγείας.

SCHLÜSSELWÖRTER Körperlichkeit; Ware; Umweltkrise; Erzählung

PALABRAS CLAVE corpaje; mercantilización; crisis ambiental; narrativa

PAROLE CHIAVE corporeità; mercificazione; crisi ambientale; narrativa

MOTS-CLÉS corporéité; marchandisation; crise environnementale; narrative

ΛΈΞΕΙΣ ΚΛΕΙΔΙΆ σωματικότητα; εμπορευματοποίηση; περιβαλλοντική κρίση; αφήγηση

It’s not difficult, in reflecting on mental health (particularly young people’s mental health) these days, to be struck by the pervasive phenomenon of the consumerising of human experience. More and more aspects of our lives are being reduced, explicitly or implicitly, to the level of commodities. Michael Sandel’s important book, What Money Can’t Buy (2013) did an impressive job of tracing this process of commodifying – from people paying others to stand and queue on their behalf to the bizarre practice of businesses taking out insurance on (not for) their employees to make sure of benefiting from any misfortune that happens to them. Increasingly, we are trading in the lives of others – trading time, convenience, well-being, as though these things were bits of transferable property. And the way in which we often approach human rights these days is not much help, as these too are regularly spoken of as though they were possessions, handed over to us at birth like old-fashioned Premium Bonds to be cashed when we want.

It makes rather depressing sense of the interest our institutions currently take in the quality of our experience of their work: have we had a good experience in the shop, the hospital, the school or university? Would we recommend it to other consumers? Questions about the ‘student experience’ in higher education institutions are a source of abiding anxiety to those who run those institutions; and the pressure on the consumer is constantly to check that you are having the best possible such experience – which involves anxious checking of our own feelings and comparing them with those of others. Somewhere in the ether there is a maximally positive experience that we should all be able to access; not a good recipe for limiting insecurity. A whole range of relationships that once had their own vocabulary and criteria are being re-imagined in these terms of producer and consumer. Student, traveller, legal client or medical patient, all are encouraged to meet on the common ground of being customers, directly or indirectly purchasing something that can succeed or fail to count as a good experience – an attitude that subtly moves us further away from asking whether a process is actually doing its job, producing a lasting outcome, whether or not we have felt it positively. Pointing this out is by no means to suggest that it is better not to think about how goods are delivered: ‘successful’ medical procedures in the past, to take an obvious example, were quiet often delivered in ways that infantilised or demeaned patients. But there is a real risk of blurring categories here. And the popularity of feel-good slogans in politics, blotting out hard questions about long-term results, properly effective and accountable methods and candid and sustained scrutiny, shows something of the danger. We like the sense of immediacy that we are offered by this stress on good experience, the sense of cutting out the interfering middle layers to secure access to what we want.

Problems enough there. But if we stop and ask about some of the underlying social factors that both explain and intensify this, the outlook becomes more complex and the problems more deep-seated. I want to try and identify some of the areas in our culture that play into the commodifying mentality, so as to raise the question of how we might step back and ask about the conditions for mental health, not just about diagnosis and damage limitation. And I’d sum up these areas as having to do with the awareness of rhythm in our human experience, with the nature of the narrative we tell, and with what we think and imagine about our future, individual and collective.

The first of these is not easy to categorise simply, but it is essentially about the ways in which we find our way to a sustainable pattern of life within the limits of our bodies. One of the most extraordinary things to surface in the last few years is the marketising of techniques to help us sleep, and the widespread confusion about this rather basic aspect of our human, embodied reality. The seductive cultural myth that associates sleep with some kind of weakness or failure in energy and aggression has sunk quite deeply into the collective psyche; we are invited to wonder at, and perhaps imitate, successful people who sleep less than the average number of hours. A globalised financial market and news cycle means that local rhythms of time keeping are felt as relative, and so perhaps unimportant: the ideal is wakefulness – not in the sense in which the word is used in the spiritual traditions of east and west as a marker for self-awareness, but as an undying vigilance around our performance and our control of the environment. As such, it is connected with the erosion of formalised or ritualised times for eating, both in households and in the round of working life. The rhythms of a body that requires nourishment, relative stillness, and pauses in the flow of buts consciousness are ignored. It is true that what we habitually call ‘civilised’ life represents to some extent a negotiation over this: we artificially prolong hours of light, for example, to give a standardised division of day and night through the year. But this has generally remained a modification of the basic rhythm rather than a denial of the underlying structure of alternating stress and slack, systole and diastole. The problem arises when this alternation slips out of view or imagination.

Some recent commentators, like the Canadian poet Jan Zwicky, have written of our situation as one in which we are, without quite knowing it, ‘homesick’ for the rest of creation. It’s no accident that many educational establishments invest in animals for petting at times of stress in the academic year; or that successful therapeutic programmes for young offenders involve giving them the care of animals. If we are regularly being persuaded to ignore our own animality, it is natural enough that the lack should be felt and that it should have damaging results; and natural that some restoration of this is part of a path to the restoration of basic well-being. Connecting with living beings that work in embodied rhythms, we are reminded of our own inescapable connection with day and night, summer and winter. And this is also why one deeply disturbing element in our current global environmental crisis is the steady reduction of forms of life around us, animate and inanimate – as if the ideal situation for human beings were to be the sole species surviving on earth.

This is further complicated by our confusions over ‘narrative’. It’s often pointed out that we are in a social and financial climate where any idea of a normative progression through stages of human life seems increasingly remote. Most human societies until recently worked with some broad pattern of growth and maturation – work, settlement in long-term sexual partnership and householding, parenthood, wider responsibility in the business of a community’s life, gradual withdrawal and movement towards death. Modernity has always chafed under the implied constraints of this – not without reason, given that this could indeed be a tyrannical routine, indifferent to individual hopes and gifts, and that it was generally more repressive for women than men. But whether we are thinking of prevailing patterns of employment and the emergence of the ‘portfolio career’; or of the inaccessibility of secure housing (let alone actual home ownership) for so many young people; or of the prolonging of the period of sexual experiemntation and the postponement of parenting; or of the all-or-nothing character of a lot of contemporary work, with little space for either public voluntary engagement or personal leisure – all these contribute to leaving us with a fragmented sense of personal continuity and a degree of uncertainty as to whether we can see our lives as having any cumulative shape, and progression towards some sort of balance or completeness. To put it very briefly, do we have stories about how we have learned to be human? We are regularly wary of putting the question in quite such blunt terms because of a nervousness of authorities prescriptively telling us what would count as a correct answer, and a proper awareness of the place of discontinuities, stresses and disruptions in the creation of narratives, pushing back against a premature smoothing out of stories into manageable continuity. We are sensitive to the dangers of all this because we (as people who have to some extent digested both modernism and postmodernism) are aware of the seductions of narrative power – my power to order and make intelligible my story about myself, my power over the narrative of another subaltern voice/perspective. The challenge is how we recover a discipline of negotiating with the material reality we all share that will produce some mutually recognisable pattern of human growth and maturity without appealing to or giving houseroom to these uncritical exercises of power. How do we come to see a truthful account of shared humanity not in terms of the ideological triumph of one party’s narrative but as a carefully evolved grammar of recognition between diverse agents and cultures?

The point needs making again that addressing the deficit of contemporary imagination is not to idealise some lost golden age of fixed roles and foreordained careers; simply to note that our economic culture – determined to the point of obsession to treat us as if we lived in a series of moments of timeless consumer choice – is unfriendly to the idea that the taking of time is essential to handling the most significant questions of how we come to understand our value and our values. The consumer model is not one that gives much help in growing into tested skills and habits; and the algorithms that dictate advertising practice simply calculate regularities in moments of choice, not the processes of learning to choose, or to discriminate in our choice. When we generally lack any clear narrative at the corporate level, the story provided by a faith or a philosophy or a national history, we are left with the formidable burden of repeatedly deciding who and what we are; creating ourselves out of our own will and instinct, again and again, rather than being able to integrate a wider narrative of human development into our own record of experience and vice versa. And this also means that we are more than ever vulnerable to the lures of pre-packaged narratives promising an identity that can be readily ‘weaponised’: a firmly policed and defined selfhood (individual or national) divorced from any process of learning or change.

If we finally add to this the growing sense of a future that is not guaranteed to produce any augmented well-being for us as individuals or for us as a human race, the position is even more serious. The loss of a standard narrative of human development, even if resisted, critiqued, refused, turned upside down, means that we have no default confidence that there is a place to get to in our human striving. The loss of the social and economic landmarks that assured us of something like a continuous working life means that we cannot be sure that we will be ‘looked after’ (what are the personal and psychological effects of the steady growth of uncertainty about the performance and calculation of pension funds over the last couple of decades?). And the unavoidable images of radical environmental degradation that are before us daily cut at the very roots of any trust in a stable natural environment. The future, in short, is not only uncertain (it has always by definition been that), but more directly menacing. It is not clear why we should exert ourselves to change, grow, understand or whatever if we cannot be sure that there is in any sense a goal that has a chance of realisation. If the future is one of advancing environmental catastrophe – even perhaps in the lifetime of the present generation – our motivation is undermined at a deep level.

All of this is really to say that the global political, economic and cultural s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction – toxic young adulthood: therapy and therapeutic ethos
• 1 The time it takes; How do we understand personal growth in an age of instant solutions?
• 2 Training for counselling young people – What is added by a child and adolescent specialism?
• 3 The narratives of parental alienation
• 4 What differend do you make? An imaginary phenomenology of working with a young adult
• 5 Finishing school, fishing and flourishing: Appetite, engagement and compliance in Daoism, Existentialism and Psychoanalysis
• 6 The golden cage
• 7 How might a therapeutic ethos serve young adults? – A commentary
• 8 Young adulthood, well-being and a therapeutic ethos: a case for therapeutic education
• Index